THE THIRD PERSON

by Richard Leise

Around the child like a forest floor with its canopy of fallen leaves and broken branches, the city’s understory. There, a cluster of brown buttercups. There, a plastic wrapper. There, a light blue mask. There were other objects such as these, and each informed a world that in equal measures couldn’t be anticipated or recorded. It was the same for everyone. 

Everyone was talking. The detective heard the same words and he heard different names and the mother stood with the boyfriend and she was holding her phone in the palm of her hand, horizontally, beneath her chin. Pale light streamed across her face. She couldn’t believe this was happening. The ground shook before the train passed, and for a moment the scene went silent. They knew what would happen, how their conversations would get cut off. And then the sound of the train’s horn moving through the city-dark streets. 

There are children in the streets. There are streets in the children. Separating a child from her mother is strange under any circumstances. When the mother herself is a kid, her fear is casual. Her fear is ancient. Her fear is easy. She holds onto fear, the idea of it, the mind inside the idea that this, all of this, is Setup. None of this is unique and that this misfortune makes her common makes her angry and anger replaces fear and this is the outline defining grief. This is the outline defining empathy. This is the outline defining forgiveness. Only there is no one to forgive. She holds on to what she can.

How then, can a child, like a pressed flower, become to her mother a memory of something worth preserving, something tangible but easily destroyed, petal by petal, stem and pistil, the mother holding the artifact petrified, knowing that, once opened, left unpreserved, the flower will quickly flit and flake until all that remains is the impression upon the wax paper, the space cleft within the pages of the book? For progeny—like the fallen child—gossip and rumor become gospel. And once a community accepts a history, there is no longer room for biography.

The child is white. Blond hair, blue eyes. In the child’s face there is her mother. Even more than her mother there is the kid. The young woman. She can’t be any older than five. She’s tall for her age. Probably. This is hard to say, given her legs, how they are bent, the right one broken. She has been dead all afternoon. And like her mom the little girl, her mouth open, a look that’s mistaken, and her eyes, how they remain fixed, staring, as if looking upon some other, frightening, dimension. 

Old men sit atop cinder blocks. Old men set atop bricks. Paint-splattered Salvation Army slacks. Plastic sneakers absent tread. Missing shoelaces. Forty-ounce mouths gape from brown paper bags, bottles and cans screwed into the deadpan earth. Eyes yellow and heavy blink slowly, red veins thick and bulbous, an Internet of forgotten thought. Their cigarettes smoking. 

Someone said: “She was always so happy.” 

It’s much darker now. The city’s lights, trapped by overcast, concentrate to present a weak, watery glow. In the distance beyond the river the sky remains clear and the night’s young stars create the first of those spaces between the evening’s constellations. Found patterns. Shapes paradoxical. Forms which, at one point in time, possessed great significance to great, fallen, civilizations. The ultimate evidence of nothingness. Yet the only proof that we are. That we remain. 

There is a sound. The detective looks up. 

Bats. Like drunken acrobats, how they rise and swiftly fall. Veer and smoothly careen. And it is in identifying, and then following the flight of an individual bat, it is in watching the animal gather speed, how the bending angle of sunlight upon one single wing lends dimension, affords to one bat a definitive shape only a shape unlike that of any artist’s rendering, that is unlike anything the detective has ever seen. The people behind the caution tape. The buildings that rise from their lots, like tombstones. Like those trailers erected following natural disasters. Only this disaster was made by human hands, and the structures upon this street, sutured one to another, were constructed long before any actual calamity. Dwellings, these, made for people who have made a tornado, or a flood, or a hurricane, of this, their only century. 

A man stoops and lifts the tape. He makes the scene. 

“What have we here,” and he lifts his camera and points and shoots. Circling the child—the little girl—he lifts his camera and points and shoots. 

“We’ll see,” the detective says.

Author Bio:

Richard writes and teaches outside Ithaca, NY. A Perry Morgan Fellow from Old Dominion University's MFA program, his fiction and poetry is featured in numerous publications. His debut novel, BEING DEAD, will be available from Brigids Gate Press fall, 2023. His unique literary work, "Johannes & Merritt" (Dark Lake Publishing), is available from Amazon. And his luminous love story, “Jennifer,” will be available from DreamPunk press January, 2023. He is @coy_harlingen on Twitter.

Artist Bio:

Jeremiah Gilbert is a college professor and award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California. His travels have taken him to over a hundred countries and territories spread across six continents. His photography has been published internationally and has been exhibited worldwide. He is also the author of the collections Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel and From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels.