something called heart failure, something like not being able to
breathe, something that bordered on death, it had happened
before, I was a veteran, I sat on the steps watching the house
while the girl in the white dress stood being laughed at with
her date and I had thoughts about death that I already knew I
would remember all my life and someday write down: death is
someone I know, someone who is dressed exactly like the
doctor and carries the same black bag and comes at night and
is coming tonight to get mother, and then I saw him come,
pretending to be the doctor, and I thought well this is it she
will die tonight I know but the others don’t because they go on
dates or play statue and I’m more mature and so they don’t
know these things that I know because I live in a house where
death comes all the time, suddenly in the night, suddenly in the
day, suddenly in the middle of sleeping, suddenly in the middle
of a meal, there is death: mother is sick, we’ve called the doctor,
I know death is on the way.
10
The streetlights lit up the street. The brick was red, even- at
night. The girl on the date had a white dress with a red corsage.
We sat across the street, near our favorite telephone pole for
hide-and-seek, and played statue on and off. I always had a
home out there, on the steps, behind the cars, near the telephone pole.
*
Inside the woman was dying. Outside we played witch.
The boys chased the girls over the whole block from front
to back. They tried to catch a girl. When they caught her they
put her in a wooden cage they had built or found and they
raised the cage up high on a telephone pole, miles and miles
above the ground, with rope, and they left her hanging there.
She was the witch. Then they let her down when they wanted
to. After she begged and screamed enough and they wanted to
play again or do something else.
You were supposed to want them to want to catch you.
They would all run after one girl and catch her and put her in
the cage and raise it up with the rope high, high on the telephone pole out in the back where the adults didn’t see. Then they would hold the cage in place, the girl inside it screaming,
four or five of them holding her weight up there in the wooden
cage, or they would tie the rope to something and stand and
watch.
When they picked you it meant you were popular and fast
and hard to catch.
*
When we played witch all the girls screamed and ran as fast as
they could. They ran from all the boys and ran so fast and so
far that eventually you would run into some boy somewhere
but all the boys had decided who they were going to catch so
the boy you would run into accidentally would just pass you
