Nothing particularly meaningful was happening to the peanut butter jar in the sink, unless he could call the dripping faucet meaningful.  But it was the plastic peanut butter jar in the sink that now held his attention.  He had tripped and fallen again, or nearly so, and the consequences of remembering other falls left him contemplating the space between the faucet aerator and the breast of water that swelled above the jar lip.  With each drip, a modicum of creamy water, swirled with foam, slid over the foiled edge of the trembling jar and down the store brand label.

Could he have realized his mistake earlier, even before impact, even midair off the ottoman, with the bark-peeled stick thrust from his mouth, straight ahead of him, like his father's cigar, a dumb, twisted move no dog, even playing, would make?  They had been playing dog.  What he can remember now of course is anamnesis, his mother's lap and the green dial of the radio as his father’s Hudson cruised the unfamiliar boulevard, as his father cruised and cursed and sought the doctor's house.  The cold rain and wet leaves on the sidewalk.  His earliest and only recollection of a diaper table and baby powder; the rose and vine patterned ottoman; a dollop of medicinal peanut butter on a tablespoon.  How he had bollixed the game for his brothers so close to bedtime.  And the stories they wouldn’t have.  And the story his mistake would become. 

When he curls his tongue backward now, sucking it with a cricket sound against the roof of his mouth, he can still feel the small wound.  Just as he can still recall for the new hygienist at his dentist’s office the pregnant taste of blood . . . 

Oh, could he have realized his fault in time!  On his side, a sleeping spoon, a wounded amphibian, his hands still rammed in the pockets of his hand-me-down winter coat as he scours the parking lot for his mother's shopping cart.  No, there had been no damage that time.  Only the taste of peanut butter as he pulled his head away from the pebble-strewn asphalt, and the foresight of prevention, the slip of sucker stick from its fateful redundancy.  He had halted transcendence, cracked the DumDum mid fall with his teeth and saved himself from the loss of voice and thalamus and leaving him nothing more than a lamprey clinging judiciously to the slimy rocks of Tahquamenon Falls . . .

Beware the edges of memory, where the molecules clutch halfheartedly, pause, as though between coughs, gags, laughter, and drop or rush, flush with warning, over the brink! 

He could have lost his balance then as well, been swept over the edge, and washed through some beastly rush of love to Lake Superior, the taste of sand.  Or he could have lost the grip of land entirely, the whole continent, as he would later, one autumn day in Maine, deliberately, his fingers loosed from the lichen-drawn and kelp-stenched rocks, high tide at Two Lights, and been washed to sea, swallowed with the plastic-strewn driftwood, the lobster shells and bird husks. 

Another fall and the brown leaves of early frost and rain, the cedar swamp, the tidal pool, the coincidence . . . 

It is no coincidence.  His whole life he's pulled away from it, from the smell and thick consistency of it, pulled away again and again, caught himself pulling away, caving in . . .  Damn, he's a fool; for Christ’s sake, he's a fool.

Either he catches himself or he doesn't this time.  If he does, he may realize the gravity of his situation:  the taste of it, the necessity.  But even if he doesn't, for this moment at least he will overwhelm the stasis of his caught breath, he will defy gravity, and resign himself to a life of pulling away, pulling away from thoughts of—

—a droplet at the faucet mouth, the round breast of water at the lip of an empty peanut butter jar . . . 

He stared at the sink.  He stared at the space between drips.  With each drip his throat clutched, damp with the shower she took before she left.

More Fiction