Peter DeMarco
Blue Shirt
The short-sleeved three button shirt is powder blue, sky blue, the world is a safe and cozy kind of blue, and to see it in a body bag, well, not a real body bag, but a Ziplock bag used for leftover food, sent home with you by the hospital, is certainly a surreal site, your dead father’s wallet, watch and blue shirt in this ersatz body bag for possessions.
He’d been wearing the shirt when he collapsed mowing the lawn. The lawn had been kept green and lush with chemicals and seeds and fertilizers, ironic, since your town was named for the Indian translation of fertile or pleasant land, and the grass you’d die valiantly on as a kid, imitating black and white gangster movie deaths, is now a setting for a real death, a heart attack, with the blue shirt framed by this verdant landscape.
A neighbor drives you to the hospital. He waves a cigarette. Your father was good at fixing things, he says. Giving him a legacy. What else can you say to an 18-year-old.
A doctor takes you inside the emergency room. Your father expired eight minutes ago, he says, in a clinical cadence. Your father’s body lies on a steel table. The blue shirt is out of place here. It belongs in the warm confines of your neighborhood, not here, in this place with metallic machines hovering and antiseptic white figures racing around, in blurs, balletic in life-saving choreography.
You wear the blue shirt to church, the supermarket, even Sears, where it was purchased. You pass racks of other blue shirts, lifeless on plastic hangers. Your blue shirt had a long life. Barbeques, Little League games, and when you played the outfield, it always stood out in the bleachers, the sun in your eyes creating a halo of blueness that enveloped your father.
At the disco you stretch your arms up to the spinning ball, the bass thundering, Donna Summer and Hot Stuff, everyone circling you, dozens of hands reaching, touching its soft blue polyester, I am the resurrection, the strobe light breaking everything around you into fragments, and you try to read the expressions on their faces, expressions that disappear for a moment in the blink of the strobe and then reappear, and you wonder if you missed an important frame from those looks, clues to how they felt about the beauty of miracles.
Peter DeMarco published a New York Times “Modern Love” essay about becoming a New York City high school English teacher and meeting his wife. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing, and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the amateur stand-up comedy circuit in New York City. Other writing credits include pieces in trampset, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, Monkeybicycle, Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Cleaver, Flash Fiction Magazine. Read more at: peterdemarcowriter.com
