Dr Jew

car in the rental lot. A road atlas open but unnecessary, for even though the young man couldn't say exactly the highway's name or where the county line was crossed and signaled a new wave of cornfields and ossified men in overalls, he recognized it all. He had gone on these roads a million repetitions through days on school buses and night trips to town and on the weekend with his parents to see a movie every few months, where the sights in the theater were so different from anything on the farm and they might have driven another boy away from the farm and small town thinking, might have magnetized him to the big city like a 1930s B-movie character, but for this boy the city had seemed overcomplicated to his unsophisticated brain, all the cogs and itches of social mechanism and noise and lack of land that sent men miles into the sky in buildings that went up, always up, like a supernova. He could have stayed here forever with his parents and the clean air and corn stalks rising and shedding again and cycled again, again, and time holding still or frozen like a beautiful Neapolitan pattern of sugar, the taste stretching out like a musical note with no end in sight. A nice thought and never to be. His heart and the heart of the next man, the eternal suffering heart of the universe, rolled on however slowly, unconsciously, and as long as it did, it called time into being and shed off bodies as easily as a body sheds off cells.
    He looked at the letter again that had arrived at Ueda 's a few days earlier. The letter that confirmed.
    Yes, boy-
    I get your letter say you wondring what happen yor ma. And I think it od that you only ask it now. She die to month back and you just go away wit no word til now and you call us famly. When we ant never seen you in so long but now when you wants cuestuns. Well she is dead and next to your father. Go see it yorself.
    Marilou
    The rental car that made a mysterious rattling noise from the back seat whenever the car surpassed 40 miles per hour was functional enough to get the job done and bring them from Memphis to here, their destination and final destination (following death) to a host and horde as easily counted despite invisibility as the miniature stone skyscrapers clogging the grass and covered with words that tried and failed to encapsulate a lifetime, just as a wooden box failed to contain the physical presence of a body to a son, and as a physical body failed to contain the person labeled as being , as being within and passing through or rising from or rolling over and never to be seen again when over.
    They parked in an empty parking lot with but a golf cart for an absent groundskeeper or dedicated golfer who tried to sink unusual bounty into these man-sized holes. Most likely the former but we have it that despite the sadness upon him, the younger man saw the golf cart and immediately thought of actual golf as we just did and the soggy humid ground almost allowed him to smile or inwardly laugh at the notion, here, them, to play the absurd game when all else was over. Pushing these thoughts aside he spoke, which usually put a pause on such perpendicular musings.
    "It 's over here in the back," he said.
    "How do you know?" asked the older man.
    "I've been here before. My father. When he died."
    "I see."
    They milled through rows of verdigris-encrusted slabs and chipped angel wings, gaudy monuments, families resting together as the world turned round, brief lives and lengthy strands, arranged under the grass without thought to alphabetization or other formal system, containing only a vague chronological scent that a casual student might fail to observe.
    Passing the forgotten, forgiven, and forsaken, they came to the newer stretch of monuments and the names were read until the name of Jack Belsun was found. It was a name he'd not heard spoken in nearly ten years, and he held it in his eyes only long enough for confirmation. He then moved on to the nearby grave to the right. Over the plot the grass still showed a faint scar where it had failed to mesh and hide the digging and undigging. Its vertical tablet was simple and unadorned of ostentatious ornamentation or baroque flourishes occasionally noted on other tombstones. This is what she would have chosen, the young man decided. The stone read only:
    MAY BELSUN
    WIFE AND MOTHER
    1968 – 2012
    TIME IS SHORT.
    "What does it mean?" the young man said.
    "Short for all of us."
    "But I feel more confused all the time. I thought I