Passing Through
(CW: Suicide)
“Walter Benjamin and his companions settled into the hotel. Benjamin, exhausted, went to his room, no. 4 on the second floor… What happened over the next few hours is a striking illustration of all of the tragedy of barbarism” – Walter Benjamin Memorial
It is a Catalonian sky tonight. You can hear the trains passing through the Portbou. My eyes are fixed and contemplating.
I press my thumb against the glass bottle and listen to the medicine rattle inside.
Looking up I can see my reflection in the mirror. I try to focus on the light in its center; the aura of a face.
Two stories up, I am looking out the window and I remember: there is an infinite amount of hope.
They seek justice and so the world will perish. I know it. I am a stain on their Reich. This is why we pushed and strained over mountains and through vineyards to find this place where we are still like prisoners.
I could go for a walk, see the Rambla, or watch that Badia and the sea out beyond. But I am tired from the climb and this hotel is like a prison.
Escape is hard to picture, I am in no state to leave. The remaining tablets rest in my hand. A tiny village in the Pyrenees.
A storm is blowing from paradise and the wings cannot close. I take water from the tiny sink beside the window and wash them down.
There is an infinite amount of hope. The trains pass through. But not for us.
Thin Strip of Road
Here there is a thin strip of road that runs along corn fields and small rectangular homes. There, beside the little green house with the small garage, stone steps, and thin metal banister, is the field in which grandfather tended to carry his oxygen tank with him and disappear among the corn stalks. Close by is the tree, thick at the base with branches that spread over the sandbox where Brother and I spent afternoons with brightly colored plastic cars and speedboats. Ice cream. Ice cream always came after. I try to imagine his smile, and my own.
Inside the little house there’s a patchy couch where Brother and I sat and ate sour candy until our mouths ached and we couldn’t taste sour anymore.
There’s a watch strapped on to the support beam in the bathroom and an electronic solitaire machine. I never understood how the lock worked and I remember crying inside while Grandmother tried to explain how to unlock it (push the knob against its base and turn).
Downstairs the carpet is thin and the air is cool. There are instruments for baking and seats for Halloween. Have you ever had a popcorn ball?
Family members I’ve never met wash into faces I’ve loved and kids I never knew (and wouldn’t know again) dare each other to climb the old thick tree by the sandbox, or jump all the way down the steps.
And then they were old, which they always were, but suddenly I could see it. We sit and watch TV, Grandfather points at the jukebox on the pawn show. I love him and I wish the gulf of the years would go away. Still, he calls Brother and I tiger and we know we are loved.
We used to eat pickles straight from the jar. I was a clumsy child and the pickle always slipped. Stupid pickle. Grandma gave us Blue Bunny Ice Cream which we enjoyed at the dinner table, hiding away from the mid-summer Wisconsin heat. I remember non-pareils in the candy dish, or Strawberry bon bons. I remember trekking below the road through the drainage pipe with Grandmother on our way to the store for some kind of treat.
There is the red SUV heading north on the thin strip of road, away from the little green home with the sandbox and the cornfield, the patchy couch and watch, and the cool basement.
Mackenzie Doebler is a writer and graduate student living in the mountains of North Carolina. They write when they can, study when they need to, and relax by binging blockbuster flicks with their pet rat Seymour.