- Post By: Jason Santo
- Date:
- Category: Uncategorized
Calvin had only been to see Laina twice since she went away, but she came to him often. Whether it was in the morning in their mother’s kitchen, that same creamy new sun light pouring over the beige cabinets now stained with years of use, or it was in the bedroom they’d shared growing up, decades-old dusty keepsakes littering the decor as if it were museum to their youth. He could hear her laugh, that eruption from deep within that echoed off the small rooms of the place and he would think about how she was always too damn loud, too damn expressive. Calvin was quiet around people, even those he knew, and his ex-wife used to call him a shadow, a term both used lovingly and, later, resentfully. “You don’t talk,” she said simply as she left him. “I need presence.” And Calvin knew she was right, but he’d long ago decided Laina had eaten up all of that power, like a greedy kid with a full plate of Reese’s Pieces that wasn’t going to share, leaving him standing quietly with an empty plate of charisma. Now he needed it, and while Lana was everywhere in mom’s house, he couldn’t find the voice he’d been looking for, even though he occasionally would physically check under musty couches and unused beds for it. The slab of granite under which Lana’s body rested seemed only to remind of her death, the accident that silenced her voice; their voice. Calvin set his hand on the cold stone and asked her to laugh and yell and say something outrageous so it would enter him, take host in his organs and speak through him. But all that was here was cold, the same he’d known all his life. And it was then that Calvin realized he’d died in childhood, that Laina and he were the same since her accident. He looked about the cemetery and saw his kind surrounding him and a shout brewed from deep in his diaphragm, an inarticulate wail that echoed among the headstones. With tears at the corners of his eyes and an electric rage thrumming through his bones, Calvin left his sister with two words: “thank you.” He was going home and he was going talk with his son, who at thirteen didn’t know his father, only a shadow. Calvin would tell him about Laina. He would explain her with his voice. (at Found)