HONOUR THY ERROR AS A HIDDEN INTENTION

Nothing says I love you like a stranger man in black slacks, a crisp grey button-down with the sleeves rolled up, shoes like a man of his word, the slightest flat top, show of beard, long piano fingers, falling asleep on the subway with his weight leaned on my left side.

I think: I could love you, with your PC laptop in a bag on your lap, home so late from work.

A jolt of the train wakes him, and he knows he’s been resting on a stranger woman for at least two stops. He straightens up. We look, smile, look away. Next stop, next stop: it’s over. Nevertheless

we are happy for this moment.

I decide to move to Chernobyl. I pack light. No one will know I’m gone.

It’s beautiful there. Creatures have come, and the land is verdant, and you can plant a garden, and no one will bother you, and there’s a very nice little community of back-to-the-landers, you might say, who returned shortly after The Incident, and you’d never know they were rotting from the inside out.

You’d never know their eyes cry blood and their teeth are falling out one by one. Not until you stop to talk to a very nice lady leaning on a wooden broomstick in her doorway, and you make her laugh through tears with your stories of the whole faraway world. She is bowled over, just absolutely knocked sideways.

You came back, she says. You can sleep on my pull-out couch, she says. Come and go as you please. You’ll get used to it. We all did.

I think: Is this what it means to be a family?

She nods, smiling, and I can see her eyes are the color of brass house keys.