Endeavors to Obtain PerpeTual Motion
by
Catherine Rockwood
Catherine Rockwood is a staff member of Reckoning Magazine and a reviewer for Strange Horizons. She has a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, and many remaining questions about everything.
Street Address
City, State, Zip
Phone Number
from Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion
Instructions for care
Once, a man I wouldn’t decipher
gave me his dead son’s shirt
and his dead son’s rice-cooker.
“You have to clean its steam-trap,”
he said, jabbing the cooker’s
back with one finger. Snapped in there
a little clear plastic box waited
to catch hot mist and boiled-up bran,
squaring them in its confines.
“If you don’t clean it,” he said,
and trailed off, shaking
with anger at the son
who’d taken an open-top Jeep
and an unapproved girl
to the beach, that summer:
swerved into a Jersey barrier,
rolled, and perished age 27
in a northbound highway lane.
The girl survived, changed.
There were lawyers, funeral costs,
an ex-
mother. And, once, a son
who hadn’t fucking cleaned the steam-trap
until some obscure disaster
paternally recalled, now
never to be fully articulated
but I took the warning
and the cooker and the shirt.
The first I keep, still;
the cooker is broken;
the blue shirt I buried
with its dryer-sheet smell
its short sleeves pinned neatly
to show off his biceps.