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Angel in the Blue
Room
Identical tombstones outside Croghan
Mennonite Church line up
as if for role call, conservatively
dressed even in death. But my
cousin’s
is easily found in the back row engraved
A child shall lead them, and Eric did
travel before us in the months preceding
his death, small and weak enough
to be pushed ahead in a stroller while
my brother, the same age, a lucky
seven, played catch and croquet
in the front yard. Thirty people
miraculously
squeezed through the narrow
chamber that Saturday afternoon
we surrounded the bed in the family
farm’s blue room. Eric’s mom
whispered Do you
see the angels? just hours after we
had
sent off another cousin and his new
wife to their honeymoon cottage. Just
before the rest of us went to see
James Bond charm women, bullets,
and all of those high-tech gadgets to
save the world once more. My parents
didn’t
care that I was off to watch skin and
violence that matinée. They knew better
than to argue with a place in the dark
where the ingredients of that day could
slip
from my bones for a makeshift moment,
knew
that soon enough I’d return to
blistering
sunlight, each ray’s hot needle
threading through
the pores of my scorched adolescence.—Debra Gingerich has a
Master of Fine Arts in Writing from
Vermont College. She lives with her
husband and pet cockatiel in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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