A.L. Gordon: PRECIOUS THINGS • Cleaver Magazine

A.L. Gordon
PRECIOUS THINGS

An octopus has three hearts. I no longer have one. With his eight arms, maybe he could have reached out and grabbed you when you were slipping away. The two arms I wrapped around your thin body as I whispered I love you were not enough. I think when I held you the last time, when I told you I loved you the last time, I knew you’d be leaving. That you’d leave and take my one heart with you, and my two arms would feel like eight—all of them empty and flailing.

I remember my heart when you were born. How full and big it was. You took so long – it was like you didn’t want to come out – like you knew what waited for you. They had to use a suction cup on your head to help get you out. I learned later it’s called vacuum extraction. The doctor put her foot up against the bed, braced herself, and pulled hard. Harder than I thought a baby could live through. That was the first time my stomach hurt for you, the first time my heart ached for you, the first time I wished your pain could instead be mine.

When you finally came out your poor head was oblong and bruised. Caput succedaneum, a name that both amuses and bothers me. They whisked you away and assessed you. Tickled the bottom of your feet. Measured and weighed you. Pronounced you just fine. I wanted you to be just fine. You were for a time. I convinced myself you always would be. I didn’t think anything would happen to you. No one thinks anything will happen until it does and then it feels like anything won’t stop happening. Every day I think I’ll find your brother dead in his bedroom like I found you dead in yours.

When your suffering was so plain, I thought things would be ok if I just loved you enough.

Three hearts. The numbers are meaningless, I know. No matter how many hearts I started with they’d all be gone with you. Maybe you leaving was your way of letting me take care of you, your way of letting me carry your pain so you could let it go.

Eight arms. No matter how many arms tried to keep you close you would have slipped away. Away. Fumbled. Out of reach, in slow motion, like a fragile plate falling, tumbling, shattering.

My pain is like that plate—caught somewhere between my soft hand and the hard indifferent floor.

A.L. Gordon is a writer and teacher in Central Wisconsin. In his early years, he wrote primarily fiction, and won the 1994 North Carolina Writers’ Network Fiction Competition. Since returning to writing, his focus has switched to creative nonfiction, flash nonfiction, and micro nonfiction, along with some dabbling in prose poetry. He is currently working on a flash nonfiction memoir. His creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines including The Rappahannock Review, Ellipsis Zine, The Awakenings Review, and Please See Me, among others. You can find him on the platform formerly known as Twitter @algordon2021 and at www.al-gordon.com