MOVEMENT
Word Count: 220
The slow morning air brushes my neck like a lover. Or a dog gnawing a bone, which is one and the same if you think about it, reaching the rich core of marrow the goal.
I once had a house built around me. Its walls layered by years and brothers. Its curtains the faded gauze of memories, the carpets the shoulders of family, friends. A flash fire took it all away, faster than I could react, faster than my mind could douse the flames and save the life I had shaped within it.
Life doesn’t come with directions, not even in poorly translated Japanese like the manual that comes with computers and cameras and TVs. You want touch screws not. As if the whole thing could explode–and it could–if the screws touch each other or you. So you reach out, your fingertips like lilypads testing the surface of pond because they don’t know they will float.
A week ago this morning would have been the perfect day. Before the crash and smash of metal, flesh, and bone. Now I watch the tips of aspen–twinkle trees, my mother even in a mind turned mush with old-age dementia called them–the tips of aspen twitter against the blue blue morning sky, and I wish they were his toes.
