Using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, a flash fiction or thought through the days of the year. Click on the images to get to the artist’s page, where you’ll find a bit more about the piece and the source of inspiration. Note that each month’s work here has a separate page, and each month’s stories are linked in the right sidebar.
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31/365 OUT OF VIEW
Word Count: 448
Shelly is just like all of us, you and me, wanting something, whatever it is, that is always just out of reach. A job that is fulfilling, a loving and stimulating relationship, a chocolate covered cream donut in the middle of a snowstorm. Roads are closed; something always seems to come up like a fallen oak in the path, branches reaching every way outward but it’s impossible to get through the tangle. A jail cell, a cage.
What Shelly wanted was to be a ballerina. In sixth grade she took dance lessons because a couple of the girls in her class were accomplished, always given the lead roles even in school plays. They brought in photos and videos for show and tell and Shelly felt her heart pound in a rhythm that made her know she could dance and wear pink fluffy tutus and upswept hair. But she was always a beat behind the music, a step out of place.
Reluctantly she agreed to stop taking dance classes when she was fifteen. It seemed such a waste of money, though her mother didn’t say that directly. She packed away the spangles and tulle and wrapped her last pair of satin slippers in white tissue paper and put it all away in the attic.
She had gone to college not sure if she wanted to be a nurse or a teacher, waffling between courses until she was spit out with a double degree. Jobs were scarce and she ended up taking one as a receptionist where everyone said she excelled because of her polite and cheery attitude at the front desk. So she practiced smiling and being helpful to strangers. That’s just about when she fell off a ladder while hanging welcome banners in the lobby and couldn’t work.
She sat there in her living room, propped on the couch with a cup of hot tea and some banana nut bread. Outside her window the first flakes of a snowstorm were falling. She watched the grey and brown palette turn white. “The world is changing its lifestyle,” she said to her cat. The cat was not interested.
But Shelly saw something in the view that she hadn’t really thought could happen. A complete metamorphosis, not just from acorn to oak, as one might expect, but a total change of clothing, tone, shape and sound to the earth.
“Me, too,” she said, louder and more to herself and the whole world at large rather than whispering it to the cat, who was sleeping. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I will be a writer.” She smiled in fulfillment, satisfied at her conviction. “And then, when my leg heals I will learn how to ski.”
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30/365 UNDERLYING STRUCTURE
Word Count: 199
Like autumn leaves color a lawn red and gold, like snow glazes a world with cream cheese frosting, life changes my tones, thickens and wrinkles me. Turns me outwardly grey.
Inside there is a six year-old playing with dolls in a world she’s created with pink houses and dresses made of bandanas and pins.
Inside there’s a teen who scribbles in her diary about her first pair of high heels, her first dance, her first kiss.
There’s a mother still hiding within me, who worries about her own daughter’s dates. About stretching meals on a dime and ensuring there are green leafy vegetables on the plate. Distance is measured not by miles and states but rather by time in between conversations–check-ins my children call them.
Inside me the sapwood still flows and outside my bark may show cracks but it also holds branches, the building of ideas and the outflow of love.
Inside me the heart beats and the sound reverberates through the layers of structure and is ever amazed at how far, how tall, how deep, that life has become. Still, the branches are reaching into the spaces that I haven’t yet touched and known.
~~~
29/365 WINTER SOFT
Word Count: 313
The harsh edges of the city have been softened by the snow. Rooftops rounded out and dripping into icicles like diamond earrings on each window face. People too are padded, layered into pillows. Yet even in this absence of sharp corners, this land of walking snowmen, my heart aches.
I drive through streets as slick as a toboggan run. In my van the weight shifts, throwing it off track as I corner. Most people aren’t out on the roads tonight but tucked away in the warmth of kitchens, the glow of TV and computer screens. I look for those who aren’t.
Down by the wharfs is where I’ll find the ones who’ve no other warmth except each other to depend upon. Their fear adds to the cold. In my headlights up ahead I see them scattering like mice before a cat. I understand their thinking; pride wins out before the need for shelter. Even if I were the law, even if I falsely dragged them into jail they would curse the roof and heat and food and rather freeze to brittle bone outside as free men.
I stop beside a drum that gives more light than warmth, abandoned though I know their eyes are hanging just outside the circled glow. I unload boxes, open boxes filled with blankets, woolen jackets–those of nylon make too much noise. And food. Campfire fare like franks and beans, beef stew, chicken soup; all easily heated up and eaten from the can.
Before I get back in my van I look around. It is silent, white, but hard-edged ice in this end of the city. Nothing moves, no one smiles. But as I drive away I see them in my rearview mirror. Drawn like moths back to the red glow of the fire, they dance and dress and shout as if it were a gypsy celebration.
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28/365 END OF THE DAY SURRENDER
Word Count: 196
The horizon of snow gives way to the expanse of a sky colored by dusk. At the junction is you, my child of the windblown curls. A fine mist of gold hair that escapes from your warm woolen cap to play in the breeze.
Laughing, with fists full of mittens three sizes too big, a hat that slips down over your eyes, you delight in the winter, find joy in the day. There is nothing but this moment, this instant of wonder, though I suspect you’ve come to expect the warming of nose and rosy-red cheeks, the soft cradling in dry clothing, the hot chocolate with marshmallows swimming around that has ended each such day.
And here am I, a mother alone, one who knows too much of bills and nutrition and watches for sniffles and coughs. One who has worry that gives only slightly to snowy hill sledding and shrieks of speed.
But at night, oh at night, when I kiss you to sleep and marvel at how the thin light draws shadows of eyelashes on your face, and swirls of ringlets on your pillow, at night is when I breathe out in surrender.
~~~
27/365 SLOWLY EXPANDING
Word Count: 133
Today I am an icicle, my tears flow and freeze to form a thickening shell cold and crystal.
Just yesterday I was a fluff of cotton candy. Sweet strands of spun sugar wrapped me in its cloud.
Today I grow in layers, ever outward from myself into the space around me. Inside I am protected, like a tiny gnome who lives within the chambers of my heart.
Yesterday I had a lover. A man who held me in his arms and sang me songs of spring scents and summer flowers and an autumn that never fell to winter.
Today is white and diamonds drip from roofs and downspouts. Today I thicken in a spire of layered ice, waiting for…
Tomorrow and a warming sun and I will learn once more to melt away.
~~~
26/365 PARTS OF ONE
Word Count: 182
Sometimes, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a moment, the scene shifts. A place where I am changes feeling to a place where I’ve been. It’s not light that moves between time, nor the people who move in the spaces around me. It’s like deja vu but it comes without memory, just a sense of a different yet familiar mood.
It amazes me how many parts of the day make up the routine whole. Each in itself like the fanned ribbons that slap the windshield when you drive through a carwash. Segmented hours that undulate into day. It’s how I get through it.
She still is a part of each one. Gone two years now, stolen by fate. The mornings come with a crash at the silence, the coldness of sheets on her side of the bed. That’s when she takes up in my mind. I whisper good morning to the space where she’s been. Somewhere in the shadows she’s sleeping. I swear I could hear her soft breathing.
I reach out and that’s when the scene shifts again.
~~~
25/365 BRANCHES MAKING DRAWINGS
Word Count: 215
She searched the face in the mirror for signs of a beard. Did her eyebrows look bushier?
“You’re nuts.” This from her BFF, Carolyn.
“No, it’s real. Maybe I just don’t have a strong enough personality of my own. It just absorbs whoever I hang with.” Shawntelle gave herself one more close look in the mirror and gave up. “Remember how I started speaking with a Southern accent when I was going out with Ronnie?”
Not a good place to be, at the tail end of one man and setting sights on another. There’s always that transitional stage, where the lines drawn by one haven’t yet faded away. Shawntelle wondered if they could be seen, like tattoos. She checked her arms, her legs, her ass.
They were in the middle of dinner at an upscale restaurant her ex had called “grossly overpriced.” Things were going well. A fine second date. He spoke in a slight Boston accent she tried hard not to pick up. She caught herself twice tapping her fingers on the table in sync with his drumming. She stopped saying, “But of course,” which was something her ex said all the time. It was going okay and getting better.
“There’s something on your chin,” he said, and as he reached over she fainted.
~~~
24/365 OUTSIDE INSIDE
Word Count: 206
Arlene leaves the house two hours before classes begin and sits in the courtyard and reads. She gulps in the day like a big glass of soda, sweetening the morning to something akin to what she guesses is normal. She is seventeen and already knows more than she should.
The sun is a coral-red ball fighting its way between buildings and trees just to shine. “Just like me,” Arlene whispers though no one is around to hear her. For a moment she watches the slow-rising sun, seeing the morning colors fall away into a natural bright yellow. She reaches out to squeeze it between forefinger and thumb, holding it at arm’s length away. It glows like good thoughts.
When Arlene was thirteen, her father left home. She remembered him standing there in her bedroom, hands hanging uselessly, head down and crying. “I just can’t take it anymore, sweetheart. Your mother won’t even try.” She didn’t ask him how he expected her to deal with it. She knew he hadn’t even thought about that.
Arlene pulls her arm in closer, adjusts her fingers to hold onto the shrinking sun. Now tiny, she brings it to her lips, places it on her tongue and swallows it.
~~~
23/365 WHAT I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE AND WHAT IT IS
Word Count: 233
It flaps its wings and flies away just as I reach for it. Feathers left like snowflakes in the room. Fragile black commas and parentheses, a lot of question marks in blue because as I now know, no answered question ever really is.
The past becomes the dream as the future turns into now. What’s happening is a realty that can’t be wished about. We can maneuver through it, make a choice of Black Forest Cake or Chocolate Mousse, regret the Bouillabaisse and will remember that next time, but that is all. In our dreams of what we thought was up ahead we hadn’t yet made up our minds on appetizers and dessert much less the main course. How could we–we hadn’t even read the menu!
Suddenly we’re facing things that are simply done and fall behind us. If we turn around, we’ll see the vortex of our lives. Back there are the boys we giggled about and refused to date. They’re attorneys, corporate heads, doctors now. Whirling still are labor pains, mixing with the first day of kindergarten, the quivering lips of trying to be brave, the prom gowns and the sweet telltale smell of marijuana in the upstairs bathroom.
Now we are alone again, you and I. We look behind in awe. We look ahead without the blur of expectation, the haze of speculation. Instead, everything is delightfully clear and new.
~~~
22/365 OUR OWN SYSTEM
Word Count: 352
There were five of us, now there are only three. My husband died last year of cancer that couldn’t be caught. Our son died after eight months in Afghanistan. The girls are nineteen (Jenn) and seventeen (Sarah). Jenn is already a part-timer at home, spending most of the year at a college that’s too far for weekends, close enough for holiday visits.
It’s strange how very much things change, how they adjust around body count. I remember just me in an apartment alone in the city. Then Carl moved in and when we got married we built our own home. The family room was added when the kids started hitting their teens and discovering loud music. An extra bedroom over it became our son’s new cave and the girls split in half to claim each their own room.
Now the rooms, except two, are empty. I considered moving to a smaller house yet the house has settled around us. After all, we still need a kitchen with a stove and refrigerator and table. It’s just that there are extra chairs. I can’t bring myself to ever adjust that.
I read once that fish will grow in direct relation to the size of their tank and the number of fish per square inch. When Jenn came home for Christmas I asked, “Do I look any taller?” She rolled her eyes, but she laughed.
We spend the bits of time we are three as if they’re the last days of summer. We shop and the girls avoid bringing up the obvious, that Sarah will need some things for college this year. I know what they’re doing, but I am the mother, the only pillar they have now to hold onto. I drag them to the departments they’ve so carefully maneuvered around and start with a bed-in-a-bag and a rug.
When we get home I make us hot chocolate. Sarah sucks out the miniature marshmallows first; she always did that. Jenn looks so serious. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
She smiles in an adult type of way. “You look taller,” she says.
~~~
21/365 FINDING NEW PATTERNS
Word Count: 214
As you might suspect, they change shape at night because by day they are committed to being snow-covered trees. They stand tall and reach for the sky with their arms, catch snowflakes in the curve of their lips, but their movement is subtle, spurred by the wind, lest they be noticed by people.
The young ones are sheltered, protected by parents, uncles and aunts. Grandparents are loving but distant, so aloof and alone in their wisdom and height. Age has earned them respect from the wind, they no longer bend to its whims.
The saplings are fragile but spring back with the resilience of youth. They still need to nap in the warm sunlight and start to fidget at dusk. They twitch in the cold, antsy to whisper, anxious to dance.
But one night I saw them, joyful and free. One night while I saw nothing else but the troubles of our kind all day. There, in the shadow, the trees moved with moonlight. Stealthy at first, growing with confidence even as my own despair of man’s nature ebbed from my mind. I watched in delight, wanting to join them. Seeing the sheer love of being they embraced. Patterns emerged from the black and white world. Jazz hands were raised, and they danced.
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20/365 FINDING A NEW RHYTHM
Word Count: 280
She fingered the strands as if knitting a sweater, which I suppose in some way was what she was doing. A new home, a new job, a new man. All necessary things in her life.
Pink. I think I’ll go pink, she said to herself. It was a color she had always disliked, a goddamned girly color. The color she’d picked the first time her parents had let her pick out the paint for her bedroom herself was celery green. It was her second choice really, since they wouldn’t agree to chartreuse. In her first apartment she painted the walls chocolate, rust, and forest.
My home is me. And she thought of all the great things that that meant. Her friend Cira told her that single meant sleeping the whole night on the couch if she wanted. Meant pastrami sandwiches for breakfast and chocolate ice cream right out of the box. Hot water showers and half the laundry load and no whiskers left in the sink. Life is good, she brightened and hummed to herself as she rolled out the brand new pink rug.
Light and bright shocking pink. She wondered if she could live with it. Waited a few hours before moving the furniture in, the bed against the one large wall, the dresser across from it with the mirror that would reflect whatever went on, and his dresser that she refused to give him because it would break up the set. She sighed. She hated the color. It made her feel better to know that he would too.
Not that he would ever see it. New bed, new men. Then she sat down on the floor and cried.
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19/365 COMFORT
Word Count: 262
Soft as a baby quilt, his love wrapped around her. Colors so pastel they hardly were there. Yet the fiber was strong and kept her away from the world.
She’d had a bad childhood, ping-ponged between parents, each week a fresh start, each weekend a thwack back into reality. Her father, a drinker of the finest Scotch whiskey. Her mother a connoisseur of cocaine. Each held a hatred, each held a love deep inside them, and neither understood it at all.
She’d met him at the community college. He’d stop by the diner where she worked after classes were done. They started dating. He, persistent; her, wary, dropping her veil slowly, ready to jerk it back into place. And eventually, when she learned trust, they married.
He was the hearth to her fire. She unfolded her fists and let bad things drift up the chimney in smoke. He cradled her when she needed cradling, let her smolder up to a point. Logic would come after emotions had broken down into ash. And eventually, when she forgot about pain, they grew into a comfort of oneness that fit together under his shelter.
Time softened, time hardened, time weathered their love. Winter must come, after all. One bitter February day she was fooled by the sun and testing her strength, gave in to the world that she touched. It didn’t take long for the past to fly in like a vulture and pick at her flesh. When he found her she was in little pieces that he carried back home in a quilt.
~
NOTE: First publication rights to Comfort, both Carianne Garside’s image and my story, along with the addition of a poem by Steve Ersinghaus belong to The Blue Print Review, Issue #27 Synergetic Transformations.
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18/365 SURVIVAL
Word Count: 570
Stress, age, meds, insurance, breathing apparatus, survival. As I go up the steps to his bedroom all these things swim in my mind but above all, the one time we became more than close friends.
I hear him before I can see him. Each breath louder, drawing me closer and into a world I don’t want to accept. This belongs to the parents, I think. The older generation. Then I remember; they’re all dead.
His wife greets me, hugs me, brings me first to their kitchen where I deposit homemade banana bread and chocolates. She looks the same, this dear friend I’d wronged so long ago. I lived in their home. Slept in the next bedroom over when I’d been between houses. The first time I’d been homeless. But there are more secrets we’ve kept, more that we, with our eyes, agree to keep buried still.
He could have been laid out in his coffin; that’s how he looks in the bed. Twenty years that I’d missed, twenty years that we hadn’t shared aging. Distance of time, distance of space, distance of choice had reassembled the past into a pleasant memory. We were forever young there. Forever strong and death was still out of reach. Suddenly close, it is a surprise.
Do you remember: the time you took in my cat overnight and he flew up your Christmas tree? The time we all dressed in black and stole apples from the orchard across the street. How we all hit the ground when we saw headlights and you tripped in a woodchuck hole. The next morning we made apple butter. I still taste it.
I try not to make him laugh. He’s on oxygen. His voice a thin whisper between breaths. But that time, oh yes, that time at their wedding when in the middle of their pictures they watched me fly by in my hot yellow sportscar. I’d burned a hole in my dress with the ash from a cigarette blown in by the speed. She shows me the wedding album of their daughter. Instead I see them.
She asks if it would bother me to see her feed him. I say no. She holds a tube up that leads to someplace dark and hungry under his shirt. She tells me he’s gained back eighteen pounds with the formula. We joke about adding Jack Daniels.
Look out the window, she says. The pine tree was my housewarming gift. Now it touches their house with its branches, has filled its rain gutters with its needles. It is unbelievably tall and as threatening as the disease that threatens their life.
There are others there, their daughter, his brother and wife. VNA, OT, RT and other initials, in and out.
We jockey cars in the driveway several times. Inside, each time I go back, I hear the breathing, the struggle. Reality now. Then I must say goodbye. Take care, I say, as if he weren’t every day fighting just to take those raucous breaths that tick like a second hand on their kitchen clock. I threaten to step on his air tube that leads through the house like a thread holding onto the past. He calls me a bitch but he laughs. There is a moment caught in our eyes that flees to a time–then it is gone. There is no past, only present. There is no purpose now but to survive.
(First Publication rights to Survival belong to Pure Slush, March 2011)
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17/365 UNDORMANT
Word Count: 216
The day was unusually warm, April taking a wrong turn into the middle of January. Lily took it as a gift.
She pulled out her heavy sweater, the one she had knitted for James and he’d left behind, and kicked aside her boots in favor of clogs. She stood on her front step and took a deep breath. She felt new life course through her as if it were an elixir.
The willows had yellowed a bit, the maples looked not as gray. As she walked down the street she noticed patches of grass smiling through a tearing coverlet of snow. Even the snow sparkled in the bright morning sun. She walked several blocks to the park and sat down on the bench where James had asked her to marry him. She had said no.
He was so good-looking and such a sweet, thoughtful man. Underneath he was all determined persistence. They were married just before he left for Iraq. Three months later she received notice that, only five months a newlywed, she had been widowed.
Lily rubbed her belly in that way that a soon-to-be momma does. She imagined their baby curled tight like the buds on the forsythias, waiting for Spring. She hoped that she, like the sun, would be enough.
~~~
16/365 WHAT CAME BEFORE
Word Count: 339
“You cannot be that cold, uncaring!” she had said. With her breath she warmed his face at night while he slept. She spoke softly, touched his brow, felt the heat of his blood as it raced through his veins, just under the surface.
By morning he’d hardened back to stone. Another night she scratched him lightly with her nails, watching as the blood rose to the surface in thin streaks. Carefully she drew the image of a man along the length and breadth of him. She felt his pulse beat in response. The moon cast shadows in the room, left streaks upon the walls and floors and through the dim she would have sworn that he was smiling.
As she slept, her back curled up against him, the warmth grew cold and colder. She woke and turned and wrapped her arms around him. At dawn her fingertips were frozen blue.
For years she tried but nothing seemed to reach him. To sink below the levels to his soul. One night in desperation she drew a thin line on his chest, watched beads of blood form along the cut. She peeled back his skin, cut through the fat and into muscle. She found his childhood, his youth and just before she met him. Like metal shards they formed a cage she’d thought were only ribs. Though she could hear it pounding she couldn’t seem to reach his heart. Dawn broke through. Discouraged, she sewed him up again.
The next time it was easier, the layers separating like pages of a book. She read them carefully, realizing how his life had damaged him. She reached a level where scar tissue, thick and hard, was very hard to penetrate but here was where she felt the beating, the pulsing of the core of him. Patiently she worked her fingers in, around, and through.
Pulling out his heart she held it for a moment in her hands. She cried. The heart beat louder, harder. She kissed it and then gently put it back.
~~~
15/365 CROSS SECTION OF MY DAY
Word Count: 235
I wake, I shower and dress, I eat a breakfast of coffee and an English Muffin with butter, and I go to work. I walk a routine through each layer of my day, each section a separate woman, adapting to fit the environment, dressing to suit. I start out reflective, quiet, alone, in my bathrobe.
The front door is a curtain and I walk out on the stage. I am a professional. I wear grey and carry a briefcase to prove it.
Corporate noise swirls around me. I drift above chatter while exploring the scene. My job is efficiently done, pondered and stressed over, given more than I knew I had in me. The gossip of downsizing clings like a fog on the floor and I listen with only one ear.
I’ve just inserted a new layer of myself between the end of the work day and home. I don’t quite have it down but I polish it a bit more every Friday. The necessary presence at a bar, a scotch and soda I nurse well past the Happy Hour conversation. At home I would only drink wine.
Walking back to my building in lower Manhattan, I feel most of the day evaporate off me in strands that drift into the night. By the time I push through the front door, drop my briefcase and kick off my shoes, I am naked and scared.
~
NOTE: First publication rights to Cross Section of My Day, both Carianne Garside’s image and my story, along with the addition of a poem by Steve Ersinghaus belong to The Blue Print Review, Issue #27 Synergetic Transformations.
~~~
14/365 SURRENDER
Word Count: 236
She walks through the chambers of my heart, opening doors, calling out. I feel her footsteps in a graceful tapping, as if she were dancing, one-two-three, one-two-three. For an hour I close my eyes and imagine her riding the river of loops and twists of my veins.
If it weren’t at her insistence, I wouldn’t go through this. Time has its reasons; I’ve led a good life. But she says that she can’t live without me and we both need to fight this together so we once more can dance. I never could, I remind her, but she only laughs.
She was so young and beautiful when I met her. She still is. Maybe it could have been longer–that is, maybe it will be. And yes, I suppose I’m not ready in some ways, to go. It’s the cure that makes it feel worse than the illness. She looks at me now with a worry I take on as guilt. But damn her, she knows that too and I cannot refuse her her wishes, her wants.
Surrendering, I see her floating through me on a boat with an unpretty chemical name. She smooths out the walls as she goes, denying me pasta, potatoes, and rice. At the end of the hour the boat slows, she smiles and nods with approval, stands up and debarks as she once again enters my heart.
(First Publication rights to Surrender belong to The Glass Coin, March 2011)
~~~
13/365 REVEALING
Word Count: 100
Soft shadows brush the white canvas of snow with odd colors. Pink in the grinning set of the sun. Blue in the time before dusk as the afternoon tires and grows quiet. Royal purple when secrets are told.
They bleed from the core of the heart where the red blood mingles with the blue. Mysteries as hot as pain and colder than ice. Shadows of snow melting to puddles, trying to grow into forgotten come spring.
The last sprigs of life steadfast and silent, fragile yet pliant, willing to bend. We bend under shadows of purple where secrets are told.
(Rewritten 01/14/10)
~~~
12/365 WHITE OUT
Word Count: 324
He noticed the fading of color on his thirty-third birthday. The warm colors went first, the pinks and the reds. The morning sky, the peony bushes, his wife’s lips.
And with it came the coolness of the grass and the trees, the expanse of sky. He took to wearing a sweater.
Which always matched his shirts regardless of what he put on. Or so he thought it did since with a wardrobe made up of greens, blues, and greys, there was little room left to go wrong.
About a month after it all had started, the sun blended into the sky, the sky into the treetops, the trees into the lawn. He didn’t need to wear sweaters but the black, white and grey world he was left with affected his mood. He even thought it affected the birds for the days became quiet and still.
One morning he watched his wife’s charcoal lips melt into her face, her eyes slowly sink into pinpoints. She was talking and he was straining to hear her. He answered her when he could, sometimes just nodding, not wanting to let her know that she was becoming a part of the kitchen, which was now one room with the dining and living rooms gone.
Soon the walls of his house bled into the back yard, and he found his car in the driveway by touch. He drove with GPS guidance, and worked fine at his job by routine. As black became lighter and grey became white, he adjusted.
There came the morning he woke up and saw nothing, nothing at all. He felt his wife move beside him and eased himself closer till he felt the soft resistance she became. She no longer snored, he had noticed, though if he listened real hard he thought he sometimes could hear it.
He reached over and pulled her close to his chest, surprised at how much weight she had lost.
~~~
11/365 GOOD LIGHT
Word Count: 291
The sun rose slowly, sending out fingers of corally orange and pink to explore. He cringed at the icy cold covered hillside, squinted at his own light reflected back by the snow. He blinked the last shred of clouds from his eyes, watched as they trailed off into a sky painted blue.
Night was a strange place where the sun couldn’t go. Try as he might to catch it he failed every morning, just at its tail, just out of his grasp. It circled on the other side of the earth, doing things he only could guess at. Though some stars would gossip and he’d heard that most nights were just like the daytime but dark. But clouds, clouds were his enemy. Even in daylight they teased him.
One small straggler drifted by like a cataract dimming his vision. He glowered and it fled quickly away.
He raised himself up for a better view and gasped. The world had turned white–was the night time that scary? He wished he’d been there to protect it. Where were the golden-green lawns and the tight grid of streets in his favorite little town where on Sundays a bell rang in greeting. He felt like crying but had never himself learned how to rain.
So he smiled his brightest and soon he saw people moving about. He saw trucks redrawing black lines in the snow for other trucks and cars to follow. He saw mothers bundling babies in carriages out for a walk. He saw his town come alive and as he watched it roll away he heard laughter. Inspired, he watched as the next town came into his light and lingered there as long as he could, listening to the melting white.
~~~
10/365 PROCESS
Word Count: 292
She was there, in an outdoor cafe in Zanzibar, sitting alone at a table. The sun struck hard at her throat, lit the jeweled pin on the velvet turban she wore. She drew deeply on a long-stemmed cigarette holder. I watched and exhaled a thin stream of curling smoke. The tobacco tasted like mint.
Many years ago I noticed her at the jewelry counter at Macy’s in the city. Long fingers tipped in plum held out a bracelet made of three colors of gold and a garden of gemstones. She was much taller than I and had the grace I’ve never managed. She played with the bracelet, let it slip through fingers, hang from her forefinger and thumb. An amethyst hopped onto her polished fingernail. It smiled at me and winked.
I followed her colors to Aruba, or maybe she followed me. There were many, many places I’d find her, but certain times stand out more clearly. In Aruba, I followed her through a trail of small shops, watched her select a neon pink bikini, then bought the same one in my size. In Dubai, I ate fresh figs which I’d never thought of trying before. On her plate they had looked so inviting. I still buy them whenever I can.
I don’t travel as much as I used to, which seems strange, now that I’ve retired. I do have a dog that I walk every day in the park at the end of the block. Several times, I did think she was there but it might just have been my imagination. Doesn’t matter anymore, I suppose.
I never had the courage to ask her her name, but I think it’s probably Lady Zorah Van Develdt, or something exotic like that.
~~~
9/365 ACCUMULATION
Word Count: 338
He wore people like jackets and gloves, each person tried on, checked for comfort, for fit, for length. His mirror was an old friend he trusted; his memory, an organized library of experience.
He shed little, altering instead, mending, patching and adjusting for growth. Letting out side-seams and putting down hems. Complementing with colors radically blue which he wore on his left, extreme glowing red on his right. Layering everyone he met like a sweater added as late afternoon feels the rush of cool air with the loss of the sun.
Some he wore daily, like a favorite shirt frayed with use, hand-laundered with reverence. His mother was there, at the core, like a tee shirt next to his heart. His father, a vest of protection and strength. There’s a bloodstained plaid shirt that was his older brother, a complex man of both a passionate and gentle nature. Tim, his childhood best friend was plain white button-down with fading drips of a shared chocolate ice cream cone. Then the seersucker pucker of a teacher who slapped his hands for coloring outside the lines.
As he got older his closet overflowed. He made some decisions, became those he most loved, most esteemed, was most awed by, for all different reasons but all of strong weaves that wore well. Some clung like jersey. Some streaked his skin as he sweated beneath them, flung them away without noticing the colors he’d already become.
He worked hard, did his best, but time picked at threads, pulled at, unraveled the flesh from his bones. Troubles bent him double and he surprised even himself with his reactions. One desperate night he exploded. Clothing like clouds blew away, leaving him naked and cold.
Some blamed his parents, some pointed at friends. Some whispered about Saturday morning TV and some highlighted passages from books, websites, political platforms, the guy down the block.
In the end though, and only he knew this as fact, it was his own mind, his blood, and his soul.
~~~
8/365 BALANCE
Word Count: 301
From his perch high in the pine tree the people looked like ants. Snow streamed out in plumes off driveways but from way up here he couldn’t hear the awful buzzing. It was beautiful in a ballet sort of way.
Jake wasn’t cold. Last night when he’d climbed up he’d picked a sturdy branch to pitch his tent then built a fire. At dawn, just before the snow had flittered to a stop he made a pot of coffee.
He watched the sun shove through the clouds and light the crystals on the trees. Drops melted on his head, sizzled in the campfire. Down below, the world was black and white. An occasional blaze of red wool jacket buzzing up and down his neighbor’s driveway. That was Harold. Harold was a nice guy, the kind he would’ve enjoyed watching football games with, sharing a bowl of pretzels and a couple beers. But Harold’s wife didn’t like Jake’s wife, Jen, and so they never got together. Harold finished, put the snowblower away and looked around. Jake waved but Harold didn’t see him.
Arguments in marriage happen all the time. Most peter out to nothing and are forgotten. This one though, this time, was one that ate away at Jake and he had needed to walk away a little further than the shop in the basement where he fiddled with things and either fixed or ruined them completely. This one had him climb the tallest pine.
He poured himself the last of the coffee. His neighborhood was striped with roads and sidewalks into a geometric grid. The softness of the newly fallen snow that made it look like one big lumpy cloud was gone. Jake sighed. He put out the fire, packed the tent, and climbed back down to shovel off his driveway.
~~~
7/365 SNOW
Word Count: 373
I never saw the face of Jesus in the clouds. The best I ever got was cottonballs. My mother would scoop down beside me, one hand on my shoulder and the other fingerpointing to the sky. “See?” she’d say, “There’s the panda bear, see his big eyes and fluffy ears?” She tried so hard that sometimes I’d nod and whisper “yes” because she wanted it so bad. My father would lift me up and point. He must have thought I was nearsighted.
I have seen people in snowflakes though. Not every flake, but scattered here and there among the just plain crystals. Full bodied and dressed appropriately for the cold weather with gloves and puffy jackets. They’re very, very tiny and their lifespans are sadly very short. Must be a bitch, taking that leap of hope and faith to hit a sidewalk and melt on contact, like free-falling from an airplane without a ‘chute.
Some do make it and that’s the kick. They talk in teeny-weeny little voices and from what I can hear, are not all that smart. Mostly they just complain about the trip, the change in temperature, and then the sand and salt.
There are a few that stand out from the others, just like people too. I’d gone out in a Sunday blizzard for some bread and milk. Just as I was heading up my stairs, a snowflake landed on my collar and starting telling me about the places she had seen while floating far above the earth. She made it sound so magical. I was so fascinated by the images she drew I almost didn’t recognize the peril as I walked into my own apartment.
Her name was Rhonda. She lived safely in my freezer for most of the winter. I took her outside sometimes at night and we would talk. She told me snow jokes and I would scare her with summer stories. I really liked her.
The last blackout did her in. The ice cube tray was pooled in water. The burgers mushy. I searched hard along each frozen pea and called her name. I never found her.
But each new snowfall I stand and watch the sky, looking for faces in the flakes.
~~~
6/365 SPACE FOR WHAT IS IMPORTANT
Word Count: 302
She touched me, this girl–young woman, really–sitting outside on her front steps every morning. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved lightweight jersey. Her thin arms wrapped around herself nearly double. Her face pale even against lemon-light hair that caught glints of a cold January sun.
I’d nod, then I started greeting her with, “Good morning.” She’d reply with a “Hi,” and a smile. Eventually, I stopped one day in front of her house, overcoming my reticence to frighten her with over-friendly familiarity; myself, a married man in my thirties and her an attractive girl all alone.
“Are you waiting for someone?” I asked her, keeping a comfortable distance between us.
“Well, more for something,” she said.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked her.
“I’m waiting for Spring,” she said.
I laughed and made some silly comment about Spring being quite a distance away and walked on to the bus stop, didn’t think much more about her until I had settled into my seat. Was she being sarcastic? Coy? Discouraging of further conversation?
The next day I drove my car to the office, pretended I didn’t see her on the stairs of her porch. Over the weekend I forgot her entirely. Then on Monday, I once more walked by her house. The stairs were empty. I looked at my watch.
I never did know what became of her but in the first dripping raindrops of April, I saw a U-Haul parked in her driveway. An older man and a thin, blonde teenage boy were carrying boxes down the porch steps. They moved quickly, not speaking. I went by, said nothing. In the late afternoon when I returned, they and the truck were gone.
I wish now I had asked them about her. I wish I had asked her.
~~~
5/365 SOFT RED MORNING
Word Count: 316
The morning light falls in wondrous disarray on the city. Like raindrops it splashes and bounces off roofs, rolls in streaks down window panes.
Jane lies in bed, watching the sun breaking into the room. It doesn’t belong here, she thinks. Night, eternal night is what lives here now.
Jane’s husband has left her. One evening out of a fifteen-year span of domestic content, he prepared his announcement. He crept through a dinner of veal scallopini and three glasses of wine, the last of which slurred into his declaration of wanting a “divorsh,” making her laugh before she understood that he meant it. He then revealed his intention to marry a twenty year-old waitress who served his breakfast every day at a diner and gave him free double orders of sausage. Jane was silent with shock, which he mistook for doubt and so he went on to reel off a list of women with whom he’d had flings over the years. Perhaps he thought it would prove his infidelity and thus his serious intent to leave. Perhaps he was drunk, or merely a complete ass. He slept in the guest room that night and moved out in a week.
Months later, Jane still wakes with a false sense of him lying beside her. Pretends every night that he’s there in the dark when the day has tired of pounding her with truth. Sometimes she hears him breathing, in and out, in and the long male breath out.
She rolls over but stops short of his side of the bed, where the sun has splayed its beams in wide stripes. Her hand slides in slow arcs, seeking, finding space instead. She closes her eyes.
“Don’t touch me,” she says to the sun. “Go back to the hell flame you rose from.” It pleases her to say this. She knows that it’s all she can do.
(First Publication rights to Soft Red Morning belong to The Glass Coin, April 2011)
~~~
4/365 LANGUAGE
Word Count: 298
Her hands flew through the air in front of his face. They fluttered like chickadees startled by hawks. He hated it.
“What? What are you trying to tell me, Jessica?” he asked her. “Just say it.”
Her hands dropped to her sides, shot dead by his arrows.
She wasn’t born that way. At two she had a large vocabulary. He and her mother were so proud, taught her songs which she’d sing in a high angel voice. It was after his wife was killed in an auto accident and Jessica was found hours later, still strapped into her car seat, that she stopped speaking normally. Then she stopped speaking at all.
“Look,” he said, “you can’t keep going on this way. You’re thirteen years old. I won’t be around forever. I know you can talk if you wanted to. You’ve got to break through this wall of yours.”
She didn’t blame him, knew his frustration. It was just that every time she tried a word out in her mouth it twisted like the branches of the tall maples that spread their fingers out to the sky. It gripped her tongue and hung there in leaves of sound that no one understood. She tried. She practiced in front of a mirror. But her hands, she felt, were superior in communicating. Her arms were the paragraphs. Her hands, sentences. Each of her fingers, a word. In unison they sang, not just the songs of her childhood, but every new tune she’d heard. Even the music came through, clicking off her fingernails like birds released into the sky.
Ooom, laaa-gaaa, she carved out, watching her lips move like wings lifting to fly. But it was useless, and she was tired. She knew her mother would have understood what she said.
~~~
3/365 INTUITION
Word Count: 225
There was no reason to check his coat pockets, none at all. She did though, because something told her that she’d find the evidence that would confirm her suspicions. She dug through them all, unfolding bits of paper that concealed no more than a receipt for coffee and toast, or fifty cents spent at a toll booth on the highway he’d said he’d be taking to Denver.
“You’re being paranoid,” her sister said. “John’s not the type to screw around on you.”
“Every man is,” she replied.
So she tried harder, more devious in her plans to prove herself right. She put threads on the passenger seat in the truck, salt on the floor. She checked odometer mileage against maps but he could have a woman on the regular route so that didn’t tell her anything much.
While he was gone she drank a sea of coffee, smoked a chimney of cigarettes. Her eyes sank into black sockets and her clothes hung like drapes on her frame. He worried. “Go see a doctor,” he’d say, but she wouldn’t. He didn’t realize that it was him that was killing her, him that was wrecking their marriage.
She finally divorced him and died three months later. He sobbed as her life slipped away.
“I should’ve known,” he cried to her sister. “I should’ve known something was wrong.”
~~~
2/365 SLOW MORNING
Word Count: 304
The crowd was a cloud of pink and blue puffs moving around her. They parted for her passing and made her think of the Red Sea and Moses and a comic book version of the Ten Commandments she had as a child. From that stuffiness, that suffocating cotton candy, too-many-people-in-the-same-space feeling, she cut herself adrift, ducked into a dark little store she’d never noticed before.
Her senses hit by patchouli incense, by tinkling bells that seemed farther away than this tiny little shop could provide in distance, she stood still, took time to adjust to the quiet, the different world she had entered. She looked around this small desert island adrift in the sea of Manhattan. Well-stocked for an island, hung with colored bead curtains and brass bells of every shape and size, the ceiling was hidden, or maybe it just wasn’t there. She looked for walls, but the moment she came up to what she thought was an ending, it rolled away and presented like mirrors except you could walk through them; they went on forever.
“You’re seeking a bracelet,” a voice came from behind her. She turned to see a very short, dark man dressed in all white.
“Yes,” she said, “a bracelet.”
From a pocket in his long, draped shirt, he pulled out a short length of blue and green stones strung together between fat beads of gold. She held out her hand and he encircled her wrist, snapped closed the clasp, and looked up at her. “Yes, that’s it,” she said, smiled and paid him and left through a door in the far back of the shop.
The crowd was a cloud of blue sapphires, green emeralds, and she walked through them with a sense of peace and satisfaction, as if she belonged.
~~~
1/365 POTENT
Word Count: 180
She remembered bouquets of red flowers with dashes of yellow–shaped vaguely like tulips–and the scent of fresh dew on green leaves. How the colors pulsed and spiraled like pinwheels held to a breeze.
Her head was stuffed full of cotton, or maybe wire filament because it zinged pain that bounced from the back of her neck to her forehead. She imagined a lightbulb but that concept brought a new crash of hurt. Her body was a thing separate from thought, though it moved slow in sympathy to her brain. Her arms felt like oars dipping through oily thick waters, her legs like tall buildings of steel.
It was much later in the day, when she was able to sit up in a chair, when she poured herself tea and bit delicately down on a soda cracker, that she remembered the noise of the party, the dizzying effect of her drink, the sudden darkness of a room and laying on wool, on fake fur, and the telltale squeaking nylon puff jackets, that she guessed how the bruising had happened.
~~~
