Free Epitaph Road by David Patneaude

their pronunciations.
    I am cursed by a full and relentless imagination. What was. What could be. Wishes. Dreams. Possibilities. Reality pales. It is vapid and vacant and empty of promise. I reject it.
    Later that day, I scribbled down the words in my beginner handwriting on a scrap of paper, and after the policewomen left, and the assistant collectors from the Office of the Early Departed took away the body of the college student, someone painted over the message. It was almost as if it had never appeared.
    Almost.
    The suicide lowered a dark cloud over our whole house. I remembered the sad faces and the quiet that settled everywhere. To encourage their remaining housemates to get their feelings out, Mom and Aunt Paige came up with the idea of stocking brushes and jars of paint and waterproof markers in a cabinet just inside the shed door. Next to it they placed an eight-foot stepladder to reach less-accessible and still-blank spaces on the wall.
    The writing incentives did their job. Or maybe tradition and doggedness and more optimistic points of view would have shrugged off the chill of the college girl’s farewell message anyway. Regardless, before long the writing resumed.
    When I was eight or so, after I realized Dad had really meant it when he told me he wouldn’t be coming back to stay, after I discovered that thoughts and impressions could be translated into something called poetry, even if it was just beginners’ poetry, after I found out it was okay for me to make a contribution to the wall, I climbed the ladder and claimed a virgin spot in the upper left-hand corner. There I wrote:
    Across the deep water, a man, tall and plucky,
    stows his anchor and sails the sea.
    He stands at the helm of his boat, Mr. Lucky,
    looking for fish but thinking of me.
    Wishful imagining, maybe, but Dad’s exit didn’t keep me from believing that deep down he loved me more than his fish or his freedom, that he’d prefer to have me standing next to him at Mr. Lucky ’s wheel. That someday he’d come back and reel me in like a trophy salmon and take me home with him.
    I crouched at the far right end of the wall now, spreading apart the long stems of the flowers. I’d chosen the spot when Merri, the one-time object of my affection, was still living in our house. I thought she might discover this perfect place — inconspicuous but accessible.
    Inside the red outline of a heart, I wrote my initials and hers:
    KD AND MN.
    F OREVER .
    Kid stuff. Immature. Naïve. I knew it, even as I’d painted it on the wall, but I didn’t care.
    For weeks afterward, I checked the weathered boards for some kind of acknowledgment from her. But nothing showed up. I quit looking. The day before she left, though, I noticed a cryptic piece of writing in what I’d come to believe was my private domain: the spot on the high left corner of the wall I’d staked out at an early age and marked with additional pieces of writing over the years. The trespassing couplet simply read,
    Long winding highway,
    may it take a homeward turn.
    I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know who wrote it. But it must have given me some encouragement, because the day after Merri and her mom ran off, something made me look at my semi-hidden heart-note one more time.
    Inside the heart was an arrow, pointing from Merri’s initials to mine, and next to my word Forever, the words And beyond.
    Although it occurred to me that someone else could have written it, the writing looked closely similar to the highway note, and I chose to think Merri had made the additions. The thought gave me comfort, even though her departure made me sad.
    The heart and initials and words — already faded — were still there. I left them now and cut a big bunch of peonies and carried them around to the front of the house.
    Inside, I dropped off my fistful of flowers in the kitchen and headed for the stairs, passing the study on the way.