archeology

william c. vilim is dead. He died an old man on an anxious christmas eve.

this is how he died:

snowflakes were falling in the backyard of his home, but he was far from there. he was in a city in the south where there was never any snow. he could see the ocean from his window in the hospital and beside him were tubes and machines and a stack of clean white sheets. and as he sat and thought about the fabric and texture of the sheets he knew he would die so he watched the ocean fade away and then he stirred abruptly and he could finally see to see.

he was dead and he could remember taking the school bus to the museum in the city and on the seat he accompanied his best friend and a pretty girl who sat between them. she had humid eyes and cozy cheeks and she rested a grade school search-and-find book on her lap. the book was open and they all looked at it for much of the bus ride--finding people and things. he recalled how hard it was to find the people as they went missing with each new page, but he was always eager. he asked his friend what he had brought for lunch and his friend said that he had a sandwich and some pudding.

and when the pretty girl moved away some years later he sometimes wondered if he would see her again or if he would recognize her if he saw her again and he wondered how she would die.

in the museum he remembered the enormous concrete ramps that led up and down and he saw dinosaur bones and they were red instead of white and he did not know why. his friend asked him if he thought there would be museums with people bones in them in the future but he could not answer.

he saw the artifacts from old civilizations and bricks and bowls and stone and wood and bolts and he thought about how much time he would need to put all of the objects back where they had come from.

(he knew the name for the people who looked across the world for these objects but he had forgotten how to say it.)

there was a window display in the museum with guns and swords and horses and parachutes within, but the children all ran by to see the spaceships and the stars in the next room.

he was dead and he thought about the snow and the seasons and where he would find a beginning. he looked around but only saw a wooden fence too high to climb.

and at his funeral a small girl in a dark dress stood against a wall, gripping a small, collapsed umbrella. and she looked across the room to watch two older boys embrace a woman she did not know.