States of Grace

Some nights, lying again in the casket he’s so delicately reassembled, the wires finally still all around him, he’ll be able to hear that forward motion again, even, that life, and he’ll smile in the musty darkness, manage to forget for a few moments that the piano isn’t his. The man follows it down to his beer, now with blood blooming in it upside down. Maybe fifty yards past it, a ghost sliced up from the glass surface of the water. His son was lucky, really, lucky that Martin’s own father had been a strict teetotaler, so that alcohol had an almost mystic, mythic quality for Martin at twelve, at thirteen, and on until the day they finally put his father in the ground, unpickled, twenty years later.