Fiction
The
box was cardboard, worn and frayed and the top still neatly in place. I recognized
immediately the now pale logo of some long ago shoe company whose name I had
not seen in years. I tugged at it gently and pulled it from its place then wiped
away with a handy rag the dust of many years. Hidden behind chests of tools and
old paint cans splashed with colored drool, forgotten quietly on one of the many
shelves in my garage, I had stumbled upon the letterbox searching for something
else. Gingerly, as one might carry a recently unearthed and long buried time
capsule, I carried it over to my workbench knowing full-well what it contained,
yet apprehensive, too, at the memories which would, like some unbidden genie, arise
from inside. With both of my hands I pried gently at the top, the lid refusing
at first to come away as smoothly as I had imagined. The box was no longer
sturdy and I became more careful, a respectful steward of my past. I tugged more
strongly now at one of the corners lifting the top and smelled at once the
musty odor of years gone by and for a moment contemplated the sight of what I had
known to be inside. Tightly banded in rows by year, some covered in faded
script and others in uneven type, were the many letters of my youth.
The
silence was profound because we lived in the country, a rattletrap drive miles
from the nearest town. Above my head I listened to the creak of the rafters
expanding in the hot afternoon sun, and outside the occasional car driving slowly
past. I was alone that Sunday afternoon, my wife miles away, our children grown,
and I welcomed my solitude.
I
struggled with the nearest set of letters bound by a worn tobacco-colored band
that snapped loudly and unexpectedly as my fingers tugged to remove it. The faded
blue lightweight airmail envelopes, with their red and blue borders, cascaded
unto the bench as I struggled to prevent them from falling to the floor. On the
first one, a handwritten notation in my father’s no-nonsense script signaled
the year—1966. It was the year of my graduation from high school, the year I
went off to college and left he and my mother and my two brothers and sisters far
behind in Africa, my father a missionary with his church devout in his passion
for spreading the word. I fanned through the envelopes quickly, remembering as
I did with some difficulty, highlights of that fateful year, a year which would
begin to shape a life: long forgotten friends, a girl, the quaint college town,
the horrors of the war in Viet-Nam, but little else. And of my freshman year, an
interesting class, perhaps a charismatic professor, I remembered nothing.
Hesitant,
and perhaps unwilling to read my words written or typed on matching blue onionskin
paper, my life then as yet untainted by thrills and disappointments, I
struggled at the prospect of being faced for the first time in a long time with
evidence of the foolishness of my past. My hand trembled as my fingers reached
in to pull out the first letter, my wide-eyed sentiments awkwardly revealed
line by adolescent line, my future unknowable, my life uncertain, a nation at
war.
I
remember, as I read over my awkward sentences strung strangely together, how
the letterbox had come to me. One of my sisters had them in custody for all of
us—five letterboxes, one for each of us, of our correspondence home from
America—saved lovingly by my father and mother in the tropical heat of their
African home. I was middle-aged and married with children when I received my
letterbox and gave it little attention and tucked it away.
As
the years passed I chanced now and then to consider sitting and reading them,
but a busy career and the pressures of life argued against it. Now, many years
later, warming at last to the memories and undeterred, I dug deeper into my
past. The thick packets, so rich and full of detail the first few years, were
now very much thinner by 1971, the final year at the back of the box. As I
opened them carefully, I learned I was busy and in a hurry that year. I had
places to go and important things on my mind. My letters were typed in those
days, because now I had a degree and a job and a typewriter in my office. My
sentences were short, cryptic and terse, as if dashed off at lunch, the closing
endearment mechanical and lacking in much passion, or so it seemed to me.
There
were postcards, too, tucked alongside the envelopes, colorful and often still
bright, the different colored inks from my ballpoint pens faded, my wide-eyed hasty
scrawl often illegible. I leafed through them slowly, looking carefully and
tried to remember first visits to Chicago, Manhattan and Washington, D.C., a crowded
summer beach, an atmospheric city view of the southern town where I was married,
and still others now mostly meaningless to me.
The
afternoon was drawing to a close. I could sense the imminence of dusk and view
the falling light through the small, dirty window high above my head. Switching
on the light, I repacked the box slowly, glancing longingly one last time at
the faraway familiar African address, a continent I would never visit again,
and put away forever the vestiges of my youth.
J.R. Rogers holds a bachelor’s degree in
French Literature but has worked most of his professional life as a management
consultant. His work has appeared in Steam
Ticket: A Third Coast Review, TrainWrite,
VelvetBlory, The Copperfield Review, and elsewhere. He has published three e-book
novels, The Counterfeit Consul, Leopold’s Assassin, and Doomed Spy, for which excerpts can be
found at www.authorjrrogers.com.
He tweets about books, literature, writers, and writing @authorjrrogers.
