On Sunset by Kathryn Harrison

Author:Kathryn Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

MY GRANDFATHER IS the only person who warns me that he will die someday and not be there, and that I would be fine. It’s the one time in my life I know he’s not telling the truth. He doesn’t know he’s lying, but I do.

He uses objects to tell me—ones I love, like the little man in the kayak, a single piece of scrimshaw placed in the curio cabinet among my grandmother’s finely carved Chinese ivories, which are so detailed that a man three inches tall has teeth in his mouth, each smaller than a salt crystal, distinct from its neighbor.

My grandfather reaches behind the cabinet’s glass door and puts the kayak on my palm.

A single Aleut, alone in his crude boat, with a hole through each round fist, one to fit a spear, the other for an oar, both of them lost. His body is a blob of parka, his head hidden by its hood. He’s different from the ivories—I’m allowed to hold him, feel how much rougher the scrimshaw is than the velvety ivories, which I touch rarely and only under supervision.

“One day this will be yours,” he says, and I tell him, every time, to please take it away, this thing I love, I don’t want it.

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