What You Save on the Way Out of a Burning House
By Joseph Kerschbaum
October 15, 2022
October 15, 2022
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i. Evidence
Memories of family gatherings are a blur but I remember disposable cameras, pauses to pose & say cheese with awkward, teeth-filled smiles. Reunions at my grandparents’ farmhouse where I wandered underfoot, listened to aunts & uncles talk about a spiking gas crisis, layoffs at Bethlehem Steel, or the Chicago Bears’ losing season, somewhere I recall camera flashes & standing next to relatives holding sweating cans of Miller Lite. There were rushed weddings smoldering in the humid oven of June at the little clapboard chapel across from the VFW where I was a reluctant ring bearer. I know photos of those events exist but I could never produce the evidence. ii. Before I was Born Inside a towering oak curio cabinet in the dining room of the old farmhouse, there were stacks of photo albums. As if they were ancient artifacts, heavy pages had to be turned with care because pictures would fall out of their precarious placements & expose handwritten notes on the back. Always written in pencil were names I didn’t recognize & dates before I was born. iii. Evaporated After my last grandparent passed, a civil war erupted over antique lamps, every knick-knack was another crack in the dam as a family divided & conquered each other. Like looting a city after a regime has fallen, rusted pickup trucks hauled away disputed property in the dark. Somewhere in this panicked evacuation all the photos & albums evaporated. iv. Tossed in a Dumpster Where everyone scattered is unanswered. My conjured narrative stitches the years together like fixing a porcelain vase with only half the shattered pieces. I can almost see where those photos sat quietly in a dank crawlspace, captive in a molded box. Divided in divorces over the decades. Loose photos were swept up in the debris of various tornadoes. They were left behind like breadcrumbs as family members skipped leases & shuffled between apartments until the last eviction when an abandoned crumbling box was left with the other garbage & tossed in a dumpster. v. I Tell Myself it’s Me There is a banana box in my guest room closet with a small stack of black & white pictures. They are a curiosity. I don’t recall how they came into my possession. Given their age & the years written on the back, these distant relatives are no longer living. Only one photo is in dim color with the hazy, faded fog of the seventies. A smiling lady, a beehive hairdo rising out of frame, holds a cigarette in one hand & a baby cradled in the other arm. This could be me. I tell myself it’s me. |
Joseph Kerschbaum’s most recent publications include Mirror Box (Main St Rag Press, 2020) and Distant Shores of a Split Second (Louisiana Literature Press, 2018). His recent work has appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Hamilton Stone Review, The Inflectionist Review, Main Street Rag, In Parentheses, and Umbrella Factory. Joseph lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his family.