| Vol. 3, No. 4 | Winter, 2004 |
A Shifting Center
story by
George Colman
At a crowded party in a country home built in a valley overgrown and green in summer but now in winter brown and bare and burnished gently by a late day sun into an unsettling radiance, I find Ned among the California reds.
Retired now, he once was a cowboy, cook, railroad worker and general roustabout. “Something of a tramp” is the way he puts it. Ours is a party relationship. We met at one, enjoyed the talk, and do the same at three or four a year. Otherwise we never see each other. It’s a good relationship. Limited and good and unburdened by any thought that we should see each other more.
At parties, he’s usually slouched in a corner by himself. Whether deep in thought or close to sleep is impossible to tell from any distance but when he looks up to see who’s suddenly standing beside him, he reveals the strongest features of his worn and bony face: a ragged handlebar moustache and startling, pale blue eyes.
He tells me he’s had a bad accident but adds, “Ned’s mostly recovered now.” The conversation wanders its one thing after another way and I hear a difference in the way he talks. He’s saying things like, “They told Ned he was wasting his money” and “Ned has limited powers of retention” and “Ned’s first wife was some woman” and “Ned would’ve stayed but they said he had to go.”
Those third person references to “Ned” and “he” and “him” were new and so was the tone of voice. It was calm, relaxed and uninvolved as if he were talking about someone else. The man who used to get excited about rising prices or horses or his cheating boss or the ranch he left behind now talks about “Ned” as if he’s talking about another man, someone whose life doesn’t affect him much.
Old now and weak from a terrible accident, he knows he’s close to mortal changes and has begun to see the brief configuration known as Ned from a certain distance. The pronoun slides from “I” to “he” and grants a new perspective. The center shifts to a less familiar, unimpassioned region of the mind and watches from a great remove, as from a far off star, the long awaited fading, death and transformation.
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*
poem
by
Michele Gibbs
she is eight.
all her memories
are of war and death.
her brothers, mother,
father, and their parents, too,
are gone:
blown apart
like her arm
that in childhood wonder
reached out to touch
a toy in the street
that turned out
instead
to be a bomb.
watch for her.
she still has faith.
she learned her lesson well:
how to make,
down to the last detail,
the instrument
that ruptured her future
beyond repair.
she carries a box of them,
gingerly.
to the best places.
the toys she sells
shine, irresistible,
in their straw nests.
you can find her, any hour.
she is eager to share her wares
so that you and she
can see
all whom she loved most, again.
she lives for that return.
*
GALLERY
Winter in America:
“Libertad Desnuda”
by
Michele Gibbs
