Tonight's Poet Corner: Murphy

Murphy
by Belinda Roddie

Unsettled, he took to his large green
chair in the middle of his bedroom,
which was furnished with forest
blemishes on all four walls. He
lit a pipe and the smoke came out in
stark white feathers that billowed across the
empty space between him and the
fireplace, the mantelpiece sparking
tender amber in the ceiling light.
Distressed, he reached for a bottle,
a vice of displeasure for his mother and a
quick and easy cheer for his father, because
that was the way the story always went: a drunk
patriarch and a Christian lady, vying for the
title of "I told you so" parent while the son
dipped one way or slouched the other.
Murphy was not a drunk
or a Christian; he was Jewish.

When the medicinal dose did not
soothe his aching throat, he rose
to fetch a book from the highest shelf -
a book bound with fretful threads of
brass and bronze, with a great red cover that
weighed more than the tome itself. He lifted the
sheets of paper and marveled at how the text had
aged so perfectly, like the words sat on
mountain tops as wise men with big, gray beards.
No one listened to their adages, but that
didn't make them any less true. Murphy
read this book over anything, even the Torah,
any day, and with the pipe lying languid
across his lap, he forgot that it was still
lit, and the sparks pushed him up from the seat
and caught him and the pages in tendrils of
fahrenheit 451 apathy, dragging him to the
mantelpiece where he saw his reflection in the
uncaring sheet of flame.