The Second Story

Listen: there was a town at the end of a river & the mouth of a bay and I lived there & it exploded on a Sunday morning. Not the whole town— no: a large piece of it, the part with the new restaurant, the pet store, the small houses wedged in between. My uncles who lived there too would tell their wives they were playing poker Saturday nights & go instead to the basement of the VFW & watch stag films on a bedsheet tacked to the wall. Behind the sheet was a mural: a squadron of B-17s with beautiful women painted on their noses, darting through dark clouds of flak on their way to pound Fortress Europe into dust. The woman on the sheet would adjust her dark wig & strip down to garters & gaze out at my uncles & their friends, who’d head home afterward & lie next to their partners & dream of dropping their own bomb in the middle of that rotten town. They were all dead when it happened, my uncles included, but perhaps they dreamed the propane leak that filled the basement of the new restaurant on Main, then the first floor and the second story apartment of the woman who’d just come back from a long July Fourth weekend. Perhaps she met someone at the fireworks—no, at the Friday show by the river, blanket on the grass, a friend of a friend whose hand she felt once, then again, as the noise on the water went up in petals—spent the next two days with him in a rented room, watching sweat slip off each other’s shoulders & soak the sheets. She was already dreaming of leaving town with this new man, or not yet, not quite, only thinking that the air elsewhere had to be better than that in these rooms. She was packing when the stove ticked on. She was folding a shirt when the gas caught. She was in the doorway, or the kitchen, or the slender hall between them. When the shingles & splinters & bits of pink insulation stopped falling and the firetrucks had gone I walked downtown and watched a newscaster with a hundred dollar haircut & tan summer suit try five times to say small town tragedy with the right weight: too light on the first take, then too slow, then too bright, until he found the version that would carry over dinner, over the sports, over the late movie. When they found her, two firemen held up a white sheet to keep our eyes from her body. We called it an accident & lived in it for years.