The Artful Trade

Mother's Day The last time my mother knew me was a few years ago on Mother's Day. She had started forgetting and remembering in the wrong order. Forgetting the things around her, remembering the distant past...like Time was suddenly dyslexic. They had her in this hospital ward for the elderly on some back street off the main drag called Memory Lane Memory Lane would be funny if it wasn’t so cruel. Sometimes living's the same way. She kept asking for a mirror but didn't recognize herself anymore. She was 17 again but trapped in an 80 year old body. A young girl staring in disbelief at the person she would become. She didn’t know her husband or daughters or sons anymore. Some days she thought I was her long dead uncle or her brother. And near the end she thought I was her father. She pleaded with me again and again to let her see that Irish boy that was just back from the war, the one that got shot in the head and survived and kept knocking on the door...

The Smell Of Bleach                         I have a scar on my hand and another on the back of my head. I got them both when I was 22 working on a construction crew down south. The scar on my hand came from trying to beat back loneliness. And for a time I did. I shattered it one night along with a pane of glass. The scar on my head came from the business end of a shovel swung by a guy whose jaw I broke trying to save a girl. As it turned out the girl saved me….though that took the better part of a year. A scar is where the true gets forced in. That’s never easy. Something is usually broken when it tries. That year what’s true about loneliness and bravery, about the stains we all carry and the hope of absolving them cut their way into me. Some nights I can feel them reach toward each other, trying to  meet somewhere in the middle like the true is trying find its way down into the heart of me. My scars ...

Inseparable                                                               W. Maguire  copyright 2016 When I was 17 and living on my own,certain that I knew more about anything than anyone around me, I took a job for a few months as a janitor at an old folks home. My friends called it the Home for the Nearly Dead.  It was out at the edge of town far from view, like it was slowly being pushed out there to the very precipice of living. The building was a sad and decrepit little place with peeling paint and linoleum floors and a funeral home next door. That part of town had its own zip code and some of the townspeople called it the Hereafter, like it was a final stop between living and whatever comes later. Passing through one day I saw a help wanted sign and answered it.  I was poor and dumb and usually hungry an...

Night Vision                                                       W. Maguire    copyright 2016  When I was a kid I answered an ad for a job working as an electricians assistant. The old man….almost 35… asked me what I knew about voltage and amps and circuits. In a rare moment of candor I stared hard at him…all of 14…and said “Nothin’. He nodded and gave me the job. That summer he tried to teach me why electricity was the greatest power on earth...because for the most part it ran unseen in the dark through wires and delivered us light. To him to it was almost as if it was stolen from God. We spent about a month that summer changing out substandard wires in some townhouses. A couple had caught fire from some faulty wiring and the insurance company wanted it pulled. One day I had some of the wire we had torn out in hand. ...