Seven Few mourners stood at the graveside when they laid Lydia Conrad to rest. Several more had been at the funeral home, but not all had opted to come to the cemetery on this hot August afternoon. Near the head of the grave, Corky stood with an arm around each of his children. Tyne had never seen him look so smart; his dark suit may be wrinkled, but he stood erect and steady. Tyne, holding tightly to Morley’s hand, could not bear to let her eyes linger on the children. But she saw how Bobby held onto his father’s leg, and buried his face in the fabric of Corky’s trousers. Rachael stood straight, hands clasped in front of her, lips set, blue eyes boring into the casket that held her mother. For the past two days, Rachael had neither cried nor spoken more than a few words to anyone. Her demeanor had been sullen. Yesterday when Tyne, hoping to involve her in activities around the house, asked her to fetch a jar of fruit from the basement, Rachael had leapt from her chair, eyes blazing. “No, I don’t have to. You’re not my mommy.” She ran from the house, banging the door behind her. Tyne had not been able to withhold the tears as pain settled around her heart. Pastor Beecham said a final prayer over the casket,
A dark windy night. Eteocles is about three years old, Nicolas five, and their mother as old as the worry about how to feed her children has made her, as old as any mother who lives in the ruins of war, a woman whose husband is on the front line. It is a windy night, and the gaps in the doors and windows make an apocalyptic music, as if the inhabitants of this hovel are walking through the hallways of hell. Eteocles remembers the scene well. They are sitting around the metal bucket their mother has made into a heating element. She burns wood in it, and the heat reaches out perhaps a meter all around it. They are sitting warming themselves, listening to the wrath of the tempest just a few meters away beyond the frames of the single door and the courageous window to the north. Suddenly from the deadly war of the elements outside a sudden wind floods the room as the door opens. A man stands in the frame gazing inside. It is their father returning from the war. He stands there for long time, not knowing what to say, how to greet them; he hasn’t seen them for twenty-seven long months. Their mother lets out a cry, a cry that sounds like the name of the standing man, her husband, the man who had gone to war when Eteocles was just a few months old. Her husband is home at last, and she gets up and calls him inside and walks up to him and hugs him with a fierceness that expresses the emotional volcano boiling inside her. She hugs him for a long time, then she pulls away, and their father kneels and calls his sons to him. Neither of them dares approach this stranger. Eteocles doesn’t know this man at all, while Nicolas, who was three years old when his father left his sons, perhaps has some faint memory of him. Neither of the two dares move toward the man in soldier’s clothes who calls them again and again until Eteocles observes his feet making small steps toward the open arms of their father and Nicolas follows soon after. The soldier clings tightly to them, saying words the two brothers only feel, the soothing words of a father who has missed his sons, a man who had gone to war without knowing if he would ever see them again. They feel those words, and they cuddle with the man who has come inside their house and ignore the wind that has entered with him and turned the room into a frozen habitat in which the small metal bucket with the burning wood cannot warm more
Armchair The orphaned armchair designing your body while you fathom emptiness in the hallows of vanity away from passion or liturgy such as the curtain’s swaying albeit some help from the breeze a myth of your homecoming turns the room’s air into pieces and shapes of limpid alabaster yet you close your eyes and travel to the moment I touched your lips with my sun your lips I touched with the sun of my youth and the cyclamen sighed not letting its fervid passion annul your lust for a spring song for the vigour and stamina of my love
Manolis Aligizakis 