Billy Blythe's Ocean

Maybe I should try something different, you know, get a real story going where there’s tension and precision and character-building and maybe make them a little shorter because it's a lot to wade through, you know, when there are poetic options so concise and sparkly and this is more of a series of dullish observations maybe a bit too fluid, too watered down, and just get to the point already if there is one.

Everybody thinks the good stuff is in the attic but I’ve always been one for basements, so when we finally got the front door open I went straight downstairs while my sister Em went up the three flights like a balloon.

Where you going? she hollered down through the lozenge of air just as I pushed the door to the basement open and slid inside.

I stood there a minute let my eyes figure it out. Two square streams of light fell in golden shapes into the space we used to play checkers, me and Uncle Billy, whose sly glances across the board I used to practice in the mirror. Just ask Em. Also got the if you’ll forgive me line from him the way he’d push the words into air like beautiful golden checkers before he’d take the win.

Uncle Billy had been married to Auntie Bea but she died and except for the kitchen, he left the upstairs of their 60s suburban home like she was still there – all doilies and needlepoints and drapery and framed photographs, jars and dishes and piles of buttons which she collected – and he stayed downstairs, he even slept there, in the hum and din of his fish tanks.

Uncle Billy lived close to our school and both our parents worked so we went to his house for lunch, straight into the basement where two plates with grilled cheese sandwiches, one with ketchup one without, waited for us. Jeopardy at noon with the guy everybody forgets about who was more like a newscaster, and then I Love Lucy which Em said shhhh at us all the way through, Uncle Billy’s surprise face like Marcel Marceau’s.

Hang in there. I am building character, focusing, trying for tension.

Even in high school when we didn't have to, we went to Uncle Billy's for lunch.

About six months ago Uncle Billy was in the third floor cardiac unit at Mount Grace Hospital before he finally went to the basement if you catch my drift – we played checkers until the end, until his final if you’ll forgive me – and now the house belongs to me and Em.

The fish tanks are all empty and the sides powdery green, whatever was left inside rusted and brown, but I remember when they were his oceans, the fish his friends, the way he’d look at them like he was saying if you’ll forgive me for loving them.

I remember spotting some of Auntie Bea’s things in there after she died, a few thimbles, a pile of buttons here and there, five or six of them spaced vertical in the sand for the fish to weave through, a zipper foot, a button banner all the way across, sometimes attached both ends which made the buttons spin and twirl in the fake current like mad and sometimes attached only one end so they made underwater kites.

I wish I could say that’s when Em came down all of a sudden said look what I found! and it’s maybe armfuls of money if that’s your thing, tiny taxidermy fish, love letters beginning with You Shark You! or an old pirate uniform, the copper pin boasting the name Billy Blythe or some other satisfying jolt, something to make you glad you read this, but do you want to know what she actually handed me?

A business card from One Man's Trash.

I reached into the tank and grabbed a fistful of buttons, caught a thimble on my baby finger, uncovered a bright red checker which I took and then a black one, and said, yeah, tell them everything down here. All of it.