excerpt from “Customs & Alterations” by Brock Clarke

Finally, fifteen months after he died, I get my son’s death certificate in the mail. There it is: the manner of his death, the time, date, place, and also his name. It’s misspelled, both first and last. His middle name they got right.

“I like the name, you like the name. But you just know people are going to take the e off the end of his last name and put it on his first. So don’t act all surprised and pissed off when it happens.”

This was said by Emelie, my ex-wife. Whose name is also often misspelled.

“What did I tell you?” texts Emelie, in response to my text that they spelled our son’s name wrong on his death certificate.

“I’m at work,” texts Emelie, in response to my text asking what we should do about it.

Emelie is Director of The Center for Teaching and Learning.

A Center for Teaching and Learning is what we used to call a School, and a Director is what we used to call a Principal.

Me, I used to be a journalist. Now I write lists. Last month I wrote “Nine Signs That You Might Need a Life Coach.” Last week I wrote “Top Three Cities for Frozen Custard Fans.” Next week I will write “Seven Reasons Not to Have Your Wisdom Teeth Extracted.”

There’s a letter with the death certificate, and on it a number to call if I have complaints or suggestions. But when I call, the automated voice tells me they are no longer taking complaints or suggestions over the phone. “Please come visit us at our main office,” the voice tells me, without telling me where their main office is.

This—the certificate opening, phone calling, texting—is happening in my apartment. The apartment is new to me. It’s on the second floor of a three-story brick building. On the second and third floors are apartments like mine, I guess, though I haven’t seen inside any others. On the first floor are businesses—a coffee shop, a wig store, and, right below me, a place that, according to the lettering on their awning, does “Customs and Alterations.” Sometimes when it’s quiet, like now, I can hear the sewing machines jittering down there like thoughts in the too-early morning.

I find the address of the main office. A twenty-minute walk. It’s a beautiful day out there! But halfway to the main office I come across a downed electrical wire, writhing and sparking and looking like a dangerous living thing. One of the poles the wire was attached to is lying on the hood of a car. Accordioned into the back of that car is the front of another car.

I’m on one side of the wire. On the other side are two men. One gestures at the wire and then at the man next to him. That man raises his hands, palms out, the universal sign for “Hey, not my fault, pal.” The men start yelling: they have gone from gesturing and pointing to yelling just like that. After a minute of this, one man decides yelling isn’t good enough anymore: he pushes the other man, hard, and that man staggers and almost falls. If he’d fallen, he’d have fallen on the wire, which seems to hiss and leap toward him in anticipation.

I decide to turn and take an alternate route to the main office, but before I do I hear the one man say, “You’re going to regret that,” and the other, in so many words, that he highly doubts it.

“If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

Is number six on my “Top Ten Lines from Classic Movies You’ll Never Forget.”

Although that one line is in fact three lines. Dumbass.

Wrote one helpful reader.

“You’re not going to believe what I saw on the way over here,” says the woman behind me in line.

“Two men fighting next to a downed electrical wire,” I say to the woman.

“Boom!” the woman says to me. Which apparently is what one man said to the other after he managed to throw the other man directly onto the wire.

And which man threw which man?

The woman tells me, and I say, “Huh, I would have guessed the other way around.”

Half an hour later I make it to the front of the line.

“Please don’t get in line unless you have these documents,” says the sign at the front of the line.

“Wire down across Elm and Oak. Emergency vehicles on scene. Injuries reported. Please find alternate route,” says an alert on my phone.

My alternate route back to my apartment takes me past a hospital. It’s the hospital where my son died.