C4 antho - Chamber Four

~182~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
A month later, I learn of his death by phone.
“They blew him up,” weeps his father. “Can you believe
they blew my boy up?”
His father says a stray mortar found him one afternoon
minding his own business inside the Green Zone. One
minute he was having a harmless turkey sandwich the next
minute his arm came off at the shoulder followed by irreversible
blood loss.
I hang up.
I look out the window.
The world is changing, but how?
I stay home.
I polish off my wine rack until the funeral, which is later
that week.
It’s a small church on the Upper East Side. Wesley’s
closed casket is there. It smells like shoe polish and candle
wax. I take a seat near the back by myself. I try to listen to
the priest, but my mind wanders. I am in Islay. I am on the
slopes of Zermatt contemplating late-night hot tubbing with
coked up countesses. My friend is not in that box with only
one arm, I reason. My friend had two arms and liked to do
lines while watching the Yankees game.
“All I want is to be left alone,” I tell people.
The first thing I do is to purchase a can of lighter fluid.
For two days I regard the lighter fluid gravely from a safe
distance. Once I pull out a box of matches from under the
sink, but that’s as far as it goes.
I go back to regarding it gravely from a safe distance.
The following nine days I refuse to leave my couch, or
watch TV, or eat excessively, or drink alcohol, or sleep, or deconstruct
porno, or do anything Wesley is now unable to