A27
Collective Memory
Excerpt from collection:Call it Awash: Stories and aphorisms.

August

When he finished reading it, August folded the letter,
placed it back into its envelope with a surgeon’s care,
then set it in a box on a shelf in his closet.
He sat back at his desk and reached for a pen, then
hunched over and began scraping a drawing
into the hard oak desktop. The drawing resembled a bell curve,
and as he drew it, he smiled a large and triumphant smile
while tears dripped from his nose.
His pen scraped back and forth into the wood,
first to make an impression and then to roll out the ink from the ballpoint.
At the top of the curve, he placed a crude drawing of himself,
as noted by the word AUGUST near an arrow pointed at the figure.
He leaned back and marveled at his mediocre work.
He pictured the entire world in the graph,
the most accomplished and the most ingenious and the most impactful population
to the right of the curve, and the least meaningful and least intelligent and most forgotten
to the left.
At the farthest left, those who fell between the words of the history books, and
at the right were the writers and partakers of history.
But at the tip-top of the mountain, at the highest measure of average,
by all means, medians, and modes,
was August, who would observe them all
from his perfect vantage point.

Ruth Crimson-Forde