THE LAST THING WE NEED: Claire Vaye Watkins

“Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our life against that which we thought it would be by now.”

The narrator of this poignancy is poignant within himself, with a wife where the sorrows are as important toward a marital gestalt as its perhaps rare joys are — a man also with two daughters, one of them whom he calls ‘sweetheart’, Layla, still too young to go to school, and he finds, in a ghost town quite near where he lives, evidence of a car accident, with life’s residua inside, including medical prescriptions with an address of their recipient upon them … He then writes a series of letters to the one who surely must have left the car amid the ghostly residua of a town, writing these letters while real-time evidence sifting (including evidence derived from the prescription recipient’s love letters to M left in the car) and asking for a heart to heart as to the desperation needed for such an installation out here in the back of beyond, an installation whether art or not, this story or not, towards an inevitable gestalt… a gestalt that means as much meaning about the prescription recipient as it does to the letter writer himself. Well, they are both letter writers I guess, each with no recipient? Life’s prescriptions unprescribed. Something else, something lethal is evoked for me finding this story installation, something that happened in the past, during a wondrously word-by-word described grasshopper storm and this proves to me that at least one of these two letter-writers was an adept erector of stories, even ghost stories that feel like truth.

“Duane Moser, what I come back to is this: how could you have left M’s letters by the side of Cane Springs Road near the ghost town Rhyolite where hardly anyone goes anymore? (In fact, I have never seen another man out on Cane Springs Road. I drive out there to be alone. Maybe you do, too. Or you did, anyway.) Did you not realize that someone just like you might find them?”

“That’s what happens when a town dies. Why? Because, sweetheart. Because.”

***

Full anthology context of this story: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1374-2/