He knew it was his last get-together.  I do not know how he knew, but there was a finality about his words and a far-away look in his eyes that I’d never seen before—stillness, acceptance, voices calling from far off. 

The house was filled with chaos, family teasing, laughter, kids discovering toys, adults catching up with each other, teenagers gathering in the center of the room to compare notes on how the world was shaping up. The open floorplan allowed all to see into the kitchen where the food was being prepared and the women fussed over each dish—setting up for a grand meal. 

He was just sitting there, somber, taking it all in.  I watched him for a while, puzzled by the spectacle of aging. Wrinkled, sagging, blotchy skin, huge veins on his arms.  His friendly but droopy face—extended stomach and feeble hands. His piercing blue eyes that looked like deep pools today. His children, grand-children and great-grand-children filled the space–sucked the oxygen out of the room.  Everything was moving too fast for him. 

He peered over his reading glasses and spoke directly to me.  “Don’t forget,” he said, “don’t ever forget that you have a wonderful family.”  “Yes, we do,” I responded, as I proceeded to make small talk about the kids and some of the hair-brained ideas they had come up with lately.  He laughed a bit, then looked off in the distance at nothing that I could see.   

What I would have given to capture his knowledge and wisdom and spread it across his full room of posterity.  What better people we would all be for it. He was a beautiful man. I loved having him as a grandfather.  He always made me feel special.  He owned a landscaping nursery and brought me flowers from time to time,  none quite as beautiful as the begonia on the morning of my fifth birthday.  It was captivating and it happened to be picture day, so I took it to school and insisted that I hold the flower in the picture.  I felt like it would keep him closer to me somehow. 

When I saw him next, he lay on beautifully tucked silk with his well-worn hands folded across his stomach.  Despite his well-lived life,  the air in the funeral parlor ached with longing and grief. I flashed on him sitting in the big green chair amid the family free-for-all just last weekend. I was never so sure that he knew his time was nigh. 

I remembered Corrie Ten Boom and her father’s words about death. “Corrie, when do I give you your train ticket?  “Right before I get on the train,” she answered.

Could it be that death is like that?  Somehow, we get our ticket right before we board, and we are momentarily prepared for our passing.

I took comfort knowing that he was ready, even though we were not.  I thought of a million questions to ask him.  So much knowledge and history gone.  I wished for one more of his warm hugs. The finality of it all was stark, overwhelming, and surreal.  I found the kindergarten picture and put it up against a small vase on the mantle for a while. 

Suzanne S. Eaton is an author and marketing consultant. She has written many corporate stories and magazines. She authored the book “Chinese Herbs,” reprinted by Harmony Press seven times. In her early days of writing, she was the first woman to get a feature article in Off Road Magazine and has been published in various magazines and anthologies. Most recently, Down in the Dirt Magazine, Writer Shed Stories and Seaborne Magazine have selected her work for publication.
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The woman, young but dew-dried, smiles as she moves up the aisle of the bus, in search of an empty seat to call, briefly, her own.  A nice smile but yellowing, evenly tinted by avoidance of the dentist, but tended to and healthy looking.  But yellow.  That would never have happened “when I was young” (that special time for every old fool), but I see that now with some frequency.  And there are, as there were not, so long ago, cars hustling down the roads unwashed, with a single headlight out while the remaining headlight stares straight ahead, “Nothing to see here, Officer, move on, thanks please.”  Houses and yards are imperfectly cared for, roof tiles missing, rose bushes gone to ruin, siding stained and scraped – all signs of a growing neglect as more and more money trickles out of the holes in our wallets.  “Is that a colander there, or are you just glad to see me?”  We’re glad to see a smiling face, however yellow the teeth may be, as opposed to the looming snarls of the collapse that old age and the evidence foretell, where teeth will be bared, yellow and red in the land of withered plenty, and perhaps tartar will chip off exposed bones, revealing the shiny white teeth of the childhood of ourselves and our time.  The homeless already have their dens.  They will look out of the alleys at clashes and carnage, snatch up fallen hats and umbrellas, a single shoe torn off in battle, and tuck their prizes under their heavy stained coats, before they scurry off, cackling, into the shadows.

JBMulligan has published more than 1100 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 45 years, and has had two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation). He has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies.

My older sister Nancy and I hit mailboxes on Halloween. The world keeps taking. Nan says we need to shake things up.

I lean out the front seat and ready the bat, so it strikes with the right momentum.

Thwack. Thwack. Mailboxes explode, metal heads shattered.

“They’ll never recover,” I joke, watching streams of envelopes disperse into the wind.

“It’s sappy cards.” Nan’s smile wobbles. “We love you a thousand miles away. Everyone else always stays behind.”

“Sometimes they return.”

She takes my hand.

“I wish.”

I feel fragility, squeeze her hand back. Ready my bat. It feels so small now.

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. A self-proclaimed Romantic and Tchaikovsky addict, Yash loves autumn and dissecting dysfunction.