In Which Brief Stories Are Told

Within an Inch of the Burnished Knob

Within an Inch of the Burnished Knob Within an inch of the burnished knob, the hand hesitates. An insignificant moment, a pause of the inevitable. And yet, in a pause, evitable and significant. Let us consider the circumstances . He has been gone twenty years, into the hills above the cemetery, or down the street to the tobacconist’s for a cherry blend, his favorite. He has seen the fantasies of years to come, the small bowlers of weather, has rented a flat two streets over, grown a beard and, incognito, taken another wife. Did he wander off to some wild gaming mindlessly, or with perfect intent? The shirtsleeves and collar are frayed, faded to the milk-blue of an impatient dawn just before light. And just before light, in a fog-dampened, brick-red morning late in the millennium, his trousers—or shall we call them pants or, maybe, pantaloons— trail gray threads like curses, and he is drunk. Or has been drunk and now is sober, newly attired in stiff suede, a purple necktie tightened in a perfect Windsor near the throat, one fashion he’s thankful to have snugged there, given the dichotomy of knots. Within an inch of the burnished knob, the hand hesitates. The fingers short and stubby, in spite of his overall size, a healthy few In Which Brief Stories Are Told 94 ) inches over six feet, or more. To see his feet, however, we’d see a size eight or less, in tan, leather-thwacked oxfords, with the bold cuff of his pants bunching and wrinkled on the laces. Or athletic shoes, although they surely wouldn’t have been so casual when he left. And consider the bush-luck of his extremities: Between the fingers there’s little room for another’s hand to spread as if in prayer; at his niece’s wedding years before, congratulating the new father-in-law, one would have witnessed the handshake of a fish, fumbling and gone limp. Or firm and calloused, having mortared cement blocks for the better part of the years he’s been gone, a job well below his schooling in foreign culture and language, but suitable for the deception. His fingers, long and elegant, have tentacled the tusks of many a piano, the small, quarter-moon cuticles gray with cement dust, or white and clean, scrubbed meticulously with pumice before he’d attempt to handle the crystal goblet of some pricey product of Gascony. Within an inch of the burnished knob, the hand hesitates. And a slight breeze in the late afternoon tickles the fat finger hairs below the second knuckle, like a housefly, or when he drifts off to half-sleep in the heaviness of a summer’s humidity, unable to keep at his briefs. He will flick at the light touch with the middle finger of his opposite hand, or he’ll swat without looking, or he’ll look and slowly swing the hand closer to his face to be certain before he swats at it. He will know that there is no fly, no insects but those in his imagination, the island free of evolution, nothing more than a nervous tick. Or he will not notice the wind at all, intent upon his mission, his familiar return or the initial movement of an unfamiliar door. The hand will move easily. And the hand will move away, or move to find the cold brass fingerprints that he had left there yesterday or the week before. Within an inch of the burnished knob, the hand hesitates. Doubly , the moon reflects in the small triptych of windowpanes. Within an Inch of the Burnished Knob ( 95 Doubly, he sees his face in the door, and the night has been long, and he longs to open the door and kiss his wife and cradle his daughter before she falls into dreams of princes at the window. A clown lamp, lit with balloons, giggles lightly near her bed. Or she sleeps on some mouse-soiled mattress on the uncarpeted floor, where he left her no visible means, and she awaits his mean deviation, confused by the warm wetness of her sex and the cramped brittleness of her submission. Spoony tragediennes, their dreams are the same. Or the hand is palsied, and he will reach in his trousers for a key, shaking, knowing that the door has been locked twenty years, or since...