Hunter’s Moon

Some days on his walk Harold Keehn thought about his wives. Some days it was caskets. Others it was the heartbreaking beauty of the natural world such as he had come to know it. Often as not the consolidation of these topics was seamless and the names and particulars would race through his brain like a litany in code that only he could cipher. Elizabeth, goldfinch, Primrose Maple, hemlock, Helen, Mandarin Bronze, osprey, glacier, eighteen-gauge Permaseal, Autumn Oak, chickadee, trillium, Joan. The list always ended with Joan, his third wife, whom he’d buried last April in a Clarksville Princess Mahogany with a tufted dusty rose velvet interior, in Mullett Lake Cemetery, between two blue spruce saplings he'd planted there. The naming gave him a sense of mastery, as if he'd had some say in all of it.