Deacon 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. Cheers.

This house has the dry 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 dry smell of ash. Dry smell of spent firecracker.  

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

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

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

The deacon 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, talking to the deacon while he stood like 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 deacon’s wife says.

”a!” my daughter begins.