by Ron Riekki
My father showed me a photo of bodies hanging, pointed, pointed again, said, That’s us; I didn’t know what he meant. That, he said, would have been us. Except we were here now, the north northern woods of the north so north that we were barely in the U.S., buried in snow, hidden in blizzard, how icicles hung off of our eyebrows, how we’d walk backwards because the wind would murder your skin, and we’d dig a tunnel to get to our mailbox and we’d die in various crashes and one cousin would freeze to death on a bike path, drunk, passed out, sleeping for the rest of his life, how I remember the last time I saw him I’d bought him an ice cream cone, the top scoop fell on the ground and I had no money left, so I picked it up, put it back on top, hoping he wouldn’t notice and when I handed it to him and he took a bite, he spit it all out, saying, What the Jesus! And I couldn’t stop laughing. I just couldn’t stop laughing. And I thought he was going to live forever. No, longer.
Photo by Aditya Vyas.