Closure

©2017 by John LaTorre

This a little different from my previous posts. You might call it an attempt at poetry, if it is indeed a poem. I submitted it to a writer's forum, and one critic maintained that it wasn't a poem at all, by his lights. He called it, instead, a piece of flash fiction. He may have been right that it wasn't a poem, but he was wrong when he called it fiction, because everything happened just as I told it.

I turned the corner past the cereal section at the Safeway

And there stood my first wife Margie,

Murdered more than twenty years ago, 

While I was thousands of miles away, 

Before either of us were prepared to say good-bye.

But there she was, the same age as when she died,

Straight brown hair flowing down her shoulders nearly to her waist, 

Down to the elbow of a dark blue raincoat 

Like the one she used to wear.

It wasn’t really her, of course, 

Although it could have been a niece

Or even the daughter we might have had

If our lives had streamed a different way.

And then the woman looked my way 

And saw me staring at her. She gave me a fleeting smile

So much like the smile that Margie used to give me

When I needed comforting. 

You know what that smile usually means 

When given by a woman who catches a man staring at her. 

It’s the smile that women smile in self-defense.

The smile that says, "I’m no threat.

Please don’t hurt me."

But I didn’t take it that way. 

To me, it was Margie herself 

Smiling from beyond the grave, 

Telling me that everything’s all right now.

That she’s at peace. 

And I felt a little of that peace, too, just then. 

The moment passed, and she wasn’t Margie anymore.

She was just some random woman buying cereal. 

I turned and went back the way I came.

But, for the first time

I had closure

If that’s what closure is.