Talespinning

PATRIOTISM
Word Count: 377

The country was on the brink of financial disaster. They insinuated themselves into our lives and stole our livelihoods. They were well educated though many called it sly. It was out of patriotism and honor that we sought to save it. It was so long ago and I’ve blocked it out of my mind for decades. Afraid that if I even thought about it not only would I have gone mad but I might give myself away. Even after all this time, I am still hunted and haunted.

You cannot understand what it was like unless you too had lived through it. We heard only one side of the story. We felt threatened and they played on our fears. We could not get jobs enough to support us yet we could join the service and fired up, feel that we had some control left over our destinies.

They were inhuman, like cattle. The horrendous conditions of the camps were real. We too, their captors, suffered the smells, the dirt, the sounds of constant and continual death. I understand now that anyone, in the extreme deprivations suffered, would be as repulsively benign, as stinking and skeletal and frightening as they themselves knew they must be.

It all went too far, each day bringing new problems. Too many people. Death was the only way. We learned to make a game of it, just to be able to cope and accept what we were being ordered to do. And constantly, the reminders that they had brought it all upon themselves, these people who were nothing like us, barely human. It was the only way to stop what they’d done to our country, to us. It’s nothing new in history. It’s nothing that ever goes away. It festers and grows even now someplace in the world. Instinct is the drive and human nature the response.

I can look back on it all now and still, even in the overwhelming sense of disgust and horror, even in the shame and regret, there resides a small pride, an undying remnant of dedication to duty and the knowledge of a job well done. It was out of patriotism and honor that we sought to save it. We did it to save our country. Ourselves.

BUTTERFLY WINGS
Word Count: 364

I sleep on down pillows and have cobweb sheets on the bed. If it’s cool in the evening I unroll the maple leaf blanket. Sometimes in the winter I may need a quilt of butterfly wings and that’s fine because butterfly wings bring good dreams.

The space you left empty is hollowed out just as you left it. Each morning I wake you up with a cherry-mouthed kiss. I know you’re not there but sometimes I think I can taste the peach of your cheek, feel the stubble of overnight spent in growing a beard.

When we were so young that the hummingbirds served as our playmates, when the robins twirled worms as a rope we could skip–double-dutch was your favorite back then–when we were that young we were joyous and laughed at the rain.

We spent our years running through meadows of sweet spring grass that tickled our bare ankles and bent into a cushion for when we had to make love then and there. We married in gossamer white with wreaths of fresh blossoms entwined in our hair, the sunshine on our faces, and no shoes on our feet.

We were the king and queen of the small plot of land on Oak Street. Our house was a castle of sand blown in from the shoreline with windows of crystalline sugar and a chocolate door. You picked bouquets of wildflowers, field grass and sun and I dried our clothes in the branches of trees with cardinals behaving as clothespins.

I remember your first silver hair and your pointing it out, your face a sad wrinkled frown. You looked so worried and frightened of years creeping away like a ball rolling away from your grasp. I picked up the years and tossed it back into your hands.

We were so happy nearly all of our lives and as soulmates, I speak to you now. And though I still love you with all of my heart, I must–as always–be honest and plain. You see I thought you would keep your last promise and never would leave me. But you left in the soft quiet morning on butterfly wings.

FLASH
Word Count: 460

After two days I’ve learned what the numbers are for. I watch the digital figures light up, flash, go up and go down. I know what is good and what isn’t. Right now, the numbers are all right, each within its plus/minus degree allowed to be labeled “all right.”

He looks even darker against the hospital white. He loves the sun and it paints him bronze, like a god. My god. My own dearly loved broken-right-now god.

A flash of a moment, a flash of a light changing color. A foot too quick on the pedal. Another’s too slow on the brake. A dance of two strangers without choreography, an impromptu ballet that ends in a crescendoed crash of steel and glass splinters. Splintered glass and shattered bone. Just that flash of a moment, and a body is made of a man.

I can’t think of him laying there on the road. Can’t without near losing my mind. He’s barely visible here in the bed. A flash of forehead and eyes. His hands.

It goes on like this day after day. Good days follow bad then swing back. Hope is doled out in IV drips to my worried questions. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I’m learning new terminology for parts of him I’ve touched with sensually explorative fingers. I’ve learned how his organs are working, parts of him I’ve never considered except for his heart and I’ve never been concerned about what volume of blood it’s been pumping through its chambers. How much oxygen his lungs bring to the flow. Now it’s what I check out first thing in the morning, when I should be pouring him coffee and buttering toast.

~

I don’t believe that one can truly understand death without that intimate experience of the moment. Holding your breath and watching a chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and not rise again. Listening, because your eyes are lying. Holding a hand that gradually grows cold and colder. And even when you’ve seen that instant of transition, that moment when your world has changed and loss hollows out your being, you wonder how you missed it. How it all became the past in just a final breath.

I walk outside on legs of fragile reeds. Feet that somehow find their way back into the night. I turn around and look up at the lighted windows and feel as a deserter. As if I cannot leave him there and yet there’s no more I can do with wish or prayer and my fingers twitch with memory at that cold touch of his hand. I turn back towards the reality of parking lots and cars. The sky is black and empty. As am I.

YOU RIDE THE GENTLER MAINE BREEZE
Word Count: 510

We’re heading up the coast of Maine and it’s already strange because for all the times we’ve gone, you’ve been the driver and I would sit beside you handing you a plum, peaches when we went later in the summer.

I’m still not sure that I can do this, set you free upon the wind. The wooden box that holds your ashes sits on the seat, anchored by my purse. There is no music playing. I don’t want to listen to anything except the wind go by. Sometimes I talk to you, pointing out a familiar thing we’ve passed before, laughed about.

It’s taken me a year to make this final trip with you. We’d never talked about what would you do if…? Too young to think about such things, we thought, except in teasing where you’d said I’d end up in the garden. And you, you wanted to be stuffed and on display right in the great room. Sitting in your place on the couch, book in hand, and a beer within easy reach.

We both loved summer weeks up at the shore. We counted days in steamer shells, lobsters eaten on the docks, freshly boiled, torn apart and dipped in butter. Cheese and wine for lunches on the beach. Swimming to that tiny island off the coast and making love, exhausted, wet.

I’ve gotten used to life without your voice, without your touch, without the nights of spooning and the mornings waking to your warm breath on my neck. I miss you more than if I’d lost my soul and yet the days go on in a new semi-normal fashion. But this, our anniversary, your anniversary, was supposed to be the day I finally let go.

I spread a blanket on the long soft grasses on the low cliff overlooking the ocean. The day is bluer than it’s ever been. The air smells sweet of pine mixed with the salt spray crashing down below. It is an almost perfect day. I fill two glasses with wine, slice off a bit of brie.

Memories of other days spent together here flash through my mind. I don’t cry as easily anymore. There is a sweet sadness to it all. It is soft  and gently squeezes my heart instead of shredding it with razors.

I’m putting off the final separation of ourselves. I’m thinking of packing up the basket, blanket, glasses, you, and heading back for home. I carry this last of you, this dust within a box to the edge of the grass and stare out at the ocean. I don’t think I can do it. I want to turn and run and never let you go.

But it would only hold you like a fly trapped in a web. Like I am held to earth when I didn’t think I should go on without you. I uncover the box and hold it out with both hands. The Maine breeze lifts and swirls you in its breath. I feel you kiss my lips, brush my cheek, and fly away.

THE BOX
Word Count: 429

The box is so small, covered in red satin and sealed though the man told me how to break the seal to spread the ashes. He gave me a pamphlet that held the more delicate details regarding choices and wind.

Joseph was a large man, six-two. When I got home I placed it on top of his dresser. It was hard enough to comprehend his being gone. It is harder to think that all that is left of him is contained in this red satin box.

I turned back and carried it out with me to the living room and placed it on the coffee table in front of the couch. I picked it back up and wondered at how little it weighed, how much it weighed for so little. I held it there in my lap, leaned back and closed my eyes, tried to imagine him inside but shot upright when all I could see was his face licked by flames.

That’s what’s been happening, the images that come when I think of him and he comes in his last moments, and he comes in a face other-worldly. When I open my eyes, wake up, turn off the film, I’m left with that last image and try to blink it away.

It sometimes reminds me of his face when he climaxed inside and above me. Except then there wasn’t that fear. It’s the fear and the fire that I’m left with. The fear and the fire and this box.

I took it with me into the kitchen, set it on the table as I made something to eat. A can of soup was the most I could manage. I wondered if this was the right thing to do. If I thought of God, a God, a life after death, the small box I decided means nothing. Joseph’s spirit was what I am missing, Joseph’s mind, his love.

Then when I believed in nothing at all but this life, this as the end of all things, then it hit me that the ashes are all I have left. They became suddenly precious and horrible both.

I’ve decided, many months as a widow now, that I will not trust Joseph to the wind. I’ve set him on the table on his side of the bed where at night, in the dark, he is sleeping, not gone. Where I can whisper into the blackness and not know if he’s there or he’s not. Where sometimes, if I hold my own breath and listen, I can still hear him breath.