The house on 42nd Street had walls that fell apart like a doll house, revealing tidy little lives. Little lives that poured milk into cereal bowls, and hugged each other and kissed the lips of lovers and the cheeks of children. Little lives with bright eyes and tidy faces, clean shaven in double-breasted suits and thick rimmed glasses. Tiny faces with porcelain smiles and glass marble eyes that were full of life, and then not. And then dead. They mowed their lawns and the hedges. They watched T.V. They watched television in statuette stasis and held hands all the while, and nobody moved. They were glued—little lives that were and were not. Little dolls so very fragile in another’s hands. The hands of God that beseeched their tidy little lives and their tidy hedges and the tidy white picket fence.
And then one morning they wake up, and their dead. Little Jimmy caught fever, and the rest caught it so soon after. The coroner comes to the house with the white picket fence and hung his head and scribbled notes on a notepad. Told funny stories to men and laughed and wrapped pretty little porcelain bodies stiff in rigor mortis into body bags. He carries them through the house with granite countertops and shag carpets and their white faces and dead glass eyes stare through the unzipped backs of black duffle bags.
Flies hover.
And tear at the flesh of the good and the dead.
God bless their souls. The entrance to heaven is marked with cellophane and blood samples.
--Got some dead one’s here, the coroner says. Stiffer than ole’ Johnny two-bit here. They have more brains for sure. Ole Johnny doesn’t have anything on good dead folk.
The coroner is a god fearing man. He stares out the window of his van with the bodies in the back-seat. A whole family lined in a neat little row, rounded up like the usual suspects.
Innocence.
Blue tongues hang from their mouth and drops of dried saliva sticks a tongue to little Sally-Sue’s beautiful curly brown hair she wrapped up in a blue bonnet that she liked to wear to school. Everyone loved her. No one noticed when she was gone.
The coroner goes home, and drinks a bottle of rum. He drowns the gullet, pours the acid. He empties the hatch and douses himself in gasoline. He is forgetting. He has forgotten.
Baby Bobby with warm hands and a quiet smile on his face. His pacifier hangs off his ring finger like a premature wedding ring, betrothed to the infantile stage he would never have the chance to grow out of.
Sally Sue with that bonnet, all beauty and youth. Supple and young. Alive. Brittle and frail. Dead.
And the coroner goes home to a wife of his own.
--Shit, Liz, what’s for dinner.
The little house on the corner where the sidewalk meets the aspect of the neighborhood’s finest gardens and the gutters below goes vacant. Children throw rocks in the windows and they land on Sally Sue’s shining new vanity she had gotten for her thirteenth birthday. It’s dusty. In the mirror are the reflections of teenage whimsical poems—poems of love and deception—written on Post-it notes on top of the table. And the lights are out.
