Afloat by Jennifer McCartney

smell was sand. When we played my
What Would You Give Up?
game, he insisted he would trade all the fingers on his left hand for our own private beach. He would not give up any of his toes, as that would upset his balance. I told him sand was just made of rocks and rocks don’t smell, and he said for someone raised Catholic I had very little faith in my own senses.
If you just sit still and concentrate long enough, you can smell anything, taste anything
. He sometimes tried moving pencils with his thoughts. Anna with all her meditation and studies about transcendence to different worlds agreed with her father. Anything was possible.
    The envelope from my closet was heavy and marked with the word MACKINAC, as if all the contents, all the cards, letters, the one cassette and the triangle straw memento were geographically branded somehow. I imagined my island past as a person, with hair made of dry green grass and a lighthouse beacon for a heart.
    â€˜It’s full of old papers,’ Anna said, reaching a hand into the envelope.
    â€˜I know what it’s full of,’ I told her. ‘Just leave it.’
    She ignored me. ‘You can’t keep this, Mom. What is this?
    A
cassette tape
?’
    She held it out reading long-ago handwriting that wasn’t mine. ‘
Sex
Machine?’
    There was a brief pause – the song selected, the disk set in place, the music beginning suddenly. The lights of the jukebox turned red, then green.
    â€˜Mom?’
    The voice was sultry, sweaty.
    She sighed, putting the cassette tape back in the envelope and placing it in the round curve of my papasan chair, which I cannot sit in anymore as it’s impossible to get out of. Thechair was full of things I couldn’t yet bring myself to throw away. I wondered if Anna were just anticipating all the subsequent cleaning she would do after I died – if her encouragement for purging was a result of her own selfishness.
    This morning’s efforts now fill two canvas bags marked
Property of The United States Postal Service
, bulging and lopsided by the front door – the huge bags they use in the warehouse before the mail gets sorted. Funny to think they’re full of a dead mailman’s shoes instead of birthday cards and bills. He had more shoes than I ever did.
Bought them on sale
, he always said proudly.
For work
.
    I wonder if I should attempt to move the bags somewhere else; they look so uninviting, crowding the hallway with the type of past we won’t want to remember. But where else could they go?
Welcome
, I will say.
Don’t mind my dead husband’s shoes
.
    Open before me is the story of Arch Rock written faithfully in my red journal, the speech bubble around my old words leading to a young ink woman with feathers in her hair. I put the envelope on top of her. It is bulky at the bottom, some of the items misshapen and the envelope worn thin in places. I touch my tongue briefly to the open flap, but the adhesive has long disappeared along with my taste buds. I decide to begin by chance, and reaching in I’m reminded of the haunted houses at St. Mary’s Primary where, with eyes closed, you hoped for something manageable like the peeled grape-witch’s eyeball. My mind is certain, however, that this long-ago envelope was carefully filled with only pleasant things. Some memories have no need of a physical reminder.
    I pull out the cassette tape that Anna had found so offensiveand rattle it beside my ear. The plastic casing is cracked, and there’s nowhere to play it now except the old stereo in the basement. We haven’t done the basement yet. I make a note to see if the stereo still works; it would be nice to hear again. Setting it down, I notice the brown ribbon running through the bottom of the tape is broken.
    Impatient now, I turn the envelope upside down and everything slides out together as if the passing of half a century has enabled each souvenir to attach itself to the