This writing project started out in January using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, with the intent of writing daily throughout the days of the year. Please note that each month’s work here has a separate page (links are in the right sidebar).
NOTE: Due to demands on time by a number of projects and a now crawling baby, Carianne has taken a hiatus from her daily drawings. I hope to continue with the flash fiction pieces and look to other sources of inspiration!
NOTE #2: For Stories #141 through #240, I will be posting the stories individually to conform to this year’s 100 Days Project.
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140/365 JUST PART OF THE DAILY NEWS
Word Count: 426
They surrounded us like buzzards, the journalists so eager to hear the young lions roar. We, with blood still staining our muzzles, stood there in shock, angry at what we couldn’t comprehend. They loved it because otherwise, without validation of the victim, it was just another teenage suicide.
We separated ourselves by innuendoes and half-truths into friends and bullies. We’d watch ourselves on the news that night. Yeah, he was a good kid, kinda quiet, kept to himself, didn’t bother anybody. He was a band member. Tuba, I think. Or maybe he carried a flag.
Which meant, that’s how kids were telling each other who he was; the buzz going around while each tried to place him in a classroom a couple seats over, up front of the school bus. At a table alone in the cafeteria.
Me too; I said the same things everyone else said. After all, someone must’ve known him, known who he was underneath the acne and glasses. Had he ever been to the prom or even a dance? One girl told the television reporter that they’d dated for a while. I doubt that they had.
So for a few days he’s the big man on campus. His name floated around like a frisbee. He would be pleased. Some kid whose father was a cop at the scene said his face was bloated and blue, his eyes staring bug-eyed, his bare feet swinging just “this high” off the floor. Some said his mother had found him. Some said it was his twelve year-old sister. I tried to imagine their morning. How hell breaks loose before the pop-tarts are done.
We looked for our own faces caught in the photographs, our words quoted in newspaper text. It made it more real, our names linked with his under the headline. We sought out each other at the service, clustered together in groups in which he himself would not have been a part. Shushed the giggles over some dumb joke because even if we didn’t really know him, we knew how to behave at his funeral.
And as the faintest of memories, the least bit of knowledge, the barely remembered face in the crowd became strong with embellishment, the newly created vignettes became our relief. We held the new truths close to our minds, comfortable with how we believed we had known him. Shock soon overwhelmed by our own rewritten narratives of his life. Of our own.
Before too many days he was forgotten again. And somehow, that didn’t seem right.
~~~
139/365 CHANGE
Word Count: 317
The sound of the hummingbird’s wings is more than I could bear. I swat around wildly above my head. It takes off in a trailing hum, which was all that I wanted. Then it comes back. It hangs in the air as if to chastise, as if I should have known better. I add the tiny body of guilt to my burden.
Who am I? I’m no longer a mother, I’m no longer a wife and I hate the word widow. I’m no longer twenty-four years old and I don’t really remember who I was then.
Mother of a dead child. There’s no word for it. There’s no sign to hang out that would warn away the innocent inquiry. Yes, but he died. And with that, you’ve hurt a kind but curious stranger. You watch the eyes widen, the face crumple; hear the stumbling for words that no matter how well strung together, simply come down to I’m so sorry.
These are my porch stairs. This is my backyard. My, mine, singular now; words that taste as bitter as aspirin on my tongue. Yet it all looks the same, even as spring brings out the pink cherry blossoms, the tight yellow-green lilac leaves. I would have been less surprised if the trees had remained in their skeletal gray through summer and fall into next winter.
I hear the whirring whizzing wings and I spot it, the female this time. She circles again and lands on the feeder. She looks over her shoulder and watches me, takes a sip of the nectar, turns back and watches. Buzzes away. The feeder is left swinging from her takeoff. It looks low on sugar syrup and I stand up and reach to pull it off its hook and bring it into the house.
I’m the lady who fills up the feeder for the hummingbirds. That’s a start, I guess.
~~~
138/365 RISING UP IN THE WORLD
Word Count: 340
It was the mother of all job interviews, for something I really wanted and it was going to be tough getting in. I was floored that I even got this far in the process, a live interview with not the manager of the Creative Marketing department, but at least Human Resources.
I left the house an hour early and got a parking place close to the front of the building. I didn’t wrinkle my jacket.
I loved the tons of glass and steel amid dogwoods and blooming crabapple trees in the parking lot. The entryway looked like an old English garden. Roses climbed over the trellis above the greyed-glass front doors. It was one world dropped into another. My kind of design.
The lobby was huge and archaic, rather like I’d imagine an old New York City hotel. It was empty. I checked the directory before I got into the elevator and pressed the button for the eighty-eighth floor. The doors swooshed closed behind me.
Again, I was all alone in the elevator yet it stopped at every floor. The doors opened, no one got on, the doors closed. I got a peek at the lobby area of each floor in those few seconds while it stood open. Each floor, to my delight, was excitingly different, as if a united nations of decorators couldn’t agree. I thought of the Tower of Babel and wondered if this was the outcome of some form of global communication.
All the way it went, styles, countries, sliding in and out of my view like a Powerpoint presentation. I looked at the lighted buttons over the doors as they lit up with a ping! and shut off, one by one in the long row of numbers. It was now on eighty-three.
China, I guessed; then Ireland, a few I didn’t recognize, a jungle, and I straightened my tie, patted my hair as eighty-eight pinged its light. The doors slid open and I stepped out. There was nothing there to catch my fall.
~~~
137/365 YOU LEARN
Word Count: 389
I didn’t know that when you stick a fork in a hotdog it bleeds. I just never noticed. Or that you can burn boiled eggs in a pot. And the pot. I mean, the pot can burn too. So much I don’t know. I have to look around me, beyond me, and I don’t mean the internet because that’s something I can’t spend so much time on anymore. I was chatting on Facebook when the eggs burned.
It was such a rush, you know? The first time you use makeup that isn’t swiped from your older sister. The first time a boy sly as a snake gets his hand under your shirt. Then unsnaps the back of your bra and stings your nipples like a wasp caught inside. I only let Foxy do it at first. Then he dumped me because I was such a prude and wouldn’t let him get no farther than touching though I did let him put his hand into my pants. I heard later that he told all his buddies and word spread like shit on a hot July day.
You learn. It’s all part of growing up I suppose.
My mama told me nothing if she didn’t tell me to keep myself safe. Not to make the same dumb mistakes she made. She didn’t tell me much more than that. She sure didn’t teach me to cook ‘cause she did it all and left it in the fridge for us, or give us money for a burger and fries. She did the best she can is what I’m saying. She had to do it all herself with nobody to help her. She’s thirty-six and she’s old. I don’t want to be that.
And I won’t. Because I’m smarter. She never finished high school and I got a year and a half of community college behind me. I know I’m pushing greasy plates now but that’s just till I get a real job. Maybe as a computer programmer or data entry clerk. That pays pretty good. And I’ll put extra time in at the diner now so I could finish the last semester maybe next year.
So now I know that hot dogs bleed and I’m learning to cook. But good Lord, how am I ever going to take care of a baby?
~~~
136/365 THE PEOPLE WHO STOP AT MOTELS
Word Count: 615
The girl is thin, pale, wet from the rain. Her blondish hair hangs like knives. She looks twelve and he hopes she’s at least sixteen.
“You alone?” he asks.
She nods, oddly unaware of any danger this information could bring. “How much?” she asks. Her voice is expectedly scrawny, a whisper held together with vowels.
“One night, a single, twenty-five paid up front.”
He watches her pull out a pink plastic wallet, take out two tens and a five. She puts the wallet back in her pocket before she holds the bills out to him from one end. He takes the money and sticks it in a drawer underneath the counter, closes and locks it, even though he’d already emptied it for the night. He turns and reaches for a room key from the board behind him and slaps it down on the counter.
“Number twenty-three. Midway down on your right,” he says, and gestures vaguely to his right because he’s not sure she’s listening. Something about her makes him uncomfortable, more so than most of the gravelly bikers who come in four to a room with a case of beer and a woman with breasts spilling out of black leather.
She turns and he notices how skinny she really is. Her legs like denim fence posts, the seat of her jeans wrinkled into a fold. Small wings of shoulder bones sprout beneath a worn sweater that drapes unevenly on her back. She gets in her car and backs out slowly, her headlights flash into the office where he still stands. He walks around the desk and stops at the doorway, watches her park in front of the room. She gets out and locks her car door, walks to the room with a small gym bag. He watches until he sees the door to her room close and the curtain-dulled light spray onto the narrow walkway from the front window.
He undresses, lays heavily down on a bed in a room off the office, part of a small apartment made by breaking through walls of two motel rooms. He lies there awake, tired with beer yet alert to the sounds of the highway off in the distance. His thoughts zoom through his brain like the traffic. His hands clench the sheets he’s pulled over his head. Still, the girl walks through. He wonders where she came from. He wonders if she’s asleep. He misses his latest girlfriend who left him just over a month ago. Karen was sweet, young and exciting. Too much for him unless he was willing to get married again and he wasn’t. He didn’t trust women enough anymore. But he missed them. His hands crept down to his crotch.
The girl in Room 23 sat on the bed holding her phone in both hands. She had washed her face and hands but didn’t change clothes, just exchanged the sweater for a pullover sweatshirt. She touched the numbers lightly, not pressing them enough to connect. The same eleven numbers over and over again. Then she started to cry.
Leave it behind, she told herself. You’re done with it now. Move on. But there were things she’d not left, but lost along with the leaving. She’d never been this far away on her own before. Never gone without somebody knowing. She held the phone to her chest, held it like it contained her best friend Addie, her little sister Jane, and her ma. Then she put it on the nightstand and shut off the light. Slipped under the sheets, surprised at the sweet smell of the linen. She thought of the man at the desk. He had real nice eyes.
~~~
135/365 IN THE LIGHT OF A METEOR SHOWER
Word Count: 487
Thalia took a lounge lawn chair, a blanket and the pillow she used when her back bothered her, a six-pack of diet cola, a thermos of hot coffee, two sandwiches, an apple and a pear, a bag of chips and another of cheese-doodles, and headed out for the hills atop the sprawling city. On her way, she stopped and bought half a dozen mixed donuts because they were cheaper that way.
No one else was around. She parked at a lesser-known spot that hadn’t the spectacular view of the city, but was so open to the wide expanse of sky that she knew it’d be perfect. She was going to watch the meteor shower that would go on through most of the night. She was hoping to catch a celestial fragment of meteor in her hair.
Once, a long time ago when she was just little, her mother had taken her outside in the back yard and holding her up, pointed to the sky saying, “See! Did you see that one?” Thalia would say, “Where?” What, Mommy?” always a second behind, a second too late. Her mother had said that if you catch a meteor spark you will marry a wonderful, handsome and rich man, and have two beautiful children. She wondered if that’s how her parents had come together. She’d forgotten that she was an only child.
At some point Thalia understood that her mother and father were not happy. He had seasonal work according to layoffs and she took in sewing to help. They ate soup that her mother made from whatever she found in the refrigerator, thinking herself quite creative. He complained that he deserved better than that. They argued a lot; always on Friday and Saturday nights. Sunday was a quiet truce of avoidance. Monday through Thursday flew by like crows in between.
Her father died when Thalia was twelve and things got better. At least for a few years. When her mother got sick it got worse and better again when she died. Thalia stayed in the apartment by herself, staying one step above making the rent. She figured she’d gotten herself as far as herself could go but it was, if not stellar, at least liveable. She was on the cusp of her thirty-sixth birthday and felt her insides shriveling, getting ready to die.
Last Monday her cat was hit by a car. She found it dead on the sidewalk in front of her building where the kids had kicked it down the street. Thalia took it as a sign that things were about to get better, another dot on the up and down and up again map of her life. By the night of the meteor shower she was openly hopeful.
She settled into the chair, opened a soda and unwrapped one of the sandwiches. She took a bite and looked eagerly up at the sky.
~~~
134/365 EARS THAT HEAR LAUGHTER AND TEARS
Word Count: 318
The grass grew last night. I heard it. Not very loud, just enough to wake me up when some young blades got into discussion of Joyce’s Ulysses. You know how those things escalate. Towards dawn, it lulled into occasional whispers from the few who couldn’t let go of the night. Lovers, I’m sure, intent on catching the last drop of their devotion on their tongue.
The morning light shook me awake before I was ready to taste it. Usually it flavors of sweet butter. This morning it held the tang of lemony tea, a leftover from the green tinge of the fading full moon.
I dressed for the rain though it was sunny on the New England coast. It was raining hard in New Zealand and the clouds tend to rise like steam from the south, quickly, scattering like birds to converge and spread again in a dance to honor the wind. My pink plastic raincoat can make even a thunderstorm smile. Today it must do more, make it laugh.
The day wears like corduroy, in wide wales of verdant plush tramped down into paths. Each trail starts parallel, veering a minus degree that stretches out in a fan that gets everything thought of, finished. A day of listmaking. A day of striking-through with completion.
Just one widget held up the flow like a petulant rock in a stream, forcing division of purpose, regaining itself like old friends with too little years between them. One sourpussed recalcitrant cajoled with pretty words wound into a tight ball of story.
I write for under a penny, I write for satisfaction the purest weight of gold. I empty the sights, scents and voices I’ve gathered today onto the page like a puzzle that squizzles itself into form.
Then, when I’ve done with the day in its fullness, I go back into the night and fall asleep listening to the grass.
~~~
133/365 THE RAVEN
Word Count: 469
In Westport they have ravens, not crows, even in a downward economy. I saw one once on a sea of lush lawn behind wrought iron fencing. He was just sitting there as if his tree had been sucked into the ground. Ravens don’t sit on the ground, they swim the sky in circles and land on the branch of tall trees to look down and laugh at us. Because they know something about life that we don’t believe in. Something only Edgar understood.
It was Friday the 13th and I wanted to believe in the dark side. I mean, I already did, but I wanted to make it work to my advantage. Learn the tricks. Get the good vibes flowing. Maybe live in my own mansion in Westport.
I wove around the roads lined with dogwoods and gated driveways, picking a home from the houses that peek out like shy children between spaces in bushes to tease those like me who haven’t achieved our place yet in high society living. I was looking for natural stone but a brick one would do. As long as it had pillars in front and a circular drive. I love the circular drives.
One house caught my eye and to be honest, it was more because of the lawn than anything else. Huge house, but a bit Gothic. Very un-Martha. The grass looked like it hadn’t been freshly mowed and this was on a Friday! I turned around and went back, slowed to a stop, and that’s when I spotted a big fat old raven sitting atop a wide-open gate. Do you believe it? My luck took its turn right there.
No one answered the doorbell so I walked around the side to the back. The raven swooped ahead and I followed. He settled atop the swung-open screen door to the back garden which really needed some good weeding and mulch. I knocked at the inner door and waited. It opened at a twist of the knob. I walked in.
Well it was love at first sight. It was evidently abandoned some months back. I found bills piled up on a desk, the latest hadn’t even been opened. The electricity was off but I brought in candles and an emergency generator, and I got wi-fi off the neighbors who were clearly up on technology if clueless about Neighborhood Watch.
So I spend most of my time writing and the house has inspired me to greater depths of mankind and his nature. I swear I feel Poe himself looking over my shoulder in glee. Every Friday the 13th I celebrate to the great fortune I’ve been led into, and raise a glass of wine to the raven who unfortunately got hit by a car a week after I moved in.
~~~
132/365 ON AGEING
Word Count: 300
When my family got together for holidays, my dad would pick up Grandma Pickens from the home and bring her over for the day. She had a serious case of the forgets and we’d give her a J.C. Penney catalog to look through all day until it was time to return her. She’d point to a page and pause in wonder. As the Alzheimer’s got worse, we found the most likely page to hold her attention was men’s underwear.
When I get old and out of my mind, I think I’d be happy watching The Pirates of the Caribbean series popped into the DVD player right after breakfast each day just replayed until I drifted out into sleep each night. I would hope I wouldn’t be caught masturbating to Johnny Depp but without a shred of synapses to connect to the appropriate embarrassment response in my brain, it really won’t matter I suppose.
It’s kind of neat to project into the future. Working with tools we only have now, making up all sort of fantastical things we’ll have twenty, forty years hence. Maybe I’ll be in a stand-up bed like in the frozen food department where the door frosts impatiently while you look for something that stirs your appetite. Or maybe I’ll be in a capsule, a gleaming stainless steel bullet-coffin pointed directly to outer space. Maybe the mortuary will be a spaceship that goes up once a week and shoots us all out to float among the stars. Maybe I’ll twinkle for eternity and they’ll have telescopes so powerful to read the names engraved along the sides.
Or maybe I’ll just take another aspirin for this arthritis kicking up in my fingers and the stiff back from gardening all day and figure what to make for dinner.
~~~
131/365 METAPHORICAL LOVE
Word Count: 220
She poked a hole into the clouds and pulled out a dollop of sky that when she licked her finger, found it tasted like an ice-blue popsicle. She grabbed a few fistfuls and licked the lump clean before it melted though much had dripped down her forearm like a vein and so her skin looked inside-out.
She colored her lips with lilac buds, deep purple, like the juice of young grapes. Shadowed her eyelids with the soft mysterious green leaves to match the green lawn of her dress. It was her favorite color since always.
She brushed her hair with the leftover morning sunbeams, streaking golden highlights like ribbons running through the long waves.
It was a special Spring day, one to mark with little bits of royal embellishment. She was meeting her undeclared lover and would sing out her heart, melting her fragile cover like a late April snow.
She saw him off in the distance, walking toward her like the sun only something wasn’t quite right. When he was closer, almost within reach she could see that the brightness was lightning, the thunderstorm cloud of his hair. When he put out his arms she hesitated then ran into the welcoming, threatening danger of his heart and in the sudden downpour of rain, she washed quickly away.
~~~
130/365 THE MEMORY BOX
Word Count: 258
She traced the script across the page with the lightest touch of her fingertips. It was the closest he had been in several years. She sniffed the paper, inhaling the scent of him. Memories spilled out and she wiped away a tear that had rushed to blur the sharp edges of reality.
He once belonged to her, though not exclusively; she knew that now. She wondered if the children’s names she’d gathered in sterling charms would have mimicked his hazely-green eyes, his penchant for black cherries out of season. She didn’t mind her dreams made out of wisps of clouds as long as she could take them out and play with them, hold them against her heart, fall asleep gripping them in her hand just as they held onto her conscious mind, as long as she could put them safely back again and know they wouldn’t ever melt away.
As she folded the page to tuck it back inside the wooden box she kept atop her dresser for her sacred things, the times and people she needed to hold within, she cut her finger on the edge. The pain was knifeblade-sharp and mellowed only slightly into prickly as she sucked the cut in comfort, the salt-taste of blood, thick with memory on her tongue. The paper lay on the floor, dropped in the surprise, a paratrooper jumped from a plane. It slowly stretched, unfolding into a shattered bird. She picked it up, opened the lid of the wooden box and lay it right on top.
~~~
129/365 COPING THE HARD WAY
Word Count: 668
It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. The body, evidently of a man, was standing legs spread apart, bent over, his hands outstretched for balance in a three dimensional A-frame, his head buried up to the middle of his neck in the backyard of his home.
“What’ve we got?” I asked a tall, skinny policeman who seemed to be in control of the scene.
“Looks like a homicide,” he said, walking me over to the body. “The wife called it in about a half hour ago. Said she couldn’t find him when he didn’t come down for breakfast. Thought he went out running. Then came the dawn, literally, and she looks out the kitchen window over the sink and there he was.”
I examined the man. It certainly was odd. I wasn’t sure if he was dead in the act of sticking his head in or trying to pull it out. He looked sort of relaxed but determined about the whole thing. Insistent even. He was dressed in grey sweats so the wife was probably right about him out running.
The on-duty officer brought me inside and introduced me to a woman who sat sniffling on a couch in the living room.
“Ma’am, sorry about your husband. I’m Detective O’Day and I’ll need to ask you some questions.”
“I’ve told them everything I know,” she said. Her pretty brown eyes were puffy with crying. Her face was bare of makeup. Right then, I knew she was telling the truth.
“When’s the last time you saw him alive?” I asked.
“Around eleven last night. We shut off the light to go to sleep. Detective, can’t you please take him out of the backyard?”
“Sorry, ma’am, it’s a homicide investigation. The coroner’s on his way. You watch CSI?”
She started to well up again, shivered a little, hugged her arms across her chest. I excused myself and went to the policeman. “Find a sheet, cover him up, will you? Just out of respect.” I waited until my order had been carried out, not sure how it would make her feel better. Her husband now looked like a teepee. “Get the dog out of there,” I said to a young uniformed cop, likely a rookie, fresh-faced and just a bit green.
I went back to the living room and sat in a chair across from the wife, now a widow. “Any children?” I asked. She shook her head. I sighed with relief. It was bad enough to keep a dog away from the scene. A six year-old kid intent on camping would be impossible.
I went through the usual questions, his job, his friends, any enemies. It didn’t give me much for motive or leads. I felt bad for her. They’d only been married five years and it looked like she was pretty broken up. I ran out of questions and for a few minutes we just sat there, both staring at the coffee table, now littered with used tissues. She took a deep breath and exhaled in a long lonely sound.
“He was never one to make enemies,” she said quietly. “He’d go way out of his way to avoid arguments. He didn’t even like going out much anymore. Hated the politics and opinions about every little thing going on in the world.”
“Can’t blame him,” I comforted. “Sometimes it’s just best to tune out.”
Something in her struck like a match. She stiffened, looked me directly in the eye. Started breathing faster as if she’d just been given the answer.
“Ma’am?”
“He did that!” she said. She was excited. “He avoided any problems, all confrontations. He did that!” Then she let out a wail that just about broke my heart.
I finished up my notes, feeling sorrier for her now more than ever. I went out to the cop-in-charge, who told me that the coroner had only confirmed what I’d just concluded. “Suicide,” he said, and I nodded and signed the report.
~~~
128/365 ANOTHER MOTHER’S DAY
Word Count: 308
“No, thank you,” I said to a free carnation from the schoolgirls standing outside the supermarket. Several long tables were covered with cakes, pies, cookies, decorated in some way for Mother’s Day marketing.
“For your own mom, then,” the girl persisted.
“No, thank you,” I said. My mother was dead just three days. It’s hard getting used to, making adjustments; I didn’t think it would be so emotional. I’d had years of acceptance of the evil that is Alzheimer’s yet it still came like a punch to the chest, knocking my heart off its beat.
Isn’t it odd that we give up on life when we see the end in sight? You’d think that we’d reach, dig, pull, push, grab with the tentacles of an octopus to hold onto the last bit of living that comes before dying. We don’t, though; we adapt, get lazy with waiting. We forget all the questions we should have asked. Especially when faced with only one-half of a memory, when instead we should share it as if it were new.
Mother’s Day came and went without celebration. Without buying a Mother’s Day card. Without a visit where I get to tell her I’m her daughter, her child and watch her face light up for a moment with the delight that tells me she’s glad if what I’m telling her is true. Some things break the heart when forgotten, I remember that blank look on her face, her asking the nurse to have “that lady” stay with her, my sorrow at her calling my sister her “friend.”
And yet, that instant when I told her that I was one of her babies, her little girl, that smile that must have been the same one she had at my birth.
That, that is what I remember and what I will miss the most.
~~~
127/365 BIRTHDAY WISHES
Word Count: 187
She picked up the phone a dozen times and put it back again. What would she say? It’d been six years since they’d spoken, ending with a persimmon taste on the tongue. Birthdays should be happy times. Should be forgiving times. Somehow “just called to wish you a happy birthday” turned to ashes in the air each time she practiced the words.
It’d been a fight that stirred from resentful embers. The flames they’d doused with compromise that came from man’s uninterruptible hope burst forth in a backdraft. It left them both charred and smoldering.
A fight over money. Inheritance. Should never have happened in this family of not needing. It happens to other families, not theirs. It should be an easy thing to bridge, even now. Surely her sister would see where things went wrong. Surely they could just forget and go on. “Just called to wish you a happy birthday,” sounded like a good start to the rebuilding of family.
She picked up the phone again. The scent of smoke, the hot curl of flame all came back and she put the phone back down.
~~~
126/365 FEAR
Word Count: 122
I fear the threat of a mid-spring frost. This year the fruit trees are loaded with blossoms that will die without birthing fruit.
I fear the uninvited hot rays of the sun before it’s time, curling the new tender leaves to black like charred timbers left from a fire.
I fear growing older if I am not able to save one more soul, feed one more mind, plant one more seed to grow into glory in a well-tended bed. If I cannot take care of myself and come to depend upon others.
I fear, and yet I go on as if none of it matters. I follow the road I have chosen to walk and see the end up ahead.
~~~
125/365 IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
Word Count: 373
It’s cold outside. The days had gotten warmer with the late April sun. Like life itself, the seasons tease and lie, get us believing one thing, have us ripening our appetites for peaches and serve us crabapples for breakfast fare.
I once thought that Sarah was the only girl in the world for me. I was happy when she told me she was pregnant. Sixteen and seventeen we were. This was just meant to be. It overcame objections of parents, friends, teachers who all thought we should be dancing at the socials, watching movies at the drive-in. I dreamt of being Daddy. Saw my son and I at baseball games, him pausing to look over to make sure I was watching before he’d throw the ball. Then she miscarried and we drifted into different daydreams, suffered nightmares no sixteen year-old could conjure up.
My second wife was Linda and she took away the pain left in my stomach from the first. Linda was sweet and smart and pretty. We adopted a little girl and then a baby boy. Linda died right after they both married and moved away. These days, families spread out further from their roots, like pachysandra popping up in the middle of the lawn spread underground, unseen, unaware how far they travel.
It’s cold outside and I am all alone. The widow three doors down from us comes by to point out Linda’s daffodils are blooming full and bright as sunshine by the walk. She’d brought tuna casseroles and chicken “baked, not fried” and soups made from things I didn’t recognize, for weeks after Linda died. Then winter came and she came by at Christmas with a hot holiday grog she always made. I had one cup and stirred the stick of cinnamon she insisted putting in even though it poked me in the nose each time I took a sip. That was the last time I had seen her except to wave as she or I went driving by.
It’s cold and here she is, her name is Lily, and as she turns to walk back home I pretend to shiver and I ask her if she’d like to come inside and have a cup of coffee.
~~~
124/365 THE UNBORN
Word Count: 290
Did I forget you? Never. In more mystical moments I like to think of having put you back on the shelf for someone else to cradle in warm arms and raise in loving memories. I could not afford you at the time. I hoped you’d still be waiting when I was ready but you weren’t and while I married it seems that you were already gone.
Where are you now? Did you have to wait for long? Are you a schoolgirl skipping into class or are you a mother kissing children of your own goodbye? I wonder what you look like, if you are short like me or have your father’s willow build. More likely you have forgotten us completely and maybe that is the way it needs to be. He was a good man, you know; we just didn’t have the same map and went off in different directions. I could not have cared for you alone.
In darker times I get a stab of pain that bores right through my heart. If there is nothing after this and I took away your only chance. If you were just a bit of living flesh, no more than an arm or leg cut off by careless working of machinery. A car accident. Steel slicing off parts that aren’t necessary to life, aren’t capable of living on their own.
If in some thoughts I bear the weight of guilt and sin, if you are playing with the other innocents of your fate, then that at least I can take comfort in, that is, your salvation, and worry naught about my own.
Will I forget you? Never. For the part of me that went on living misses all you could have been.
~~~
123/365 A HORIZON SANS JELLY AND WINE
Word Count: 302
Prepping for my old age, I took a chainsaw to the peach trees and grapevines. Turn the garden into lawn. If he thinks I’m going to stand and stir a cauldron of sugary juice until it reaches jelly stage he’s nuts. And wine? What for? We’ll both be fast asleep before the sun hits bottom every night.
Big dreams, big schemes, we had. I planted trees and fruits to make us self-sufficient. To also lessen the amount of grass he had to mow. Now he complains about the corners, curves, and angles so I turn it back to grass. I wanted a second floor put on the house, the bedrooms above and with a second bathroom. Well we might need the second bath someday but already I’m too tired at night to climb a set of stairs. I want to bring the washer and the dryer up from the cellar too.
There comes a point in time when you decide the place you’re going to die. Sometimes it’s Arizona, or Florida, or someplace else that’s warm. Or maybe just across town in the new nursing home they’re building. With levels of comparative competency depending on if you can be trusted with access to a stove.
It’s closer than it used to be; the horizon getting crisper with division even as my eyes attempt to blur the line. I can resolve to make the time go slower since time is just a concept of the mind. Still, I am a realist and control of certain things I understand. And yes, I saw the twiglet peach trees that fell into the garden soil and sprouted on their own. And yes, I dug them up and planted them someplace else so he won’t hit them when he’s mowing his straight lines throughout the summer.
~~~
122/365 IMAGINATION
Word Count: 400
Marielle painted a field of wild flowers and from it picked a bouquet she put in a vase cut from an icicle that hung from the roof of her porch.
She wrote a story and fell in love with the protagonist, a man who was kind and sincere and just under six feet tall, a man who would sing in the morning and had eyes the color of young tanzanite. She wrote that he took her to dinner in a restaurant in Paris on a balmy spring night. She wrote that his hands were strong like the roots of an oak and she wrote that he fell in love with her too. They were wed as the words aligned themselves into lavender bridesmaids and tall golden groomsmen on the very last page of the book.
They were married five years before Marielle sought from her doctor specific instructions about when and how and how many times they should make love if they wanted a baby. She took her temperature daily, and her beloved raced home from wherever he was when he saw the text message “NOW.” They tried everything, even outside on the lawn under the first full moon of the new year as her grandmother Sadie had suggested.
Then she painted a nursery, a baby, a son. He was born without pain on the soft bed of canvas. He was roly-poly and sweet, never screamed, never bit at her nipple, and slept straight through the night. Two years later she Photoshopped an image of him as a girl. Their daughter was a rose made of whipped cream, delicate and sweet-smelling with hair that burst yellow of sunshine.
One day long after all that she looked around at the walls she had made and covered with living. Each piece of art made up years of her life, each book on her shelf told her story.
Her children had grown up and lived far away in castles that didn’t fit on her street. Her husband had sickened and died before she could write his recovery. Her eyesight was poor and she no longer could paint away wrinkles and bad knees and hair thinned and gray. Marielle sat in her old rocking chair by a window and looked out on the colors of autumn. She dabbed her brush in the rusty red maple and painted it white with snow.
~~~
121/365 MAYDAY
Word Count: 347
Mayday brings the scent of lilies, the rustle of crinolined white dresses, the shuffling feet of little boys in ties. Boy, girl, boy, girl, waiting in line to parade into church, a giant centipede squirming as time ticks on waiting for the priest to sober up from Saturday night wine. Parochial school lives on in nightmares forever.
Bats swoop through my dreams, miniature Draculas with high squeaking voices. My therapist tells me they’re nuns. Oh no, I say, when I think of nuns I catch the scent of lavender powder and hear the clacking of a rope of wood rosary beads. He frowns at my strong inner sense of denial. He rolls his eyes and I spot that instant where he lingers like a raindrop on the clock. He makes me paranoid. I think I’m taking up too much of his time. No, I’ve learned that I make myself paranoid, or my reaction of paranoia is under my complete control, or whatever but whatever it is my own fault. Except, evidently, when it comes to the nuns.
Did they beat you? he asks. Did they humiliate you, make you kneel on sand on a hardwood floor?
No, no, I say, they were kind.
They were mean, bitter, the ugly daughter sacrificed up to God to ensure eternal salvation for the whole family, he says.
No! I cry. That just wasn’t the way it was. Was it?
Six months into therapy I finally agree that the bats are probably nuns. My therapist is pleased. We move on to rid my dreams of all bats. We find them in corners strung with cobwebs. In rooms shut away by wings. We dust the souls of the sinners from the tables off of which the bats feed. In a year I am completely bat-free. My therapist is now ecstatic.
Tell me about your dreams, he says.
It is cold, snowing, I say. I have no coat, no gloves, and no shoes but I run against the storms, across great Arctic sheets of slick ice. I’m being chased by penguins.
~~~
