almost didn’t go (md wheatley)

i remember because i even shampooed my hair that week. i wore my new black shirt with old black cords and beater docs. some old lady from some random church shuffled to the dais to sing a cappella. her voice was so bad it was endearing. i was shoulder to shoulder with my brother as we tried not to laugh. she held the highest note i’ve ever heard for exactly seven seconds—i counted. on the seventh second, every window of my dead grandpa’s house shattered and everything poured out. the decennial memories. the jack-daniels breath. the vintage smell of gucci loafers. the pages of countless unread cookbooks and the desire for things that never happened/never will. there were so many people who knew my grandpa yet i didn’t know him at all. that almost seemed degenerate. my father’s life of absent- fatherhood evolved into absent-grandfatherhood.

i showed up. i wasn’t absent. if the preacher took attendance from the pulpit, i could have raised my hand and said, ‘present’ with confidence. i stood from my fold-away chair and made my way to pop-pop’s forever bed. i opened the coffin to get a good look at him because i had forgotten what he looked like. i remembered walking thru fields of perennials behind his house. i removed two stemless daisies from my shirt pocket—the one over my heart—and placed the flowers over his eyes. he whispered something but i couldn’t make it out. i bent down and whispered in his ear, ‘present.’

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md wheatley is a husband, father, and sometimes a writer. he runs frequent and vigorous chapbooks—@freqandvig on twitter. more of his words can be read on his website mdwheatley.us 

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image: Amateur photographer and author Andrea Damic (Sydney, Australia) has words published or forthcoming in 50-Word Stories, Paragraph Planet, The Dribble Drabble Review, 50 Give or Take (Vine Leaves Press) Anthology, Spillwords, The Centifictionist, The Piker Press and elsewhere with her art featuring or forthcoming in Rejection Letters, Door Is A Jar, Fusion Art’s Exhibitions, Welter at the University of Baltimore and elsewhere. You can find her on TW @DamicAndrea or linktr.ee/damicandrea.