The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here. As Ben takes his first sip of his last cup of coffee in this house, he thinks of Whitman’s lines, then, from “Song of Myself”—his favorite passage from his favorite poet:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

He is a practical man, but still in a wordless place within him, Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.

“Signal Fires,” by Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro is a good writer. I enjoy her prose and her utilization of verbs that add new meaning and dynamism to the sentences. The novel is about secrets we keep in the family and their detrimental consequences. One can read and understand the book, but the author often sends the reader back and forth in time. Someone taught her that telling a story the old way—recounting stories as if we all sat around a campfire on a summer night— only begets a boring account. I hope that she freeds herself of this constraint. 

The snippet shows the well-thought metaphysical aspect of this story, “He is a practical man, but still in a wordless place within him, Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.”