Talespinning

RECOGNITION
Word Count: 327

It doesn’t look like you and yet it does. I can’t be sure. It’s been a few years.

The way you’re strutting to the table, your hand just lightly at her back, steering her direction, cutting through the sea of white-capped tables, crystal sparks like sun-caught waves.

I remember how we took the yacht out to the Island. How afraid I was to tell you that I wasn’t sure I could swim the distance from where we anchored but I finally did. I wonder if you still keep a boat.

No, that’s not you. You’d be much taller sitting down. Then she’s quite tall so maybe that’s what’s odd about the two of you together. She looks a lot like me. Except she is so very tall.

A bit of gray like hoarfrost on your hair. You keep it shorter now. I wish you’d laugh; I know I’d know for sure if it was you to hear you laugh.

You look my way and hesitate for an instant–do you think it’s me you see? Am I a pleasant ghost laying golden-skinned against the paisley silk sheets of your waterbed? Are you remembering…

No, it’s not you. You would have winked and gotten up and come right over. I’m sitting here alone so there’s no danger of your ego touching ground. But still, the way you pour the wine, hand her the glass and clink it with a smile, it looks so much like you I really wonder.

I wish she’d let me kiss you, then I’d know for sure. We could excuse ourselves for just a moment and though she looks jealously possessive leaning into your shoulder as she is, she’d have to understand. And if it is you, well, we’d catch up politely on each other’s lives. She’d be no more to you than just a name.

And if it’s not, well nothing lost that wasn’t lost a long, long time ago.

BOUNDARIES AND LAWS AND ALL THAT KIND OF SHIT  
Word Count: 293

The hummingbird hones in on the feeder. A bee bumbles its way around the faces of New Guinea Impatience, each hair picking up pollen like a new coat of gold dust. A sewing bug slams into the wall.

That’s me there, at the end; the nearsighted bug, smashing my nose on everything harder than air. Some of us, I have noticed, float free and directly. Some of us flounder to the end of our safety tether and still come away scarred.

I, who don’t read directions, who follow gut instinct, who wander off the main trail blazed by others, should expect to trip up and fall. But that’s where I and the sewing bug differ; I consciously choose. I see the wall and still try to walk through it. I like breaking rules, even those proven by laws of physics. I, after all, am a sinker where others can swim.

This last one got me good. This one time I thought I could do it. There were no hints at impossibilities, no tremulous red blinking lights. I, who hold a certain measure of intelligence balanced by experience and still drawn by curiosity, fell down the rabbit hole without warning at all. Twenty feet down I realized I had fallen. Thirty, I thought to reach out. At fifty I started to panic and at sixty, I hit with a wondrous splat that surprised even me.

So there I was in a puddle of flesh and tidbits of bone and a whole lake of blood seeping out when I realized that this was just part of my learning. This was just part of my way. Yes, I will do it again. And again. And yes, it might be the real death of me yet. Someday.

LOVE LETTERS  
Word Count: 290

There it is, I see it just up ahead, a bright burst of color on a colorless back road that winds and curves too slow for its 35 mph speed limit and too fast for your 426 hp Camaro.

I pull over, just past the bank of flowers and teddy bears and candles and junk. Cautiously get out of the car though traffic at this time of day is random, sparse. I see skid marks which mean you had that instant of knowing. Must have been like a dream where you couldn’t wake up, back off, stop in time. Can’t help it, I look for blood but it’s only the leftover crinkles of red plastic tail-lights catching the sun.

Flowers are drooping, whipped by the wind and rain of the night, the heat of yesterday’s sun. I drop my red roses in the center, like a splash of blood. White patches of letters, words dripping with watered-down ink telling of missing you, loving you; I start to read them, wondering why I didn’t think to write you a final love letter, wondering if I have paper and pen in the car.

Most of these people whose names I can still read I do know. Chas was your very best friend and he survived. I think you’d be happy about that. And Rafael, your little brother; God, how he cried. And Sheryl–who’s Sheryl? She says here she’ll love you forever. I don’t know Sheryl, at least I don’t remember a Sheryl as one of your friends.

I’m sorry we had that argument that broke us apart. Is that why you were driving so fast? I’ll carry that burden forever.

Sheryl. She’ll love you forever. Who, I wonder, is Sheryl?

INDIVIDUAL
Word Count: 309

The day starts with the sun rising in the east, breaking into my room through the blinds on the window, articulating each slat as a separate entity yet part of the whole. I too, am an individual. I too, am tied to mankind by ribbons of faults, cords of needs that run through us all yet keep us separated by sunbeams.

The decisions I made yesterday are going to change the direction of my life. I put much thought into them. I put his car up for sale, paid off the mortgage, took his name off the insurance and credit cards, cancelled his license. I have not gone through his clothes, emptied out drawers. There’s just no immediate reason; I’ve plenty of room for my own things.

The bills are all paid: hospital, insurance, doctors, funeral home for the service and stone. Jeffrey is settled back into his routine of school, Little League, sleepovers. I won’t allow myself to cry during the day, because he wouldn’t be here anyway. The hole that he left in the morning opens for my own shower without waiting, two less pieces of toast and half a pot of coffee. I close my eyes for a moment, imagining his kiss goodbye. Then, only then, are things as they should be, as if nothing at all has changed.

It is at the dinner table that it strikes once again. The empty chair, the missing plate, things that can’t be filled with conversation about Jeffrey’s day and mine alone. I keep the room dark as we watch our regular shows on TV, almost forgetting that he isn’t there. Almost. For some things go over Jeffrey’s head and there’s no one to catch them.

And at night when I go to bed, alone until dreams return me back into a couple. Until the morning separates me again.

DREAM SCHEMES  
Word Count: 260

When I was little I dreamed of being a ballerina, like the ones I saw on TV sometimes before my father grumbled and changed channels to football or baseball or whatever sport was in season when he asked my mother to go get him a beer.

When I was a little older, I asked to take dance lessons. My father bellowed and my mother explained that we simply did not have the money for such frivolities. Yet under the tree every Christmas were things I never told Santa I wanted. Clothes and books about uninteresting things and toys I never would play with.

When I was a junior in high school I picked out a liberal arts college I completely felt would be right. After the din raised and fell like dust into the furniture and covered the carpets like snow, my mother said it was distance, and yes, money too, and what was wrong with the one they’d suggested?

The years stacked up like stairs. To look behind made me dizzy and sad. My days are knife-edgy. I am an accountant who dances numbers around on a screen locked into a cubicle that stands in a line of moveable walls. I sometimes imagine myself dancing on tiptoes, floating around in the pink of my dreams. The years slice into each other and dully cut with an overused blade. My father is gone and my mother is fragile and I am living alone.

I am grown but not fully. Because I grew up still pretending at being a man.

PERSPECTIVE 2
Word Count: 101

Drifting clouds I catch on my fingers, twirl them around and eat them like sweet cotton candy.

I wait for the noon sun to melt roads into chocolate, the special dark kind that I love.

I avoid the green broccoli trees but I do like the rock-candy panes of the windows at Henderman’s Hardware downtown, and if you’re partial to ribbon candy which you often can get only at Christmas or in the old-fashioned stores, Henderman’s striped awnings are quite good.

Life’s what you make it, I found, and roads are too hard to enjoy just as they are.

MOVEMENT
Word Count: 220

The slow morning air brushes my neck like a lover. Or a dog gnawing a bone, which is one and the same if you think about it, reaching the rich core of marrow the goal.

I once had a house built around me. Its walls layered by years and brothers. Its curtains the faded gauze of memories, the carpets the shoulders of family, friends. A flash fire took it all away, faster than I could react, faster than my mind could douse the flames and save the life I had shaped within it.

Life doesn’t come with directions, not even in poorly translated Japanese like the manual that comes with computers and cameras and TVs. You want touch screws not. As if the whole thing could explode–and it could–if the screws touch each other or you. So you reach out, your fingertips like lilypads testing the surface of pond because they don’t know they will float.

A week ago this morning would have been the perfect day. Before the crash and smash of metal, flesh, and bone. Now I watch the tips of aspen–twinkle trees, my mother even in a mind turned mush with old-age dementia called them–the tips of aspen twitter against the blue blue morning sky, and I wish they were his toes.