So after Clerk #1 takes my paperwork and fifty-six dollars, he calls me back to his window ("Yo, Pops, I said you forgot your wallet," as if my lapse of memory were a personal affront), and I grab my billfold, say thanks, my cheeks burning, and return to the second window.
There, Clerk #2, all dimpled condescension, says nice and loud (for everyone else's benefit, including the surveyors and the tax assessors next door), "Please read the second-to-last line on the eye chart," then another, which I do perfectly (not every septuagenarian is blind) before she smiles briskly and sends me to Clerk #3.
Clerk #3, only a voice behind his camera's gaping eye, takes my photo, then on I go to Clerk #4, who, pale and gaunt and discreetly tattooed, says do I want to be an organ donor.
He is the spitting image of my grandson (the boy who, ages ago, my daughter spirited away and turned against me; the boy who, two years later, she found silenced, blue, a spent needle cradled in the crook of his arm).
"Do I want to be...?"
"An organ donor," the boy says, and smiles a kind smile, a real one, and I picture my lungs, smoky and dark as Virginia hams; and my eyes, cheerless as the sky before a summer storm; and my heart, hardened and packed with ice and tears, and I say, "Sure," and I check the box and sign below and head out into the toothless light of day, imagining some clerk scrutinizing my corpse on a gurney parked in the ER, and this clerk, Clerk #5, let's say, smiles and initials the paperwork so the surgeons can grab their knives and pick me clean.
Peter Beynon lives in Albany, New York. Recently, his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review and New World Writing Quarterly.
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