Centuries of June by Keith Donohue Page B

Bemused, he clapped his leathery hands together, sending a talc of dead skin puffing like a cloud.
    “Not singing bicycles, singing from the windows.”
    “Even better,” Dolly said. “Singing windows. Or maybe it was the house itself that was singing?”
    Bachelard would allow such a possibility in his poetics, but only in a metaphorical sense, with a house so imbued with happiness that the windows could be said to sing. He speaks of the archetype of the “happy house” that young children reproduce when asked to take up their crayons and color their idea of home—a square with a peaked roof, two windows and a door that suggest a face, and around the house a tree and flowers, a line of blue at the upper border to indicate the sky, and a sun, often smiling, radiating from its tucked position in the corner. While there is no good reason to dispute the existence of a companion to such an idealized fantasy, say, a singing house, a family place so full of joy that it hums a musical score night and day, I have never seen or heard of such a space. My own childhood, as my father would attest if he is indeed my father, lacked all such song, unless one includes the dirty ditties he would sometimes croon late at night after arriving filled to the lid with drink.
    “You have misunderstood me, or perhaps I did not make myself clear. It was like the opening prelude of some fantastic play or movie, and the house itself was the theatre. I was on the lawn marveling at the bicycles’ sudden strange appearance and studying the light reflectingoff the chrome when I heard someone singing from one of the open windows. ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca .”
    “Verdi?” the old man guessed.
    “Not so. A common mistake, but I believe it is Puccini.”
    “If you two are going to hide behind the screen of dead white male Eurocentric cultural references, I will take my skullcrusher and leave.”
    “Apologies. The actual composer is not as important as the song, and the song itself is not as crucial as the singing. And it only truly gains significance through the hearer.”
    The old man enjoyed my gambit, for he nodded vigorously and sprang to life. “A word is not a word until it is heard.”
    “A soprano floated out the melody and drew me in note by note.” My audience of two appeared mesmerized by my story, for their jaws gaped and their eyes widened in anticipation. A cool breeze or, rather, an intake of air behind me tickled the short hairs on the back of my neck, and the scar tissue from the earlier hole constricted. Had a window been opened in another room to cause a sudden backdraft?
    “Do you trust me?” the old man asked.
    A preposterous question. Even when alive, my father earned no such confidence. Trust him? I was not sure that I even believed in his existence at all or, indeed, that he was my father and not some conflation of my imagination. A larger-than-life character from the stage. Come to think of it, my father had hazel eyes, and my inquisitor’s eyes were quite blue.
    “Come now, Sonny, no time to dally. If I give you the word, will you follow without reservation, no questions asked?”
    “The word?”
    “A command, boy-o. When I issue an order, do as I say at once, for your very life may depend upon it.”
    Beside him on the edge, Dolly nodded her agreement.
    “Yes, I trust you.”
    “Good lad. Now, one, two, three … duck!”
    I squatted immediately as above my head a projectile creased the air and smashed into the opposite wall. An irregular corona of cracks radiated from the impact against the shower tiles, and anchored deep in the center, a pointy barb of a small harpoon. From the direction whence the weapon had been chucked spewed a fount of the vilest invective. A young woman, hardly more than a girl, swore and cursed like a sailor and stomped her feet in fury. “Whoreson dog, blot, canker! Blast to Hades, I’ve missed.”
    Framed in the doorway, she shook with rage, balled her hands to fists, and