Andy Fogle
Duende and Ms. Walker

I raise my first-grader hand and tell her how sometimes I can't believe I'm alive. She either frets the worst—a car wreck, a near fatal disease, a grazing bullet, suicidal tendencies at the age of six—or is just asking the reasonable follow-up with the tentative calm of a seasoned teacher on the edge of an abyss.

“Did something—happen to you?”

No, I tell her, it’s just that sometimes I listen to my heartbeat, with the yellow and blue Fisher-Price stethoscope, and I don't know how it goes on. How can it do that? Between the pauses—which I have trained myself to slow down and perceive as eternal—I fear the next won't sound.

When it does, I am exhausted with relief, and feel like soaking the world in gratitude for another tide of blood in my body.

Then another pause, and the fear and wonder begin again.

I don't have anything to do with the only thing that keeps me here; it can stop or seize at any moment. Why does it do that? What makes it go, and what makes it stop?

The class is silent, because they are first-graders, but I believe Ms. Walker likes me because she too, surely, must wonder at nothings like this.