Talespinning

Word Count: 200

Some people build a house in your heart and some people pass through your mind, maybe knocking on doors, sitting in for a long conversation, or streaking naked through the outer edges, leaving starbursts like synapses going off while they’re there.

There are those who huddle on comfortable couches and those who take a piss somewhere in a corner where they don’t think you’ll find it. Others browse the shrubbery you’ve planted and trimmed, leaving dropping to fertilize the ideas.

Then there are lovers, entombed in glass caskets formed from your crystalized tears. Look at the strong sturdy arms that once held you, the curl of hair at the brow, the eyes hidden as they always hid feelings. Each man unchanging through decades of time. Pull one out, look him over. Does he bring a smile to your face? Then it was worth all you put into it, the little or much he gave back.

Life is short and there is no promise made for forever. Fill up your basket with what you can find and nibble each offering, sink your teeth into flavors that please.

And look back on all you’ve experienced; take them with you wherever you go.

Word Count: 359

The summer night is so warm. And quiet. The backyard rolls away into the darkness of black trees. The pool sits like a cupcake, luring me to its cool icing and I crush out my cigarette, leave my coffee cup sitting on the ledge, and walk down the hill, pull down the ladder, take off my robe and slip into the silent invite of the water.

My husband has long been asleep. The neighbors too, it appears. Just a few nightlights glow dimly through windows.

I don’t swim but float on my back up and down the length of the pool, skimming the surface, barely rippling the water, barely making a sound. There’s a loneliness that conflicts with the joy of being alone in a world full of people who don’t know I’m here, bathing in moonlight, naked and absorbing the moment I don’t have to share.

Slipping out of the water, waiting for the warm air to dry the beads of water off my body. There comes that instant when it becomes strange, even to me. When I wonder if anyone’s watching, if someone heard something, a splash, a sigh, and looked out their windows to see what’s different in their night.

I put on my robe though it clings to the still-wet skin. Put up the pool ladder carefully, not wanting to cut the silence with a clang or even a squeak. The house calls me back home, a plump white box in the distance that looks further than the pool did when I stood at the doorstep.

I can’t believe I went down there, tested the waters as if it’d be different from the day time offer of a cool dip to offset the heat of the sun. My secret, a chill that comes not from the cool air on my wet skin, but from an ancient past. One of the thrills I sought in my youth, the near topple from treading the edges, of peeking over the good walls I’d built, of reaching in and taking something to hold in my hand as a secret. My moment I stole from the otherwise sleeping night.

Word Count: 281

I probably could just tell her the truth, about losing my job, not about stealing. She’d be furious at the first. But she’d likely leave me over the second. The holidays are nearly here and I just made a split second decision and slipped the gold bracelet into my pocket and left.

The mall is crowded, my elbows brush against people loaded like freight trucks with packages. I can’t take my hand out of my pocket; my fingers are glued on the gold ringlet with shame.

Safely out of the mall, I sit in my car, my hands on the wheel, half-wanting to go back and return it. That’s when I’d get caught. I can’t look at it, my prize, my booty. There is no joy in my acquisition. Will it feel any better when she opens it up Christmas Day? A box, I need a box. I’ll need to wrap it, to handle it, to set it like the sun shining in a cloud. Cover it with a lid like the night. Wrap it in sparkly paper and with the card, sneak it under the tree.

She’d admired it once when we went shopping. I almost bought it back then. Does that count for something, intent? It cost half of a mortgage payment. Will a warm living room take the chill out of my heart?

Oh, I’ll tell her. After Christmas, before the New Year. I’m usually home that week since my–the–company holds a shutdown. I’ll pick a good time. She’ll be wearing the gold bracelet. She’ll get that scared look on her face, insist on returning the bracelet.

And I’ll have to tell her, I can’t.

Word Count: 683

When I think of my father I think of him tucking me into bed, in the old house, an apartment above my grandfather, his father. A hard candy slipped between lips in a goodnight kiss even as the plastic wrapper crinkles in his hand. Don’t tell your mother, he says.

Just like his father. Sssh!, he’d say, taking me into the bedroom he shared with my grandmother. I’d stand in the dim light of the oak-heavy-furnitured room while he opened a top dresser drawer, took something out, slid it into my hand which I dutifully stuck in my pocket as I followed him out. My fingers could make out the size of a quarter, enough to buy candy during recess at school. Don’t tell your father, he’d say.

Being awakened on Friday nights at 11:30 for pizzas, when he’d get home from the night shift, every fifth and sixth week of his three, two-week revolving shift schedule at the factory.

Spending Saturdays on the New Haven green while my mother and oldest sister shopped downtown. Feeding the pigeons, playing with my other sister while my father sat on the bench accepting compliments from strangers on his little girls. Sometimes, at Christmas especially, waiting in the car after dark for the shoppers to return, playing I see something red, or naming the cars, make and model, as they drove by. He taught me to easily guess the Fords by their huge round headlights, the Chevys, the Plymouths, the “rocks in the head” Oldsmobiles like ours.

He’d read stories from Golden books while I sat in his lap in the rocker. He’d wrap flannel imbued with Vicks Vaporub around a sore throat when I was sick.

He taught me to trim out paint around windows when I was ten. To fix plumbing and electrical wiring when I was a bit older. He believed in burning the lawn and the bottom lot every spring, to get rid of dead grass. He and I, watching the fires spread in circles, ready with rakes. It sometimes got away on us and we could depend on my mother, near hysterical and threatening, to finally call out the fire department for help.

He’d get poison ivy just like me, the two of us awash in calamine lotion for days. He’d disappear just before some young dude showed up to take me out on a date.
His reputation alone as a good honest worker as factory foreman got each one of us called into work in the offices without even having an interview. He never minded the hooting and teasing down in the factory when my sisters or I brought him goodies from the bakery, or an ice cream on the night shift. He grinned and his eyes would light up.

He was locked in the garage once, for hours because we didn’t hear him when he was fixing the spring on the garage door. He came quietly in when we got him for lunch, went upstairs, sat down on the bed. Didn’t want to go to the hospital but we insisted where in the emergency room, they set his broken radius and ulna.

Years later, when I told them I was taking an apartment with a girl that I worked with, my mom made him talk to me about leaving home. I felt so bad they didn’t quite understand it. I almost backed out.

He kept horehounds in the glove compartment of his car. I used to get him a bag of them for Christmas for years later. He’d get me a pomegranate for my birthday even after I was married and my husband took over the gesture.

He was so proud when I went back to college. It hurt him to know that back then, he didn’t have the money to send me. There’s so much he kept inside that I found out years later. I can’t think of all that he did without missing him, tearing up again and again at the loss.

But when I smell butterscotch or licorice, I can’t help but smile.

Word Count: 241

I’ve walked through the bright crunch of autumn, kicking up leaves in a swirl. I’ve felt the warm earth pierced by spring growth. I’ve lain on the soft green grass and watched clouds puff their way across summer skies.

Now I slog through the snow, deep and cold at my ankles. Each trudging step cuts the smooth glistening surface; right, left, right, left. The trees around me are weighted by layers of white frosting, their tips poking out like chocolate curls. There is a quiet beauty about it, as if life has been muffled by soft fluffy blankets, suspended in sleep.

There were times when I ran freely, oblivious to rain, wind, and thunder. With my shadow a billowing parachute alongside. When I stood fearlessly watching as the sky sent down great cracks of lightning and lit the horizon with silhouette trees, angles of houses, gray angry clouds. Then there were times where the days laughed and spilled like a stream over rocks split with mica, wearing them down, polishing their depth, even as they lay still in their beds.

I stop, look ahead to the west where the sun is a beacon to travelers. Behind, to the east, where my progress is evident, where my footprints are deep in the snow. I am weary yet fascinated to see where they’ve been, staggering in a path, tethering me to a past that stretches into this moment before they all melt away.