Breath

Kent Shell

The sirens are continual; they seem to be one siren, pausing for breath.

Every evening Jenny and I make our lists, side by side in bed, and email them to each other. Three things we’re grateful for. When we started I noticed that gratitude begat gratitude, like multiplication. The pale amethyst of the shallots as I minced them into tiny jewels, a golden egg yolk, beaten, the deep acquaintance I’ve made with the tiny rectangle of nature in our Brooklyn back yard. A seven-letter word—50 bonus points!—in our seven hundredth game of Scrabble. I’m grateful that my daughter managed to get home to Wisconsin, grateful that Jenny’s older daughter, who lives a few blocks away, left her apartment and is sheltering with us. 

Lately we’ve been forgetting the list. Gratitude feels harder to come by. I’ll try this: I’m sixty-three, and on a Zoom chat I was complimented on my full head of hair. Gratitude may thin but I’ve got my hair, and my vanity.

At first I pushed the sirens away. I felt worried, I didn’t want to see, I didn’t want to hear. I told my daughter every time we spoke by phone, until she made me stop, “This could be the thing that kills me.” 

Every two minutes another death in my city. Oh, New York. You’ll break my heart.

I came across a Walt Whitman poem yesterday: The past and the present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them . . . I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I will wait on the door-slab. Who has done his day’s work? Who will soonest be through with his supper? 

The words filled me and then emptied me, like oxygen in my lungs, and I burst into tears. The astonishing magic of simple words. How did Walt Whitman, Brooklynite, who walked on streets a few miles from here a century and a half ago, know the words that would bring me back to my humanity this very day? 

At three o’clock every afternoon the church bells of Brooklyn ring for fifteen minutes to accompany the souls of the dead. At seven we’re on the stoop with Cleo, the new puppy, whooping and clapping and clanging spoons against pots, in a rowdy chorus with neighbors we can’t approach. Across the way there are people cheering on the tops of red brick buildings, lit up in sunset like spires on golden crowns.

Deep in the night as I sleep I hear the thin sound of a siren, rising and falling, getting closer, getting farther. I wake, grateful to touch warm, sleeping Jenny beside me. The siren fades as the ambulance passes, and I imagine the passengers inside: the patient in distress, the EMT, the driver, all journeying together, all exhausted, all scared. I join them. I send my arms through the walls of my bedroom, through the streets, through the night to wrap them all in an embrace. 

And I say to them all, “I won’t turn away from you.”