In January, He Remembered

Empty swings go soft as ghosts back and forth, back and forth. He pauses on the sidewalk, weighing the sight with the rhythm of his stride. 

He approaches with precision. Chin tucked against the cold, wind stinging the scent straight out of his nostrils. Almost at the playground now. 

He continues closer, relishing how his soles level leaf after leaf. He stops. Frowns. Blinks once, twice, again. There has been some mistake. Perhaps it is too many mornings alone. Forty years ago, now…surely, he is safe. He meant well. They were hard times. He meant only to dispose of the child, to simplify. But Irene intervened.

He turns bodily away. She cannot still be haunting him. There is no place for memory in the wind’s magnum opus of empty swings.

Yet there is a place for her.

His suit ceases to hold him to his human shape, wind cutting through thin trousers, blowing down his bones.

A quarter turn, an angled head, a narrowed gaze. Gone are the houses hemming in the playground, the rush-hour percussion on the roadway.

He can see one swing.

And then he sees her, too. Irene as she would have been, famine-thin and slightly stooped, her papery cheeks pinked with cold. She does not move—the swing clings to stillness out of deference for her age.

All of a sudden his bones reassemble and they are shrieking, breaking, shouting into the stillness for her to hear him. The fingers of his right hand twitch once. Twice. Not a single puff of breath escapes to hang in the waiting winter.

She tilts her head to the side without expression, hair turning whiter beyond white beneath the snow just beginning to descend.

His eyes drop to her stomach. Flat. He realizes he has not made a sound.

The wind continues clinking swings, playing with his clothing. He comes back to himself. He can’t quite remember, after all, why he is here…and, my, but the air is icy.

He pivots sharply on his heel and walks with clipped steps back toward the street. Though still early for work, he lengthens his stride. He chides himself for not wearing thicker pants.

Original context: short story, San Francisco Globe