Talespinning

Word Count: 463

I’m listening for the howl of the fire alarm horn. For the rush of the trucks, sirens blaring. I am seriously worried I may have started a fire.

It happened yesterday morning, running errands, making the loop through the towns and stopping for gas, groceries, but first stop, the post office uptown. It’s a small tired village where you leave the car running in winter out in the parking lot because you can. On Sunday the mail trucks are lined up like toys on the side. No one is around. I pulled right up to the outside mailbox and left the car door open for the six steps it took to the box. I opened the flap with my right hand, my left holding the mail and a cigarette. I’m not supposed to smoke in the car. I’m not supposed to be smoking at all. That’s why I don’t use the ashtray.

It took only a puff, I was barely out of the driveway and heading down to the market. I sucked and I sucked and realized my cigarette had gone out. And then I saw why; the head was missing. The fully fired and burning head of ashes was gone. And then I knew where it was.

It’s a small town, like I said. Someone might have driven by and might even have known me. I didn’t go back, didn’t dare. What could I do? It would take a while to catch fire, slowly smoldering in that pile of birthday cards, bills, Dear John letters. I imagined the next person stopping, opening the flap, letting in air and adding that needed oxygen. I imagined that giant ball of flame that shoots out like you see in the movies. I imagined the men with their thick hoses filling the mailbox with water. I imagined the aftermath, the crime scene gone over to discover the source of the fire. I imagined my bill for the cable TV, my name clearly as the return address, a small circle, brittle and burnt from where the ashes had dropped.

I didn’t sleep well that night. It’s a small town, the mail isn’t picked up on Sunday. Monday morning I searched the news, bleary-eyed and ready to turn myself in. I had coffee to steady my nerves. I showered and dressed, took a deep breath and got in the car. Drove by twice before I had the courage to pull into the post office lot. Nothing. Nothing. The same old mail box and no snares to catch me back at the scene of the crime.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Got back in my car and lit up a cigarette, ready to make my rounds, listening to the news on the radio and safely stress out.

Word Count: 340

There’s a line of cocaine on my dresser, left over from Saturday night. I walk through the bedroom picking up laundry. I always do laundry on Tuesdays.

Since he left I don’t have to vacuum and dust except maybe when company visits. The last time somebody came by was sometimes around Christmas. Looks like the last time I did laundry might have been around then too. I’m out of underwear and it doesn’t dry quickly when washed in the sink. I think that’s how I got this rash; from damp panties.

Once upon a time I had a husband and baby. Back when I had my own home. Then he left and I lost the baby to a system that just doesn’t understand how hard it can be. He turned the house over to me and I lost it. But I always found dollars for drugs.

I don’t care what you think. I don’t care that you may look down on me, find me weak-willed and wanting. I’ve been beaten down too badly to even look up to see that smirk on your face. You didn’t expect much more of me, did you? You really didn’t think I could make it on my own? Hold onto my job and pay daycare as well? No, I didn’t do coke in the goods times but you can believe whatever you want.

It took a few years to give up completely. To quit fighting, take the easy way out. Somewhere I thought I’d won it all back in a card game but I wasn’t holding all the right cards.

I believe in Jesus. I believe He’s my savior. I believe He’s got some sort of plans He’s not letting me know what they are. I just need to get through this one lifetime. Then I’ll be ready to go.

Meanwhile, I suck up that snow on the dresser. It’s the last good stuff that I got. Things look better for a little while because I don’t know yet that now everything’s gone.

Word Count: 133

It’s a worry I try not to think about. The onset of senility, the threat of dementia. It’s something I don’t want to face.

Yesterday I sent two emails out on something I’d just discovered. Both replies came back that I mentioned that already.

Today I looked around at the cars driving straight through an intersection, trying to make my own way through the traffic but they wouldn’t stop. Where are their stop signs? When did they pull them all out? Horns blared at me as I pulled out in a left turn realizing I was still several intersections away from where I thought I was turning.

It’s something I do have to think about, but something I won’t tell my husband, just yet.

It’s something I need first to discuss with myself.

Word Count: 388

There’s a man who lives in the corner of my eye though I can’t see him clearly. He’s more like the blur of a tear.

I think I know who he is; a man I loved some years ago, when we were young and lived on the top floor of a skinny brownstone in Boston’s outskirts where the smell of the streets was Wednesday’s spaghetti sauce and drunks wrote their names in the snow.

We used to go to the local coffee shop and share a French donut for breakfast because we couldn’t afford more than one. It was a Sunday morning splurge and a time we could argue without drawing our swords. We’d talk about the benefits of socialism and how it could work in a society where the people were educated as finely as we were. Where it wasn’t a sheep herd of takers but a coalition of intellectuals who understood how the system worked best.

Of course it couldn’t but we didn’t accept that for we had the world all figured out. It was easy to find the quirks in our own political machinery. It was easy to blame the powers they wielded for the drunks who lived on the streets they kept watered, for the woman with a different black eye every week, for the Godzilla that crushed the old buildings and the metal monsters that came and built steel and glass teepees that shook in the breeze off the bay. It was easy to blame the powers for our own discontent with each other so we didn’t have to look too deep and see our own flakes of rust.

So we parted without guilt, as friends sworn to love each other forever. As intelligent adults who understood our destinies were elsewhere. But it was never as good, never as ripe as the ruby red tang of a pomegranate, never as achingly imperfect and bold.

He moved with the sun to the cliffs of California. I wrote to him once; he wrote back. He called that first Christmas and the words came like dashes staggering out. And that was the last time we talked.

I don’t know why he’s here now, in the edgeline of vision, as if he couldn’t find his way through the door. Or why I don’t let him back in.

Word Count: 258

I remember I cried when my uncle took us fishing out in the stream through the woods. He joked that we were lost. I was terrified and howled. He didn’t know I would believe him so completely.

And the year I didn’t make the cheerleading squad in high school. For some reason it was important to me at the time. I’ve cried at the loss of parents, family, dear friends; memories are ghosts without the warmth of the living.

And when the planes ripped through the twin towers as if they were fragile as flesh. We all cried. As much for the lives lost as for the terror of reality that seemed more like watching a movie in which we all played a part.

I realized since then that the terrorists hated Americans not only for their power, but for their success. They stabbed at the heart of America. Made it bleed people and dust.

What we’ve learned is not all good. We’ve learned to distrust a certain color of skin, big brown liquid eyes. But we’ve learned this is wrong and do what we can to focus instead on the cause. We’ve learned to hate what forms the heart of America. We’ve learned to resent money and corporations and the wealthy, no matter how they have earned it. We’ve learned to point fingers, fling blame at ourselves. Like children, we believe what they’ve seen as the evil. We have become the terrorists they’ve taught us to be and hate not them, but ourselves.

That makes me cry.

Word Count: 288

I said yes because I was thirty years old and alone in the city. I said yes because he was the first real man that I’d known. Because at thirty you think your life is already half over because sixty, sixty is old.

I didn’t have a big sister or a close, really close friend who might’ve suggested that this wasn’t love. Who might’ve opened the city up for me like a can of sardines. Who might’ve at least raised an eyebrow at getting married to someone I’d met at a bar.

He is nice enough and at the time I said yes he was working full time at a company that looked steady enough through the recession. I still had my job at the agency, making the rent and utilities and peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast and lunch. My timing, as always, was off by so little. My timing was off by so much.

Tomorrow we’re going to be married at City Hall. I’m taking the day off from work and he just won’t go to the bar. He’s gone through whatever money he had saved while he was working but that only lasted two months. He moved in with me  a few weeks ago. Moved in and took over my life.

He is nice enough, I suppose. He makes me laugh. When there’s really so little to laugh about. He says he’s been writing his novel, between sending out resumes. He says so and I need to believe him.

I can’t say no now, it’s too late. But I wish for some kind of miracle. Something that would make it all better. Something that would offer a way out because sixty seems a long way off.