Suspension
My t-shirts are suspended off plastic hangers in my closet. Straight and still as soldiers at attention. They obey a force I can name but not understand.
As I sit on the side of my bed, I’m fixated by this mundane miracle. I think of Sir Isaac beneath the proverbial apple tree. A fleshy fruit hangs by a stem one moment, unleashes its potential the next, striking a great mind burgeoning with equations and alchemy. A big bang of calculated trajectories. Arcing, plunging objects in motion: cannonballs, gravity bombs, the long curve of missiles.
Suspended in space.
I flash on Cherie. One Halloween afternoon, Mom ironed my new store-bought Spiderman costume, then placed it with its plastic mask on a wire hanger. She hooked it on a doorway frame in our kitchen. Hovering there like a scarecrow, the suit and mask alarmed Cherie, who barked and barked her shrill poodle bark. “Christ on the cross,” said my exasperated mother. “Christ almighty.”
I rise off my creaking bed and, naked though I am, hobble through the too-still house to the garage. A rope dangles off a rafter, one end tied to a thick pipe. With difficulty, I untie that end, pull the rest down, and unknot the remaining loop. Then I coil it all and place it neatly on a pegboard hook, where it hangs straight and still.
For a little more of my fiction, please go to Fiction/Poetry
