she is one
The funeral lady needs a line for the order of service, just who she was, and I have the shoebox open on the kitchen table and I cannot give her the line.
There are two photographs of the front step. Same step, same pot of the something that was always going and never gone, same chip out of the same paving. In one the door behind her is blue. In the other there is wall where the door should be, brick, calm as anything, as though no one ever cut a doorway there. I held them side by side under the lamp and neither would give. They are not a before and an after. The light is the same, and she is the same age, smiling the same small smile at whoever held the camera, and there is no one left to ask who that was.
I tried to write down her children, to have the number ready, and it would not sit still under my pen. By their faces I got one answer, by the names another, and the two would not meet. So I stopped. You stop minding which, after a while.
There is a man been writing, very kind, very sorry for my loss, asking might he take the box off my hands. I have not written back.
On the back of the blue-door photo, in her own hand, in pencil gone soft, it says she is one. Not what it means. Just that. And it is the only thing in the box that says the same thing every time I look, so I gave the funeral lady that. She was one. I know it isn’t the line. It’s the only one that holds still.
Pull a thread:
- the house at the end — the house, the blue door
- Mr Ashe buys a photograph — Mr Ashe, who buys the shoebox
- the auditor’s first morning — the auditor’s file