He

The big toe of his left shoe has a mark that he had been unable to buff out that morning. He’d spent a good ten minutes in the hotel room, applying the shine with teenagerly vigor to no avail. In the backround, the hotel’s air conditioning hummed like an old refrigerator and pale light made a small ingress at the feet of the curtain.

He remembers the rough tongue of the bark pressing into the tips of his fingers, and using those same tips to press into the small circular appearing holes left by a woodpecker from some other time. This image, of fingers pressed into holes, had come back to him today while delivering the eulogy, and he’d briefly and extemporaneously expounded upon the theological parallels between the unseen bird whose presence was still made manifest in the world and life after death. The irreligious people at the memorial were lost almost immediately, and the remainder of the crowd found the metaphor mildly obtuse, though perhaps apt.

It was Hal, his older brother, who had first helped him to believe in things unseen. After they’d been hustled off to bed—brushed, bathed, kissed, and reassured that they were loved—all by eight so that mom and dad could catch up on their own evening oblations of television and the easy familial camaraderie that comes with battling children and jobs and taxes and mortgages in the company of the same person for years. The stories Hal told him generally centered around animals that could speak and the very real presence of things like leprechauns and the tooth fairy, a character his parents did little to refute by putting one dollar bills beneath his pillow each time he lost a tooth. He still remembers the story about fireflies, perhaps because he’d watched Hal smear them across the sidewalk to make a well lit path. Hal told him that after their death firefly souls briefly rose up into the sky before coming back down to earth in the form of shooting stars. It was the sort of story that was only believable because it was dark and he was young. That week, he spent every night sitting in the silk tree after dinner, watching for signs of souls sailing through space. When the stories were finished Hal would occasionally reach down and take his younger brother’s hand. This was the sort of unspoken thing that the man sitting on the cold grey stones clung to, the remembrance of not being alone.