NONFICTION     

"A cold Wyoming evening darkens
outside a corner window of our tidy living room."

                                                   Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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Memory
by  MaryLee McNeal

I’m five, standing just behind my father’s left shoulder as he sits reading. A cold Wyoming evening darkens outside a corner window of our tidy living room. My father has changed from a three-piece suit to t-shirt and pajama bottoms; his body seems softer, looser. The hair on his bare arm is dark. He smells like the cigarette he smoked after dinner. He doesn’t seem to know I’m here. I move closer to see the book he holds open, it’s joined sides thick as generous slices of cake. I know the pages are covered with letters, grouped, with spaces between. I know what he’s doing is called reading. I watch his face: his mouth moves, a quick purse of his lips, a fleeting half smile. His eyes move from left to right and back again. A corner of the top page on the right side is caught between his thumb and index finger as if he’s ready to turn it. Not yet. When he does, with a soft sigh, his eyes return to moving across the page. A reading lamp behind his chair shines on a bald spot on top of his head. The warm lamplight and the silence around him make me aware that snow is falling outside and the wind has begun to whine at the window as if it wants in. I touch my father’s elbow. I want to ask him again when it is that I will learn to read. In kindergarten we listen to Miss Bailey read, but we only know the letters of our names. When I touch him he seems startled as if I’ve shocked him. He lifts his head and looks at me as if he doesn’t know me or where he is. He tells me to go help my mother and sisters in the kitchen. I don’t move. He has already turned back to his pages. Later I will ponder the strange way he looked at me, and I will find the deep pleasure of leaving my world to enter another, but now I know only that something in his book carried him off from the room, the window, the lamp, from me. I want to go away like that. I don’t know how. It seems like magic.

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​​MaryLee McNeal is retired from teaching. Her stories and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Bellevue Literary Review and Green Mountains Review. Her novel, Home Again, Home Again won the San Francisco State’s Clark Award in 1989, and her poetry chapbook, The Space Between Us, won the Bear Mountains Press Award in 2002.  A second chapbook of poems, The Way We Fall, with an introduction by Jack Hirschman, was published in 2014. She is seeking publication for a second novel, Saint Kate’s, revising a manuscript of linked stories, and recently enjoyed her first OLLI classes in memoir and poetry with Kathleen McClung.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
Advice to the Aging Self
Time Is Marching On

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