N O N F I C T I O N
Fortressing Time
JANINE MACRIS
“ M
OMMY, IT’ S LIKE you want to marry the word‘ in a minute.’” He ducks back down, back into in the corner of his pillow fort, his shirt off because it is too hot in this house, and he is always hot.“ I’ m always hot,” he says in the car on the way home from school, during Taekwondo, in the bath. And the ultrasound results the doctors said are normal have to be normal because the doctor said they were, so the heat and the vomiting and the nausea and the cough this week, are all just a stomach bug from school because the seven other kids have the bug too. So I tell him it’ s normal to be hot. And when he calls for me to re-drape the blanket over the fallen corner, I say,“ In a second,” and hope that this replaces“ In a minute,” and that I don’ t break my promise. But these promises are broken daily, in minutes, in seconds, in time.
~
And at night, as he sleeps soundly, snoring in his big-tonsilled, allergyridden breaths, I kneel next to his bed and plead against how many minutes I wasted telling him I would be there in a minute. I could measure the time against the microwave clock counting down the boiling pasta; I could measure it against my phone’ s messaging reminders; but I must choose to measure it against this fleeting innocence, and capture it quickly. Quickly. Before it’ s too late.
~
So the next time, I unzip my black boots I wore all day long in hopes of taking the bulldog for a walk too. And I climb into the hovel he has built, crawling through the vinyl, clown-colored tunnel causing me claustrophobic screeches, and tell him I’ m almost there, into the living room he has built inside our own living room. When I finally fold my long body into the tight space where five fake votives are flickering under the three books resting against the
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