Eulogy By Chad Sullivan

Warren LeMay CC




Eulogy

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    Do you remember the house on Hillside Street, how its emptiness felt like a portal? How it sagged and bowed and leaned, as if it were melting into the overgrowth? How one-bys held up the front porch awning, salvaged from interior walls ripped open for copper, the lath left dangling? And how the porch itself was buttressed by stacks of cinder blocks at each corner?   
    How on the day we met, you leaped out of an upstairs window and stood on the awning ledge, thinking about jumping? I talked you down. You’d have broken your legs. Or the awning could have collapsed and killed you.
    Do you remember our room and the feral stains on our mattress? The milk jug of piss? The black mold that darkened the walls? Do you remember James and his prog band, James Is a Monster? How he swore we weren’t squatting? And Mike, whose kidneys were failing? How he slept sitting up on the couch downstairs, mouth open, head thrown backward, looking dead?
    I bet he is dead now.
    Maybe you know.
   Britt and I flew down yesterday with your ashes in a cardboard cylinder, tucked in my carry-on. We were held up at security as they swabbed you for drugs and explosives. I showed the agent the cremation certificate. She said something about you chasing rainbows and smiled. When she handed you back, you shushed like rain.
    Asheville’s changed.
    The Southern closed down. So did  L.A.B., and The Laughing Seed, and The Lucky Otter. 
    Green Life is now a Whole Foods. 
     The house on Hillside is a law office. 
    This morning I spoke with the owner of our Airbnb. He’s lived here for fifty years. He asked why we’d come, and I told him. “I have ten grandkids,” the man said. “I say to them, “You’re watchers. You’re only here as witnesses.’” 
    What did we witness here, Paul?
    What was it we missed?

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Chad Sullivan's work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, tramspet, and Broken Antler Magazine, among others. A Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee, he lives with his family in Elburn, Illinois. ​