A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

“No one can take what’s inside your head once it’s there.”

Better to armor yourself with the unreal. Better to turn inward, hide in the dark waters among the sea anemones, down deep where the sharks can’t see you.

Your father did many things in his forty years. Yet if pressed to recall his finest moment, I would choose to see him in the living room, with you, by the chess set, peeling a plum.

Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor.

For one year, eleven months, and four days the pleas, admonitions and prayers he had wanted to utter never left his lungs. The weight of all he hadn’t said hung like a dead organ in his chest. He could barely breathe.

For years he’d lived with the fear of murder, torture, or disappearance, as all men of his age did, and it was the senselessness that truly frightened him; that the monumental finality of death could come arbitrarily was more terrifying than the eternity to follow.