Blueboy

Beth Follett

Dr. Love, by now you’ve had twenty letters from me but this will be my last. Even Alzheimer himself came to an epistolary end. I am tired of the effort to speak sequentially. My husband is the same man I married, in a different suit, a paradise who these days answers the question, What year were you born? with, Coleslaw. When in the fullness of life, and coleslaw animates the soul: what of my own reply? Aprons, dropped stitches, crushed velvet, cashmere, violet corsage on a green ballgown, oversized renunciation, humiliated young love, a blueboy (handsome southern cousin), a rose garden, bloodstone. Supplication. Father. Espoir.

Yesterday we spent the morning walking to the public library. My blueboy no longer wears socks, refuses to wear his glasses. We are a pretty sight, me in a thin housedress, him in his funeral suit, stopping to spit in his clean handkerchief, to wipe clean a spot on his spotless shoes. Many things in close proximity call to him, manifold like a morning cavalry, the nearby a bugle, and blasted. He stoops to clean his shoe and cannot straighten. I who am weakened must ask a passing stranger to lift him.

Dr. Love, it is said that youth is wasted on the young, and feeling this to be true I adjust my espoir so as to see more clearly this paradise that my blueboy is, the two of us walking, slack and timeless. Dr. Love, at long last I’m stepping out without a hope in the world.

— from Literary Review of Canada