Read Forgiving Ararat for Free Online Page A

night,” she replies, puzzled by my question.
    “But when you just said you were going to miss her and she was your favorite.... I guess you meant for the weekend.”
    Miss Erin looks at me strangely and gives Sarah a kiss. “Goodbye sweetie,” she says. “I love you.”
    Sarah gives Miss Erin a peck on the cheek.
    “Thanks for taking good care of her,” I say, grabbing Sarah’s bag of nearly empty milk bottles and art projects and glancing over her activity sheet for the day. “Have a nice weekend.”
    I carry Sarah out to the car, buckle her in, and slip a cassette of
Hot Tea and Bees Honey
into the tape player. As we drive away, I glance at Sarah in the rearview mirror and ask her how her day went. She pretends to answer with cooing and babbling sounds.
    We stop at a convenience store on the way home to buy milk. The parking lot is empty. An autumn breeze freshens the car when I open the door. It’s not even six-thirty yet but it’s already dark as midnight. I unbuckle Sarah from her car seat. She reaches for my hair and I tease her by tilting away; she giggles, exposing a single tooth; her hair falls into her eyes, dark and full of curls like her daddy’s. Carrying her across the parking lot, I’m humming the song we had been listening to on the cassette.
    We enter the store and head for the dairy case in the back. I have to juggle her with one arm as I pick up a half gallon of milk; she giggles at nearly falling. We turn and head back toward the counter through the pastry aisle. Sarah reaches out with her tiny hand and knocks a row of cupcakes onto the floor. As I stoop to pick them up, the overpowering smell of decaying mushrooms fills the air. How strange, I think. I turn to locate the source but, suddenly, find myself back at Shemaya Station, on the bench beneath the rusting steel dome. Sarah’s gone. I’m sitting next to Luas, covered in my own blood.

5

----
     

    D ead people doubt the finality of their own deaths. We either don’t believe it’s happened or we hope for some miracle to change it. We learn to accept it only gradually, at our own pace and on our own terms; but this creates confusion, because we extend the torn fragments of our lives into the open wound of the afterlife, grafting the two together. For sensitive souls—the souls of saints and poets who lived their lives in the knowledge that truth exists only in the spiritual world—the transition to Shemaya might seem perfectly seamless and immediate; but for the rest of us, including people like me, who placed their faith in logic and reason and what could be measured with instruments and seen with our own two eyes, the transition from life to death takes much longer. We resist, deny, and explain away our mortality at every turn. Thus, the very first thing we forget when we die is how it happened, or, more accurately, this is the very first thing we choose not to remember, because to remember such a momentous event is to concede the inconceivable.
    The next morning, which was my first morning in Shemaya, I awoke to the smell of coffee and cinnamon. These were the aromas I’d become accustomed to on Saturday mornings during my life, and as far as I was concerned this was just another Saturday morning. Bo would get up early for a jog and bring breakfast home from the bakery, slipping quietly out of the house and returning with a bag full of sticky buns and other goodies. I loved him for this. While he was gone, it was my privilege and vice to linger in bed with my eyes closed, drowsy, warm, and contented beneath the covers. That morning in Shemaya, I lingered in bed just this way, in the blissful state on the border of sleep, unable to discern the meaning of the bizarre dreams about the train station, Luas, and my great-grandmother, trying to commit them to memory before they dissolved into the noise and distractions of a new day.
What was it she said that I wanted to remember...? I’d forgotten already. Dreams can be illusive that