Late and After
Chauna Craig
You still remember the toy xylophone when you were four and your world so bright. Primary colors and tones that clinked clear and hummed after. That’s the sound you remember. Buzz of invisible insects, echoing red blue noise you would always love because the strike of your small hammer moved molecules. Because you heard it late and after everyone else stopped listening.
Doesn’t time flatten everything?
The arches of your feet. The bread dough you dreamed would rise and fill the whole house. Enthusiasm. New mounds of earth, old mountains, and the soft body of the doe you struck on the highway —- everyday sinking into the horizon. The music of you striking everything with your small hammer. Weak kerplinks, quiet thuds that echo. After.
One day you will meet a man who was deaf as a child. He banged with the other children but never heard the xylophone. When you play your own stone xylophone, your every muffled thump will strike him as music. When you weep against the curve of his shoulder and beat his chest in a crescendo of gentle fists, he will whisper maestro. Breathe. Bow. Everything else, the air between beats, your electric encore.
Chauna Craig’s flash fiction/prose poetry appears or is forthcoming in Double Room, the anthologies You Have Time For This and Dogs: Wet and Dry, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
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