Sometimes I fear memories.
I don’t know why—
I fear that they will take me
Down shimmering halls where I don’t want to go,
Down slates of eternal and composite angst and worry and regret and sorrow,
Down impervious concrete tunnels of hardball unspoken thoughts and feelings,
Down forgotten psychic highways and byways,
Down regret-filled mosaics of images that
I know form part of me and will never depart.
Memories are rooms where you don’t want to go.
The memories are too painful.
They stir up too much.
A memory.
My grandmother had died.
My father and I were walking to the funeral home.
I was afraid.
I wanted to hold his hand, but I didn’t.
I thought of something. I had to express this
Fear.
I asked him what a dead body looked like.
I asked him what Grandmother’s body would looked like.
I had never seen a corpse
Before,
Except in movies.
My grandmother’s dead body:
What would it look like?
We were walking to the funeral home.
He looked down at me.
His eyes narrowed into slits.
He told me to just be quiet, please.
Please be quiet
While we were walking to the funeral home.
Memories.
They make me want to cry sometimes.
Even though I was only thirteen years old.
I remember the corpse well.
My grandmother was dressed in one of her old-fashioned dresses,
Dark blue with white polka dots.
Her skin was the pigment of white—extreme white—radical white.
Her skin was pale, serene.
Her clear blue eyes, which were like the sea—
Were closed.
I was absolutely fascinated.
I ignored my father.
I was angry with him.
It would take me a long time to get over the anger.
As I stood before Grandmother’s corpse,
I wanted to reach out and touch her,
To bid her farewell.
I was sad she was gone.
She had listened.
What more can one do?
I came close to leaning over and touching her.
But I did not.
She resembled a statue with alabaster skin,
And her face was marked by age-old wrinkles that spread
Like the rivers on a map of Europe.
There was something alive about her
As she lay there dead.
Her dead pale skin crawled over her inert body.
Memories.

Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s done a lot of different stuff in his life. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.

You can find more of Christopher’s work here on Ink Pantry.