Devon Branca teaches at Morrisville College. His work has been published in Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, and Fugue.
Desmond Has a Box
Desmond has a box where he keeps lost keys.
He worries it’ll be found years after he’s gone
and that the archaeologist, who he imagines
as half Indiana Jones and half the scientist from
Jurassic Park, will keep digging, looking for
missing locks. They will think this box the collection
of several other locked boxes, or perhaps containers
and engines and gates of different shapes. But
Desmond’s box is not a collection of keys to a collection
of loss. The keys in the box, without reason, make
all of Desmond become one place inside, where a six-inch boy
dances like a Spanish woman he saw on TV when he was a kid
on a day when no one was watching. There is no bike lock,
no diary, no house he’ll no longer sleep in or walk around
on a path; Desmond will tell you, these skeleton keys,
these here, went to no locks. He will go on to describe
the burnt down door factory. The way the doorknobs
were scattered across the ground as if he could just
draw doorways in the dirt wherever. No one ever noticed
the burnt bodies of the birds in their eggs, asleep in the rafters
of the ground. It’s that simple. Desmond makes sure
you’re listening. He pauses. Looks at you. Says, there’s
always two, two ways to think about hope, and when
he says hope, he says it loud: hope is to see a different past,
hope is to put what you have in a box. He says, what if
the goal is not happiness, but doing what one should do,
not morally or ethically, just purely, as in, why
are you here? Then both ways are necessary. Counting them
makes them a collection, makes them new, makes them
anything but what they once were, every possibility
becoming an introduction without a past. Desmond,
who always loved the ceremony of religion, jiggles the box
like a maraca. Taps his foot. Sings a psalm. Believes in ritual.
"Desmond Has a Box" first appeared in Fugue Winter-Spring (2009).
