You’re digging off in the corner of your yard where you think tomato plants might grow, where your father when he was your age took out the brick barbeque that your grandfather built when he was your age before he passed the house onto your father who passed it onto you, and your shovel clinks a brick that you dig out, and it’s one of those red bricks, the old fashioned kind, one of those your grandfather used, and your dad must have missed, and you pull it out and turn it over and over thinking it’s a kind of buried treasure, and that the last person to touch it was gramps, and your son comes out the back door, and he’s still young enough to be impressed by things like old bricks, and thank god you’re old enough to be impressed by them again, so you tell him the story of the brick, its history with your grandfather, and you give it to him as a gift, and he says he’s going to use it as a platform for his favorite Hot Wheels car, and you nod seriously and never see the thing again, but he keeps it there until he’s done with Hot Wheels and then he uses it as a bookstop until he leaves to college at which time he sticks it in the back of his closet, which becomes your gym until you die, and he moves back in with his family, and he finds it there at the back of the closet and remembers it and the story you told him, and he understands it’s a strange heirloom, but an heirloom nonetheless, and since heirlooms do not have intrinsic value necessarily, he treasures it along with the heirloom that is his house, and he gives it to his daughter, and in that moment your granddaughter is touching your grandfather sort of, and your son knows that you were always a sentimental son-of-a-bitch, and he imagines you crying right now to see it, and he’s right. You would.
About:
John Brantingham is the recipient of a New York State Arts Council grant and was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Check out his work at johnbrantingham.com.
