during a 50-minute massage. The grading, the emails, the sunken cold: my mid-back balled into a walnut. At Hand and Stone, a blind masseuse named Homer leads me to a room with prancing emerald lights: hospital sink, mirror from Marshall’s—a franchised underworld.
“Nice name. Homer. Like the writer,” I confirm.
“Like Homer Simpson,” he corrects, voice as soothing as the guitar-plucking on Spotify.
Homer’s good. I feel his fingers vibrate; riverstone of elbow, railway of forearm, twinge of hidden bruise. But it’s the lonely, long vowel of Homer’s name that drops me: Hom-er…Home. This time, it’s my dad. When he taught me how to hit a homer. Elbows in on the swing. When he’d take me to Home Depot, which I hated because it meant resurrecting a car or a brittle house—I still smell him in 2 x 4s, see the sun in the tawny of his arm. When he’d say, “Back home in the Philippines…,” and the black wind of his eyes curled back somewhere. When he went to EMT school at 40 and tried, he got good at naming muscles: rhomboid, soleus. When last we walked on Santa Monica Pier, salted crab in the air, in his maroon Members Only jacket, eating cotton candy just to hold something, I asked in anger why he did that to mom, and who is my half-sister, and why he couldn’t quit smoking so that he might see his grandson be born. When all he’d say was, I know, in that undammable voice which made the gloaming ocean freeze.
O, how I aged into a slender axe that could shatter that Pacific with a lone syllable. How one camouflaged siren of memory beaches us. How I want to approach him, cupping my palms around his trembling matchstick one last time.