Dear Calvin: On the day I learned of Evelyn’s death,
I was living in Morrison, Colorado. I was in Winifred
Hubbord’s shop. He did the technical direction
on the Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland. The flying
monkeys? His creation. He won an academy award
for his work on that film. By the time I met him, he
and his wife had retired to Morrison where he designed
animated creatures for Disney’s theme parks. He was
creating a dinosaur the day the postman brought the mail.
It was a small town, the postal deliverer would hand you
your mail no matter where he bumped into you.

It was the practice in my family to edge envelopes bearing
bad news in black. I knew before I opened it that someone
had died. I thought it might be one of my great uncles. Two
were in very bad shape after lives of exhaling strong cigars.
I had lost a grandmother the year before and thought it might
be the other. There were any number of my father’s friends
it might have been. Many still worked in the woods. I was
in no hurry to read the news. In fact I became so engrossed
in Winifred’s mechanical beast, I had forgotten it was in my
shirt pocket by the time I got home. It wasn’t until I prepared
for my shower that I found the envelope in my shirt pocket.

I wrapped a towel around my torso, took it to the kitchen,
poured myself a glass of wine, sat down in the little breakfast
nook and stared at the envelope for about five minutes before
I opened it. When Evelyn’s name appeared in the second line,
I swooned. I remember air going stale in my lungs, my skin
sagging, oceans forming in my eyes, my process of thought
growing gnarled as a wounded tree. She appeared to me in
flashes – flirting in study hall, leading a songfest for a young
people’s meeting at church, preparing to kiss me at the drive-in,
and standing before me in her black robe the night of graduation
when we were so sure we knew what the future held from us.

Fredrick Zydek is the author of eight collections of poetry. T’Kopechuck: the Buckley Poems is forthcoming from Winthrop Press later this year. Formerly a professor of creative writing and theology at the University of Nebraska and later at the College of Saint Mary, he is now a gentleman farmer when he isn’t writing. He is the editor for Lone Willow Press. His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Cimmaron Review, The Hollins Critic, New England Review, Nimrod, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Yankee, and others. He is the recipient of the Hart Crane Poetry Award, the Sarah Foley O’Loughlen Literary Award and others.