Jason Irwin: Cucumbers

We sit in near silence – your mother in a creaky rocker, and I, in a hard backed, cushioned chair –sunlight falling from a window. It’s Sunday, ten years since that Sunday in May. We smile at each other, avoid each others gaze. Your high school photo, framed in gold, watches from the mantle: the same picture from the newspaper. Your mother asks about my life in the city. How long will I be in town? She speaks of people whose names I can no longer put faces to and confesses how she still searches the want ads for jobs you would’ve been good at. “I still can’t bring myself to buy cucumbers. He loved them,” she says, but never mentions the car accident, or how she had blamed me for your drinking again, and I never tell her about that night, after you died, how you visited me and we sat together until morning.

Copyright 2016 Jason Irwin. From A Blister of Stars. Published by Low Ghost Press.