This Dross

By W. B. Emerson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 W. B. Emerson

Raven’s hair flowing, a playful smile at the wide-eyed child who attempts to run through her knees, caught in the net of her long flower-patterned dress, a wisp of scent warm and inviting as she glides past me.

“Did you call 911? Did you call 9-1-1!” Mrs. Brookfield is screaming at me. She wants to grab me by my shoulders and shake me. She does not. Her face is doughy and pale, her short, graying hair sticking out in tufts under a Cal baseball cap. There is the slightest hint of a tear forming in her left eye. “Where is Carla!” She lowers her rounded frame to a level near my knees. She must be hugging Slim, our seven-year-old, my seven-year-old son. “Don’t cry Francois, Dearest. Sweetie, you’re okay.” Only Carla and I called Francois Slim.

I must have appeared like a statue to the neighbors approaching our lawn.

The fire spread much too quickly, its color unlike what I imagined, sharper, more pure. Smells, burnt and acrid, cut the night as the flames hissed and cackled at humans.

I did not call 911.

Mrs. Brookfield has disappeared, which leads me to believe she has gone back into her home on this warm night, neglecting to close her door behind her as she calls for help. She has not turned on any lights. She knows that house like the back of her hand, having lived there for the past twenty or so years. Her husband is away, spending time in Santa Cruz with a woman he met in the Haight. Mrs. Brookfield knows. I can tell she knows, see it in her eyes. But she is either too weak or too strong to care.

The flames continue to eat the house, blackening the white of its exterior. Voices whisper around me. Some scream. They are trying to communicate with me, asking me questions. Slim does not hug my leg, does not tug at my pajama bottoms. He whimpers quietly, perhaps longing for the ginny smell of Mrs. Brookfield.

Carla once loved that house, once loved Palo Alto. The Bay Area was expensive but so “decadently posh,” she had once said. She didn’t enjoy traveling to the city, finding it “offensive in so many ways.” Disheartened by the number of homeless men, women and children she saw walking the streets, sleeping outdoors. “Some of those kids are so young.”

Joshua Santos was one of those homeless kids.

I arrived home one Thursday afternoon to hear laughter in the kitchen—Carla, Slim and the raspy voice of what sounded to be another man. There he sat, face badly pockmarked, teeth rotten, hair falling out. He looked as if he weighed ninety pounds, adrift in the rags on his frame. It was like something out of a horror movie. Fortunately it was just a dream.

But there is a Joshua Santos. Though homeless, not at all like the Joshua Santos in my dream. This Joshua is healthy, with a goofy grin and a thick mop of curly hair atop his head. Short, muscular kid about twenty-two. Carla, who had begun volunteering at a homeless shelter in San Jose on Saturdays—days labeled “Father-Son Day” ala Slim and me—spoke highly of the young man. He was intelligent, had graduated from Berkeley. He was an artist and full of dreams, like Carla had been, like we had been back when we were in school.

“What’s happened to us these past fifteen years? When exactly did we sell our souls to Dollar,” Carla had asked.

She had begun to hate the house we lived in: its four bedrooms, its minimalist furnishings, the door handles. “Why are they so fucking small?” Carla never used profanity, except during times when she wanted me to know her unhappiness bordered on the tragic. She wondered why we needed such a big house. Why we spent so much money on things we didn’t need. Carla seldom watched television. “Why the big-screen TV?” Why buy a BMW when a Dodge would perform the same function for half the price.