Old Mrs. Rigsby sits at home at the kitchen table.
The fireplace is lit. Still it’s cold.
She dreams about a new room and red paint and a new garage door and one-day Petér will come home.
There’s a knock on the door.
She makes tea, “come in Father Murphy,” she says laughing in an Irish voice.
She throws tea and biscuits like hand grenades.
She treats tradition like she’s paintballing with nineteen-fourty.

On the streets of Dublin Mrs Rigsby, you had petals in your hair.
You had petals in your hair because it was summer and all those gentlemen had that long umbrella that looked ever so bold.

Mrs. Rigsby reminisces cooking stew in her last pot.
The meat is chopped so small, hiding the fact the portions aren’t so large anymore.
She stares down on a stairwell by a clean kitchen floor.
Mrs. Rigsby’s loneliness and sadness are her dreams.

Angelina Rigsby she looked like a pearl till she went all snow white.
Like a white line tornado on an autumn morning she got out of bed.
She made toast with jam and whipped cream mixed into a big bowl of blueberries.
She was terrified that day she woke up and realised there were no guardian fairies.

A bad man made you feel so bad, he was a bad man.
That’s why you upped and ran from yourself to the stairwell in nineteen-fourty-five where you saw young Petér staggering.
He went to war, you loved him, you kissed him but he collapsed on a stairwell back in fourty-five.

Mrs. Rigsby, you never forgave yourself.
You cry when you eat porridge and you still eat it every night so you can cry.
Angelina Rigsby wore diamonds in her hair then stopped one morning at a stairwell when the diamonds fell and she never picked them up.
Upwardly mobile she was until the light fell coldly on a banister somewhere in nineteen-fourty-five

Angelina Rigsby sits by the kitchen table and finds a photo of Petér.
She is old and tired.
She feels like a child with diamonds in her hair and she rolls in the grass and stares at the yellow yellow sun.

Copyright © 2004 Oisín Breen. No reprints or distribution of any kind sort in any form in this or any other known universe or dimension or medium without my express permission.