C26
Public Record
Excerpt from novel: Best Cellar

Caroline and me were real torn up about all that.

She went around the house sleepwalking all the time.
I remember one morning when she got out of bed
and took out everything out to make the kid’s lunch,
but then she had to remember that
his brains were all in pieces in someone else's driveway
or cooking on a radiator or something.
She crumpled into a little ball on the ground
and made a great big puddle of tears on laminate.

We made it through that even.
Took ten years or so not to think about it all the time, but we made it through.
She didn't want kids during those three thousand some-odd days
because she was afraid of something like that happening again.
Then after all those millions of minutes she didn't want kids because we were too old —
the risks were too high.

Too old. That was a hard thing to wrap my head around.
We were in our mid-forties then, and around that time
you're already self-conscious about age and all that.
You keep having to justify your age by relating it to other ages.
"Forty three isn't that old," you'd say. "Fifty is old, and that's still a long ways off."
Then you're fifty-nine.

My dad's old books are all over these shelves.
Never really read any of them — I'd be surprised if he ever did either.
But there's one that I see every time I look at the shelf.
Might be that the gold of the spine is particularly catching,
or that it's a bit wider than the ones around it,
or it might be that it's got "Mid-Life” in the title, I don’t know.

Thresher Charles