Word Count: 312
Autumn Monday mornings fall like rain, two days darker, two days deeper into winter. Five a.m. is dawnless, creeping up without the sun. Eventually you flick on the headlights to drive to work. Eventually again, you don’t turn them off until you get there.
Summer is a slice of melon, yellow-orange and sweet as a cantaloupe. Autumn is an apple. Some people only like bananas.
Eyes burn through the night from wooded roads, caught like candles in the windows of an old colonial home. It’s just a deer, as surprised as I am that we’re both awake before the birds who sing the morning into being. Wondering if we share a brotherhood, a mother somewhere who didn’t think to tell us of the seasons.
Five miles away from home, twenty miles yet to the city. My wife is sleeping still. She used to wake up to make me lunches. I make more money now and buy my own. I buy her two more hours of sleep before the children must be peeled like corn cobs from their sheets.
She makes them breakfasts, lunches packed to go in pink and yellow backpacks with their books and pencils. Or maybe they don’t use pencils anymore. I don’t know for sure; I just assume. It isn’t what I think to ask them during dinner. In the family time before the split of TV and computer screens puts us all in different rooms.
We kiss goodnight as if from memory. We hold each other as if to float above the sinking night. I didn’t think to ask the children if they still use pencils. I didn’t think to tell her she looked pretty in that blouse. Her breathing slows and softens, and I think tomorrow, I will remember. And I wonder, if I asked her, if she’d make a lunch for me some morning too.
Ths is so loving and sad, so well observed – and I particularly enjoyed the fruit and veg references. I hope you submit this for wider publication – it’s perfection. Tender as a fresh young pea shoot.
Gill–thank you. For a long time almost all my stories were based on nature in some form. Food a biggie with me as a leit motif.