Page 34 - WTP Vol. XI #2

The Unfinished Building
When we moved in, the gray corridors ran out into the daylight, stairways led to nowhere and emptied into nothing.
We played in the hollow shafts
before we knew the fear of narrow places, where the wind vibrated within our lungs
like breath inside a bottle and stopped cryptically each time someone somewhere opened
or closed the heavy doors. All about the stillness,
they unpacked the somber marble.
Great wheelbarrows hauling slabs of brick stood like kettles in the brilliant doorjambs.
At night in her bed, radiators hissing, my mother would hear animals clawing inside the walls now forever sealed.
Lying there in the dark, listening for a sound much like desperation
on the other side, she’d peer back
behind her to the little red prayer light past the picture of St. Demetrious
with a spear astride a golden horse.
And much later came the grim ceremony
to empty the cupboards and the closets,
to bare the floors, strip everything to the walls—
in the same place, where her mother passed, and her husband passed, and then she—
to begin anew, as though that could be.
Handwriting
I remember the feeling of something like dread, the alphabet wrapped around the classroom high above the wainscoting and the coat cubbies, above the hanging lights, each giant letter
set strictly in lines like a musical score in a rhythmic dance of perfection designed to shame me
every Friday on cursive exercise day.
The style, I later learned, was the Palmer Method which emphasized muscle arm movement
rather than the fingers, meaning my fate was sealed. I never learned to hold a pencil correctly,
my report cards being a constant reminder.
So I invented a short-lived script with letters
tall and thin like telephone poles. Even now, grasping a pen like a paintbrush, nothing
I write looks the same as anything I wrote before, leaving me without a signature to call my own.
My mother wrote letters to me for decades
in this style until her fingers grew crooked
and her words began to disperse like flecks of ash. She had aspired in life to be a court stenographer. Graduating from high school with a 1st place typing award, she spent forty years as a secretary in an old industrial building on the now defunct Crane Street, taking dictation in shorthand,
an archaic cipher that mystified me. But the letters written in her joyous hand, and those
where the script became feathery and resigned with longing, I keep hidden away.
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StePhen RuffuS