Zurich

ZURICH / Stuart Friebert I walk up the hill to the playground where I used to take the kids, pushed baby back and forth, changed quadrants: sandbox, little swing, merry-go-round. On the other side of the street the office of the doctor who worked on my back, I remember looking up from the massaging machine, he'd rip a drape aside, expose an immense enlargement of him assisting a famous surgeon on a brain operation somewhere in the world and the photo opposite showed him skiing down Mont Blanc in the dead of night while at home, and I remember this in sickness, my wife went slowly mad, making little sketches, puppets, anything to keep the nights turning, had her hair done Swiss style for quiet dinners on second floors of second class restaurants and then: Kennedy assassinated, whole streetcars of Swiss crying, we rushed home, tried tuning the radio to a station we could understand. Paris, it's Paris, my wife screamed, while I wired the antenna to the kitchen pipes for more sound: two journalists and a philosopher putting it all in perspective, then choirs and violins and the sound going dim. We slapped the pipes, the sun making little spots on the tiles by our feet. 26 · The Missouri Review ...