The Witching Hour

It’s the dead of night in early July. The fan oscillating on my dresser makes a slight clicking sound as it travels the same path--back and forth, back and forth—beside a small metallic clock making steady progress in the night. Outside, trees rustle in a tired wind.

Down the hall, the nightlight from my son’s room bleeds around the crack of my closed bedroom door. I like it dark when I sleep. Quiet. Unlike my brother who sleeps an urban sleep in the spare room when he visits. The voices and static of talk radio coming from the nightstand, a cell phone that beeps periodically throughout the night—and him snoring over the cacophony and occasionally crying out in his sleep.

It’s the witching hour, a friend tells me in my office the other day. She has rounded the corner of eighty, and talks to me about the invisibility of being old in this country. Everyone over seventy knows about the witching hour, she says, that happens at 3am. Fate sprawled out in front of you, hogging the covers, and taking up all the room in the bed.

Earlier tonight I looked at your photos. Saw you smiling in a green shirt and caught by the camera bending over to dance. A face in shadow, still a stranger to me… And then to another page where she presents her life in a series of still shots—husband, wife, daughter, son--their faces lifted to the camera, open, revealed. Arms circled round each other like protective ropes holding their love in. Reminding me of what I have lost.

And I live in a glass house at which life has been throwing too many stones. It is an old house, a tired house, that settles quietly in its fatigue. I chase the cracks with packing tape, tugged from a resistant roll, trying to meld the fissures, pull the two broken sides together—as all my neighbors watch--but the cracks spread quicker than I can keep up with them along each smooth, transparent wall.
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