Excerpts

Off the Shelf: Descanso for My Father by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

FletcherRead the beginning of the Prologue from Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher:

"I watch my son as thunderclouds gather outside my Denver home. He stomps his wide little feet on the hardwood floor, clamoring for a tube of eucalyptus lotion he cannot reach and cannot have. He balls his dimpled fists into hammers, tugs at the reddish wisps of hair curling around his head like flames. He is twenty-three months old, the same age I was when my father died. I look at him now and try to imagine the impressions he is forming from this time, the feelings he is filing away to retrieve later and hold to the light.

Mood shifting, he gallops away, squealing with delight into the kitchen following a bouncing red ball. And I wonder: if I died at this moment, would he remember me?
Nine years old. Rumbling down a two-lane highway on the way home from a Jemez Mountain stream, cutoffs damp, comics wrinkled, sun slanting through the side window of my mother’s ’67 Comet. I’m trying to sleep but I’m kept awake by the jolt of potholes and the rootbeer breath of my little sister, who snores on the backseat beside me. Hills the color of red chile powder slide by on the horizon, lulling me into a dream. I open my eyes to another bump and it is there—a “t” on the mesa, a cross etched black against the white August sky.

“Someone died there,” my mother says, glancing in the rearview. “Struck by lightning, probably. That’s what they did in the olden days. Put up crosses. Little piles of stones.”

I sit upright. “Someone’s buried there?”

“Oh, no,” she says, laughing. “They’re memorials. Shrines. It’s a Spanish tradition.”

She lifts a hand from the wheel and crosses herself.

Our car rounds a corner and the wooden marker fades into the granite and scrub. I close my eyes but the image remains, the person who died without warning, the spirit wandering the roadside like a hitchhiker, watching cars pass, waiting for someone to notice. I see a man, always a man."

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is a New Letters Literary Award winner, four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, National Magazine Award, and PEN Center USA contest. He is also the editor of Shadowbox magazine.

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