TheBanyanTree: Part 1 of Something

[Monique Colver]

With every death he felt a little smaller. He imagined his mind full of
rooms, and each death brought forth a slamming of a door, the memories he
should have kept alive buried behind the doors. He wanted no part of the
dead, not their memories, their reminders, their sadness.
            Sometimes the doors clanged shut, heavy steel that reverberated
long afterwards, and sometimes they merely whispered shut, well fitting
doors that were barely noticeable. And sometimes there was a click, a quick
sound that left him feeling bereft but only for a second, a minute at the
most.
            When Adie had died, her enlarged heart finally giving in to the
pressure, her once firm grasp releasing him so quickly, he thought he would
mourn forever. But her door shut as if a gust of wind had pushed it, and he
could hear the sound of his grief dissipating as clearly as he could hear
the neighbor's dog, a bossy rat terrier, take up his afternoon yips and
yaps.
            With his brother Allen, the door had swung shut slowly, perhaps
because Allen had left slowly, one day being there and then the next still
there, and on and on, so that only someone who saw him infrequently would
notice how he was slipping away. After Allen's death he felt, most of all,
puzzled, for he'd always expected to go first, being the oldest.
            Death began to be an abstraction. By closing the doors after
each one he could pretend almost that it had never happened. Not that Adie
and Allen and Carlos, the irritable gardener who lived next door, did not
stop being, but that they never were in the first place. He found that this
way he could cut down on his sorrow, and he had always been practical. So
practical Adie would make fun of him, teasing him about his lack of whimsy,
his insistence on cost effectiveness and ease of use.
            But with each death he also grew smaller, as if not just the
memories disappeared, but physical pieces of himself. A chunk of his thigh
here, an inch off his height, a pinch of fat around his waist. He had to buy
new clothes, smaller clothes, which he thought a horrible waste of money,
for he surely wouldn't live long enough to wear out new clothes.
            That is what he told himself, but still others went before him,
and the doors kept closing, and he continued to become smaller.
            Jack and Jill, his daughter and her husband, went together, an
accident, a drunk driver plowing into them going the wrong way on the
interstate, and they never had a chance. Two doors, a slam and a clang, and
it was over. He'd never liked his daughter all that much, thought she was
bossy and domineering, but he'd loved his son-in-law with a passion that had
frightened him. After their deaths he mourned for a day, maybe two, and grew
perceptibly smaller.

-- 
M