Talespinning

Word Count: 302

The day flew by so quickly I don’t think I even enjoyed it. I’d waited so long, built such enthusiasm, made such plans, then it was suddenly here and just as suddenly gone. All that excitement and flurry of a storybook wedding is long past, the last notes of the band music faded past the strain of an ear, and all that’s left is a white gown crumpled and stained at the hem, and a man who’s been pronounced as my husband.

The day has become just a series of photos spaced in a narrative form in an album. A one and a half hour video that captures the dressing up of a young woman into a bride and walking her down to the sacrificial altar. The ritual meal and the celebration of the natives in drunken dancing and wild innuendos and jokes that are so out of place at a wedding these days because that “first night” was, come on, not the first time at all.

It was all about the happiest day of my life. I replay it again and again, on the videos, flipping through the album pages like a cartoon movie. It really was the happiest day of my life but I’ve had to relive it through recall. Life following that day went decidedly downward and the whole reason for the event is what I do wish would somehow just go away.

But he won’t.

I’ve since shredded the gown but the man, the groom, the one purpose to the whole thing remains. Much fatter, much lazier, much balder and much more real than I ever had dreamed it would be.

So I spend my days getting through the days and my nights dreaming of weddings, the way weddings and happy-ever-afters I’d been told would be.

Word Count: 299

He was little, probably around five years old but looked younger because he was so small. Thin, bony, his eyes ringed with blue-gray circles that gave him a haunted and haunting look. He never spoke to me but would nod sometimes in response if I saw him outside in his yard. His name, I learned later, was Tommy.

He was one of those kids you see without seeing. Who take up a corner in the memory of your mind that you aren’t really aware of because it’s such a small part of your busy life. When he was killed by a hit and run driver right outside of his house no one saw what had happened. No one knew how long he’d lain out there. No one missed him at home until hours after dinner, sometime after it’d already grown dark.

The police went around asking questions. I was embarrassed to say that I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen him, didn’t know what time or even how he came home from school. The policeman shook his head sadly. No one else knew anything either it seemed. Just the loss of one little boy who was no more than a flick of life in the edges of the neighborhood. If I tried hard, I could almost recall the face of his mother. Couldn’t even do that with his dad.

We all went to the funeral service and to the house afterwards. My wife brought a couple of casseroles and a pie. We found that Tommy had two older sisters, as hollowed and haunted and silent as ghosts.

The family lived there a few years after Tommy was killed. And then sometime in the middle of winter they left.

I don’t know who lives in that house now.

Word Count: 215

The old maple is split from the storm. Like a deer hit by a truck it lies sprawled on the lawn, bleeding its leaves into the ground. I don’t know what to do though it reaches its fingers onto the road and I know that I must somehow cut its grasp and its hopes to snare passing cars.

The night has been wicked and loud. The wind howling at windows. Branches cracking off in the distance under the weight of the rain. Thunder roared in a rumbling roll, upset by the turn of the weather, the flash of the lightening. Perhaps it was more frightened than I.

The morning is silent and bright. The street is a tangle of wires and limbs. The neighbors stay inside their doors. But I must go see, must check out, absorb this new world that has changed as we slept. The birches are bent into sheltering tents. The bushes are flattened and spread. The leftover rain clings to the edges, shining like crystal hung in a mad New Year’s Eve party.

This too, shall pass into normal. The normal has changed into the past. I adapt and follow the weather, adjust to each passing storm. To the loss of a maple that welcomed us into this home years ago.

Word Count: 642

The man who thought outside the box was dying. I was sent to collect his last words.

His skin was the color of the hospital sheets, his hair sparse and needle-straight on the pillow. His lips were parched blue and opened in a tight little “O.” His arms were sticks of bone attached to tubes that led to so many monitors and machines that I wondered if the right combination of buttons and dials would make him spring up and dance like a marionette.

For a long time I sat close to his bed, ready to record anything at all he might say. The long-whistling breaths that he took were paced with such space in between that it kept me on edge, not knowing if each one was his last. So far he’d said little; something about being kind to each other, using one’s talents to better the world. Turning one’s cheek, yet an eye for an eye, all terribly conflicting and senseless.

“It won’t be much longer now,” a kind nurse told me. She stroked his hair gently, using her fingers as comb. She rubbed a sweet-smelling lotion into the dry fragile skin, as if one can bring back summer’s green glory to a dry autumn leaf. She brought me some coffee and offered to sit listening if I needed to walk for a bit.

“No, I can’t leave him,” I said. “They’ll want me to catch every word.”

I was getting weary, having slept little in the last two days, afraid to drift into sleep as the old man took his odd way of thinking into the darkness unheard. Strange that all his life no one would listen but now they were rethinking positions, testing theories and strategies, so determined (they said), so desperate (thought I), to set society back into some place more stable. Someplace in time before, where as a whole, we fell victim to someone’s supposedly wise words and followed like the Pied Piper’s rats.

I caught myself nearly nodding off when a sharp gasp of breath and a low rattling exhalation poked me back to an alertness heavy and swollen to bursting. I pushed myself up from the chair, leaned over the skeleton form on the bed. In the low light I could see his eyes were now open, his breathing so shallow his chest wouldn’t have tipped over a wineglass filled to its brim.

His “O” of a mouth started moving and it struck me that he was trying to form words. I grabbed my laptop, set it down on the bed where I could type with my ear to his lips. Yes, yes; this was what they had wanted, what I’d been patiently waiting to hear. It sounded vaguely familiar but I didn’t have time to reflect. For a dying old man, he started spouting them off in a bubbling whisper and I typed as fast as I could, trying to get everything exactly in the words he was using.

I typed on and on, for near fifteen minutes before he breathed out a last long low breath and did not draw another one in. I felt bad, this poor man ostracized in his youth, sneered at in his manhood, ignored in old age until now. I touched his hand lightly, closed his eyes and noticed his lips were left shut on his words, as if that would indeed be the last time he’d try to tell anyone his basic thoughts and ideas for a better society.

I called in the nurse and bid her goodbye. I read the last thing he’d said, the last thing I’d gotten down from this man who had his last say outside of the box. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods,” I read. “Could work,” I thought as I closed the laptop and left.

Word Count: 373

The dinner was just a disguise with tables and chairs as the props, the restaurant a stage where we dressed up and made small talk and pretended to still love one another.

The waiters were bit players with small walk-ons and stage lefts and they hovered in the wings to wait for their cues.

This was our traditional her-birthday dinner, number sixteen I believe, if you count the two years before we were married. She loves rituals and routines, lives each year around them as others may look to the first frost of late autumn or the bright burst of forsythia shouting “spring!” I used to think it adorable, one of the things I loved best about her, that innocent delight in the Christmas tree swathed in lights and shimmering tinsel. Or the surprise over each little gift on her birthday. The golden-brown Thanksgiving turkey. Each met with such honest amazement as if she’d never seen it before.

Perhaps if there had been children, someone who’d never grow tired of the wonder, someone who would have shared her excitement and glowed with the same level of light.

I just grew weary of trying to keep up with her. With the worries of juggling money and bills and the constant uncertainty and stress in my job, it got harder and harder to smile, to forget or even just relax now and then. She honestly felt above it all, let the struggles wash over and roll back out to sea. She never seemed to get wet while I fought not to drown.

We talk about weather and skate just the surface of politics. When the meal comes we talk about that. Sometimes I think we could live out our lives safely like this, and if not in enjoyment at least in some standard contentment. But there, I just caught a look that tells me it would be impossible to maintain it, to keep the glass bowl of our lives in one piece.

She knows, you see; she knows that I’m thinking of leaving. But in her own way of handling what comes at her, she acts as if nothing is wrong. And that, above all, is the problem that I can’t overcome.

Word Count: 316

When was the last time I saw her? It had to be the week that she left. Just a few days before she boarded the plane that took her away forever.

I was stubborn, I know, and angry and even resentful. A year, she said, just a year and then she’d be back and complete the dream of a life spent together forever. She would write every day, she promised, and call me whenever she could. She didn’t know if there was internet service in the village–I said I doubted they’d even have running water–and she smiled and said she was sure they’d have mail and maybe even a phone.

She never called, she never wrote. The plane that I wouldn’t even watch her get into took off like a bird and fell somewhere just over the jungle. I watched the search party on the TV.

So the last time I saw her I was hiding behind a thick wall I had built that I had expected she’d jump, leap, crawl up to and over to stay on the safe side with me. Instead she grew cloudy and distant before any distance was there. Instead of committing her red lips to memory, her eyes to a space in my mind of their own, I edited all that she was, that she said on that last day to my own brand of despair and selfish longing. I ruined that very last memory with sepia toned thinking and faded the bold and bright colors she offered me there.

I wish I had been more understanding. I wish I had the good sense to hold her tight one last time. Had I known it was really the end, the last time, I would have sent her off with a song that blazed red and yellow with flame. Instead I am left with the ashes of only regret.

Word Count: 313

A single shot jumps the crowd and we all turn to look at the now bloody pulp of our former leader. He is slumped, no longer begging, no longer lying. I step back, look around. A young boy waves a pistol of gold, claiming credit for firing the instant of life moving to death. I look deeper and wonder; unrestrained anger or an act of human kindness amid the turmoil of hatred and victory.

What was he thinking, this man who had access to the world, to hide in his own small town of birth? I found something sad in that, like Saddam Hussein, returning like runaway boys to the safety they’d found in their childhood. A place where they last felt real love.

They have laid him out on a blanket, stripped to the waist, shoeless, knowing he had no place left to go. He is smaller than I thought he was, old and thin. His hair is no mop of manhood but sparse and frazzled and matted with blood. Some of his henchmen lie dead in the room, sprawled and scattered. Some are blindfolded as if this could have kept them from seeing their own inevitable deaths.

Some of the men walk around kicking the bodies, their first chance to show years of resentment, their need to be part of this great event. Some laugh and spit at the bodies. They clap each other on the back, filling themselves up with the moment. Seeing the monster slain, still believing they are much better than him.

I slip out the door into the street where people are shouting and dancing. I look back for a moment, notice the red footprints I leave in the sand. The noise is no different than protest and cries of despair. I feel it thunder and echo inside the hollow man I suddenly feel that I am.