The Mahjong Box

The Mahjong Box
by L. Stewart Marsden

After Bapa died,
after my parents cremated her in the night
and whisked away her cold gray ashes by plane
— perhaps in a brass urn that lay in my dad’s lap on the flight —
back to Luverne where she was lain in the family plot
with the lot of other distantly-remembered ancestors —
though not by me or my brother or sisters;
Aunt Vi and Uncle Albert,
or Marylee — my not-ever-known sibling who died
unexpectedly — tragically — in her crib near Lake Ponchetrain
where Dad was trained for war.

Bapa — who used to read me Uncle Wiggly in her gravely-hoarse voice,
who clunked about in her chunky-blunt shoes,
on akle-less tree-trunked legs sheathed in seamed hosiery,
who shuffled about the tall-ceilinged apartment,
strewn with hand-sewn Oriental throw rugs
and Victorian furniture and delicate demitasse china figurines.

Her small, black and white TV topped with ineffective rabbit ears,
hummed the sometimes nights I stayed with her,
camped on the red divan with the undulating sculpted wood back,
clutching a goose-down blue-striped pillow and wrapped in a scratchy wool blanket —
the tick-tick-tocking of her church-steepled hand-carved clock marking
the slow
and loud minutes of the night —
not quite right.

Bright lights of cars passing on the street — fleeting cross the walls and ceiling in
window-paned framed patterns — silent and sudden — there, and then not.

My sisters got the lot of her furniture and rugs, the delicate china figurines
and useless boxes of tarnished silverware
and mock Tiffany lamps.

I got the Mahjong set.

A wooden and brass box — the cube of Oriental mystery —
that Bapa left for me.

Teak, I think.

Mahjong.
The game I never learned.
A toy, with drawers filled with ivory bricks and sticks —
the bricks — dominoes glued to bamboo shells —
etched with hieroglyphic
designs and colors and untranslatable Eastern script.

Perfect for walls and tall, stacked temples.

I never learned Mahjong. The box came along,
a curiosity to my own, who played much as I had —
stacking the ivory bamboo-backed dominoes
into wobbly, unsound temples —
that smelled of Bapa.

The box, cracked and broken through the years,
pieces lost and dust-ball gathering under sofas and chairs,
has gone.

No doubt out under mounds of other
discarded antiquities where memories decay.