The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

You know, I imagine what it would be like if you were here. I’ve taken your personality, all that I knew of it before you were gone, and stretched it out as far as I am able. It’s like trying to press out pastry dough as thin as possible without tearing it. I stretch you out to now, imagining you as a fifty-four-year-old man. However, what I have very rarely allowed myself to do is remember you. When I start to think back, I often slam the door—well. But this morning I was sitting in my sister’s garden listening to the birds and the breeze and the cattle nearby, my eyes closed, and a memory came to me, a gift, and I didn’t slam the door. I allowed myself to remember. An afternoon one autumn I took you all down to the park, down that hill through the neighborhood past the houses, and remember they got bigger as you descended, and it got pretty steep (walking back home was monstrous). You always took off running full speed down that hill. You with your long legs would fly. It was miraculous. By the time you were this age, six or seven, you know, it didn’t even concern me anymore, you were like a limber bolt of lightning with that blind assurance and comfort in your body. Anyway, at the bottom of the hill that path along the stone wall, just lovely there, and then you would come out under the shade of that magnificent weeping willow tree. It was like heaven.