Page 17 - WTP Vol. X #2

cause Sally was laughing. He cried because he felt he would drown in his tears they were so big. And the room started to move. Faltered and sputtered, like a light bulb flickering in the sky. And he laughed and laughed and cried and laughed because all he could hear was byebyegone.
“Byebyegone, Mary.” Byebyegone. “Byebyegone? Byebyegone?”
That’s when the they rushed in. That’s when the herd burst through the door, trampling his suitcase (bye- byegone?, byebyegone?), and stampeded through
the room and roared through their nostrils until he was no longer there, and then darkness settled and there was a stillness he could taste with the tip of his tongue and there, in the center of it all, was Mama (“where’s Sol?” “Sol, are you all right?”) and night- time came and summer came and the birds returned and greeted him with their song and Sally was just a wisp of a cloud and the man disappeared and every- thing started to make sense.
~
Until sense didn’t make sense anymore. Until sense was something he no longer had to deal with. No longer had to confront and grapple with like all the other things he had had to grapple with throughout his very slow life. And it didn’t matter any longer where he was or whether his name was Salvatore Vecchio or not, or even if he were married to Sally or Lucy. Because Mary had come and gone and didn’t seem to care. Somewhere. (Byebyegone?) Because even the fat man was no longer there answering questions that were of no importance. Because the morning eggs were still winking at him, sly things that they were, and breakfast was just a sliver of day- time that popped up every once in a while. But what really mattered was that Sol was here somewhere. Outside or inside or packed in the suitcase ready to go. And he could count the birds singing in the sky, 65 or 56, he wasn’t sure. And Mama (poor Mama, who’s Mama?) would come by that evening and tuck him in bed, kiss him good night as she had always done when she was a child and he was still alive. And that, even though she didn’t know where he was, he was still here. Somewhere. And that’s all the really mattered.
Maggio’s work has appeared in The Montserrat Review, The L.A. Weekly, The Washington City Paper, among others. He’s also had published a poetry collection deMOCKracy, (Plain View Press); two short-story collections The Keepers (March Street Press) and Let- ters from Inside (Vine Leaves Press); a novel, The Wizard and the White House (Little Feather Books); and a novella, The Appointment (Vine Leave Press). A new poetry collection, Let’s Call It Paradise, is forthcoming from San Francisco Bay Press.
“He’d wake up and lose himself
and strangers all would come to help him, with- out his asking, and then they’d ask the same silly questions and get angry and then they would whisk him off to that place he did not wish to go.”
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