Make Dust Our Paper by Bill Merklee

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Make Dust Our Paper


Paulie didn’t claim his father’s body. Told the hospital to do whatever. Hung up and remained still in his kitchenette, like he might become one of the appliances. 
      He walked into his small bathroom and pulled the chain that hung from the light above the sink. Stared at himself in the mirror, remembered how people used to say he looked just like him. Opened his eyes wide and clapped his cheeks to pink them up and said “Not today.” Went back to his small table and continued writing in his small notebook.
         He didn’t take off work the next day, didn’t say anything to anyone at the warehouse. At lunch he did what he always did: sat in his car drinking soup from a thermos and writing.
        A cop Paulie knew came by his apartment Friday evening with keys, said Paulie could take anything he wanted from the old man’s house before the bank brought the dumpsters. Paulie thanked him and closed the door, stood there with keys in hand beside the small walnut bookcase that held other notebooks he had filled. Tried hard to think of something he’d want.
      In the morning Paulie grabbed a Sausage McMuffin and black coffee from the drive-thru and headed to the house. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the place. Couldn’t remember how long ago his mother had died. Could barely recall what she looked like. He pulled up to a shack of mossy cedar shakes in a sea of tall pale grass. A detached downspout leaned away from the house onto an overgrown lilac bush. He climbed broken brick steps.
         It took a couple of tries to get the door open. Once inside, he could smell dry lumber in the stale air. The living room held a few faded photos on dingy walls, a threadbare green sofa, a console TV from the 80s. The old man’s routine was worn into the carpet.
        In the kitchen, greasy pans sat on the crusty stove. Paulie touched a painted-over horseshoe above the doorway to the basement, a good-luck souvenir from a second-grade field trip. There was a maple-stained rack on the wall with hooks for keys, stuffed with unpaid bills and a clutch of pens. He pulled a red Sharpie marker from it and next to the horseshoe wrote Don’t go down there, it’s dark. ~ Bugs Bunny. He surprised himself with a laugh.
         Paulie crossed the kitchen to his parents’ bedroom. Above their door he wrote It’s getting better all the time. ~ The Beatles. He didn’t laugh.
          At the back of the house, the bathroom had surrendered to mildew. The toilet and tub looked ready to fall through the floor. On that door he wrote Safer to shit in the yard. 
         His old bedroom still had the light switch cover with a silhouette of a child, head bowed and hands clasped, with the words Did you think to pray? on it. Next to that he wrote You cannot petition the Lord with prayer. ~ Jim Morrison.
           The last room he approached was the smallest. Paulie took two deep breaths and opened the door. The space was empty except for an old cast-iron radiator -- heavy, tapered fins with dust caked in the spaces between. The kind that hissed and pinged on cold nights. 
          Paulie gave it a kick. Then a harder one. He grabbed it, grunted as he tried to twist it from the pipe that came up through the floor. Peeled off his jacket and rolled up his flannel sleeves, exposing a runic history of radiator burns on the insides of his forearms. A thinner, younger scar ran back from his left wrist, as if to strike out the older marks. 
          Encasing the radiator coupling in his callused hands, Paulie held his breath and bore down until the coupling gave way. He dragged the radiator to a window, stood it up on end and leaned it against the sill. He bent and grabbed it down at the floor and roared as he flipped it through the glass and out into the yard — a quick shattering and a dull thud. Didn’t think twice about the noise. Nobody would be coming.
        He turned and put his foot through the hollow door, kicked it off its hinges. Scooped up his jacket and stepped out of the room. Uncapped the marker to write over the doorway. Tossed the marker on the floor.
            Paulie shuffled to a seat at the cluttered kitchen table, took his notebook from inside his dusty jacket, stared at blank paper. His heart raced but his pen was still. He got up to wash his hands. The faucet sputtered. Through the grime-frosted window above the sink, the old neighborhood was a half-remembered dream on the brink of dissolving.




​Bill Merklee’s work has appeared in numerous journals and in Best Microfiction, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. He was short-listed for the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award and the Fractured Lit Chapbook Prize, and long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in New Jersey.



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