A Prayer for Better

I don’t know what‘s coming.

He died on a Tuesday afternoon whilst resting in his porch rocker. The occasional breeze stirred it and him like an ever so gentle hand on his back, or like a single bare toe barely touching down. The weathered slats beneath the chair bemoaned his passing, groaning with the shifting weight of it even as Nature’s warm breath ruffled the cotton sleeve of his work shirt and rocked him away to someplace different.

I cannot know what’s coming.

The bronzed skin of his face was cast in the halo of a single porch fixture, it’s mason jar globe speckled with time, flies and spiders. In the weak light he looked deceptively young with his many wrinkles relaxed, and drawn in tight. In fact, he could have been only resting. There was no reason to think that the bony fingers draped around the end of the chair’s armrest wouldn’t tighten their grasp at any second, that they wouldn’t lift him up onto those spindly, unsteady legs so that he might shuffle into the kitchen to re-fill the iced tea glass grown half-clear with melted ice water, the same glass which always waited so patiently for him on the tin table-stand beside the chair. The glass that sat amongst the rusty tattoos etched into it by forty years of condensation rings. I always thought he’d made his tea too sweet, although I drank it when it was offered, but then he wasn’t making it for me, and that was how the old folks done it, like the tea was their only candy, and they must have it close by to satisfy an intermittently raging sweet-tooth.

We don’t know what’s coming.

We cannot know.

Whatever it may be leaves a far away expression on a withered face, despite the cold chill it shivers through the bones of those left behind. For a long time I looked, brushing away the moths and gnats with my cap, far longer than I should have, wondering where he’d gone. Something turned as I stood there looking. The longer I looked the warmer those bones grew. Wherever he was, it was not here, and it might be he’s somewhere with her again, which is what he’d always wanted anyways.

He looked happier than I’d ever seen him before, and many times I’d seen him crinkle with laughter. He was at ease, so I picked up my guitar case and started away. He wouldn’t want the first responders… that whole scene. He was always so private.

No. I don’t know what’s coming, but it must be better.

It’s got to be better.