Day 67

More from Kingdom come, its been quite a bit. I actually kind of like where I ended it last time, with them opening up the storage unit, but I feel like I can use this as something else.

Inside the storage locker there were sixteen chairs, all of them different. They were set onto one another, seat to seat, in the very back, I could see the legs up in the air. There was a cabinet, with a chinese front, wood carved, and I knew that inside there were empty hangers, because there wasn’t anything inside. All of my clothes fit neatly into a large plastic tub that was right by the chairs. Mom’s things were splayed out in the middle and there were things that I couldn’t name, two bed frames on top of one another, which meant that he bought a new one and threw out the bed that they used to sleep in together. That makes sense, for all that he was. She hadn’t cheated on him with another man, but it was close, closer than he would have liked. I asked her once if she had thought about going out with Gerald, which was the name of the man, who was a nurse, just like her. And she said, “I thought about how nice of a person he was, and that dream felt pretty good to me, but it’s the dreaming that was the best part. You can’t eat a dream, or fold it up in your wallet.” That was the first time that we shared a cigarette, it was in my new apartment. She told me she was going to take it up again, said that I should slow down though, because of my size it couldn’t be good for my heart. I still smoke a pack a day.

“You know where her stuff is?” Lynda is still standing in the rain, her foot is on the head of Kingdom come and it rocks back and forth. “I mean, could you tell me?”

“Its right there,” I point to a trunk against the wall, its thick lacquered wood, the height of a coffee table. She has to knock away a tower of boxes that spill into the middle blackness that belonged to my mother in order to get at the side handle, made of twisted rope covered in more shinning lacquer. She tugs at it and dust clouds plume up and behind, they arc towards the falling rain and just stop. My headlights are on and in the blue tint light the chest seems like at the bottom of a lake.

“Is this all?” Lynda asks.

“Its all I remember.” I tell her, which is the truth, we may have had more, but that’s all that my mother got left.

“Help me,” she says, “Get you car closer so I can lift it up.”

“We’re going to take it?” I ask, and I remember that this was the point again, that we were going to open the locker to take back what was mine. I look at the dark inside, and linger on each thing that the dull light can make out. And I’m not sure that I want it at all that much now.

“Yeah,” she says, “get your car.”

I nod, and kick the head and handle of Kingdom come into the storage locker and shut it closed, before heading back the car.