Brian Builta

Dear Austin,

Even though you’ll be dead again tomorrow, your classmates pitched in to buy you a ring for the finger you no longer have. For a while, I fingered the rosary your friends brought back from Rome. It smelled of rosewood and jawbreakers. Still, that first Christmas, I cried at the foot of the Pietá replica at the east end of the garden, Mary there holding her broken heart. I pull over at the garden frequently to gather my mouth around the moans. Sometimes the o in moan is a cosmic peephole wherein I can see my loved ones flickering in the distance. As you suspected, life is a teetertotter and despite the laws of physics, nothing is fair. You were right to install walls. Abraham may have been a father of faith with mad knife skills, but his son Isaac spent the rest of his life sleeping with one eye open.