Burn

by Peter Heller

She called it a prayer stone. It was the size of a radish and taken from their favorite creek and given to him as a reminder to pay attention: Love is attention, she’d said. That is all you know on earth.

It was a little over a year since Jan had left, and their dog, Bell, had died two months later. Collapsed on her walk. Only seven and with no known health conditions—Jess figured she’d died from a broken heart. Did dogs do that? Some nights he had willed himself to go the same way; no luck.

The liminal spaces are the ones I love the most and where I feel the most uncomfortable. And the most sad.

Maybe enlightenment and total loss are the same thing. That is something to chew on.

I think love is all about our own capacity. So, if I am really good at love, at paying attention, at appreciation, at acceptance, then I can fully love anyone. How deep I love is about the depth of my ability and not the other person.

Felt an ant crawling on his cheek. A tear.

Anything too cute always seemed to be hiding something, maybe nothing more menacing than the daily pain of normal life.

I’ve gotta stop thinking so much, Jess thought. And now I’m thinking about thinking. Too many echoes in the world. Get your shit together!

He hadn’t seemed like a daybed kind of coot, but maybe it had been his wife’s. Maybe the old man slept there in her scent, curled like a hound.

Through the window of his bunk room he watched Orion rise over the trees, flexing his longbow toward the Bull, which he would never kill.

“Fuck,” Jess breathed. “Fuckfuckfuck. You hear about stuff like this, in other countries.”

Thanks. Which was what, truly and simply, was in his heart. Thanks for all of it. For partly, maybe mostly, raising me. For shuttling me everywhere. For teaching me to garden and cook a little. For laughing when my own house was so serious. For insisting on listening to my poems. For guiding me so graciously through that other rite of passage. For—I guess—seeing me full-on, gladly, when my own parents just lowered their reading glasses and looked up over their books.