I didn't attend school this morning, because mother heard a crashing noise through the duct and thought we should wait for dad to return with news. She spoke of the crash with a quiet, distracted voice, and I suspected that it wasn't very important; she mostly wanted us to be inside today for her own reasons, whatever they were. I doubt she knew them well herself.
Crashes can be bad. They mean something, all of them, and we have no way of knowing what causes them but direct observation, which is like standing in front of a bus to determine in which direction it travels. Usually a crash is just a random decaying piece of the former world too fatigued to maintain its place, which falls to earth with a bang and clatter. Sometimes though a crash can have more ominous notions.
In school one day there was a crash and they locked the rooms. The principal and his security staff walked the halls to make room-checks and when they arrived at the crash-side of the school they found jagged edges of cement and iron bars sheared off as if by a scissor--the fourth grade was gone. I didn't have any friends in that grade but mom knew some of the mothers and we attended funerals for a week, perfunctory affairs where the absence of a body or molecular trace left the parents and siblings stunned into permanent breathlessness.
No comments:
Post a Comment