POUCHES

Another driver would’ve left the trailer door open, let the spring air wash over the pallets full of pouches, folded oranges and whites sealed tight as new shoes. My eyes couldn’t leave them alone. They’d never seen that many before.

When Craig the lumper finished and I roared the door down, echoes sheltering in my bones, he said, “You’re the last one,” and I tried not to worry if it’d be enough. It was the longest week of April, the longest of 2020, and I felt gorged with guilt, a feeling that I should be doing more than hammer down I-95’s bare lanes to Elmhurst Hospital, then to the forty-five mobile morgues beneath the Empire State Building. I was grateful to drive a dry van – God knew what awaited the reefers, the pouches filled, lumpy and cold. I’d heard they might take them to Hart Island. Potter’s Field.

The warehouse pulsed with the final chirp of a forklift before it caved in with silence. I can still hear it now, sometimes. That old quiet filling me up.

I’d gotten lost in a memory of my late grandfather telling me about his mother, how I had her eyebrows, steep arches like baseball stitching. He liked to remember her, he said, and I carried part of her with me, and part of him too, and my parents and teachers and friends and all the tedious commercial jingles that interrupted morning cartoons. I’d been wondering how there could be enough room inside of me for anything more than the pieces of others when Craig poked my shoulder, the latched trailer filled with bags inside bags. I felt like I was shrinking.

His eyes brimmed over like he’d been waiting for me all month, like he couldn’t wait to say it. “We fill them with emptiness,” he said, and I could tell he was holding back. After a soundless double shift, he had so much more he could say.

I grinned behind my mask, wanting to give him something in return, something he’d remember. One use only, I thought, then, We carry them and they carry us, but it’d only trivialize his hours, this truck and warehouse, the job we were doing. Our bodies went one way, the memories another. There was no other way to say it. “I hope they don’t need more,” I said, the words just tumbling out, and he stared above my eyes. I kept picturing my own eyebrows, thinking about the memories of my grandfather that only I had.

Craig handed me the box of ankle bands. “It’s just enough. We just keep on going.”

And the road was a balm, and the trill was a turn, and the tunnel was my great grandmother’s eye. That whole hallowed drive, I wondered if she could see me.

Joseph Celizic teaches writing at Bowling Green State University. His work has been published in Indiana Review, Third Coast, North American Review, Redivider, Ilanot Review, and CutBank, and has been shortlisted in Best American Mystery Stories.