Semi-Random Reflections

Read time: 1 min.

I see his hand first, passing me a drink.
The drink tastes like old houses smell.
The rustling sound of yellowed pages
moves through the marsh grass.

“Boats’d dock here,” he tells me. “River’s deeper in dem days.
We’d a walkway ‘tween the dock and the Lodge,
cobblestones, lotsa people’s names engraved in ‘em.
All dem’s in graves now.
Wish I’s in one, too,
but I gotta do som’in’ with dis first.”

A shimmer of light or a shadow blinks in my hand;
a pewter locket appears.

“Found dat in da rubble day we tore da Lodge down.”

I open the locket.
Compressed papers spring out and hover:
love letters from an infantryman to a hippie,
playing cards adorned with handwritten mantras,
a birth record on the back of a shipping receipt.
Newspaper clippings:
a train arriving, the Lodge under construction,
a train leaving, the Lodge demolished.
Photographs of catches and drownings.

He closes my fist over the locket;
the papers dematerialize.
“Don’t nobody want an old doodad like dis.”

“I do,” I say.

A crescent moon smile appears at my eye level.
“I know you do, Boy.’

The locket’s chain snaps choker-tight around my neck.
The smile leaves, the rustling leaves, my drink leaves.
I find an ink pen and notepad.
Something knocks inside the locket.