Talespinning

Word Count: 361

If you look carefully, you can see the tip of his cigarette glow when he inhales. Probably got a live-in girlfriend. Same thing as a wife these days. It lights his face just enough to show that I got the right man.

The cigarettes will kill him eventually. Maybe I can just let him die slowly from that. Say that I watched while he smoked outside his own door. No, I just have to do it myself. Then I’ll be cool with the gang.

Just this one guy, I think. Just this one. It’s always the new member that gets this job. It’s proof you’re going to be loyal. And this gang has plenty of members. Unless it’s a revenge thing that calls for immediate action. Then Skull takes care of it. Skull’s got quite a few bodies under his belt.

The cigarette falls to the ground. I’ve got to go for it now.

“Hey dude,” I say.

He looks startled, as if his girlfriend just caught him smoking. I wonder if she knows or just won’t let him smoke up the walls and the drapes.

“Got a light?” I ask.

“Sure,” he mumbles and pulls a Bic from his hip pocket. He hands it to me and I light up and pretend to inhale.

“Thanks. Nice night,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. Not a talker, this guy. Which is good because I’m not here to be friends. He turns to go up the steps to the building and I stab the knife through the thin shirt, up through the ribs to his heart. It goes in surprisingly easy and slides out the same way.

I wonder, as he gasps, his breathing heaves and then stops, if I’m supposed to take something for proof. But I think word will get around soon enough. He lies still in the edge of the light from the front porch. I back up, turn, and walk quickly away.

I get in my car and am surprised that my breathing is calm and quiet but I want to stop somewhere for coffee before going home. I thought it’d be different. I thought it’d be hard.

Word Count: 186

His knuckles were big purple grapes that matched the trail like spilled drops of wine on her breast.

It was learned behavior on both his part and hers. Both came from families where wives and children were beaten. Neither learned to avoid rather than mimic the family script.

It happens. It happens again and again in the pretty little cape down the street, where the lawn is lush clipped green and runs in straight lines around porches and bushes and gardens where dahlias bloom and the black tongue of driveway where his gray sedan sits smugly next to her overweight blue SUV.

It happens on the second floor of a low long brick tenement where the halls smell of Wednesday’s fried pork chops and Friday night’s meatless spaghetti sauce. The woman, a gray tiny mouse to the man’s burly black bear.

Wherever it is, in the land of ice where it comes from dark days and no electricity and boredom, to the blazing lit motion of Vegas, the impetus deeper than a moment of anger, the reason the actors replay the scene is always family script.

Word Count: 397

It’s taking three hours to get there, constantly upsetting the GPS lady who knew of a dozen different ways.

I took her along in case I got lost on the way, but mainly just for some company on the long lonely drive up. Her “Turn left in .7 miles” and annoyed “Recalculating” when I didn’t follow her lead gave a strange sense of validation to the trip. A source of comfort but more, welcome station stops to my runaway train of thinking. I didn’t want to keep doubleguessing my own decisions. Didn’t want to hear the tearing in half of my mind.

It wasn’t a good thing, this journey I’m taking. As myself, I’d say it’s out and out wrong. He’s married. So am I. We meet whenever we can or can no longer not.

We met at a company party, he works with my husband at Tompkins Aerospace though on different floors. It’s barely a nodding acquaintance as my lover has assured me. I don’t think I could do this at all if it weren’t. His wife has some sort of progressive disease which I try not to think about because it can be used to justify as well as repulse the whole idea of this affair. It does not make me feel better.

We’re careful. We don’t meet locally. We don’t take headless risks. In the back of our minds there’s always that bridge that grounds us to our separate realities. Instead, together we are the river that flows on its own beneath our loftier lives.

I shouldn’t need this, this extra excitement, this surplus man.

We’re not still in the heat of first passion. This overnight get-away–that’s why the three-hour drive–was to reignite what smolders to ashes if not kicked back to life. Funny how that works.

Maybe I need a new man.

“Turn right on Route 77 in 2 miles,” she says. This time I’ll trust her. It’s the same route that Mapquest suggested so maybe she’s right.

My husband and I married young; college sweethearts through all four years.

“Turn right on Route 77 in 1 mile.”

“I’ve never cheated before,” I tell her.

“Turn right on Route 77 in .3 miles,” she insists and I do. Then I pull into a parking lot and upset her again when I stop.

“Recalculating,” she says.

“Me too,” I reply.

Word Count: 348

I knew everything there was to know about Sandy McDonnell. We were best friends after all. Then she dumped me for a new girl that’d transferred from Middleton High and that’s about when her secrets started to leak out.

I’ve been called “passive/aggressive” and I suppose that’s a true image of how I can be. I’m not a fighter, a yeller, a punch-in-the-facer. I’d rather take defeat, rejection, what-have-you, with a silent sense of dignity. Time always gives you a chance to retreat and recover. To reassess and plan your revenge.

Sandy’s boyfriend Darryl was about the seventh person to hear of her pregnancy and it took a whole day before anyone dared tell him. I don’t know what Sandy said when he asked her but evidently he hadn’t been getting anything himself from her yet so it was not her he was concerned much about. They split up almost immediately. Eventually it became obvious she was not pregnant; or at least that she wasn’t pregnant anymore.

Sandy and I went to the same college but her new bff went there too. They were roommates and I was three floors upstairs in a drafty cardboard box of a room with three others who came from somewhere in the Midwest. They had the same strange sense of humor and laughed at things I scratched my head over. I finally ignored them and focused instead back on Sandy. It slipped out, to my Midwestern roommates, about Sandy’s unfortunate problems back in our small hometown. They were naturally aghast and promised to keep all her secrets, but somehow it spread campus-wide. Sandy spent her Saturday nights with her little friend. I spend mine painting the town.

We both married guys local to the college and lived within blocks of each other. Her bff, I later heard and only whispered to others, married another woman back home.

I run into her now and then at the grocery or cleaners and though I do my best to be forgiving and cordial, she never even says hi.

Word Count: 365

She balled up the day like a lunch bag after she’d eaten. It hung on her tongue with the bitter tang of meat gone bad. She was still hungry, the hollow of her stomach grumbling and sore, even as she processed the pain.

The loss of a lover is always the worst at the onset, before the actual leaving has been made, the severing of a learned normality of routine that leaves you naked and lost in the middle of Twelfth Street and Vine. Human traffic flows by, each light blinking a hint of direction. If you have faith you can dodge the oncoming cars.

Sharon was near-sighted and cautious. While people streamed around and near-missed her, she crumpled into herself with each pass. She felt the wind from each passerby ruffling her hair, making her itchy and fearful. Even the smiles seemed like frightening jack-o-lantern grins. When she saw an opening in the crowd, she floated through with a grimness enhanced with a sense of destiny. There was no will left to fight, no desire to protect.

Obviously the inevitable head-on crash was a five-star event. Sharon lay sprawled on the sidewalk, eggs cracked and spreading, apples bouncing, hamburger splattered in a roadkill pose of its own.

He helped her up first, holding onto her hand firmly since she offered no real strength of her own. Together they bobbed in a widening circle, collecting food that was bruised and bloodied and colored the walk. He claimed full responsibility and apologized, something she didn’t quite trust.

He called her a few days later. Without the good sense to refuse, she met him for an after-work dinner, a small place she knew well. A place she felt safe in because she had saved it as a hideaway from her last lover, knowing she’d lose it to him if she didn’t.

Even as Sharon relented, opened herself to the charm and generous nature of this friendship, this about to become a relationship, this man, she prepared herself for the taste of eventual loss. For that time when it ends. When the night rots the bold luscious tastes of the day.

Word Count: 539

Ryan’s dad was coming home from Afghanistan. His mom said that he was a hero. Ryan was five when he left; he was almost seven now. He’d written “I love you!” a hundred times in different colored crayons on the bottom of his mother’s letters she mailed every few days. He’d drawn houses and trees and suns and himself with an upside-down U mouth to show that he missed him. His mother read his dad’s letters home, each with a special note just for Ryan where he promised to play ball, teach him to ride a bicycle, take him fishing and beat him at jacks. Ryan was very excited.

His mom said that his dad had saved the lives of his buddies. His mom said that his father was brave. Then she told him that things would be different, his dad would need time to adjust. Ryan would have to adjust too. Because she told him that his father was very brave and a very good man, and his legs had been blown off by a mine.

Ryan thought about that. His mom tried to explain but she couldn’t say much without crying. Sometimes, when her friend Jake came over for dinner, and they didn’t talk about the war or his dad, she would laugh like it would all be okay. Ryan thought it would be okay too.

Ryan’s dad was one of the last off the plane. He was rolled out in a wheelchair. Ryan’s mother’s hand tightened on his, held on. Ryan looked at the man coming toward them and couldn’t quite understand how he felt inside. There was happiness, yes, but something else, something that made him feel ashamed. But he understood this: he didn’t want the man in the chair to be Daddy. He hoped there had been a mistake.

Ryan’s mother took a few steps up to meet them, the man in the chair who was now unmistakably his father. She leaned down and kissed him, then pulled Ryan close so that he could too. He felt his dad’s arms go around him, pull him forward and kiss the top of his head. Ryan almost fell over but his mom’s hand was still tightly locked onto his.

In school the teacher told the class about Ryan’s father. Ryan blushed and mumbled something but he didn’t remember later even what he said. His friend Joey kept pestering him about what his dad’s legs looked like, where they were cut off, until Ryan shoved him hard and ran away.

Ryan stayed in his room and played video games. Or watched the small TV he had on the dresser. He gobbled down dinners and raced out early each morning to stand and wait for the schoolbus.

Jake never came around anymore and Ryan realized he missed him. He asked his mother about him but she said he’d gone away. Sometimes, she would tear up, and asked him not to mention Jake anymore. Ryan felt that was because it would make his dad angry and that made his realize that his mother wasn’t very happy too. So he tried to be nicer to the man in the chair and sometimes they watched TV together on Saturday night.

Word Count: 446

He asks what I want for my birthday. With my best Miss Universe smile I say, “World peace.” I’m sorry; I can’t always be ready with the right answer.

He is the love of my life. I cannot tell him I want a whole man. I want him to have feeling below his waist. I want him to want me, to make love to me again. I cannot tell him I want sex with a man.

He laughs. He always gets my jokes. And he’s always ready to laugh. It’s one of the things I love best about him. It’s one thing he was able to stop the war from taking away.

I don’t know how he does it. How he’s come to accept and adjust. I don’t have that forgiving resilience. It’s the faith of a child and I am too worn to believe any more.

It was the shock of his coming home without legs overcome by the blessed relief he came back at all. So many of my friends are widows. I felt lucky, I did, and I didn’t mind at all the days spent driving back and forth to the hospital, rehab, and later, the care he required at home. It was easy and I never thought twice about bandages, oozing wounds, scars, moving the bed downstairs to the den, emptying bags of urine and feces, washing his body, helping him learn to do what he could for himself. I was busy, my life full of things I could do to keep him safe, keep him comfortable, simply love him.

“It gets easier with time,” everyone told me. And it did; it did until now. When the children are gone and the guy mowing the lawn is some neighborhood boy who doesn’t come in for a beer between front and backyards. Who expects to be paid in money instead of lasagna and wine.

“No, really,” he says, “what would you like for your birthday this year?” His smile is cut with importance. He must order something online and time is something he has to consider. And have our daughter pick up and send him a card he can give me. No longer last minute, my man. “Anything you really want in particular?” he asks. His face softens with emotion. His eyes show me all that he feels, all that he’s determined to give me that he can.

I sit down beside him and take his hand in mine. These bad times come and go. I accept the guilt and move on, move on to reality and things I believe to be true. Things that transcend. Endure. “Just you, my love. Just you.”