by: m. gantee

He is always so serious.  His friends (of whom there are few) ask him, “Why so serious?”  With a name like Mortimer, I suppose you are born to be serious.  Or at least aware of death; which, to humans, is a deadly-serious topic.

I see him – Mortimer – staring up at me.  He always comes to the foot of the stairs this time of day and looks upward.  Up to the second floor.  I see the afternoon sun slanting quietly through the hallway, across his bare feet and denimed legs.  I see the dust moats drifting by his pants, from one side to the other, oblivious to the gravity of his body.

He stands and stares.  He stares up the stairs (see, I can make jokes too.  I, too, can be clever…).  Yes, I am clever.  I, too, feel the words as they whisper across my own tongue or move through the sinew of my own fingers through pencil and onto paper. 

He stares at my shadow, at my lean height, at my stillness.  He stares and thinks better of ascending.  And then walks away and I know I will see him again tomorrow.  I will see him again tomorrow.

What does he see when he sees me?  A figure at the top of the stairs?  Maybe a shimmering that could easily just be the sunlight shifting this way and that through the white muslin of curtains.  The curtains move this way and that in the wind that comes through the windows.  He looks up the stairs, remembers—what does he remember?  It is hard for him, thinking about the years that passed through this house, the sounds and smells.  And now it is just him.  Looking up the stairs, thinking.  His body is filled up with memories.  He thinks about those past universes.  I can see him thinking.  There, in the shifting dust moats, he stands and thinks and the dust pays him no mind.  He is one of those moats.  I see that.  And he, too, knows that: he is old enough to know that now.

He comes to the bottom of the stairs and looks.  And I stand here at the top of the stairs and I, too, look.  At each other.  We are here together.  We have always been together in the breeze that moves through the house, in the breeze that tousles the maple leaves, in the shadows blue and green, in the dust moats, in the memories and in the silence.  We are together.  We are the same.