A Map in Sunshine, and: Oracle

A Map in Sunshine

I was seven and my sister four when we first visited the Central Park Zoo. We drove in one spring Sunday

and we had to look our best. Walking through the park, our parents took our pictures and then each other. My father charmed

a young woman into taking one of all of us. That was when my sister noticed them— the family coming toward us,

and suddenly we had good reason to stare: the grown-ups tall and handsome and new; their children, boy & girl,

like smaller, finer versions, each holding a parent’s hand. Their mother looked at our mother,

as if to confess that raising them was no harder than making pancakes. Their cheerful father showed

he had his camera too; it was slimmer and newer—newer made him smile. The year before, my class took a field trip

to a children’s zoo in the Pine Barrens, a place where the animals looked old and underfed or did nothing but sleep;

where a mountain lion, hunkered down and coughing, may very well have been a Maine Coon with only one ear

and a piece of straw stuck behind it like a no. 2 pencil. Sitting on a bench with my parents and sister,

I watched pigeons fail at curbing sparrows. Squirrels sprang across the grass like boys fleeing piano practice.

Don’t wander, our teachers told us; voices down. One day soon, on my first & only field trip to Manhattan,

I will eat an egg salad sandwich, then later, in the Hayden Planetarium I’ll throw up on the left shoe of Janet Barwis,

and apologize, forever. If there’s a photograph somewhere, in it my sister & I shield our eyes;

we’re thinking about wild animals and lunch; my father studies a map he never opened until now—

he’s on the edge of making plans. If there’s a photograph, my mother doesn’t tell us to smile.

Oracle

A dull morning dream: short, with a bit of story left over from the last dream, and sunshine in one corner, but just before I woke, I heard a woman’s voice:

“I’m sorry, Campbell Warren died this morning,” as if she said, The number you have reached— the same recorded tone, the intended message

so close to my ear I knew right then: it’s true. “A good day to ask for a raise,” a man’s horoscope read, and he smelled the spring air, saw the sun on the windows,

the glass exclaiming light, and just knew, Today’sperfect—if I had a job, for sure I’d ask for a raise Campbell Warren fresh out of college took a job in radio,

and years later, if you happened to wake up in Arkansas, his good voice each weekday morning guided your car through the loathsome gates of work,

or so they say. Back home I ran into Campbell long after graduation, and realized all this time I’d hardly thought of him; I could tell he felt the same.

Don’t worry—morning radio in Little Rock is safe. The voice I heard in my sleep—so clear, so close, so real— that voice was wrong, and it’s not even sorry.