Dead Reckoning

Henry retired from preaching to compose poetry. His preaching had been more poetry than prose to disguise his uncertainty about pretty much everything, his wiles devoted to concealing his fear that he was heir mostly to his alcoholic, agoraphobic mother, dead twenty years. Now, at the insistence of his hard-shell, litigator wife, Alice, he's gone to the attic to get rid of the rotting box that holds his mother's detritus. As he thumbs through a tiny telephone/address book he remembers being on his mother's desk, he's haunted by memory of name after name. His late mother joins in his conversation challenging Henry to wrestle demons he's fended off his whole life. His choice: dismiss his mother again, or plunge into the fray, perhaps making peace with himself. And her. The conversation leads Henry places he's always detoured around. As he embraces old demons, you may, too.