Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

We were on the porch.

Uncle Stephen had decided that the best way to get over his health problems was to ignore them.

We were on the porch, in the cane bottom chairs that both needed to be re-caned, tilted back, the wooden chairs creaking as we shifted our weight and watched the yard, newly green, and the road, where a car might, it being Spring, drive by.

“Anything’s possible in Spring,” Uncle Stephen said.

He had been saying it all morning, while I installed him on the porch, with the cooler, a handful of Pay-Day candy bars he had decided would save his life by giving him the calories he needed, and an old quilt he pulled to him with a hand that was punched through the sewn together end of a sweater, with holes left for his fingers and thumb.

The sweater was a left-over from one of his inventions: footed pajamas for grown-ups. The feet had each had individual toes, which he was proud to point out that he wasn’t taking credit for, but the fingerless tops and tops with gloves were all his.

I had a pair of the tops. The bottoms made my toes miss each other.

It was close to seventy degrees. The oak in the yard had sprouted its red curlings that would become green leaves. And then red again in the Fall. It was Uncle Stephen who had pointed them out to me, unfurling and curlicued as the shell of a hermit crab.

“They’re kind of like a hermit crab,” I said.

He knew what I was talking about because I had thanked him for pointing out the buds. Every year I had sworn to see their first appearance and every year there was an explosion of tiny green leaves of every shade I could imagine and I had somehow missed it again.

Not this year. It turns out I always missed the start of Spring because I was looking for green and some of them were red, or white, or brown.

“A hermit crab?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Sure,” I said, “like, the way the shell curls up on itself.”

“Because leaves, they spend their time in the ocean, being used as shelter by multi-legged creatures who are very shy and smell bad if left too long in a jar forgotten by one particular boy.”

“OK. Not a hermit crab,” I said, “and the car never smelled the same again.”

“No,” Uncle Stephen drank from his coke, “it didn’t. That’s how you can tell ma’s aged, if that’d been me, she would have had me get out and hitch the rest of the way back from the coast.”

I was about to call bull-shit on that story, as he had crushed my metaphor, but then I remembered a time when my cousin Tim had been carrying-on in the car and grandmother had warned him, once, she said, you get one warning, and next word out of your mouth and I’m putting you out beside the road.

He got back to the house eight hours later, at night, one foot so blistered he still has the scars.

“You still happy?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Yup.” And I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. She was suffering. The girl I was so broken up over, my insides so shattered and sharp and scraped and muffled and…

“Why, again?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Because she and her new guy are still having problems,” I said.

A hawk sailed through the yard and shifted into the pine forest. As it passed I heard the feathers in its wings push against each other. And then there was a breeze following, as if the hawk was the future of air.

“I thought you loved this girl,” Uncle Stephen said.

My chair fell to the cement of the porch. The trick was to balance on its back two legs. I had seen Uncle Stephen sit motionless for minutes, balanced on those two legs. I needed the wall.

My chair went forward. And back. And forward, and then, for a moment, I had it, balance, and then it was gone again.

“I’ve been seeing a new girl,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Uncle Stephen said.

Uh-huh. As if this weren’t news. I wanted to shock him. And I opened my mouth but ended up taking a sip. I had seen the circles under his eyes. The way his chest rose with each breath taking too long. He had insisted I buy him a scale at Target and so we learned that he weighed a hundred and thirty-three pounds. Six feet two inches.
“You want another candy bar?” I said.

“You made her a mix CD, right?” Uncle Stephen said, “Drove up special to see her in the middle of the night. Knocked on her window.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Didn’t you do the same thing with what’s her name?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Whatever works,” I said, but I knew I was fucked as soon as I’d said it.

Uncle Stephen looked at me, and then there was that breeze again. But this time it was as if his eyes had pulled it. His eyes echoed the gray sky, the iris deep black. He looked at me and pinned me to my chair, leaned against the wall, a bug in a museum, a curiosity for him to see, then put away.

Close the case.

“Don’t be stupid,” Uncle Stephen said, “I hate it when you’re stupid, and I haven’t been trying to unstupid you all these years to have you start all over again over girls.”

The worst part about dealing with Uncle Stephen was that he was always right. Even when he was wrong, it was as if he was wrong on purpose. His wrongness made the few times I was right that much clearer and sharper, so that win or lose, I felt chided.

But the clarity was worth it. And long ago I had learned to recognize my own pride. Not enough to be free of it, but at least to recognize it, and know it for what it was.

To try and set aside its yammering.

“I know,” I said, “every woman is different.”

“No,” Uncle Stephen said, “you don’t.”

He didn’t say, Or I wouldn’t have done what I did, but it was there.

“Every human is a human first, right?” Uncle Stephen said.

“And a gender second,” I said.

“And every human uniquely expresses his or her gender,” Uncle Stephen said.

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at the yard.

There were leaves from last Fall scattered there, while in the trees the new leaves were forming.

Uncle Stephen had been too sick to rake.

And I had school.

Uncle Stephen had said something and I had missed it.

And he had seen me miss it.

“Whatever,” Uncle Stephen said.

My eyes teared up. I looked away, towards the scraggling line of trees opposite the pines.

I had never heard that tone in his voice. There was nothing defiant there, nothing trying to convince me I was wrong. There was only exhaustion, hours of days of weeks of months of years of fighting freighted into one word and shoved out.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not even sure what I was apologizing for. The girls didn’t care. Or didn’t seem to.

I wasn’t sure I cared, the way Uncle Stephen defined caring.

Or that I didn’t care.

Shit. I wasn’t sure of anything.

“I had a girlfriend,” Uncle Stephen said, “who used to tell me, when I had done something that she didn’t like, that she hoped one day I would learn what a woman likes. Needs.”

I didn’t say anything. I had decided today was one of those days that I would be better off not saying anything.

“It never occurred to her that maybe I was paying attention to her needs, as best I could, but that every woman was different, every single one. And so she was unique.”

He looked at me again. He smiled.

“Buck-up,” Uncle Stephen said. And when he turned away, I tried to stop it but one damned tear escaped and made it halfway down my cheek.

I left it to dry in the wind.

“It’s what sucked,” Uncle Stephen said, “she kept claiming that she wanted to be special to me, that she wanted to be unique, when there was no other way for her to be. No other way for anyone to be. But she didn’t believe me when I told her there was only one her, because she didn’t even know it herself.”

“And I knew, would watch,” Uncle Stephen said, “when she’d try attitudes or games on me she’d used on other guys. I don’t think she meant any harm. Sometimes I’d play along, sometimes I’d call her out.”

“It’s hard,” Uncle Stephen said, “to learn the person you love, to not try and short-hand it and expect him or her to be like all the rest. Because there are, of course, similarities. But don’t ever mistake the being similar for the being the same.”

“Don’t ever treat any woman as if she were interchangeable,” Uncle Stephen said, “and try to shrug off the roles you’re going to be given by your women.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“Love,” Uncle Stephen said, and his sharp shoulders shifted under the quilt.

“You’re the one who said you loved her,” Uncle Stephen said, “that’s easy. I’m just the guy with an inkling what that means.”

***

For the first time in months, that night, I tore open one of his envelopes, I Miss You, was typed on the outside, and this was on the inside:

We thought we understood each other.
Did we?

***

I put the envelope and its letter under the bed, under the Mississippi State Bulldog blanket.

He had been writing to a her. But she never got any of the letters.

She never knew of his questions.

And he, for how long, pondered the answers?

For how long being both sides of a conversation?

Uncle Stephen had given the questions to time and the silence of the page, and I had stolen them.

When he had wanted them burned.

Do we understand each other?

The obvious answer was that no, they hadn’t understood each other, because then they would have been together, unless they understood each other so well that they knew they weren’t supposed to be together. Or one of them knew that while the other one didn’t.

Christ. And I wasn’t cursing. I was praying. Help me, I thought up and into the world, help me.

It was dark enough in my room that I could look at the ceiling and see nothing.

I was sure I didn’t understand myself.

Could anyone else?

Damn Uncle Stephen.

The ceiling remained dark.

By the time I arrived at Uncle Stephen’s it was clear that grandmother’s concerns about him burning down the back-forty were not going to come true.

He sat by his fire and burning at its center was the last of a hollow tree he had cut down.

I had seen the tree as a row of cut pieces behind his house for my entire life.

Now, the last piece burned.

“Pull up a seat,” Uncle Stephen said, and pointed at one of his cracking lawn chairs.

The remaining section of tree contained the fire and its center was bright red, the heat burning my face.

When I scooted the chair away from the fire, its legs grooved the soft ground. Grandmother’s concern about Uncle Stephen setting the property alight was needless, as it had been drizzling all day.

The misty rain fell down and met the rising smoke.

I sat down.

Uncle Stephen flipped opened the cooler, and inside, beside the usual cokes, was a bag of ice and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I took a coke.

We watched the fire.

Twilight crept on, the fire cooking our fronts, the night cooling our backs, and depending on the direction of the wind, the rain dampening our clothes, which then dried in the heat from the blaze.

Uncle Stephen had been told by his radiologist that he was dying. His neurosurgeon said the opposite.
The second opinion had had no helpful opinion.
The third opinion had had no helpful opinion.
Uncle Stephen was back to the first two, and was spending his days wondering.

I had never seen Uncle Stephen drink before, but he was using the same jelly jar he used for his cokes.
The rain fell on us, and we drank.

The fire popped, and in turn, that sound was broken by the drag of ice cubes against Uncle Stephen’s glass.

“Did you bring them?” Uncle Stephen said.

From my backpack, I pulled out the box of envelopes. One corner of the box had been repaired with masking tape.

The tape cracked off the box, but it left its stickiness behind. I thought, if I were Uncle Stephen, I would know what to do with that information, how the tape, the repairing agent, is gone, useless, but the failed attempt of the repair, the nasty stickiness, remains.

“You ready?” Uncle Stephen said.

“No,” I said.

He shook his glass, and made himself another drink. The moon had risen. Grandmother would be worried. She would be wondering whether or not to call the fire department.

“What you said about unconditional love,” I said.

Uncle Stephen leaned back into his chair and stuck his legs out in front of himself.

His legs steamed in the heat.

He gestured up into the smoke.

“You can see the moon reflected in the smoke, as the smoke passes through the tree branches,” Uncle Stephen said.

I followed the smoke as it wound through the branches, and saw the moon, as if the smoke were a screen.

I watched the moon on thickened air.

“In that unconditional love, you’re doing all the sacrificing,” I said. I held the sides of box. I had been thinking about this all night.

At school my her and her boy were no longer sitting together at lunch. But that was all I knew. Maybe all I wanted to know.

Uncle Stephen picked up a stick and dragged it across the ground, manipulating one leaf into the fire.

“You’re not thinking it through,” Uncle Stephen said.

Of all the common ways he chided me, that one bugged me the most.

“Let’s say, one day while I’m away from home, she reads through my journals. These journals she knows are private. The past, whatever, it doesn’t matter, but she’s looking for something.” Uncle Stephen said.

I thought of computers. E-mail. No e-mail when Uncle Stephen was dating. Of what it would mean to read someone’s journal. The opening of a book. Handwriting. It seemed like everyone I knew had poked around in their person’s e-mails. Their Facebook sites, the mySpaces, the blogs. Searching for what? Is it OK to break trust to find broken trust? Is there a way to glue it all back together?

“Do I not love her because she broke my trust?” Uncle Stephen said.

“That would be fair,” I said.

“Honesty. Fairness,” Uncle Stephen said, “Great ideas.”

“If you forgave her,” I said, “then you’re doing the sacrificing and she still dumps you for whatever reason?”

“Slow down,” Uncle Stephen said.

“If I love her unconditionally, then that means I have to forgive her, true, but if she were loving me the same way, then she would forgive me. Whether for the same faults or different ones, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Everybody sacrifices?” I said.

Uncle Stephen nodded towards the box.

“Yeah,” Uncle Stephen said, “throw them in.”

I looked down at the box of envelopes, and then at the fire that was the heat of an entire tree. While I had been studying the constitution, Uncle Stephen had been out in the rain, rolling the logs into the fire.

Burning.

Uncle Stephen had told me to bring them, and I had known what he was going to do. Or ask me to do. Maybe he couldn’t do it alone.
One unknown on an M.R.I. One bright spot in the smoky heaven of his brain.

I thought I might screw it up, one of the few direct things that Uncle Stephen had ever asked of me, but no, I tossed the box and it landed in the center of the flames, and then it was burning.

We both followed a few of the ashes as they sailed into the tree, their edges searing red against the night sky. But they all faded before they had gone far. And the pieces were dime sized. We weren’t going to set the world on fire.

“She didn’t love you,” I said.

“Shit,” Uncle Stephen said, “of course she did.”

“How do you know?” I said, “if she wouldn’t look past, whatever.”

Uncle Stephen drained his jelly jar.

“There were a lot of whatevers,” Uncle Stephen said, “and besides, she told me she loved me.”

“She told you?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you believed her because you loved her unconditionally, so you had to trust her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Uncle Stephen said.

Then he changed the subject, and I let him.

On the way home, I thought of what it means to lie. How I had never lied to him before, as far as I knew.

Maybe he had been done with the letters, but I wasn’t. I had kept the rest of the I Miss You letters, filling the original box with a set of grandmother’s old tax returns stuffed into her envelopes.

I hoped that whatever had prompted him to give them to me in the first place, justified me, somehow.

I hoped that he was able to watch the ashes rise and feel some weight lift from him.

A weight wrapped in one of my old T-shirts and now hidden under my bed.

Each one of his letters to her a secret, now, of mine.

Between Uncle Stephen and myself. And whoever she was. Or had been.
Pages after pages of omissions. And secrets.

I couldn’t bare to destroy anything of his, even something that wasn’t for me, and by her rights, perhaps I should not have seen.

Who owns the words, once the letter is sealed?

The dot had gotten to me too, its shining where there should be no mark, where light was never meant to be.

I was going to sleep.

Had closed my eyes, thinking of nothing but school-work, some math problem, some something that was so not her when I heard her voice calling my name and I was awake and she wasn’t there and my heart was pounding.

I felt under the bed for the box and pulled it out.

In the darkness, I opened the box, feeling the way the cardboard had softened over the years.

I was putting the letters back as I opened them, so I felt along the opened edges, the torn ones, for the first one unopened.

Then I pulled it from the box and lay on my back, the envelope pressed to my chest.

It was no use. I turned on the light.

Envelope number 4.

I ripped. I even tore the paper inside.

Today I found a doodle. A short sweetness we shared.
Or that you left for me to discover in love
found instead in loss.

I sat up. Pulled on my pants and shoes and coat. It was past ten.

On the way out of the house I grabbed my fuzzy hat.

Then I was out, walking head down, pushing my feet so that each breath hit me as I moved.

“Bull-shit,” I said. Then I said it again. Each foot step.

Bull. Step. Shit. Step.

I jammed my hands into my pockets. I wished I had put on a shirt.

By the time I got to Uncle Stephen’s I was out of breath.

I was raising my hand to knock when he spoke, and I thought I was going to die, he frightened me so much my breath stopped and the ocean sounded in my ears.

“Bull shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

He was on his porch in the shadow cast by the moon.

“Jesus Christ.” I said.

He was sitting with his legs curled up. Wearing his own fuzzy hat. An almost twin to mine. But no coat. His arms were pale in the moonlight, and his feet were bare.

When I had caught my breath, I said, “Aren’t you cold?”

“Sure,” Uncle Stephen said.

He pointed up at the stars.

And as always at his house on clear nights, the stars were stinging in their brightness. Pin pricks by the acupuncture of God, Uncle Stephen had once said.

“Bull shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

I sat down.

“Did you love her?” I said.

“Unconditionally,” Uncle Stephen said.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“I loved her as I found her. No more. No less. Everything,” Uncle Stephen said.

“And she loved you?” I said.

“Sure,” Uncle Stephen said.

“Unconditionally?” I said.

“No,” Uncle Stephen said, “She needed me to be things I wasn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Pick a thing. Any thing. Something more than this sick man on his porch at night.”

“You loved her, even though she didn’t love all of you?”

“Yes.”

“She left because you couldn’t change those things?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t have changed her, so that she accepted you as you are?”

“Then, she wouldn’t have been the person I loved,” Uncle Stephen said.

“You loved even the parts of her that forced her to leave you.”

“That’s the unconditional part.” Uncle Stephen said.

“But she didn’t love you unconditionally,” I said.

“That wasn’t her way of loving,” Uncle Stephen said, “You can’t help who you love, it seems, no matter how right or wrong, and you don’t have to accept every love.”

“But you would’ve accepted her?” I said.

“Now we’re in circles, but yes, that’s what unconditional means,” Uncle Stephen said.

“It’s all bull-shit,” I said.

“Sit down,” Uncle Stephen said. Despite the fact that his ribs were showing through his thin T-shirt, and his pale arms prickled with the cold, his voice still had the edge. I sat down.

He waived at the sky bristling above us.

“Stars,” Uncle Stephen said, “she was like them. A brilliant thing. Of life. Our small joke was that she was a kite too, a star on a string.”

“Look at them all,” Uncle Stephen said. And the same edge was there but even without the command I was searching the stars, imagining him with that string of what? Fire? Electricity? What knot do you use on a star?

“Are they bull-shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

I shook my head. Was I up there? Or down here? Was my her up there? Did I love her?

“We all love the way we love,” Uncle Stephen said, “that’s the way it goes.”

“What happens to the string?” I said.

From my her to me.

From Uncle Stephen’s her to him.

The line an atom thick but so strong as to break time and curve space all the while burning and surviving the burning to mark us. All.
Cross our hearts and hope to die.

“That,” Uncle Stephen said, “is the question, isn’t it?”

Grandmother and grandfather’s house was built in 1974.

Uncle Stephen was four.

He walked amid the studs that were not yet walls, and moved like a ghost. He told me he wrote his name, in crayon, on one of the raw pine boards and the date.

A time capsule of a name.

Grandfather built his house with what, at the time, was considered extravagant things: storm windows, brick, fiberglass insulation and central heat. But he had had a good year of the soybean crop, and at that time one good year equaled one house.

The money allowed N.A.S.A engineer in him to build the house the way he wanted.

One contractor quite over a disagreement in how much insulation grandfather wanted.

All of that engineering means that in the winter the house is easy to heat, but very quiet.

During the Mississippi winter nights, sleeping in what was Uncle Stephen’s room, I would lie in bed, and if I had the shades drawn, or it was a moonless night, I couldn’t see my hand waving in front of my face.

And the silence was a weighted thing that pressed on my chest.

Blackness and silence.

Except for the snoring of my grandparents in the their bedroom. Not every night. But many.

When I was young, their snorts and grunts were monstrous.

When I was old enough to realize what the sound was, I was appalled.

How could they sleep next to each with that caterwauling?

I imagined myself married, my wife sounding as if water was pouring into her open mouth and then being spurted out through her nose. I didn’t know what I would do. Uncle Stephen wore earplugs.

But earplugs made the darkness and silence too absolute.

This is the inside of a coffin, I would think. And not sleep.

*

The central heating ducts had a side effect: they carried sound as well as heat.

Noises rattled throughout the house.

Each sound was there, sometimes small, sometimes large.

The bathrooms. The bedrooms. The kitchen, farthest from the bedrooms.

In the mornings, I awoke to the sounds from the kitchen, echoing through the ducts, and when the heat was on, the forced heat carried with it the smell of bacon frying. And its crackling in the pan.

The brick construction on a solid slab of poured concrete meant the house didn’t settle or creak like a wooden house.

*

When the house was full, it was very full, all of us hearing each other. There was no privacy of sound.

When the house was empty, it filled with emptiness.

Each room’s silence traveled through the ductwork and melted into the silence from the other rooms and then gathered and rushed from room to room and so as I sat and waited for grandmother and Uncle Stephen to return from Starkville, the silence folded over me.

It was an invisible blanket, quilted from the absence of sound in each room.

*

I had sworn I would dole out the envelopes Uncle Stephen had given me. Make them last. Save them for when I was sure I was going to collapse under the weight of her absence into a nothing that would join the silence of the house.

But with Uncle Stephen still gone, my thoughts turned to her. I held my breath until I could hear my heart beating.

See the edges of my world grow dark.

She had moved on. Why couldn’t I?

She had her new boy.

Or man. My great aunt had told me the last time I saw her that I had turned into a man when she wasn’t looking. And then she had winked at me. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she still needed a boy. Or maybe he was more of a man than I was.

My thoughts circled each other, flew down the heating system and came back to me, amplified.

*

I tried the television.
Without Uncle Stephen to point out the ridiculousness of each television show and commercial, how each demeaned humanity in one way or another, the images were surfaces devoid of meaning.

Point. Less.

He had taught me that there was something underneath each sight and sound, and now I couldn’t watch without hearing his voice. I needed to hear his voice.

Besides, the TV masked the noises from outside; the sounds of wheels on gravel that would be them returning.

And I was back in my room. The box again on my lap. The next envelope.

“I miss you,” I said. And though I wanted to cry. I couldn’t.

“Didn’t writing these make it worse?” I had asked Uncle Stephen.

“I don’t know,” Uncle Stephen had said, “and I had always intended to give them to her.”

“Why?”

“She never believed that I loved her. And only her.”

I Miss You.

Uncle Stephen’s advice on love came and went with the seasons, and his health.

“And you never mailed a single one?”

He had shrugged, “I pictured her new man coming home, finding the envelope, opening it.”

“People open other people’s mail?”

“Love makes you do strange things,” Uncle Stephen said.

“But that’s wrong.”

Even as I was saying it I was remembering her computer, the one time I had been left alone in her room, while she went to the bathroom, and how I could see the Instant Messaging boxes popping open and a chime, meaning that she had new e-mail.

To not look at her computer I had made a fist, and the marks of my nails on my palm were there for days. One pain for another. She had found the marks on my palm, and asked, and I had lied, telling her I had fallen on the hay rake.

I Miss You.

The house was silent.

Outside, winter held its breath.

There was no car pulling into our driveway.

No snap of the river-stone gravel under the car’s wheels.

There was only myself and the past, one letter at a time, boxed.

This time I used my knife and slit the envelope open, though grandfather had warned me that paper dulled knives.

Again, the single sheet of paper.

I held it up to the light. Watermarked. I knew from Uncle Stephen’s writing days that he only used 100 percent cotton rag paper.

I Miss You:

I had forgotten what it was to be pure.
I had forgotten what it was to be seen.
I had forgotten what it was to believe.
I had forgotten what it was to be known.
You brought me these.

I had the house to myself.

Uncle Stephen and grandmother were in Starkville to see the neurologist.

I pulled the box from under the bed.

Grandmother’s house had its own smell, as if all the years of drying her clothes on the line had brought the fierce sun into the house, burning away the Mississippi mustiness and leaving a hint of hot clean cloth.

But Uncle Stephen’s box had his house’s smell.

When I missed him, I had the box.

And its envelopes.

The second was addressed the same as the first: I Miss You.

And the return address: Uncle Stephen’s initials, S. R. V.

Stephen Rye Vickers.

His last M.R.I. had a small white dot.

The neurologist was going to explain the dot.

I held envelope number two and thought about going to medical school to learn how to explain one small mark.

One mystery.

He had typed the addresses, and the periods of the manual typewriter left dents in the envelope I could feel.

Dots.

“I miss you,” I said.

I tore the envelope open.

Your voice comforted me when nothing else would.

It was February, but warm.

There had been tornadoes.

Uncle Stephen’s house sat on a small hill, and grandmother had called me and told me to come home, and to bring Uncle Stephen with me.

He was having a bad day. An under the blanket day. All the windows in the house were open, so that if a tornado hit, it wouldn’t pressurize the house and blow out the windows.

But Uncle Stephen’s papers and projects were shifting and twisting in the cross winds.

For once, we didn’t have to have the fan on.

We were in his bedroom, Uncle Stephen didn’t believe in cordless phones, and instead had a single land line with a fifty foot cord that warped and weaved throughout his projects. I twisted the cord around my fingers.

I was watching the bump of Uncle Stephen’s head under the blanket as grandmother talked, and when I said I didn’t think he would be moving, the bump nodded.

At least get in the bathroom, grandmother said, and I hung up the phone.

“She wants us to go in the bathroom, doesn’t she,” Uncle Stephen said.

“There’s funnel clouds over Starkville,” I said, “heading this way.”

“I won’t be killed in a bathroom,” Uncle Stephen said, “smashed by my own cast iron porcelain tub.”

Under the blanket, and the blackness that was his breathing hole, I could see his eyes glitter in the gray storm light.

The hairs on my arm stood up. Then settled. Stood up again.

A drawing of a tree sailed past us and plastered itself against the window screen. The drawing was one of his sketches of the tree doctor’s tools, the ball of gel to cradle the roots sketched in with blue Prismacolor pencils.

Uncle Stephen coughed and rolled over to look out the window, and I was left facing the back of his head. He was under one of Cora’s blankets, the quilt hand stitched and the patch on his head cotton cloth covered in yellow flowers made from knotted thread.

“You still thinking about that girl?” Uncle Stephen said.

I watched the clouds. They spun and swirled. I thought about being swept away. Of how you were supposed to be able to hear it coming, like a train. But I had never heard a real train, except in the movies. I tried to imagine the roar. I tried to imagine what she would think, if I were to be taken by the tornado, if she would be sorry.

“No.” I said.

“You love her?”

“No.” I said.

The bump under the blanket moved. He coughed, and I picked the bucket up from the floor, but his hand appeared from under the blanket and waived it away.

“I’m sorry,” Uncle Stephen said.

“It’s no trouble,” I said.

“About the girl,” Uncle Stephen said.

“I’m fine,” I said. But he knew I was lying. I had been talking about her for almost a month. The month since she had told me it wouldn’t work. As if we were machines. Cogs in some life machine. And I was the wrong part for her life, the wrong size, the wrong strata of the Southern life, layered as any fancy cake could be.

“What sucks,” Uncle Stephen said,”is that you can’t tell if you’re truly in love until it’s too late.”

I set the bucket down. The house shook, and outside the trees bowed, then straightened, obeisant. Begging to be left in the Earth. Attached.

Whatever I was made of, inside, tightened whenever I thought of her. Myself grinding against myself.

“I know,” Uncle Stephen said,”because I was in love, once.”

This was news to me.

When he was younger, he had been a topic of conversation in the small community he lived in. But I had never seen a woman in his house. Or pictures.  Nobody special.

I had thought his head was full of engines and inventions. Wires. Sparks.

“Of course,” Uncle Stephen said, “I told her I was in love with her, but I didn’t know it, like I know it now, until it was too late.”

“Great,” I said.

The bump under the blanket moved again. Nodded?

“I won’t tell you it will get better,” Uncle Stephen said.

There was more air in the house than there had ever been. The February heat had brought the smells of damp Mississippi winter rot into the air and sent them flying, mixed in with the rushes of the ionized storm.

But there wasn’t enough air when I let myself turn my thoughts to her.

“Get me an envelope,” Uncle Stephen said.

“What?” I said.

“From above the desk, there’s a box of envelopes, bring the box.”

It took a while, as above the desk there was also three tool chests, a nest of cables wrestling together and a snake-skin that crumbled when I touched it, but there was a box of business envelopes. 150 count.

“You find them?” Uncle Stephen said. He was so quiet. I could’ve been imagining his voice.

I walked back into the bedroom and set the box down on the bed where he could reach it.

“No,” Uncle Stephen said, “open it.”

I did.

“Envelopes,” I said.

“Give me one,” Uncle Stephen said, and I reached into the box and pulled out the first envelope, and realized it was already addressed, stamped, sealed.

“Well?” Uncle Stephen said.

I handed it to him, to his hand that groped from under the blanket, and he held it to his breathing hole and then gave it back to me.

‘I miss you’ was typed on the front, where the address would go, and his initials were typed in the upper left hand corner, where the return address would be.

“Take them. Open them, but not now, not here,” Uncle Stephen said.

I riffled through the box. Each envelope was the same. His initials. And the same addressee. If three words could be an address. A person.

“I was too old,” Uncle Stephen said,”or too sick, or too something. It was a long time ago. I thought that I would get over her, and I was curious how long it would take.”

“How long did it take?” I said.

“I wrote about a letter a day,” Uncle Stephen said, “whenever I thought of her, I would jot down what it felt like. I reckoned maybe if I wrote them out, the thoughts would leave me, leave me be.”

“And you never mailed them?” I said.

“Not one,” Uncle Stephen said, “she had someone else.”

“You loved her?” I said. But I was also thinking that we didn’t talk this way. Uncle Stephen’s life before me didn’t exist, except in stories, a few tall tales, a random photo of him standing next to a long gone car. But no women. No one woman in particular.

“She used to tell me she loved the shit out of me,” Uncle Stephen said, then coughed, and I picked up the bucket again.

“Go home,” Uncle Stephen said, “grandmother will forgive me if I get killed, but she won’t forgive me if you get killed too.”

I got up to go and Uncle Stephen said, “take them. Read.”

And then he rolled over and was vomiting into the bucket, and for some time, there was only the vomit, and the cold cloth I brought for the back of his neck. The night swelled through the windows and then I did have to go. Grandmother didn’t trust me to drive at night.

I emptied the bucket one last time, rinsing it in the tub. There was nothing to clean, only bile, because God knew when Uncle Stephen has last eaten. I placed the bucket where he could reach it, and put the box of his letters into my backpack.

He was asleep when I left, the blanket only covering half his face, his eyes sunken into his head and his cheek bones stark and sharp, his face stubbled with gray hairs that caught the last of the storm light, and each hair was a telephone pole, lit as night was falling, the city of the body.

Back at grandmother’s house, after I was in bed, I pulled the first envelope out of the box.

I miss you.

I thought of her. Of Uncle Stephen writing the missing out. Or trying to. The box had originally held 150 envelopes, and from what I could see, it still did.

I took the first one. It was sealed. And when I pressed my finger under the flap, I hesitated.

I miss you.

The envelope was yellowed and smelled of Uncle Stephen’s house.

Mold. Summer heat. Dust. And paper.

The seal gave without a rip, as if Uncle Stephen had barely wet it, and inside was a single sheet of paper.

I miss the heat off your skin.  The way I could hover my hand just above your bare back and feel the electricity between us. The thousands of my cells crying out for your cells, and the echo from you, begging for me.

And that was all.  I looked at all the envelopes. They weren’t dated. There was no hint of a name. I had never touched my her’s bare back, and it was looking like I never would. And at the thought of her, my center tightened again, twisting.

I folder the letter and put it back into its envelope, where it had waited all these years.

Where was she now? Who was she with? Did her cells still remember Uncle Stephen’s touch, and when she wasn’t even aware, hunger for him?

I put my head on my pillow, and watched as the storm outside threw down the rain and the windows lit with lightning.

I wondered what would happen if I kept tightening, if there was a limit to how taut my soul could become.