Doug Ramspeck
Cigar Box
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A girl I knew in college shaved her pubis, placed the clippings in a wooden cigar box, and left them outside her ex-boyfriend’s dormitory door. The cigar box had belonged to the girl’s father, who had died from a fall from a roof shortly after the Korean War, where he had flown a B-29 on bombing raids. The cigar box had been made in Costa Rica and had Spanish words on it I couldn’t decipher. I was in the girl’s room when I saw the cigar box, not on the evening the shaving took place but on an evening when four of us (the boyfriend included) were studying together for a philosophy midterm. We discussed radical doubt, the mind and body split, and proofs of God’s existence. It was dusk and outside the dormitory window the sky was bleeding into the earth near the football field. The girl, just nineteen, was sprawled on her bed in a way that made me alternately exhilarated and uneasy, and I recall that her boyfriend saw the cigar box at one point and teased her about smoking cigars. For a long while we debated the difference between a priori and a posteriori, and then the girl started crying just a little and told us she was the one who had found her father dead on the driveway. Later, when the ex-boyfriend opened the cigar box to show me, he didn’t say at first what was there inside, and for some reason I thought of a bird’s nest, a small bird, maybe a sparrow. It was an image I couldn’t seem to shake. Every time I saw the girl after that my first thought was of the tiny nest arranged as strange offering in the Costa Rican cigar box of her dead father. |
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