Elder and Wife

The earth isn’t flat, course, but it is spherical, he says at dinner. Too, he’s not unconvinced that Jesus didn’t turn wine back into water before He drank it.

I tip my glass.

This house has the smell of snapped pencil.

We’re trying to be church friends. Like Sherman sending a final telegram before cutting the wires.

Maybe it’s the smell of paper bags in a pantry.  

Maybe it’s the close air of the lunar module that brought the Apollo astronauts the dry sulfur of apples.

B-bono? the elder’s wife kindly asks when my children bring the name up.

Bono!! my astonished children repeat. B-O-N-O!  

He finds arrowheads in the garden bed, and the wife once invited us to ice skate on the plowed corn field behind their backyard. I remember it this way. My family may not. My wife and she watched the children. I skated in fractals, ellipses, as a goalie might in a music box, not talking to him, who stood silent as a camel.

Bright moon. Corn stalks under the ice like bones in a drawer of a natural history museum.

*

After dinner, one of the sons asks to lick the lid of the ice cream tub. The quiet one is like his mother. She taught him piano. The better athlete. As she’d once been. Orange mercurochrome stains from skateboarding in culottes at those abandoned apartment complexes in Santa Clarita.

Rad! says our family’s Stoner Jesus.

Would one of the children like to say grace for tonight’s dessert? she asks my wife and me.  

My sons look down. No. My fearless daughter declares that she wants to learn every word in the dictionary by July.

Oh, and, y-yes? the elder’s wife says.

“a!” my daughter begins.