(Read by the author.)
I should be staying in a tent somewhere, Colin thinks, as he walks up the sidewalk toward the house. Somewhere in the wilderness, far away from here. He’s thinking about loud voices, swirling around conflict that always seemed inevitable, that he always entered willingly, with gusto even, but that he also tells himself he never wanted, maybe, if he was honest, which he isn’t always. Conflict that he sometimes instigated himself, but always for a reason. For a purpose, but he’s not necessarily sure what the purpose would have been. In any case, he knows he can’t be anywhere else. The dorms are closed, he doesn’t own a tent, and he’s not even sure where the wilderness is.
Colin steps up toward the porch. His feet drag, like the chain of Marley’s ghost is wrapped around his legs, weighing him down, pulling him backward, down the steps, down the sidewalk, back to school, back to his independence, back to where he is now an adult, can skip his 8:00 a.m. class anytime he wants, and no one will say anything, can skip breakfast, and no one will remind him incessantly that it’s the most important meal of the day.
Colin pauses at the front door and stares. There’s a knocker at eye level. This is new, he tells himself. He looks to see if the doorbell is still there, off to the side. It is. He looks back at the adornment on the door and wonders why his father would have installed it. Who has door knockers anymore? He examines it more closely. It’s brass, oval shaped. Colin realizes with a start that it’s a face. Scowling, eyeglasses with round lenses pushed up on its forehead. In its grimacing mouth, it clenches a circle of metal, shaped like a cold snake curled around and eating its own tail. Maybe his father thinks it will scare off young people with clipboards, annoying him with requests to sign petitions to save birds he’s never heard of. The nose on the knocker face hooks down, mean. The door knocker looks like his father. It’s like Marley’s face staring balefully back at Scrooge.
Colin is confused. Should he bang on the door knocker? Should he ring the doorbell, if it still works? He can’t just walk in – he doesn’t live here anymore. Knocker or doorbell? He resolves the question by avoiding it, which is what his father tells him he usually does. He reaches out for the worn door handle, knowing that it won’t be locked. He pushes the door open.
Colin stands in the vestibule. He’s looking at the aquarium, still there on the parson’s table, the sword plant he placed in the gravel years ago now spreading upward through the water, and Oscar, a flash of gold, still darting among its broad leaves. He’s surprised his father didn’t remove the tank the day Colin left for college.
Suddenly his mother is rushing down the hallway toward him. In the living room to Colin’s left, his father is rising from his Barcalounger. From the kitchen down the hallway billows the aroma of roasting turkey. Colin’s eyes close. He inhales. Sausage, bacon, and sage -- Pennsylvania Dutch dressing. Through the door to the living room, Colin can see that his father is smiling. Marley’s chain melts, falls, and evaporates before it hits the vestibule carpet in Colin’s home.