Stridor, a creakling as if a fire nearer. Her mouth’s open, dry, and senseless as if stuffed with a beard.
Help, her ringed toes wriggle.
A drawer gapes open.
She shrieks.
Hanna, like where art thou already?
Knocking on the frontdoor, the sound, the doors there they seem then three more, quickening…she sees: behind it, a fist, Adela’s, and she’s yelling, a whisper: Wanda’s own name now Wanda, Wanda, the language she knows, that of emergency home, that of babytalk crisis, Adela tapping her acrylic tips on the door — to tear out the eyes of the glass, which is faceless.
In her other hand, Adela’s holding a flashlight.
Wanda sits up, gets up, goes to the door.
A diffuse star skies the house.
To pass slowly throughout, through the room with the screen, the room with the piano, through the room with the books on their shelves then unread, now reading themselves, looparound through the diningroom, around and around its table unset, then into the livingroom, the vestibule beyond then up the stairs slot by trip.
Blueprints moldering in the basement say this is the Master Bedroom.
And so it was, and it’s good.
Here Wanda stands, Adela behind.
She knocks lightly, frightened, to no answer and, slowly.
Huddled masses yearning to breathe — only to be…
To lift Adela’s lamp beside the golden door — and its dead. Seven limbs braided like bread, gray bread broken, fingers of one hand intertwined into a candle lacking a burn — Israel, sitting, had been untying his tie, finally, singlehandedly trying, Hanna lying, abed, her exhaustion exhausted, already asleep.
No more dream.
Employers, they’d been surrogate parents of sorts; strange, how a eulogy recipes itself right away…Wanda goes to them to knead their flesh into life.
No longer to rise.
After one night spent under observation, made ill with the urban up at Kennedy Memorial, then the others at home, all of them recuperative, though without sleep and dreamless, then after another dinner, Shabbos again and its last, less guests this night save the newborn, whose appetite — which is that of twelve regular guests or more, always more who knew who invited whom — only approaches in grandeur His size, always huge the both of them, and demanding, and hungry still and thirsty for the teat since gone cold, a milky mold left atop a platter wobbly.
His Hanna, stilled — nothing more to cook or clean, nothing more to do.
Wanda trips to the next rooms, Rubina’s and that of Simone and the same, then the next rooms, that of Liv and Judith and then that of Isa and Zeba, and the same…then the next rooms and the next, then the next hallways, now through a left perpetually spiraling still left maliciously dark and forever, to the two shared rooms of the rest of them whose names Israel’d always forget and of whom Hanna would always remind, and the same: those aged ten and twofifths, those aged nine and onesixth, as they’d remind you, as if; dressed as they’d been told to dress not for night or for bed but for the morning that’d never be next, trying on their new dresses and skirts and blouses and sweaters purchased and tailored lastminute, fitted especially for the occasion impending, the bris tomorrow, to be, their only brother’s one and only circumcision, or so they’d hoped, or so they’d not even thought of it, to hope and the same. They hadn’t even undressed for bed, modest unto the end: brushed teeth, flossed, tucked in, Shema Israel and goodnight, Laila Tov and again, in yet another left, this off the hallway that lies furthest to the left, almost lost in the recesses of orientation, of night, its turn opening out into the one lone room just above the backdoor, the last exit, the final escape, to be used In case of fire, meetingpoint outside, let’s regroup the backyard’s the plan, between the rust of the swingset and the moldy spiderweb hammock; this the room of the newborn, shushwhispered about, tiptoed around, and also the most spacious, the one with the most light, a room to grow into, itself a posthumous birth, stilled in its fall from the house’s main bulge, a promontory pregnant, cloudcarried high above the cars and the doors for the cars, the garage and the flooring of oil and dirt. Jealous Him not such rarefied privacy: Isa and Zeba’d been moved out, though their submission’s been bribed with lobelove, the promise of piercings for ears. A thimble trash for diapers soiled, alongside a table for changing up against one wall, with a chest of drawers at the other, next to the desk, cedar, too; atop that, a bureaucratic clutch, foldered His birthcertificate, hospital paperwork, a sheaf of greeting cards and deflated balloons pressed up against dying flowers, silvered photographs saving just the last week, instant mementos, posterity developed then doubled; atop that, a passport application for Him they’re intending to fill out any day now, you know, if they’d have to get away, or only wanted to.
