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 (links are in the right sidebar).
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59/365 MISTY ILLUMINATION
Word Count: 553
He landed in a patch of brown dry grass. She was out hiking the trail that wandered the soft hills above her house trying to forget a lost love. She might’ve missed him if she hadn’t looked down just at that point and seen the bright stripes of his hot air balloon, vibrant against the drabness of the wintered ground. She bent down closer to get a better look.
It looked just like a large button, or a swatch of gypsy silk caught on the brittle stalks of a March landscape crying out for spring. It billowed in the slight breeze that tickled at her face. Then she caught the movement as he climbed out of the basket.
He looked young and quite handsome, his dark hair revealed as he pulled off his cap. He turned and looked up as her shadow cast its cool dim around him. He might have thought it was a cloud though he didn’t seem surprised at all to see her. He waved and shouted something she had to lean in closer still to hear.
“Yes, of course I can,” she said. She spoke soft and low. Her first “Beg your pardon?” had nearly blown him and his balloon away. She held her hand, palm up, close beside him and with a little help, he climbed on top. She brought him carefully up to view.
“Sorry, I’ve been blown adrift and am so far off course I don’t have a clue where I might be,” he said.
“You’re in Petersboro,” she answered, “just off of Route 73.”
He frowned and from a hip pocket pulled out a map. “Oh dear, I’m about 150 megamiles from where I’m supposed to be.”
“Where’s that?”
“South Darwin.”
“Oh but that’s just a mile or so from here,” she said. “I can take you there.”
She set him carefully back down near his now deflated balloon and tried to help him fold and pack it into the basket. Her fingers were just too big and she backed off as they both realized she was liable to do more damage than good. Then she picked him up, stuck the basket into her pocket and set off down the trail toward home.
She insisted on giving him something to eat and a hot thimble of tea before they set off to his destination. She was surprised at how much they had in common–aside from ballooning which was his passion and something that she’d never tried.
The short trip in the car was enjoyable, once she turned down the radio volume and the fan on the heater.
She soon found the spot where he and his friends had agreed to meet in a small field off a back road. She set him down within walking distance and helped him strap the basket to a halter on his back. The late afternoon sun caught the mist rising from a nearby pond and it all looked so lovely. A perfect end to the day though she was quite sad to see him leave.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “I promised you a ride.”
“That would be lovely,” she said. She watched as he headed to join his friends, and her heart felt just a bit hollow. But she brightened as soon as he turned and waved goodbye.
~~~
58/365 WHERE WE’VE BEEN
Word Count: 209
The first time I looked around there was so much to see, eighteen years of my life. What I saw was precious in some way, or so awful that I shivered still. A birthday dress of pink tulle dancing. A first kiss from the soft lips of a sweet boy in the shadows of the porch. The man three doors down with his walleye leering.
Each time I take a step ahead it is from the footprints I have left behind. There is a soft depression in a wild daisy-spotted field in upstate Maine where I have lain,you, a young man with a blue-black curl that dangled on his forehead.
I catch the scented lily-of-the-valley that marched upon a cottage where we first lived as man and wife. Green-leaved Lilliputians gathered in a cheerful mob by the front steps, bearing ivory-white bells they rang in Spring.
The white-carpeted aisle at the old stone church where we were married and where I follow you now, draped in purple, hiding beneath a spray of yellow roses and teak. I look ahead of me and there you are, and yet I want to look behind to live instead in places where we’ve been.
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57/365 ON THE MOVE
Word Count: 497
The wind blew circles around her. Snow rose in a fine mist of sunlit fairy dust yet she moved doggedly unaffected within it. It blew harder, hard enough to shimmy the store banners and street signs and make the traffic light dance like a crazed marionette. It whipped at the ends of her scarf and bounced the tassel on her knit cap. She felt like a Chrismas card with a strange message inside. Her mind was made up, her feet rhythmically heading downtown to the First Federal Bank of Pishtalullah which she intended to rob.
It was something she always thought she’d be good at but the need never drove her to cross that right or wrong line until now. She had to have a Prada bag, Louboutin shoes, and a little black dress by the end of the week. It was already Wednesday.
She didn’t even want to go to the ten-year reunion but they’d found her in the bowels of the city, a basement apartment that was all that she’d dreamed of during six years of incredibly expensive schooling. And a job at Bloomie’s, of course not the designer and marketing big shot, but still, a sales clerk, which of course, was just as important, just not as high-paying.
The wind nearly blew her past the bank entrance, then grabbed the heavy glass door from her grip. It slammed open with a bang. Everyone inside turned and looked. She wished she’d already been wearing a Prada bag, the Louboutin shoes. She went up to her regular teller and took a deep breath before blurting it out. “I need to make a withdrawal,” she said.
The girl picked up a form from a pile and slid it over to her. She looked at it then back at the teller.
“Oh, not from my account,” she said and laughed nervously. “There isn’t enough in there.”
The teller stared at her.
“I need about three thousand dollars,” she said. “My college reunion is this weekend,” she added and gave a “you understand,” kind of half-smile.
“Oh,” said the teller.
“I figured if I can get a super handbag, maybe exotic leather so that I can use it for less dressy times too, and a killer dress and really neat shoes with those platform style stiletto heels…” She looked at the girl wistfully.
“Oh,” said the teller.
“Well, I don’t know how I can go in anything I have in my closet…” Tears welled up in her eyes turning the teller, the cages, the tall chandeliered ceilings, the whole scene into a crystal palace before they overfilled and slid down her cheeks.
“I understand,” said the teller, her heart breaking with the familiar pain. She counted out thirty one-hundred dollar bills, scribbled something on the slip of paper and stuck it in her drawer as she handed over the money.
“Oh thank you! Thank you!”
“Go to Sak’s,” said the teller. “Their Prada’s on sale.”
~~~
56/365 MORE WAYS OF GETTING THERE
Word Count: 668
The girl who saved leaves lived next door to my parents since I was eleven years old. She wasn’t that much older than me, maybe three years, but there was a gap beyond age that prevented a friendship, hesitated any semblance of finding mutual interests. Her name was Anna and she was the Pearson’s only child.
Something was not quite right about Anna. She seldom went past the porch in the daytime and I suppose she was tutored at home. Sometimes in the warm summer moonlight she danced on their back lawn. I would watch from my upstairs bedroom window though I don’t think she ever knew. My father and hers had a nodding acquaintance over the picking-up of the daily newspaper. My mother and hers would smile and greet with the politeness of understanding and avoidance, their hearts set their minds to protect mode, which meant that you just never mentioned it.
At first I thought she was stuck-up. Then deaf, and maybe blind too; she never looked anyone in the eye. She would search the ground for fallen leaves, regardless of season, and only within the borders of her own yard. She would pick up certain ones, inspect them carefully, and if they passed whatever standards she set she would slip them into a satchel slung over her shoulder. The leaves that didn’t meet her approval were carefully placed back down on the ground. I offered her a leave once, a perfect, fiery red maple from the tree in our yard. It caught her eye for a moment but she ignored it and me.
My mother explained as best she could, though the word autistic I mistook for artistic and found it dramatically exciting and free. I still hollered hello to Anna whenever I saw her but as I grew up, she was outside less and less and months would go by, a season of snow, before I would even see her again. She had stopped dancing outside long ago.
After college, I never returned to live in the town I grew up in. Visits were rolled in with holidays. Sometimes I’d remember to ask about Anna but more often not. When my Dad died my mother stayed in the house alone for a while before she, too, passed away. It was when my sister and I came to sell the house that I even thought of Anna again.
“Oh they both died a few years back,” my sister said. We were having a cup of coffee–our last in this house before we both left for homes separated by states, next door via email and Facebook.
“And Anna?”
“She’s still there.”
“How? Wasn’t she mentally challenged? Autistic or something?” I said.
“I don’t think so. She was just different.”
We expected the real estate agent but the knock on the door surprised us with Anna. She was older, of course, but somehow she looked younger, much younger than me.
“I’m sorry,” she said. These were the first words I’d ever heard her speak. “I miss them.”
“Thank you, Anna.” I struggled for words. Thirty years had gone by since I first saw her, lovely and mysterious, scanning her lawn for leaves. Her hair was still a brilliant gold that held sunshine in its strands. Her eyes, I noticed for the first time, were a deep grass green. “Won’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?” I asked.
She smiled–the first smile I’d seen on her face though I believed that those nights, when she danced on the lawn silvered by the pale light of the moon, I believed she was smiling.
She nodded, and came in and sat down at the table, looked around at the stripped-down kitchen walls, bare of family meanings, packed in boxes to be taken away. As she reached for her cup, she unshouldered a large woven bag that I hadn’t noticed, and let it slip with a rustle to the floor by her feet.
~~~
55/365 RANDOM VS CONSCIOUS
Word Count: 185
I tiptoe like a spider traversing its web. Sometimes I feel the silk strands with my feet, sometimes only their shadow. Both hold me up as I balance on the tenuous earth I’ve been given to walk. Either is flexible, neither is complete as an answer.
Every day starts out the same; the choice to rise or remain. One morning I’ll bound out of bed like a jack-in-the-box and the day must race to catch up with the streamers of steam from my coffee, the footprints that leap from one tree to another never touching the ground. Another morning I’ll lie there and muse the minutes into the crowd of an hour while the sun glowers through the blinds as if bleeding onto the walls, the floor, the carpet I’ve carried around from one home to another like a great gob of silk.
It’s a toss-up of random wanderings or a mapped-out strategy of life. One or the other, I never know how it will begin but I know it began on the day I was no longer a wife.
~~~
54/365 QUIET ORDER
Word Count: 195
I watch the wind cut spirals in the air, mixing trees and sky and earth together like a marble cake. A spatula knifing through the scene to blend it, meld it, make it one and yet for me it’s never that.
The trees will groan in agony with each swipe of its breath and yet the wind is ever piercing, heedless of the pain. The trees will grow in girth to stand against the force, they’ll grow in height to try to rise above it till they touch the clouds and find them soft, pliant to the wind.
From the sea the spray of water slips into the air, separates and fly like tiny birds to join the sky that mops them up with sponges made of clouds. Later to be returned as wrung-out rain.
It’s all a natural ballet of movement quicker than the wind, slower than time itself. It’s acceptance of something out of my control and still I hold my hand up to the horizon, see the circles, lines and forms that slip between my fingers.
With a sigh, a sense of peace, I join the rhythm of the silent dance.
~~~
53/365 IN THE THICK
Word Count: 478
Chelsea pulled three blades of grass from the thin patch of urban lawn in front of her apartment. She turned them over and over and held them this way and that and then up to the light until she could read them. She let two blow away and reread the third.
Today you will meet someone who will help you reach your goals.
That sounded good to Chelsea who needed a break. Her boyfriend hadn’t called in three days after an argument. Her landlord had upped the rent. Her car needed a new transmission and her cat died. So this fortune told by the grass was welcome indeed. She just had to figure out what her goals were.
In Economics she paid close attention to the professor, scribbling notes that may have been clues to success. Her Algebra test was handed back with an A-minus; would she be someone who would discover new answers to questions asked of the universe? She wondered what the questions were but learned new formulas anyway.
Chelsea ran the register at the bookstore in the mall five nights a week plus Saturday and Sunday from noon until six p.m. She studied each customer’s face, made conversation with each in case they were her savior. She left work disappointed and a little pissed off at the guy who told her to mind her own business when she asked what he did for a living. Then her supervisor had warned her not to “dally” with the customers, to just make sure she tried to sell them something and if that failed, take their money and get them the hell out of the store. She clocked out and talked with anyone she ran into on her way home. She felt bad when a homeless man gave her an odd look and hurried away.
She made a hot cup of tea and poured in a jigger of rum. It tasted awful so she added some lime juice, then honey, then threw it all down the drain. It was all so depressing. She went through her class notes again but nothing came out as the secret to her success. If she couldn’t trust the grass messages, handed down from Mother Nature herself, what was she going to do?
She found a flashlight in the kitchen drawer, pulled on her jacket, changed slippers to shoes and went down the stairs to the front yard. She searched, shining the light in small arcs until she found what she was looking for. She held it in the beam and smiled and ran back up the stairs and got undressed for bed. On the nightstand she carefully put the blade of grass in a small crystal bowl on the nightstand and shut off the light. She’d memorized the words:
Tomorrow you will meet someone who will help you reach your goals.
~~~
52/365 GOOD ENERGY
Word Count: 176
I close my eyes to the sun and absorb the warm gold into my skin, through my eyelids, my upturned hands. I sit perfectly still, shallow-breathing the air that smells fresh and green, like lilac-tipped branches and the red budded maple holding its own breath for spring.
But the golden glow holds me in its arms, wrapping around in soft breezes, tickling the senses into recall of years of the first warm day of spring that shows up too early, like an unsophisticated guest at a party. But welcomed by those who can delight in surprises.
Like me, now. Having shed the memory of the years of the days where anticipation meant stress, where surprise meant fear of a day’s dust settled and seen. I draw in good energy, to replenish all that I’ve given up and lost.
When I open my eyes the birdsong is still with me, the scent of the day colors the air, and I find myself smiling at the loss of the memory of time spent in lesser ways.
~~~
51/365 LIVELY MOMENT
Word Count: 366
It was hibernating or maybe just hiding. At any rate, no one had seen it since Christmas or NewYear’s or such when the first snowstorm hit and since then, the bush was buried deeper with each layer of snow.
February snuck in with a two-day thaw, just enough to give the bush a glimpse of sunlight through the sparkling white crystals which held it tight in their grip. The little bush pulled one way, then the other, rocking gently and gaining space with each move back and forth. It lost a few needles in its attempts to break free but at last it had a clear view of the bluest blue sky, a puff of white cloud, a breath of clean and cold air.
People walked by and never noticed the bush in the snow piled up by the sidewalk. The bush listened to everything it could catch in snatches of sentences, so lonely it was after the quiet insulation of winter.
“…tonight, I guess.”
“How much are they saying?”
“Another six to ten inches of snow.”
The bush was so disappointed. It had been hoping for spring. It had no way of knowing about seasons, just waited for the warm touch of the sun to know when to smile, when to grow. It was supposed to be sleeping but being the only bush in the yard, it didn’t know this for sure and could do what it liked and what it liked to do was enjoy life.
That night it made up its mind. It reached its branches way up to the crust of the snow, spread its fingerlike shoots out on the surface and pulled, pulled itself up and out. Its feet were cold, but it didn’t need them. It rolled itself into the wind and blew like a tumbleweed away, down the street, down the highways and through the back fields and front yards of hundreds of people who never noticed it rolling by.
Though people thought it unusual, they soon got used to the transplant where it happily settled itself by the warm southern coast and learned to adjust to the climate though it did miss its home just a bit.
~~~
50/365 NEW TERRITORY
Word Count: 335
The wind howled and blew without pause except to pluck at the shutters and shake the windows in their frames as it raced by. Trees bent to the master. Signs fluttered and stuttered their messages to the few who braved the night highways.
Giselle went to bed early, hoping to sleep through the noise that wailed outside the house. She didn’t know exactly when it had stopped but rather, when it was no longer roaring and wild. Giselle woke and noticed just that, the quiet, and was glad that the roof was still over her head. She showered and dressed, had a quick cup of coffee, poured the rest in her travel cup as she headed out the door to go to work.
Outside was quite a different matter. Standing on her front porch, Giselle looked around in dismay. The neighbors were gone, their houses, the street, the whole area beyond her front steps was a completely different scene. To Giselle, it looked vaguely familiar, like the parking lot of the Walmart over in Brighton. But that was ridiculous, no?
Once she got in her car and started driving around it became clear that while it might seem that her house had taken flight in the night and landed twenty miles west, her house was firm in its original foundation. Instead, everything west had been blown as lightly as autumn leaves away to the east.
Intact. Each blade of grass, each road, sidewalk, building and everything in, on, and around them, each tree, every rosebush, had moved as one in the breath of the gale force wind. No one else seemed to have noticed since everything–people included–had moved at the same gradual pace. One can imagine the roots clinging, stone cellars digging in, all slowing the inevitable progress as everything slid away.
Giselle noticed it though. After a couple miles, she made a U-turn and a mental note to turn right out of her driveway instead of a left from now on.
~~~
49/365 WHAT WE TAKE IN
Word Count: 257
She sees tulips. I see birds. Shadows are confusing.
We compromise. We tolerate. We force an enthusiasm; she for baseball, me for the annual Home Show and shopping for drapes. I walk just behind her, ready to nod and agree. I know I should take more interest and yet nothing moves me. The fact of our own home is so far away and I see no reason to decorate now. She does; changing the colors of make-believe kitchens each year as the new trends hit.
She knits during games on TV. “Lets” me go to the local games with the guys. But she’s there on the couch, cheers at mostly appropriate times and doesn’t know when she doesn’t. I’ve explained it so many times and it doesn’t bother me anymore.
I wish I could knit or crochet or weave baskets.
We were walking into the main entrance at the mall when she stopped and pointed out our shadows. The slant of the sun turned us into tulips and birds. There was her hair in the wind, long black and shivering though in reality she’s blonde. My shoulders are hunched, my hands in my pockets; leaves and stems she says. I think of featherless wings, useless to flight.
“Now we’re only looking,” she says, “but I want to get some ideas.”
“They’re laying-off at work,” I say.
She gives me a look that tells me I’m bursting her bubble.
“Your birds look like they’re fighting,” she says.
I don’t tell her that her tulips are wilted.
~~~
48/365 PURPOSE
Word Count: 166
The morning sky is so pink, like an awful Kincade. The snow reflects it in mauve. She reaches way up, beyond her understanding of space and pulls down a gob of corally salmon. She moulds it with fingers long as willow branches into a triangled heart. Then she threads it onto her necklace with a special long needle she made.
She ties a triple knot in the string to hold it in place. To keep it away from yesterday’s moon and a soft chunk of blue sky she picked one sweet-scented mild afternoon. Smiles at the sun she stole in the last days of summer.
She carries it into her kitchen, lays it carefully on the top shelf over the sink. The yellow block of sun winks like a golden eye catching the bubbles as she washes her teacup and spoon.
Then she sits and waits. Thinking of days that will pass before she can gather the green that she needs to complete her season.
~~~
47/365 FEELING GOOD OUTSIDE
Word Count: 256
The snow has pulled back a bit, condensing itself into layers of ice. I believe it will hold my weight.
Without changing my slippers I cautiously take a step and another. Let go of the doorframe and walk out on the shine of the dunes. Rolling out from two feet over the walkway they cover the bushes, changed the back yard into puffs where the wind has left them gathered around patio chairs and the grill. I am standing level with the top of the grill! Then I am flat on my face.
Like a crab I crawl sideways, looking for something to help myself up. It’s too funny, I think; my neighbors still sleeping, my husband already gone off to work. I sprawl on the crust of the snow in a world that for now is much higher. I would finally be taller–if I could stand.
It’s one of those moments when decisions are made. When life can go one way or the other. Woman pulls me one way, back to the large gaping welcome of home that is the doorway into the garage.
Yet Child pulls me another and I turn my back to the door. I sit up, legs straight out with toes pointed, and with a shove and giggles that turn into pure laughter, I slide down the backyard, nearly into the woods. I slow to a stop at the bottom, right into the arms of the Woman who asks, Oh dear, how will you ever get back up the hill?
~~~
46/365 ABUNDANCE
Word Count: 303
Whenever Mariel was ecstatically happy, her hair burst into flame. No one ever understood it and she went to many doctors over time. At eighteen she gave up and learned to adjust to living on the edge of immolation.
She hung with artsy friends who could be counted on for levity and dolor, and anticipated punchlines at parties where she didn’t know everyone there who might have understood her situation. That helped quite a bit but she still carried bottled water for emergencies.
At twenty-eight her lover of three years got down on one knee, whipped out a diamond the size of a chickpea and proposed. “Um, yeah, I guess so,” said Mariel. They both waited. No puff of smoke, no orange lick of fire, but she nervously held a glass of white wine at the ready.
At the birth of their first child the hospital room was prepped as the baby slid out and promptly screamed his first hello. “I would get a noisy one,” she said, a smile sneaking into place until she thought back for a moment on the pain that brought him into the world. Her husband held her hand and beamed. She concentrated on her scowl.
It seemed that Mariel could enjoy brief spots of life without endangering herself and scaring those around her. She proudly watched her children graduate college and marry. Happy tears, she guessed, were safely keeping flame away.
Mariel outlived her husband and didn’t suffer many flare-ups after that. Time eased her burden and she died of natural causes in a nursing home with her family near. They gathered at her bedside, amazed at how her bright auburn hair surrounded her face. It never had turned gray; great joy nor deep unhappiness never having slipped behind the wall she’d built of fear.
~~~
45/365 GOING WELL
Word Count: 190
There is an invisible broadcast of color we leave in a trail behind us every day. Mine is usually a blend of blues and greens, hardly ever red or orange anymore. That happens when you’ve grown up and left adventure to your past.
My days are filled with papers, screens of information, the hum of cars and conversation that flit by. Now and then I pause and look around as if a finger of the day is poking for attention. There is so much to do I bend my head down to the things I know already and can do. Why stick my hand within the flow?
Yesterday, I did. Just to see what would happen if instead of letting time and space run by in ribbons trailing from the people I do not even know, I dipped my fingertips into the sea of colors.
It made me smile. There, amid the royal blues and forest greens I saw a streak of yellow from my index finger. Suddenly from my thumb a vivid red that spread into a disarray of pinks and lavenders. And then, a lovely shade of orange.
~~~
44/365 MAKING THINGS
Word Count: 171
I really have no idea how it works, how the lines and circles, the reds and greens and blues form into stories. Is it my own? Is there some claim I may lay to it or does it float randomly in the wind, waiting for someone to see it. Is ours a case of having not a creative spirit but a mind attuned to forms and colors in the environment? Pulling puzzle pieces from the sky to lay them down on paper?
Yesterday my mind was stuffed with cotton candy news. A plump pillow of comfort and satisfaction. Today I feel I’ve sprung a leak and cotton batting billows out my ears.
There is no relief. Couches, tables, chairs sit in heavy judgment, stale with routine days. I escape the walls to search the trees for answers. I see their fingers playing in the clouds of a sky pinkened by the morning sun.
And there it is, the story floating by, caught on the branches and the edges of the earth.
~~~
43/365 HAPPY CALIBRATION
Word Count: 335
The good days were the diamonds and the bad days were near unbearable. Somewhere in between was where she hoped to softly settle. Hidden from the world since no one else could understand that losing one’s lifelong love was like trying to find something to hold onto in the inside of a bubble. Standing at the ready with a pin.
Colors lost their brilliance, green melted into blue and that, she realized, was the meaning of not seeing the horizon for it wavered in a blending of earth and sky. Every day she poured her morning coffee and went out on her patio to wait for the dawning sun. “I think it’s yellower today,” she’d say to the space that came as day, though she wasn’t absolutely sure there was really any difference.
Weeks and months went by and sunbeams stretched to reach her yet she never felt the warmth of touch they offered. Day was light and nights were dark and in between was just a shadow woven of the two. Change came slowly, a shard of cadmium red within the morning light; a blink of lavender at dusk. One day she thought she saw a burst of orange but it shot so fast between the moments that she worried it was just a wish.
Then one day it merely happened. She was talking to a friend and laughed out loud. From her mouth the laugh spilled in rays of yellow, pink, and fiery red. In near euphoria she watched the rays flatten out in ribbons, unravel to the floor and wriggle across the kitchen tiles. They cut right through the door out to the patio and she followed close behind. While she watched the trees burst into buds and then to leaves. It was as she once remembered a time called Spring.
Though she never found the middle band of white she had been seeking she gave it up completely. She found a happy life bouncing through the shades of color in between.
~~~
42/365 WHAT MAKES IT BETTER
Word Count: 314
What makes it better?
A mother’s kiss on a skinned knee. A hand on the shoulder of a despondent friend. A hug.
Chloe had lost the woolen scarf her grandmother had knitted for her several years ago. She’d worn it every winter. Loved it’s bright bold stripes and its fuzzy warmth. Her neck felt worse than cold without it; it felt bare.
Christmas brought a new and lovely scarf from Santa but it wasn’t the same. Grandma had made the original the year she died. It had missing stitches, a messed up pattern. It was perfect.
Chloe looked everywhere, EVERYWHERE. She asked the teacher, the bus driver, the kids she hung around with at the school. She wondered if someone had stolen it but knew she’d always locked her locker. No one would have really wanted it, and no one really would have taken it just to be mean. It was clearly lost. She had been careless and now it was forever gone.
She wore the new scarf through the rest of winter but it didn’t feel the same. Snow fell and piled up at the bus stop, fell and melted as the days warmed into Spring. She changed outerwear to a lighter coat–one that would have surely clashed with the colors of the old scarf–and stopped wearing mittens, hat, and scarf.
As she waited for the bus a color caught her eye in the muddy sand-mixed snowpile on the curb. She dropped her bookbag on the sidewalk and with her fingers dug a hole around the color. Deeper, deeper, and there it was!
Chloe wore her grandma’s scarf a couple days regardless of the weather. Then she never wore it the next winter or any winter after that. But even now, with three children of her own she takes it out and hangs it by her coat in the hall.
~~~
41/365 LIGHT AND ORGANIZED
Word Count: 237
At two in the afternoon the sun strikes the desk and it becomes time for Carol to write. She breathes quick with anticipation after rising just before noon since the morning is useless and dark in the northern part of the city.
For breakfast she’ll eat soup and a sandwich, then she’ll shower and dress for the day. Comfortable jeans, a baggy sweater and slippers that are shaped to the spaces between her feet and the floor. Then she’ll wait, with fingers poised on the keyboard, breaths now shallow and deep, watching the billowing curtains yellow with warm sunlight, stepping back to let the light in.
Then she’ll type.
It happens just that way, every day. The words come in sentences, lyrically formed. Paragraphs grow as if sprouted from the seedlings of language and watered with creative force. She never notices as the light shifts, for once it has struck, it has already performed its duty.
Though she’ll stop for a meal she types straight into the night, words sliding through dusk and shining in the blackness of the room. Late, very late, she’ll stop, stretch, and yawn. She’ll get up and dress for bed. She’ll sleep in a happy place where words have been committed to paper with more left to say.
Has she clicked “Save”? She doesn’t remember but falls into sleep with a blank screen in her mind, ready to wait for the light.
~~~
40/365 NOT GOING TO BUDGE
Word Count: 225
“It’s just not how I feel,” she said. “I can’t help it.”
“Please,” he begged. “Please think about it. Think about us.”
Somewhere in the course of any relationship is the wall that won’t come down. That needs to be cleared with a leap. For Megan and John this was it. Their Donnybrook, their clash of the Titans. Their life together from this point onward was in danger of being cut short. A job offer too good to turn down in a faraway state. Family too close and friends too familiar to leave behind.
But it happens all the time.
Silence follows the screaming. Stones replace tears. Time ticks forward and leaves change in its place. If the move is made together, one thing will happen. If they remain where they are, something else.
They each weighed their options, each licked at the other’s point of view, tasting it, testing it for palatability. For possible poison. Neither one finding the antidote of compromise.
She nearly gave in, scared but willing to trust him. He almost gave up, disappointed and forlorn. But the branch never reached far enough, the words never said in the hope that they wouldn’t be needed.
Megan and John went their own separate ways. He left for the East Coast and she stayed behind.
To this day they still wonder, what if…?
~~~
39/365 OFF BALANCE
Word Count: 959
I was seventeen when I first understood it. That stick-poking in the brain that says something’s not right. Something’s off-balance. The fluffy pink clouds I had worn on Sundays that only itched and made me feel stupid. The GI Joes that locked Barbie in her castle to gather dust while we went on outdoor adventures.
I was twenty-one when I married. Hal was a great guy; fun and loving, dependable and strong. He never complained about the sex, my lack of enthusiasm that eventually became avoidance. “We’re almost forty years old, for Pete’s sake!” I’d say.
We had two children together who were already on their own when we finally agreed on a divorce. I never did tell him the reason. Still too ashamed to let anyone know, but more, I’d come to understand that this truth, this secret would have been the biggest blow to his ego, to his whole understanding of who we were. I might have come to accept me but I didn’t believe I should make him face the facts. We still loved each other and it was easier this way.
In time Hal met another woman and was planning to marry her. Our kids had settled in different states. It was a good time to break with the past I had known and how others knew me. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I knew that if need be, I could pretend nothing had changed on the short weekend visits and holidays. But I needed a new environment to let this new person I was finally allowing to be, to paint her own walls, sing her own songs, meet new people and make friends that I didn’t have to lie to. I put our house on the market and started looking for a small place up north.
The Maine coast was the perfect place for me. It was as revealing and honest in its nature as I was determined to be. The rocky edges of the coastline drew a hard line, a crooked horizon that wandered at will to be whatever the sea made it. I found a small cottage that suited my own rugged ways. I loved the wool jackets and jeans that everyone wore, man, woman, and child. Long hair, that had never really looked good on me, I realized had also been used as a symbol, a disguise. I cut my hair into a feathery style to adapt to the harsh wind and it felt as natural as the setting. I had found my place in life, my life in place.
And love; I found love in its completeness of being. Caring and compatibility and finally, sensual, sexual love. With Barbara I am what I was born to be. Life had stopped swaying, gradually slowing and finding its balance. I was happy enough to overcome the guilt of the one thing that still stuttered in the conversation with family. I thought I could do it forever. I thought I was doing it out of love.
Barbara is so strong, so confident and I try to learn from her. “Don’t worry,” she tells me, “someday you’ll tell them when the time is right.”
“But I don’t feel good lying to them, and worse, I feel I’m betraying you,” I’ll say. It’s true, burdens have just been exchanged from one way of life to another with the same weight. The same guilt, despite her love and understanding.
Hal and the girls surprised me with a visit one Saturday morning. It was a week before my birthday and they’d planned this as part of a surprise. It didn’t take long for them to see how we lived–how we really lived when they weren’t around.
We carried through our roleplaying for the weekend, I walking on eggshells and scurrying between moments to install myself in one of the other bedrooms then empty it again to leave it for guests. It was too late to worry about closets and drawers.
I’m not good at surprises. It takes me a while to adjust. We got through the day somehow but it was like swimming in caramel candy. I felt a beat behind the moment, even relaxing at dinner with good food and wine. I went to bed early, nearly walking into the wrong–I mean, what’s normally right–bedroom that Barbara and I share. Hal and Barbara were still talking politics when I drifted to sleep.
Some of the awkwardness softened in the morning, and I caught a few winks and thumbs-up signs from Barbara as we walked the high cliffs after breakfast. After lunch, they packed the car, getting ready to leave. I kept looking for a time, an instant, a moment when I could tell them the truth. I didn’t worry about words, just about the moment to start letting them out. It never came, or maybe I once again let it slip by. We all hugged and kissed our goodbyes. The distance between the two of us standing and waving goodbye was like mountains. The car was soon out of sight.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wasn’t ready,” and the girl part of me pushed tears through my eyes. I wanted to reach out and hold her but didn’t feel worthy.
She smiled and came over, wrapped her arms around me and rocked me gently as if I were just a child.
“They all know,” she said. “Hal came right out and asked me and I came right out and told him the truth.”
Suddenly everything settled. I could hear gulls in a far-off cry. I was home. We stood there a while, rocking gently back and forth, holding on to each other for balance.
~~~
38/365 DISTANCE
Word Count: 36
“The world is like a sponge,” she said. “It sucks in rain and snow. It tries to put the fire out.”
“What fire?” I asked her. She was always saying screwball things. Usually I just let it fly.
“The fire that rages in its core. Deep, deep down.”
I tried to explain to her about the water table. Even got into magma and evaporation off the surface of the sea. She pooh-poohed all that. Her explanation was naturally more creative. I also suspect it made it easier for her to cope.
Anne was a foster child. It left its mark. The ground to her was sacred. In February she started seedlings under grow-lights in the basement. If we had a three-day warmth in early May she planted. She wouldn’t wear garden gloves, and once I remember we were in a restaurant and she realized the dirt was still firmly stuck deep under her nails. She hid them in her lap through most of dinner. We laughed about it later.
She’d wash her car in summer rain. Put on a bikini and with a bucket of soapy water wash the whole car till it gleamed, the rain rinsing the suds in stripes down the driveway, into the road. I loved to watch her.
We didn’t have any children and I think that bothered her a lot. She felt it was disruption to the roll of living. “Funny,” she told me once, “how I was an extra child, one that no one wanted, yet here we want one and can’t seem to have one.” Adoption was denied us because I didn’t make enough money. Funny, we would have had that covered but back then, the mother wasn’t supposed to be employed.
It’s spring again and the cellar tables are empty, the lights never turned on above them. I think that this is the worst time of the year. It’s when I miss her most.
The smell of wet earth fills the air from April rains. Above her grave the earth is mushy, like a sponge. It feels warm on the soles of my shoes, like a fire still burning deep below.
~~~
37/365 OUR WORLDS
Word Count: 211
The snow melts into dripping icicles that try so hard to reach the ground. Hanging from up high, a branch caught in flight, an eave of a house well warmed by love and laughter.
It seems to be a living thing, a need to put down roots. Sky is freedom, dreams and everything unknown; earth is anchor.
I count the people in my life who’ve counted in my life. Every smile that’s come my way is yes, appreciated; there are lives who’ve dallied longer than a smile, penetrated more deeply than a conversation.
Today I touched the hand of one such man. It was cold and still. Fingers entwined in rosary beads, as if he fell asleep while praying. I half-expected a twitch of mustache, a dry remark to break the silence of the scene. I held my breath as if I could give him one instead.
Coming home alone as I’ve left a hundred times before, yet feeling different. This time there was an emptiness behind me, a world that moved in different space of time. But then, a scent so sure and strong I couldn’t laugh it off. But laugh I did, as two separate worlds were breached for just an instant and friends touched one last time.
~~~
36/365 BIG SPAN
Word Count: 293
“It’s been a while,” he said. His eyes had what you could only call a twinkle, a sort of exclamation point that put a different gleam on his words.
“Too long,” she said. Not coy, but subtle. Not accusatory and yet it held that tone of wistfulness like when women want a bit more than they think that they deserve. She was like that, steady, sturdy, dependable and self-reliant yet lacking confidence as if those qualities weren’t ever going to be enough.
He looked out of her kitchen window, saw the well-kept yard, the woodpile dwindling low from a long winter that ate through two cords easy. He nodded, turned and told her, “Tomorrow I’ll get some more wood cut and stacked.”
“You don’t need to,” she said, “March is almost half done.” But she knew he’d be out there early morning and she knew she’d be making him breakfast while he did.
She laid out blankets for him on the couch, a pillow from her bed. They sat and talked a long time over coffee at the kitchen table. She caught him up on all the little bits of life that had changed since he’d been gone. He told her very little of the life he’d led as she managed to fill the hole he’d left in her world. Words ran out eventually, what was needed had been said. She washed the cups and turned out the kitchen lights.
“Sleep well,” he said.
“Good night, see you in the morning,” she said as she started towards the bedroom they’d once shared..
“Tess?”
She turned to him, a silhouette in the dim lit hall. He had her heart, always had. She held out her hand and he got up and followed.
~~~
35/365 BY TWO
Word Count: 91
Two trees rooted in the same patch of earth, separated by an expanse of space that are empty of obstacles yet as solid as a stone wall. They reach out to each other, boughs stretching, needles whispering secrets in the wind to one another.
Long days pass, seasons swirling colors of blue sky, spangles of stars, young green grass and woolen blankets of white, yet the trees stand firmly in place. They grow in size and knowledge of the world and of each other.
One day, years in, they will touch.
~~~
34/365 THINGS TO CELEBRATE (Remembering Kevin 1942 – 2011)
Word Count: 173
When good things happen, fifty thousand tiny fairies help me celebrate. They fly like moths around the party lights, their iridescent wings aflame with reflection.
Things to celebrate, the breath of morning air in spring, or on a winter’s day when icy air transitions from exhilarating to nearly painful. When breath comes in visible clouds in the air. When living leaves its mark.
A life that touched me years ago, that stayed within my heart. Laughs that echo just as loud through decades as if current. A friend with eyes that lit up when he smiled, and a mustache that I swear would twitch and curl with mood.
Things to celebrate, friends that translate language into love.
Hollow sounds that echo through the chambers of my heart. Beats that bounce with happiness as well as the latest greatest news of life: a wife, a job, a daughter.
Things to celebrate, the breath of friendships that time and death can never hesitate, never end. Friendships that glow with the reflection of fifty thousand wings.
~~~
33/365 GENTLY ACCUMULATED
Word Count: 215
Layers of years like snow falling in flakes soft as feathers. Layers of people we meet that brush our lives with color. We take a long time to turn from a toddler wondering at the flight of a bird, the pop of a bud into a rose, into an adult that sees things too often in the extremes of black and of white.
Somehow I wanted to think that I saw all the nuances, all the angles and tricks of a situation. Experiences should work to broaden, not narrow one’s focus. The man I thought was the easiest read, the most pleasant, reliable, intelligent, humorous person to show up on the right level of my life was the one I should have married.
Seventeen years, one layering over another like petals with just a slight variation in shade, in shape. Countable, circular, asymmetrically perfect. Like snowflakes that we shake out of our mittens without ever seeing for their dainty quick beauty.
He came back to Denver last week and gave me a call. I wonder what he will look like, be like; I wonder what the years have changed, what have they fine-tuned and deepened.
Is he hopeful–as I am? What will we see if we see with the eyes of a child?
~~~
32/365 SETTLING IN
Word Count: 314
The city was a bouquet of people, not a dozen red roses but an armload of wildflowers picked from the fields. Some loved the taxicab mentality, hop in and out and not knowing who drove you there or who’ll bring you back. Some dart through the streets following its grid like a map, unwilling to cross against lights, try a new shortcut through a parking lot.
Anne was a transplant whose roots found their grip in the north end of the city, where people clung to each other in bunches bound by language and holiday dinners. She brought no traditions of her own but inhaled the aromas that drifted up from the shops that sold strange meats and fish that were brined, pickles redolent of garlic, and cheese that filled one’s senses with pungency, urgency, and places unknown.
She still missed the rolling acres of corn and the nods to the neighbors, even the Sunday routine of services and family all crowded together around a table heavy with roasts and potatoes and vegetables pulled from the garden. It had begun to feel smothering. It was what she thought she had had to escape to exist. Now she felt lonely, the laughter a low hum that filtered through the apartment walls from other families, other lives gathered in concentric circles around her.
One Christmas Day she hung up the phone from greeting her mother, her father, her sisters and brother, an uncle and aunt who’d come hours before dinner just to help out. She watched her small tree blinking its white city-like Christmas on the table, its feet empty of presents. Then she heard a knock on the door.
Anne didn’t know Italian, she’d taken four years of French, but she sang carols along with the family that lived just below her, never minding at how they all laughed at her mangling the words.
~~~
