Talespinning

Word Count: 376

Looking back, she thought that she could stickpin her annoyance to the first argument about the shingles for the house. He thought they should go for the 20-year shingles, meaning those guaranteed for 20 years. The 30-year he felt would be a waste of money since they likely would need to sell the house by then, unlikely that both of them would still be alive and healthy enough to maintain a house or have enough to pay for a re-roofing job by then. She suggested the 25-year shingles as a compromise. He finally agreed.

Recently everything went like that. The last refrigerator (though she pointed out that nothing lasted twenty, thirty years anymore). The last stove. The final wallpapering job in the living room. She felt she had to choose so carefully, since she’d be living with the last new carpet she’d ever have. He went from an SUV to a station wagon; the winning point being the difficulty of climbing up into the higher-based SUV when they got older.

She was over her own mid life crisis, getting used to the softness of her skin, the gray hair like frosting through her thick dark hair. And the one-piece bathing suit that still flattered her figure. These were little adjustments, she felt, not final choices. She didn’t want to buy a pot with consideration to its own life cycle. Out of spite once she bought a fragile crystal vase that she set on the edge of the bookcase. He frowned and suggested she move it. She said she didn’t plan on its lasting thirty years.

Everything was bought based on its warranty. Everything, he said, would need to last a certain length of time. She asked whatever would they do if something didn’t. He just grunted because she refused to understand.

Chocolate Almond Coffee in the morning had the ability to make her slow down and reflect. She wondered if perhaps he wasn’t right. That they were on their final twenty, maybe thirty years of living. That everything should be planned around that fact.

That week she withdrew half their savings, flew to California, and lived the life of a free-spirited beachcomber with a man twenty years her junior.

Word Count: 406

She saw it as a dancing pinpoint of light, just out of the corner of her eye. It bowed and swirled and spun as if it were a ballerina with a candle lit to flit across a darkened stage. She saw it at the oddest times, mostly in the night but sometimes in the mid-day sun as well. She’d grown to welcome it, to even love it.

When she was little she told her mother once about it and she was taken to an eye doctor to have it checked. All sorts of fancy tests were done and she remembered how the drops the doctor put into her eyes made her vision so bleary she couldn’t see to walk without being guided. He found nothing. She never mentioned it again and kept it as her secret after that.

It seemed to appear when she was feeling especially joyful. And later, when she was older, exceptionally sad. She learned not to let it distract her if it showed up in the middle of a conversation with someone. She’d watch it for the few seconds it would dance until it disappeared. No one seemed to notice.

It was a comfort to her, a constant in a world that changed around her. Though she made choices that put her in some of those different worlds, like moving across the country east to west to settle in the California seaside. Sometimes she mistook the sun flicking off the rolling waves to be her light.

Then one day it simply stopped appearing. After a week without even the slightest hint of sparkle she started watching for it. Realized that something special might be lost to her forever. It was about the time she started working for a huge software company and rarely saw the daylight because her desk was somewhere in the maze of cubicles created by movable walls.

She never married, but she had a baby who grew into a lovely little girl. The child was her delight and they sang and played games together and she taught her how to play the guitar and to dance.

And while she missed someone to share the moments, to lay in bed with and hold onto through the nights, there was an evening when she saw the light again, for just an instant, as from the audience of parents, she watched her daughter dance just like a ballerina on a stage.

Word Count: 473

It wouldn’t seem like much to anyone else; in fact, her own friends simply laughed at her and called it old timer’s disease. And it was. Beneath the jokes and her own denials, it was.

Mary Anne first noticed when she burned a teapot on the stove. She thanked God she found it in time and told herself she had too much going on at once and must be much more careful. Then a missed doctor’s appointment, even though they’d called the day before to confirm. Then laundry left in the washer for two weeks.

Of course the thought had crossed her mind but she was only fifty-two. She told herself it was the stress of watching Jake die slowly from pancreatic cancer. With the help of home care, she seemed to still be doing so much of the physical work and the emotional strain was surely distracting her from normal daily routines. Simple things like breakfast toast that was second nature seemed to be beyond her comprehension.

One morning she realized she was driving to the post office in her slippers. She noticed when she stepped out of the car. They were pink and fuzzy like angry bunnies on the black pavement. Horrified, she got back in the car and drove home. But she went the wrong way and forgot for a moment where she was or where she was going and why. Her heart was beating, her confusion overwhelming. It came back, all the rational thinking, but she was frighteningly aware of what had happened. She didn’t go out again that day.

Jake had a bad night. Mary Anne helped him as much as she could, making him comfortable, praying. She was relieved when the nurse came in the morning. She made arrangements for twenty-four hour care. In the noisy isolation of the shower, she worried. About Jake, now that it was becoming so real, so inevitable, despite all the preparation and plans. And about herself; not about being alone, not about learning to live without him, that was something that just would have to happen. She worried about losing her mind.

He died a week later. She got through the last gasping breaths as she sat by his bed. The final whispered goodbyes and the last kiss. The service, the paperwork, the removal of the hospital bed, the walker, the portable potty and refilling the spaces they left with the furniture she’d moved out of the way.

And one morning, when she came downstairs and into the kitchen, made coffee and set out two cups and splashed milk into each as she waited, listening to the gurgling of the coffeepot, drawing in a deep breath of the delicious coffee aroma and smiling at the sun streaking through the window, she turned around and called out, “Jake, coffee’s ready!”

Word Count: 315

It wasn’t snowing. It should be snowing on Christmas Eve. Anja didn’t figure in that snow in Alabama was unlikely, all she was hoping for was a Christmas like she had as a child. She needed that. Her own “Christ Child” had been left behind in a hospital bathroom.

The night was silent and still. The stars were out full and studding the sky like pinpricks of golden light. One shone brighter than the rest. She thought it could be the North Star but it could have been a meteorite or space debris, like they were talking about on the news.

Inside her apartment it was cold and quiet. She turned on a lamp and in the dim glow, the room didn’t look as shabby. She turned up the thermostat to sixty-four degrees, the highest the landlord allowed. She took off her coat, hat and mittens and pulled on her bathrobe that she hung on the bathroom door.

She was hungry but all she had available that was quick and heatable in the microwave was packaged dry chicken noodle soup. When it was ready she took the bowl into the tiny living room, covered herself with a lap robe, flicked on the news on the television and started to eat.

There was a house fire in Austin that claimed four lives. A bad accident on I-73 that involved seven cars and possible fatalities. And a baby was found floating in the river two towns away.

The feeling of Christmas drained through her, puddling somewhere beneath her feet on the floor. Baby Jesus, Mother Mary, God Himself all flowed away. In the hollow left behind in her stomach was an ache. In the empty space of her mind, her soul bounced and banged at the furrows like a maze, seeking escape. She opened her eyes and in a blink, it flew out and away.

Word Count: 389

They’ll be sorry, she thinks, as a thousand children before her have said. They should have listened. They should have noticed. But now it’ll be too late.

Jen is fifteen years old. She is pretty in an innocent way. Her eyes are large wafers. Her lips are full pout. Her hair is thick and shiny like melted chocolate. She is tall and thin but shapely. Her recent vegetarian trend has fallen to her love of hamburger and lamb stew and her disgust with the embarrassment of lentils and beans. Her mother is a real estate agent and her father is middle-management in a company that’s managing to squeak by in hard times. She has an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad and wireless connection. She is an A student when she tries; B-minus when she refuses to study. She has three close friends who all hang together and a boyfriend who presses her to have sex.

So everything is just about normal.

Why then, these thoughts of suicide? Why the need for attention? Because she is fifteen and a cross word cuts like a razor. An overlooked invitation is surely a slight. A giggle across the room must be over the dumb sweater her mother bought her. Because she is fifteen.

After a year of going together, Jen has occasional sex with her boyfriend. He is rushed yet spends time on getting her where she should be. But it’s not at all what she expected. She doesn’t find sex to be fun. Something, she thinks, must be wrong with her “that way” but though she’ll hint, she won’t come out and ask anyone.

Nor does she understand why she hates her bedroom, her house, her parents. Maybe “comfortable” is what irks her the most. She thinks, as she reads Poe, Faulkner, Borges, and Blake, that there is something big in life she is missing. She writes. She posts at Facebook, twitter, and at a weblog loaded with photos and good times with friends. And she writes in a weblog where nobody else has the password but her.

That’s where she lays out her frustrations, her plans. Where nobody else can read them, know who she is deep inside.

And somehow, likely just luck of the draw, her timing is wrong–or right, she turns sixteen and moves on.