Brass

Since it’s Saturday I figured I’d have some fun with MJ Polks Stories from the Jukebox. Especially as he chose Bob Seger this week and I’m a fan. Here’s my humble submission to something inspired by Turn the Page.

Thanks MJ for having some fun with this.

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The brass knows. It knows what the hand knows before the hand itself. Salt-slick from sweat, fevered by the spent. In the first light it waits, some graven relic burnished smooth by the endless passage of the broken.

They approach hollow as gourds left to rattle in the wind. Their fingers poise, and in that frail suspension the old beasts gather, crouched and silent. The door will open. It has always opened. Ten thousand dawns of hands shaking like autumn leaves, yet turning the brass all the same.

What god keeps vigil over doorknobs? What small deity of surrender and lesser apocalypse? The metal holds their heat long after they have slipped through, keeps the memory of their doubt, a brass prophet engraving each small death. The rising, the moving on, the turning of handles that ought to stay still.

A woman’s hand trembled. A man’s did not. Children clutched it as if grace lurked in the metal itself. Elders turned it with claws of bone. The brass asks no questions. It knows only the weight of palms and the endless return of flesh to metal, metal to flesh, the ritual of human endurance.

Beyond, rooms beneath cold fluorescent suns. Desks in ranks like headstones and the dead sit upright, typing their own epitaphs into sleepless machines. Here they arrive each morning to forfeit a measure of themselves, feeding the vast engine of days that grinds them grain by grain into dust, into less than dust.

The brass has felt the hands of the nearly-gone who changed their minds at the threshold. Felt the heat of the cancered who rose to water a plant, to feed a cat, pretending such small mercies could stay the dark. It has known the grip of the grief-struck who came the morning after burying, for grief must be ferried like lead into furnaces already numb to heat.

Evening returns them, faces gray as midwinter day. The brass warms under palms filmed with exhaustion. They linger as pilgrims at an unblessed shrine, not for benediction but for the strength beyond. The house where supper waits, the children who need stories, the lover who must be tended, the debts that crouch like predators.

Some nights the hand never turns. A body stands in the corridor, palm laid upon the metal, hollow as a scarecrow. The cleaning crew finds them at dawn. Figures fixed in darkness, weeping without sound, praying to gods long deaf.

The brass remembers those who never came back. The salesman Their last turnings are branded in the metal, their final hesitations sealed in brass that will outlast us all.

If the brass could speak, it would hold its tongue. It would keep its silence. A memory of fingers counting and recounting. The unsent letter, creased and re-creased, never handed over. The photograph worn thin by the slow labor of longing, its edges smoothed in the dark, year after year. What remains is not the telling but the keeping. What remains is the heat and the imprint, and the world that goes on unknowing.

And still the brass waits. Hands will come. They will come until the rooms fall to ruin and the lights fade out and the building surrenders to wind and time. The metal will remember each palm, each heartbeat, each fleeting warmth, keeping the tally of our small passings long after names are dust and the earth has turned its wounded face toward another sun.