It Will End with Us by Sam Savage

I wasn’t going to begin again, having stopped, apparently, and started up again, foolishly, too many times already, attempting to write about my family and Spring Hope and myself there with them and later there without them.
    Writing a few pages and giving up.
    Between one stopping and another starting there was always an interlude, filled in its first part by regret at having stopped and in its second part by excitement at starting again, finally, and I tried towrite about that too once, or maybe twice, I don’t remember, a tragicomic tale of my endeavors to write that other thing, this one to be titled Pendulum .
    Or Oscillation , to avoid associations with Poe.
    And wrote several more pages that I filed away with the rest.
    Rejecting the temptation to lay them out on the floor and scribble all over them with a big red crayon, the way I used to scribble over my drawings when I was a child and they refused to look the way I wanted.
    Scribbled them out, crumpled them into little balls, then threw myself down on the carpet and screamed.
    My mother would say, “Do you think Matisse lay on the carpet and screamed when he was your age?”
    I have sparrows on my window ledge this morning. I don’t have a hairbrush.
    I don’t know who lives at Spring Hope now.
    I have never liked Poe.
    Truth is, despite my many failures and despite what I told myself, I have never actually stopped searching. In some deep recess of mind, in my heart of hearts—a phrase my mother loved—I never abandoned all hope.
    As people once had to in the Dante poem, supposedly, before entering hell, of which I could recite the first lines from memory, I believe, in Italian, when I was quite small.
    “Now Eve will recite the first lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri,” my mother said, I imagine.The objects of my pursuit were figments, mental images, and phantasms. I would refer to these figments, etc., as Mama, Papa, my mother, my father, our mother, my brothers, Spring Hope, the dog Gracie, the coal bin, the chinaberry tree by the tractor barn, and so forth, talking about them in the same unreflective way that I speak today of this room, this desk, Maria, Lester, and so forth.
    They are figments now, I mean.
    Searching is not really the word for what I do, have been doing for a long time, since I know where they are, where the images and memories of my mother and so forth are, and can’t search for them, properly speaking, there, meaning in my head or mind or whatever, soul even, where they lie very quiet, lost or buried in the darkness there or in the brightness, though it is the right word for my attempts to find the hairbrush.
    One would not say, for example, while breathing into the mouth of a person who has drowned and is not at all breathing that one is searching for life there.
    I wanted to breathe life back into the memories that had drowned there, in the darkness of the mind, as I said, or soul.
    Resuscitate is the word for that, for what I tried to do many times over the years, and stopped, and finally almost lost hope of ever doing successfully, as I said.
    I remember aiming a jet of water from a garden hose into a hole at the base of a large oak tree and being surprised when a toad hopped out.
    I remember a woman we called Miss Henrietta, who was extremely tall and thin, seated in a very small chair reading to us at school, and wishing I was home.
    I remember Thornton dropping a tick into the mouth of a pitcher plant and saying, “Look, now it’s digesting it,” but the tick was just swimming around.
    I remember my hair full of dirt and twigs. I remember my father telling me to bathe. I remember that I wouldn’t change my clothes. I remember listening to Wagner on my record player as loud as I could make it go.
    The hairbrush I used to have has disappeared mysteriously. Maria thinks it fell off the window ledge into the bushes.
    There is always birdseed on the window ledge. I said to her, “Do you think I would put my brush