Talespinning

This project started for me on January 1st, 2011, with the commitment of one flash fiction, poem, or idiotic rant each day. I’ve transferred those 140 stories to this weblog under posts made for each month.

For Stories #141 through #240, I will be posting the stories individually to conform to this year’s 100 Days Project. In 2008, I wrote a hypertext fiction each day for the project and last year, produced and image and a flash fiction each day throughout the summer.

The 100 Project is a collaboration of artists committed to their work, and a link to the centralized unit where all individual artists and writers are linked is 100 Days 2011.

This writing project started out in January using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, with the intent of writing daily throughout the days of the year. Please note that each month’s work here has a separate page (links are in the right sidebar).

NOTE: Due to demands on time by a number of projects and a now crawling baby, Carianne has taken a hiatus from her daily drawings. I hope to continue with the flash fiction pieces and look to other sources of inspiration!

NOTE #2: For Stories #141 through #240, I will be posting the stories individually to conform to this year’s 100 Days Project.

~~~

 

140/365  JUST PART OF THE DAILY NEWS
Word Count: 426

They surrounded us like buzzards, the journalists so eager to hear the young lions roar. We, with blood still staining our muzzles, stood there in shock, angry at what we couldn’t comprehend. They loved it because otherwise, without validation of the victim, it was just another teenage suicide.

We separated ourselves by innuendoes and half-truths into friends and bullies. We’d watch ourselves on the news that night. Yeah, he was a good kid, kinda quiet, kept to himself, didn’t bother anybody. He was a band member. Tuba, I think. Or maybe he carried a flag.

Which meant, that’s how kids were telling each other who he was; the buzz going around while each tried to place him in a classroom a couple seats over, up front of the school bus. At a table alone in the cafeteria.

Me too; I said the same things everyone else said. After all, someone must’ve known him, known who he was underneath the acne and glasses. Had he ever been to the prom or even a dance? One girl told the television reporter that they’d dated for a while. I doubt that they had.

So for a few days he’s the big man on campus. His name floated around like a frisbee. He would be pleased. Some kid whose father was a cop at the scene said his face was bloated and blue, his eyes staring bug-eyed, his bare feet swinging just “this high” off the floor. Some said his mother had found him. Some said it was his twelve year-old sister. I tried to imagine their morning. How hell breaks loose before the pop-tarts are done.

We looked for our own faces caught in the photographs, our words quoted in newspaper text. It made it more real, our names linked with his under the headline. We sought out each other at the service, clustered together in groups in which he himself would not have been a part. Shushed the giggles over some dumb joke because even if we didn’t really know him, we knew how to behave at his funeral.

And as the faintest of memories, the least bit of knowledge, the barely remembered face in the crowd became strong with embellishment, the newly created vignettes became our relief. We held the new truths close to our minds, comfortable with how we believed we had known him. Shock soon overwhelmed by our own rewritten narratives of his life. Of our own.

Before too many days he was forgotten again. And somehow, that didn’t seem right.

~~~

 

139/365  CHANGE
Word Count: 317

The sound of the hummingbird’s wings is more than I could bear. I swat around wildly above my head. It takes off in a trailing hum, which was all that I wanted. Then it comes back. It hangs in the air as if to chastise, as if I should have known better. I add the tiny body of guilt to my burden.

Who am I? I’m no longer a mother, I’m no longer a wife and I hate the word widow. I’m no longer twenty-four years old and I don’t really remember who I was then.

Mother of a dead child. There’s no word for it. There’s no sign to hang out that would warn away the innocent inquiry. Yes, but he died. And with that, you’ve hurt a kind but curious stranger. You watch the eyes widen, the face crumple; hear the stumbling for words that no matter how well strung together, simply come down to I’m so sorry.

These are my porch stairs. This is my backyard. My, mine, singular now; words that taste as bitter as aspirin on my tongue. Yet it all looks the same, even as spring brings out the pink cherry blossoms, the tight yellow-green lilac leaves. I would have been less surprised if the trees had remained in their skeletal gray through summer and fall into next winter.

I hear the whirring whizzing wings and I spot it, the female this time. She circles again and lands on the feeder. She looks over her shoulder and watches me, takes a sip of the nectar, turns back and watches. Buzzes away. The feeder is left swinging from her takeoff. It looks low on sugar syrup and I stand up and reach to pull it off its hook and bring it into the house.

I’m the lady who fills up the feeder for the hummingbirds. That’s a start, I guess.

 

~~~

 

138/365  RISING UP IN THE WORLD
Word Count: 340

It was the mother of all job interviews, for something I really wanted and it was going to be tough getting in. I was floored that I even got this far in the process, a live interview with not the manager of the Creative Marketing department, but at least Human Resources.

I left the house an hour early and got a parking place close to the front of the building. I didn’t wrinkle my jacket.

I loved the tons of glass and steel amid dogwoods and blooming crabapple trees in the parking lot. The entryway looked like an old English garden. Roses climbed over the trellis above the greyed-glass front doors. It was one world dropped into another. My kind of design.

The lobby was huge and archaic, rather like I’d imagine an old New York City hotel. It was empty. I checked the directory before I got into the elevator and pressed the button for the eighty-eighth floor. The doors swooshed closed behind me.

Again, I was all alone in the elevator yet it stopped at every floor. The doors opened, no one got on, the doors closed. I got a peek at the lobby area of each floor in those few seconds while it stood open. Each floor, to my delight, was excitingly different, as if a united nations of decorators couldn’t agree. I thought of the Tower of Babel and wondered if this was the outcome of some form of global communication.

All the way it went, styles, countries, sliding in and out of my view like a Powerpoint presentation. I looked at the lighted buttons over the doors as they lit up with a ping! and shut off, one by one in the long row of numbers. It was now on eighty-three.

China, I guessed; then Ireland, a few I didn’t recognize, a jungle, and I straightened my tie, patted my hair as eighty-eight pinged its light. The doors slid open and I stepped out. There was nothing there to catch my fall.

 

~~~

 

137/365  YOU LEARN
Word Count: 389

I didn’t know that when you stick a fork in a hotdog it bleeds. I just never noticed. Or that you can burn boiled eggs in a pot. And the pot. I mean, the pot can burn too. So much I don’t know. I have to look around me, beyond me, and I don’t mean the internet because that’s something I can’t spend so much time on anymore. I was chatting on Facebook when the eggs burned.

It was such a rush, you know? The first time you use makeup that isn’t swiped from your older sister. The first time a boy sly as a snake gets his hand under your shirt. Then unsnaps the back of your bra and stings your nipples like a wasp caught inside. I only let Foxy do it at first. Then he dumped me because I was such a prude and wouldn’t let him get no farther than touching though I did let him put his hand into my pants. I heard later that he told all his buddies and word spread like shit on a hot July day.

You learn. It’s all part of growing up I suppose.

My mama told me nothing if she didn’t tell me to keep myself safe. Not to make the same dumb mistakes she made. She didn’t tell me much more than that. She sure didn’t teach me to cook ‘cause she did it all and left it in the fridge for us, or give us money for a burger and fries. She did the best she can is what I’m saying. She had to do it all herself with nobody to help her. She’s thirty-six and she’s old. I don’t want to be that.

And I won’t. Because I’m smarter. She never finished high school and I got a year and a half of community college behind me. I know I’m pushing greasy plates now but that’s just till I get a real job. Maybe as a computer programmer or data entry clerk. That pays pretty good. And I’ll put extra time in at the diner now so I could finish the last semester maybe next year.

So now I know that hot dogs bleed and I’m learning to cook. But good Lord, how am I ever going to take care of a baby?

 

~~~

 

136/365  THE PEOPLE WHO STOP AT MOTELS
Word Count: 615

The girl is thin, pale, wet from the rain. Her blondish hair hangs like knives. She looks twelve and he hopes she’s at least sixteen.

“You alone?” he asks.

She nods, oddly unaware of any danger this information could bring. “How much?” she asks. Her voice is expectedly scrawny, a whisper held together with vowels.

“One night, a single, twenty-five paid up front.”

He watches her pull out a pink plastic wallet, take out two tens and a five. She puts the wallet back in her pocket before she holds the bills out to him from one end. He takes the money and sticks it in a drawer underneath the counter, closes and locks it, even though he’d already emptied it for the night. He turns and reaches for a room key from the board behind him and slaps it down on the counter.

“Number twenty-three. Midway down on your right,” he says, and gestures vaguely to his right because he’s not sure she’s listening. Something about her makes him uncomfortable, more so than most of the gravelly bikers who come in four to a room with a case of beer and a woman with breasts spilling out of black leather.

She turns and he notices how skinny she really is. Her legs like denim fence posts, the seat of her jeans wrinkled into a fold. Small wings of shoulder bones sprout beneath a worn sweater that drapes unevenly on her back. She gets in her car and backs out slowly, her headlights flash into the office where he still stands. He walks around the desk and stops at the doorway, watches her park in front of the room. She gets out and locks her car door, walks to the room with a small gym bag. He watches until he sees the door to her room close and the curtain-dulled light spray onto the narrow walkway from the front window.

He undresses, lays heavily down on a bed in a room off the office, part of a small apartment made by breaking through walls of two motel rooms. He lies there awake, tired with beer yet alert to the sounds of the highway off in the distance. His thoughts zoom through his brain like the traffic. His hands clench the sheets he’s pulled over his head. Still, the girl walks through. He wonders where she came from. He wonders if she’s asleep. He misses his latest girlfriend who left him just over a month ago. Karen was sweet, young and exciting. Too much for him unless he was willing to get married again and he wasn’t. He didn’t trust women enough anymore. But he missed them. His hands crept down to his crotch.

The girl in Room 23 sat on the bed holding her phone in both hands. She had washed her face and hands but didn’t change clothes, just exchanged the sweater for a pullover sweatshirt. She touched the numbers lightly, not pressing them enough to connect. The same eleven numbers over and over again. Then she started to cry.

Leave it behind, she told herself. You’re done with it now. Move on. But there were things she’d not left, but lost along with the leaving. She’d never been this far away on her own before. Never gone without somebody knowing. She held the phone to her chest, held it like it contained her best friend Addie, her little sister Jane, and her ma. Then she put it on the nightstand and shut off the light. Slipped under the sheets, surprised at the sweet smell of the linen. She thought of the man at the desk. He had real nice eyes.

 

~~~

 

135/365  IN THE LIGHT OF A METEOR SHOWER
Word Count: 487

Thalia took a lounge lawn chair, a blanket and the pillow she used when her back bothered her, a six-pack of diet cola, a thermos of hot coffee, two sandwiches, an apple and a pear, a bag of chips and another of cheese-doodles, and headed out for the hills atop the sprawling city. On her way, she stopped and bought half a dozen mixed donuts because they were cheaper that way.

No one else was around. She parked at a lesser-known spot that hadn’t the spectacular view of the city, but was so open to the wide expanse of sky that she knew it’d be perfect. She was going to watch the meteor shower that would go on through most of the night. She was hoping to catch a celestial fragment of meteor in her hair.

Once, a long time ago when she was just little, her mother had taken her outside in the back yard and holding her up, pointed to the sky saying, “See! Did you see that one?” Thalia would say, “Where?” What, Mommy?” always a second behind, a second too late. Her mother had said that if you catch a meteor spark you will marry a wonderful, handsome and rich man, and have two beautiful children. She wondered if that’s how her parents had come together. She’d forgotten that she was an only child.

At some point Thalia understood that her mother and father were not happy.  He had seasonal work according to layoffs and she took in sewing to help. They ate soup that her mother made from whatever she found in the refrigerator, thinking herself quite creative. He complained that he deserved better than that. They argued a lot; always on Friday and Saturday nights. Sunday was a quiet truce of avoidance. Monday through Thursday flew by like crows in between.

Her father died when Thalia was twelve and things got better. At least for a few years. When her mother got sick it got worse and better again when she died. Thalia stayed in the apartment by herself, staying one step above making the rent. She figured she’d gotten herself as far as herself could go but it was, if not stellar, at least liveable. She was on the cusp of her thirty-sixth birthday and felt her insides shriveling, getting ready to die.

Last Monday her cat was hit by a car. She found it dead on the sidewalk in front of her building where the kids had kicked it down the street. Thalia took it as a sign that things were about to get better, another dot on the up and down and up again map of her life. By the night of the meteor shower she was openly hopeful.

She settled into the chair, opened a soda and unwrapped one of the sandwiches. She took a bite and looked eagerly up at the sky.

 

~~~

 

134/365  EARS THAT HEAR LAUGHTER AND TEARS
Word Count: 318

The grass grew last night. I heard it. Not very loud, just enough to wake me up when some young blades got into discussion of Joyce’s Ulysses. You know how those things escalate. Towards dawn, it lulled into occasional whispers from the few who couldn’t let go of the night. Lovers, I’m sure, intent on catching the last drop of their devotion on their tongue.

The morning light shook me awake before I was ready to taste it. Usually it flavors of sweet butter. This morning it held the tang of lemony tea, a leftover from the green tinge of the fading full moon.

I dressed for the rain though it was sunny on the New England coast. It was raining hard in New Zealand and the clouds tend to rise like steam from the south, quickly, scattering like birds to converge and spread again in a dance to honor the wind. My pink plastic raincoat can make even a thunderstorm smile. Today it must do more, make it laugh.

The day wears like corduroy, in wide wales of verdant plush tramped down into paths. Each trail starts parallel, veering a minus degree that stretches out in a fan that gets everything thought of, finished. A day of listmaking. A day of striking-through with completion.

Just one widget held up the flow like a petulant rock in a stream, forcing division of purpose, regaining itself like old friends with too little years between them. One sourpussed recalcitrant cajoled with pretty words wound into a tight ball of story.

I write for under a penny, I write for satisfaction the purest weight of gold. I empty the sights, scents and voices I’ve gathered today onto the page like a puzzle that squizzles itself into form.

Then, when I’ve done with the day in its fullness, I go back into the night and fall asleep listening to the grass.

 

~~~

 

133/365  THE RAVEN
Word Count: 469

In Westport they have ravens, not crows, even in a downward economy. I saw one once on a sea of lush lawn behind wrought iron fencing. He was just sitting there as if his tree had been sucked into the ground. Ravens don’t sit on the ground, they swim the sky in circles and land on the branch of tall trees to look down and laugh at us. Because they know something about life that we don’t believe in. Something only Edgar understood.

It was Friday the 13th and I wanted to believe in the dark side. I mean, I already did, but I wanted to make it work to my advantage. Learn the tricks. Get the good vibes flowing. Maybe live in my own mansion in Westport.

I wove around the roads lined with dogwoods and gated driveways, picking a home from the houses that peek out like shy children between spaces in bushes to tease those like me who haven’t achieved our place yet in high society living. I was looking for natural stone but a brick one would do. As long as it had pillars in front and a circular drive. I love the circular drives.

One house caught my eye and to be honest, it was more because of the lawn than anything else. Huge house, but a bit Gothic. Very un-Martha. The grass looked like it hadn’t been freshly mowed and this was on a Friday! I turned around and went back, slowed to a stop, and that’s when I spotted a big fat old raven sitting atop a wide-open gate. Do you believe it? My luck took its turn right there.

No one answered the doorbell so I walked around the side to the back. The raven  swooped ahead and I followed. He settled atop the swung-open screen door to the back garden which really needed some good weeding and mulch. I knocked at the inner door and waited. It opened at a twist of the knob. I walked in.

Well it was love at first sight. It was evidently abandoned some months back. I found bills piled up on a desk, the latest hadn’t even been opened. The electricity was off but I brought in candles and an emergency generator, and I got wi-fi off the neighbors who were clearly up on technology if clueless about Neighborhood Watch.

So I spend most of my time writing and the house has inspired me to greater depths of mankind and his nature. I swear I feel Poe himself looking over my shoulder in glee. Every Friday the 13th I celebrate to the great fortune I’ve been led into, and raise a glass of wine to the raven who unfortunately got hit by a car a week after I moved in.

 

~~~

 

132/365  ON AGEING
Word Count: 300

When my family got together for holidays, my dad would pick up Grandma Pickens from the home and bring her over for the day. She had a serious case of the forgets and we’d give her a J.C. Penney catalog to look through all day until it was time to return her. She’d point to a page and pause in wonder. As the Alzheimer’s got worse, we found the most likely page to hold her attention was men’s underwear.

When I get old and out of my mind, I think I’d be happy watching The Pirates of the Caribbean series popped into the DVD player right after breakfast each day just replayed until I drifted out into sleep each night. I would hope I wouldn’t be caught masturbating to Johnny Depp but without a shred of synapses to connect to the appropriate embarrassment response in my brain, it really won’t matter I suppose.

It’s kind of neat to project into the future. Working with tools we only have now, making up all sort of fantastical things we’ll have twenty, forty years hence. Maybe I’ll be in a stand-up bed like in the frozen food department where the door frosts impatiently while you look for something that stirs your appetite. Or maybe I’ll be in a capsule, a gleaming stainless steel bullet-coffin pointed directly to outer space. Maybe the mortuary will be a spaceship that goes up once a week and shoots us all out to float among the stars. Maybe I’ll twinkle for eternity and they’ll have telescopes so powerful to read the names engraved along the sides.

Or maybe I’ll just take another aspirin for this arthritis kicking up in my fingers and the stiff back from gardening all day and figure what to make for dinner.

 

~~~

 

131/365  METAPHORICAL LOVE
Word Count: 220

She poked a hole into the clouds and pulled out a dollop of sky that when she licked her finger, found it tasted like an ice-blue popsicle. She grabbed a few fistfuls and licked the lump clean before it melted though much had dripped down her forearm like a vein and so her skin looked inside-out.

She colored her lips with lilac buds, deep purple, like the juice of young grapes. Shadowed her eyelids with the soft mysterious green leaves to match the green lawn of her dress. It was her favorite color since always.

She brushed her hair with the leftover morning sunbeams, streaking golden highlights like ribbons running through the long waves.

It was a special Spring day, one to mark with little bits of royal embellishment. She was meeting her undeclared lover and would sing out her heart, melting her fragile cover like a late April snow.

She saw him off in the distance, walking toward her like the sun only something wasn’t quite right. When he was closer, almost within reach she could see that the brightness was lightning, the thunderstorm cloud of his hair. When he put out his arms she hesitated then ran into the welcoming, threatening danger of his heart and in the sudden downpour of rain, she washed quickly away.

 

~~~

 

130/365  THE MEMORY BOX
Word Count: 258

She traced the script across the page with the lightest touch of her fingertips. It was the closest he had been in several years. She sniffed the paper, inhaling the scent of him. Memories spilled out and she wiped away a tear that had rushed to blur the sharp edges of reality.

He once belonged to her, though not exclusively; she knew that now. She wondered if the children’s names she’d gathered in sterling charms would have mimicked his hazely-green eyes, his penchant for black cherries out of season. She didn’t mind her dreams made out of wisps of clouds as long as she could take them out and play with them, hold them against her heart, fall asleep gripping them in her hand just as they held onto her conscious mind, as long as she could put them safely back again and know they wouldn’t ever melt away.

As she folded the page to tuck it back inside the wooden box she kept atop her dresser for her sacred things, the times and people she needed to hold within, she cut her finger on the edge. The pain was knifeblade-sharp and mellowed only slightly into prickly as she sucked the cut in comfort, the salt-taste of blood, thick with memory on her tongue. The paper lay on the floor, dropped in the surprise, a paratrooper jumped from a plane. It slowly stretched, unfolding into a shattered bird. She picked it up, opened the lid of the wooden box and lay it right on top.

 

~~~

 

129/365  COPING THE HARD WAY
Word Count: 668

It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. The body, evidently of a man, was standing legs spread apart, bent over, his hands outstretched for balance in a three dimensional A-frame, his head buried up to the middle of his neck in the backyard of his home.

“What’ve we got?” I asked a tall, skinny policeman who seemed to be in control of the scene.

“Looks like a homicide,” he said, walking me over to the body. “The wife called it in about a half hour ago. Said she couldn’t find him when he didn’t come down for breakfast. Thought he went out running. Then came the dawn, literally, and she looks out the kitchen window over the sink and there he was.”

I examined the man. It certainly was odd. I wasn’t sure if he was dead in the act of sticking his head in or trying to pull it out. He looked sort of relaxed but determined about the whole thing. Insistent even. He was dressed in grey sweats so the wife was probably right about him out running.

The on-duty officer brought me inside and introduced me to a woman who sat sniffling on a couch in the living room.

“Ma’am, sorry about your husband. I’m Detective O’Day and I’ll need to ask you some questions.”

“I’ve told them everything I know,” she said. Her pretty brown eyes were puffy with crying. Her face was bare of makeup. Right then, I knew she was telling the truth.

“When’s the last time you saw him alive?” I asked.

“Around eleven last night. We shut off the light to go to sleep. Detective, can’t you please take him out of the backyard?”

“Sorry, ma’am, it’s a homicide investigation. The coroner’s on his way. You watch CSI?”

She started to well up again, shivered a little, hugged her arms across her chest. I excused myself and went to the policeman. “Find a sheet, cover him up, will you? Just out of respect.” I waited until my order had been carried out, not sure how it would make her feel better. Her husband now looked like a teepee. “Get the dog out of there,” I said to a young uniformed cop, likely a rookie, fresh-faced and just a bit green.

I went back to the living room and sat in a chair across from the wife, now a widow. “Any children?” I asked. She shook her head. I sighed with relief. It was bad enough to keep a dog away from the scene. A six year-old kid intent on camping would be impossible.

I went through the usual questions, his job, his friends, any enemies. It didn’t give me much for motive or leads. I felt bad for her. They’d only been married five years and it looked like she was pretty broken up. I ran out of questions and for a few minutes we just sat there, both staring at the coffee table, now littered with used tissues. She took a deep breath and exhaled in a long lonely sound.

“He was never one to make enemies,” she said quietly. “He’d go way out of his way to avoid arguments. He didn’t even like going out much anymore. Hated the politics and opinions about every little thing going on in the world.”

“Can’t blame him,” I comforted. “Sometimes it’s just best to tune out.”

Something in her struck like a match. She stiffened, looked me directly in the eye. Started breathing faster as if she’d just been given the answer.

“Ma’am?”

“He did that!” she said. She was excited. “He avoided any problems, all confrontations. He did that!” Then she let out a wail that just about broke my heart.

I finished up my notes, feeling sorrier for her now more than ever. I went out to the cop-in-charge, who told me that the coroner had only confirmed what I’d just concluded. “Suicide,” he said, and I nodded and signed the report.

 

~~~

 

128/365  ANOTHER MOTHER’S DAY
Word Count: 308

“No, thank you,” I said to a free carnation from the schoolgirls standing outside the supermarket. Several long tables were covered with cakes, pies, cookies, decorated in some way for Mother’s Day marketing.

“For your own mom, then,” the girl persisted.

“No, thank you,” I said. My mother was dead just three days. It’s hard getting used to, making adjustments; I didn’t think it would be so emotional. I’d had years of acceptance of the evil that is Alzheimer’s yet it still came like a punch to the chest, knocking my heart off its beat.

Isn’t it odd that we give up on life when we see the end in sight? You’d think that we’d reach, dig, pull, push, grab with the tentacles of an octopus to hold onto the last bit of living that comes before dying. We don’t, though; we adapt, get lazy with waiting. We forget all the questions we should have asked. Especially when faced with only one-half of a memory, when instead we should share it as if it were new.

Mother’s Day came and went without celebration. Without buying a Mother’s Day card. Without a visit where I get to tell her I’m her daughter, her child and watch her face light up for a moment with the delight that tells me she’s glad if what I’m telling her is true. Some things break the heart when forgotten, I remember that blank look on her face, her asking the nurse to have “that lady” stay with her, my sorrow at her calling my sister her “friend.”

And yet, that instant when I told her that I was one of her babies, her little girl, that smile that must have been the same one she had at my birth.

That, that is what I remember and what I will miss the most.

 

~~~

 

127/365  BIRTHDAY WISHES
Word Count: 187

She picked up the phone a dozen times and put it back again. What would she say? It’d been six years since they’d spoken, ending with a persimmon taste on the tongue. Birthdays should be happy times. Should be forgiving times. Somehow “just called to wish you a happy birthday” turned to ashes in the air each time she practiced the words.

It’d been a fight that stirred from resentful embers. The flames they’d doused with compromise that came from man’s uninterruptible hope burst forth in a backdraft. It left them both charred and smoldering.

A fight over money. Inheritance. Should never have happened in this family of not needing. It happens to other families, not theirs. It should be an easy thing to bridge, even now. Surely her sister would see where things went wrong. Surely they could just forget and go on. “Just called to wish you a happy birthday,” sounded like a good start to the rebuilding of family.

She picked up the phone again. The scent of smoke, the hot curl of flame all came back and she put the phone back down.

 

~~~

 

126/365   FEAR
Word Count: 122

I fear the threat of a mid-spring frost. This year the fruit trees are loaded with blossoms that will die without birthing fruit.

I fear the uninvited hot rays of the sun before it’s time, curling the new tender leaves to black like charred timbers left from a fire.

I fear growing older if I am not able to save one more soul, feed one more mind, plant one more seed to grow into glory in a well-tended bed. If I cannot take care of myself and come to depend upon others.

I fear, and yet I go on as if none of it matters. I follow the road I have chosen to walk and see the end up ahead.

 

~~~

 

125/365  IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
Word Count: 373

It’s cold outside. The days had gotten warmer with the late April sun. Like life itself, the seasons tease and lie, get us believing one thing, have us ripening our appetites for peaches and serve us crabapples for breakfast fare.

I once thought that Sarah was the only girl in the world for me. I was happy when she told me she was pregnant. Sixteen and seventeen we were. This was just meant to be. It overcame objections of parents, friends, teachers who all thought we should be dancing at the socials, watching movies at the drive-in. I dreamt of being Daddy. Saw my son and I at baseball games, him pausing to look over to make sure I was watching before he’d throw the ball. Then she miscarried and we drifted into different daydreams, suffered nightmares no sixteen year-old could conjure up.

My second wife was Linda and she took away the pain left in my stomach from the first. Linda was sweet and smart and pretty. We adopted a little girl and then a baby boy. Linda died right after they both married and moved away. These days, families spread out further from their roots, like pachysandra popping up in the middle of the lawn spread underground, unseen, unaware how far they travel.

It’s cold outside and I am all alone. The widow three doors down from us comes by to point out Linda’s daffodils are blooming full and bright as sunshine by the walk. She’d brought tuna casseroles and chicken “baked, not fried” and soups made from things I didn’t recognize, for weeks after Linda died. Then winter came and she came by at Christmas with a hot holiday grog she always made. I had one cup and stirred the stick of cinnamon she insisted putting in even though it poked me in the nose each time I took a sip. That was the last time I had seen her except to wave as she or I went driving by.

It’s cold and here she is, her name is Lily, and as she turns to walk back home I pretend to shiver and I ask her if she’d like to come inside and have a cup of coffee.

 

~~~

124/365  THE UNBORN
Word Count: 290

Did I forget you? Never. In more mystical moments I like to think of having put you back on the shelf for someone else to cradle in warm arms and raise in loving memories. I could not afford you at the time. I hoped you’d still be waiting when I was ready but you weren’t and while I married it seems that you were already gone.

Where are you now? Did you have to wait for long? Are you a schoolgirl skipping into class or are you a mother kissing children of your own goodbye? I wonder what you look like, if you are short like me or have your father’s willow build. More likely you have forgotten us completely and maybe that is the way it needs to be. He was a good man, you know; we just didn’t have the same map and went off in different directions. I could not have cared for you alone.

In darker times I get a stab of pain that bores right through my heart. If there is nothing after this and I took away your only chance. If you were just a bit of living flesh, no more than an arm or leg cut off by careless working of machinery. A car accident. Steel slicing off parts that aren’t necessary to life, aren’t capable of living on their own.

If in some thoughts I bear the weight of guilt and sin, if you are playing with the other innocents of your fate, then that at least I can take comfort in, that is, your salvation, and worry naught about my own.

Will I forget you? Never. For the part of me that went on living misses all you could have been.

 

~~~

 

123/365  A HORIZON SANS JELLY AND WINE
Word Count: 302

Prepping for my old age, I took a chainsaw to the peach trees and grapevines. Turn the garden into lawn. If he thinks I’m going to stand and stir a cauldron of sugary juice until it reaches jelly stage he’s nuts. And wine? What for? We’ll both be fast asleep before the sun hits bottom every night.

Big dreams, big schemes, we had. I planted trees and fruits to make us self-sufficient. To also lessen the amount of grass he had to mow. Now he complains about the corners, curves, and angles so I turn it back to grass. I wanted a second floor put on the house, the bedrooms above and with a second bathroom. Well we might need the second bath someday but already I’m too tired at night to climb a set of stairs. I want to bring the washer and the dryer up from the cellar too.

There comes a point in time when you decide the place you’re going to die. Sometimes it’s Arizona, or Florida, or someplace else that’s warm. Or maybe just across town in the new nursing home they’re building. With levels of comparative competency depending on if you can be trusted with access to a stove.

It’s closer than it used to be; the horizon getting crisper with division even as my eyes attempt to blur the line. I can resolve to make the time go slower since time is just a concept of the mind. Still, I am a realist and control of certain things I understand. And yes, I saw the twiglet peach trees that fell into the garden soil and sprouted on their own. And yes, I dug them up and planted them someplace else so he won’t hit them when he’s mowing his straight lines throughout the summer.

 

~~~

 

122/365  IMAGINATION
Word Count: 400

Marielle painted a field of wild flowers and from it picked a bouquet she put in a vase cut from an icicle that hung from the roof of her porch.

She wrote a story and fell in love with the protagonist, a man who was kind and sincere and just under six feet tall, a man who would sing in the morning and had eyes the color of young tanzanite. She wrote that he took her to dinner in a restaurant in Paris on a balmy spring night. She wrote that his hands were strong like the roots of an oak and she wrote that he fell in love with her too. They were wed as the words aligned themselves into lavender bridesmaids and tall golden groomsmen on the very last page of the book.

They were married five years before Marielle sought from her doctor specific instructions about when and how and how many times they should make love if they wanted a baby. She took her temperature daily, and her beloved raced home from wherever he was when he saw the text message “NOW.” They tried everything, even outside on the lawn under the first full moon of the new year as her grandmother Sadie had suggested.

Then she painted a nursery, a baby, a son. He was born without pain on the soft bed of canvas. He was roly-poly and sweet, never screamed, never bit at her nipple, and slept straight through the night. Two years later she Photoshopped an image of him as a girl. Their daughter was a rose made of whipped cream, delicate and sweet-smelling with hair that burst yellow of sunshine.

One day long after all that she looked around at the walls she had made and covered with living. Each piece of art made up years of her life, each book on her shelf told her story.

Her children had grown up and lived far away in castles that didn’t fit on her street. Her husband had sickened and died before she could write his recovery. Her eyesight was poor and she no longer could paint away wrinkles and bad knees and hair thinned and gray. Marielle sat in her old rocking chair by a window and looked out on the colors of autumn. She dabbed her brush in the rusty red maple and painted it white with snow.

 

~~~

 

121/365  MAYDAY
Word Count: 347

Mayday brings the scent of lilies, the rustle of crinolined white dresses, the shuffling feet of little boys in ties. Boy, girl, boy, girl, waiting in line to parade into church, a giant centipede squirming as time ticks on waiting for the priest to sober up from Saturday night wine. Parochial school lives on in nightmares forever.

Bats swoop through my dreams, miniature Draculas with high squeaking voices. My therapist tells me they’re nuns. Oh no, I say, when I think of nuns I catch the scent of lavender powder and hear the clacking of a rope of wood rosary beads. He frowns at my strong inner sense of denial. He rolls his eyes and I spot that instant where he lingers like a raindrop on the clock. He makes me paranoid. I think I’m taking up too much of his time. No, I’ve learned that I make myself paranoid, or my reaction of paranoia is under my complete control, or whatever but whatever it is my own fault. Except, evidently, when it comes to the nuns.

Did they beat you? he asks. Did they humiliate you, make you kneel on sand on a hardwood floor?

No, no, I say, they were kind.

They were mean, bitter, the ugly daughter sacrificed up to God to ensure eternal salvation for the whole family, he says.

No! I cry. That just wasn’t the way it was. Was it?

Six months into therapy I finally agree that the bats are probably nuns. My therapist is pleased. We move on to rid my dreams of all bats. We find them in corners strung with cobwebs. In rooms shut away by wings. We dust the souls of the sinners from the tables off of which the bats feed. In a year I am completely bat-free. My therapist is now ecstatic.

Tell me about your dreams, he says.

It is cold, snowing, I say. I have no coat, no gloves, and no shoes but I run against the storms, across great Arctic sheets of slick ice. I’m being chased by penguins.

~~~

 

Using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, a flash fiction or thought through the days of the year. Click on the images to get to the artist’s page, where you’ll find a bit more about the piece and the source of inspiration. Please note that each month’s work here has a separate page (links are in the right sidebar).

~~~

120/365  DAYS BECOME DATES
Word Count: 220

It’s Willie Nelson’s birthday today. Seventy-eight years ago, he was born. It’s also my neighbor’s first granddaughter’s birthday; she’ll be fourteen. I have a picture of when she was just a year old, held high above her grandfather’s head, both laughing in delight. He died shortly thereafter. And today, April 30th, 2011, is the day nine years later, that my mother died too.

I remember getting the call from the nursing home. “You might want to come down,” the nurse said. I called my sister. We didn’t call my dad. We sat. We fixed her hair, touched her hand, talked to her. We walked around. We waited and ran out of things to say. My sister left and I was near ready to take off when an aide brought me some orange juice. My mother died two breaths after I finished.

I suppose if you live long enough events stack up on top of another. There are only 365 days in a year after all. They repeat in a cycle and after a number of years, some things are bound to happen on a day that’s already marked in your mind. Doesn’t seem fair in a way, a dramatic event should have it’s own special day.

Then again, it doesn’t take away from the joy or lessen the pain.

~~~

119/365  ROYAL WEDDING DAY
Word Count: 304

She woke up that morning and realized that this was it, today was the day! Every girl dreams of her wedding day, and most think their husband-to-be is a prince, but today, in exactly two hours, she was going to marry a prince, a real prince, Prince William himself, who she’s adored since she was just a little girl. How lucky was that?

She showered before having her coffee and cereal because she didn’t want to be late. She towel-dried her hair, slathered cream all over her body, slowly working in the lovely scent of peaches before she put on her robe and sat down to wait and relax. She flicked on the T.V.

The news ran down the events of the day. In between the national reports and the weather she put on her makeup, drawing her eyes subtle yet sexy and bold. She blow-dried her hair, curled it into gentle waves during commercials. It looked like the rain would hold off but she sprayed her hair doubly well just in case. She put on her new white satin bra and silk panties and pulled on her pantyhose, finished the coffee and rinsed out the cup. All she had left to do was slip into her dress.

Trumpets blared from the living room and she hurried in and sat down on the couch. She folded and unfolded her hands, touched her hair, checked her earrings to make sure they were clasped. She knew it was supposedly bad luck, but she watched as Prince William and his brother, Prince Harry, made their way into the cathedral. William looked so handsome! It was hard to tear herself away from the T.V. but she went out and slipped into her dress as the limousine carrying Kate stopped in front of the church.

~~~

118/365  EN MASSE
Word Count: 356

Do we need to die in groups in order for people to care?

How about the guy who died at his desk of a heart attack cross town the same time that the towers fell? Do his kids feel any better because he wasn’t there? Did his wife say, “Oh well, at least he wasn’t in the towers” and bless herself in grateful thanks?

My dog died and I don’t care that he was just a dog, or that he died of old age and in my arms rather than in a meteor strike along with a hundred other dogs. He was a good dog. I had him since I was seven and even though I don’t live home anymore and only saw him during semester breaks and summers, I still miss him more than anything.

Or maybe there’s a reason for it all. One person dies and a certain space is now available. A bunch of people die, all in relatively the same space, and there’s a huge amount of cubic footage left empty. Maybe it creates a vacuum. Maybe it sucks the grief from all of us right down to our toes.

I watched it on TV. It was a horrible thing to see and I’ll bet it was even worse in person, especially if you knew someone that was still inside. And the aftermath, like holy ground. But the car inside the fenced in area, all crumpled and if you look real close you’d see the brown spatters and splotches on the seats and rugs that are the last remnants of a life that left its allotted space on earth last night, doesn’t that mean just as much?

They’re showing the floods, the buildings gaping open-mouthed from earthquakes and tsunamis. I’m struck by the amount of devastation. I know somebody there but worry doesn’t interfere with the greatness, the total size of tortured ground. Until I hear the voiceover that pinpoints the arena. And focus on the single soul I know. It hits me like a giant wave of nausea and I’m sucked right into the hungry vortex of the empty space.

~~~

117/365 ME AND JOHN THE BAPTIST
Word Count: 540

He says he’s John the Baptist and to be carefuI of his head. When I’m sure that he’s asleep I touch the long brown curly hair. In the dim light from the window I watch him sleep and study his long neck, his Adam’s apple prominent like Mt. Sinai against the dawn.

We met at a Chinese restaurant where he was deep in conversation with a girl whose hair was frizzed and orange-red. She was animated, in every inch of her body, her hands flailing with emphasis, her legs crossed, uncrossed, set their stance to pounce. Her face would change expression at the speed of old movie film, her eyebrows going up and down in curves, her nose scrunched up or elitely sniffed, her mouth moving in curls of lips that stretched and puckered, opened wide and lost themselves in a tight purse. Her eyes were focused on his face.

I too could not tear myself away from his face once I followed her direction. In contrast to his companion, nothing about him moved except his eyes, which caught a light and sparkled. His mouth, a thin smile. His body leant in like a hockey net to ensure no word of hers could fly past him and lose the meaning of her conversation. His hands both gripped his handleless cup of Chinese tea. His feet were planted flat and solid on the floor. He radiated goodness. Peace.

They finished their meal and she pulled a credit card out of her handbag and paid their bill. As soon as she got the receipt she got up and flounced off, or so it seemed like a flounce though I hadn’t heard any sort of disagreement between them. Maybe it was just her body’s need to still be in some form of motion. I watched him watch her leave. Then he turned and looked directly at me.

There’s that moment when you know you’ve been caught but you look away anyway. Some of us think we’ve managed to handle it by simply averting our eyes and avoid other movement. I’m sure it doesn’t fool anyone. It didn’t fool him.

He got up and came right over to my table and sat down. I reset my gaze to meet his. I was, of course, already facing him. “Hello,” he said. I melted. I barely got out my name. “I’m John the Baptist,” he said. So okay, street names are cool. He did look clean and pleasant.

And so it came to pass, John B. moved in with me and has been here just over a month. We have a lot in common to talk about; we’re both history lovers and particularly fascinated by early civilization and migration patterns of the Mediterranean area. He goes off to the university every morning and teaches on Sundays. He likes my cooking and that’s a big plus. And okay, he’s a phenomenal and more than considerate lover.

But as he lies here, sweetly sleeping, I know something about this whole relationship is just too perfect, too not my usual luck. I touch the soft curls on the pillow, I gently trace the perfect curve of his jaw. I sneeze . . .

. . . and his head rolls clean off the bed.

~~~

116/365  THE MAGIC PASSWORD
Word Count: 184

“Abracadabra! Now you see it, now you don’t!” he said. She applauded in wonder. Clapped the loudest. Her playmate, her friend, who she secretly believed was her boyfriend, had performed magic and she was the first to encourage him. They were seven and eight and lived three doors down from each other. She already knew that she loved him, as girls usually do.

She cheerleadered his quarterbacking. It happened that they ended up going together to the Freshman Social. It was almost as if the play had been written, the characters chosen, the stage set. And so it went a couple years, then “Abracadabra!” and a new girlfriend appeared.

They went separate ways off to college but she got a phone call from him one day. They talked for hours and met halfway for a date. They were engaged by graduation and “Abracadabra! You’ve turned into a wife,” he whispered before they kissed at the altar.

Forty-three years and two magical children later, she walked in alone to the funeral home. She bent over him and whispered “Abracadabra!” but he wouldn’t wake up.

~~~

115/365  DELUSION
Word Count: 337

He fed her strawberries from an icy-cold spoon, dipping each first in a bowl of freshly whipped cream before teasing the tip of her tongue. She could catch the fresh green and red scent of the berry as it was raised to her lips and she opened her mouth in wet anticipation. She wished he would remove her blindfold.

She’d lost track of the days but each brought a new surprise, nothing she could come to depend upon but random new things to taste, touch, and hear, and that made the days pass more quickly. One time he gave her a bar of bittersweet chocolate that melted into velvet in her mouth. The bar lasted all day, the last broken square comforting her way into sleep and colorful dreams that moved slowly like lava to last through the night. She loved the strawberries the best, but once he had given her sips of a liquid that smelled pungently sweet. It was sticky on her lips, flowed like hot honey over her tongue. It made her sleep. She remembered his fingers following the curve of her cheek, down her throat, curling gently around her breast. She had reached for him during the night. She didn’t remember him leaving.

Last night, after the pain stopped he washed her body with a warm cloth that smelled like yellow roses in August. He dressed her in a Spring-scented cotton gown and she felt the crisp newness of the sheets on the bed. She slept for a long time until he wakened her and helped her sit up.

He placed the child in her arms and it felt softly warm just as he’d promised. She felt the thump of its heart, heard the whisper of breath that moved it in rhythm against her breast. She heard a whimper, a weak little sound that stirred something within her. She asked him to remove the blindfold. She heard him sigh deeply. He reminded her that he’d removed it a long time ago.

~~~

114/365  EASTER EGGS
Word Count: 407

It was sitting there as if it’d just been laid by a chicken lacking in any degree of maternal instinct. A purple egg in the middle of the dog path that leads through the park. I’d almost twisted my ankle avoiding it during my regular early morning run. I use the dog path because it’s less crowded on weekends, and it’s easier to avoid dog turds than people pushing running strollers, with headphones clamped on, oblivious to the natural world around them.

I picked up the egg. It was the size of a chicken egg, though maybe more rounded and speckled with deeper purple freckles. It felt warm, alive. I stuck it in my pocket and finished my run.

I’d stuck it in the glass bowl by the entryway along with my keys and small change. It’s one of those catch-all bowls that my mother gave me from my Great Aunt Elbina’s estate. She thinks I don’t take proper care of it. I think it’s ugly but serviceable. It’s bright yellow with big white and red tulips painted in dripping-clock Dali style down from the edges. It’s shown up in several of my nightmares.

It’s not always easy living alone, with the lack of conversation and the bills, but it suits me. I turn on the television for noise and work overtime when I can and it all balances out. The good points are the elimination of any need to do the dishes immediately or make the bed every day, and getting away with dusting only once every month. And, I sleep better in a bed all by myself where I can stretch and kick and snore.

Sometime during the night I woke up to a crack of thunder–or so I’d imagined. There was no storm happening outside. I heard more odd sounds coming from outside my bedroom and quietly got up, grabbed my cellphone in one hand and a lead pipe (my brother provided and insists I keep by the bed) and tiptoed out.

The dim light from the plug-in nightlight in the bathroom pretty much lights up the whole small apartment and I could see nobody was there in a sweeping glance around corners and behind tables and the couch. Then I heard a peep! Yes, a definite, clear and sharp peep!

And that, as I later explained to my landlord, is how I came to have a chicken living here.

~~~

113/365  COUNTERWEIGHT
Word Count: 344

The phone call is from my “help-I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up” neighbor again. I’m glad my husband is home because together we just might make up a counterweight against the neighbor’s close to 350-lb. body.

She’s sitting on the bedroom floor, barefoot, nightgowned, cellphone in hand. The story’s in her grim expression. A lifetime of conflict of loving food and dieting.

“I was just settling in with a cup of tea and television,” she says, “and turned around to sit and whoomph! went down.”

I look to the small table and see the mug of tea still steaming. Two brownie squares laid out beside it on a plate.

He pulls, I push, she warns, “watch out for my knees!” Her knees have been remodeled in plastic over the years. She’s smashed one to confetti and had it picked out and replaced just two summers ago.

We stop, rest. She’s half on, half off a chair, on her side, her head mashed into the back cushion. She slides back down before we can catch her.

Rinse, repeat.

Her plan’s not working, and we try other things. We look for things she can hold onto to pull herself up with our help. The bed’s not sturdy enough to hold the weight at one end, the dresser slithers away at her touch.

“We need leverage,” my engineering-brained husband suggests. “Last time when you fell outside, we got you sitting on the step and your feet were lower than your . . . butt.” But she’s inside, in her bedroom.

But an engineer excels at problem-solving mechanical things. He knows angles, and tolerances, and all that sort of stuff. We get her onto a quilt and pull her backwards through the house, sliding (fairly) easily on the hardwood floors. Open the front door, spin her around, put shoes on her feet and get her feet down on the slate of the porch.

He pulls, I push. She’s up. She sighs with embarrassed relief. He sighs with that particular pleasure of having successfully completed a project.

~~~

112/365  PINK
Word Count: 237

It seems that days pass like weeks, dragging their tails like snakes swiping the slates clean of all memory. Sometimes I have to think hard to remember that I haven’t eaten all day. And there are times when I forget that she’s gone.

She was a little pink cloud and I was a boy who liked dirt. She hung in the edges of my sight like an apparition just out of reach. There wasn’t a fleck of dust on her. She was clutching a small white pocketbook with a bunny on the flap. It was white like her shoes and socks. Her hat was a mass of pink blossoms that matched the cloud of her dress. She was staring at me, not moving, not smiling, just watching me wrinkle my Sunday pants and shirt, dip my tie in the mud.

She wore pink to the prom. She let me go “all the way.” The memory of pinkness we lay in on the back seat of my father’s car is still vivid and tingly.

Sometimes I wander up to the attic, tiptoeing as if she could hear me and discover what I’ve found in the garment bags where she had stored things too special too throw away over the years. Afraid that she might remember and come back and take what she seems to have forgotten. Bags hanging dusty and zippered against time. Bags filled with pink clouds.

~~~

111/365  INFINITELY CHANGING
Word Count: 277

It may have been irrational or maybe just a blip in time, the moment between that movement of the second hand that pauses, ticks, pauses, ticks around the smiling circle of the library clock. At any rate, Christian understood that at some point in the day he’d become immortal.

He met Anne for lunch at the deli, as he said he would. Even though he didn’t rush–why would he anymore?–he got there just as she was going through the door. They hugged the quick hug of long-time friends and ordered and sat down at a small table right by the front window.

“Pastrami?” Anne said, “Christian, I thought you were a vegetarian.”

“I was,” he said. He didn’t feel he should start the conversation out with telling her it didn’t matter what he ate, he was going to live forever.

“You’ll never believe what I saw today,” she said. “They’re going to be taking down the old Warner Theatre and putting in an Apple store.”

“Hmm.”

“Christian, that’s sad, don’t you think? I mean the way that we’re losing bookstores, print of all kind, and now movie theaters?”

“It’s progress,” said Christian. “Things must change to keep up with tech.”

“But we’re losing everything we’ve grown up with,” she complained. “I feel like the horses must have felt when the first cars started rolling around.”

“I wonder what will replace the computer store some day,” said Christian.

“We’ll both be dead by then,” she said. She played with her salad, eyeing his sandwich, watching the melted swiss cheese ooze out as he bit into the bread.

And then it hit him; she would be.

~~~

110/365  ACCUMULATION
Word Count: 272

Her apartment is getting hard to walk through, troubles piled up like January snow. She wears kneesocks to bed so that when she gets up in the morning her legs won’t get cold. Her slippers are set at the foot of her bed on top of her bedspread.

Sometimes she thinks that if Jacob hadn’t left when he did she would have. It was the fear of being alone, of doing it all, the checkbook, the banking, the shopping, the meals, the cleaning, keeping gas and oil in the car and feeding the cat that had kept her from leaving. She’s ended up there anyway, she sees that now, and realizes she should have made a move years ago.

He doesn’t call anymore, looking for things that he forgot or purposely left behind. Like the watch she bought him for their wedding that he’s left in the drawer with his ring. And the sport jacket she just gave him last Christmas when he really didn’t deserve cashmere.

She told him she’d get rid of everything if he didn’t come pick it up. She mentioned the watch and the jacket but he never came back or called.

It’s way past the deadlines she’s given, way past a reasonable grace period of time. She starts in his closet and works her way through the house. It takes her a whole weekend and laying in bed Monday morning, hearing the trash truck come by, she holds her breath, listening to the rattles and clinks and thumps of him leaving, exhales as the truck pulls away, and gets up, putting her bare feet on the floor.

~~~

109/365  ONTO THE NEXT
Word Count: 475

“Oh, I know something that’s new,” she said, and went on to tell me she’s back to parting her hair in the middle.

I couldn’t believe it. Nancy just did what I’d thought of doing last week but she actually did it.

We’ve been friends so long I can’t remember a time when we weren’t. We had worked at a small education aid company in the advertising department, she as a migrant worker, which was our definition of a temp. She was nineteen and newly engaged. I was twenty-three and ready to move out on my own. She wore lots of navy blue clothes and penny loafer shoes and parted her hair in the middle.

Over the years, she married and had children. I sat with them playing Pinochle while we counted the minutes between labor pains. It took a long time. While her husband was in the bathroom we messed with the cards, gave him all the nines, tens and Jacks while we held the face cards and aces. We played the whole hand that way as he grumbled and we giggled. Eventually he learned to be wary when we got together.

I house-sat with their dog and cat while they went to Florida to visit his father. I took the call from the State Lottery when they won the car. My boss, the Vice President of Sales and the Sales Manager lifted me up to get through a window when I locked myself out of their house.

Years went by. She listened to all my relationship stories. Knew every man and his quirks. Kept quiet when she met the man I finally married. We’ve gone on silly teenage girl adventures thirty years beyond our teens. We still giggle and whisper and look for things to excite us the way things more easily did way back when. To compensate for the illness and funerals that come along with life’s cycle, we find the humor in each. I tell her about my father-in-law’s hearing aid going off as he lay in the coffin. She tells me about her dead sister’s makeup and wig. We’re both laughing so hard, enjoying it more because no one else would understand that it’s funny.

And now, she’s parted her hair in the middle after decades of parting it on the side. I watch in the mirror as I carefully pull the teeth of the comb in a straight line down towards my nose. It looks all right but feels uncomfortable, like wind blowing into your face.

Next time we talk and after we’ve gone over the basics and come to that almost-ready-to-hang-up pause, I tell her my news. “I’m cutting my nails straight across, you know, flat tips like they’re showing now.”

“Wow,” she says, and I know she understands why.

~~~

108/365  THE TWO
Word Count: 231

The city, she said, is unkind to a country girl. He told her she was made of much stronger stuff and knew she would do well. It’d only been a few months . . .

Five, she said. That’s a long time. And it costs too much to live here.

It’s all relative, he told her. They pay more there.

If you have a good job, she said. She hated to whine. It was so hard, just so hard.

You’re making enough as a waitress, aren’t you? he asked. Concerned, but keeping discouragement out of the question as best as he could.

But I’m an artist! she tried not to cry.

Give it more time, he said. You’ll make it big. I’m sure of it.

She sighed. Tried to smile through the phone. Tried to pull his confidence, his whole self through the phone.

I love you, he said.

She smelled the new pine needles down by the lake. She heard her daddy’s guitar, saw her mother clean freshly caught catfish her little brother brought home. She thought of the two of them the night before she left; how the curtains danced softly like ghosts around the moonlight that spread over his bedroom floor like a beacon. He had called it a sign, her personal spotlight.

I love you too, she said and hung up. I wish you had told me to come home.

~~~

107/365  NEW GREEN
Word Count: 388

The Sunday circuit drive changes only by time of day, season, weather. There are the faithful crossing the street to rush into Mass held at the big stone church by the river. Children are dragged back from the road if they race ahead, dragged from behind if they’re laggers. I’ve already slowed since I know there’s a policeman who sits in his car during the service, praying to catch a few sinners.

The intersection just past that makes me laugh. Four roads. Two lay there nearly inactive, rarely pushing a car out or welcoming one in. All of us go and come here and there only.

The bridge over the river is the gateway to the small rural town. It’s fishing season. This, after the church worshippers, is the next round of wanderers I need to watch. But fisherman are a patient lot, they’ll stand on the bridge with their lines hanging into the river below for hours. Still, I watch both sides for a flash of movement, of the joy of success that may muddy even a fisherman’s focus to bring him dancing deliriously out into the road.

But the town–oh the town! This is a small, crazy quilt town made up of odd angles and crosswalks and an entire population of walkers and bikers all confident that they can stop tanks in their track. People loiter at crosswalks not comprehending that I’ve stopped for them according to law. I beep. They look over, annoyed at the interruption, then go back to their conversations, daydreaming, spiteful mood. I gave them their chance and warning, I figure, and go on like a bowling ball down an alley.

Runners, joggers, ponytails swinging, carriages with scared babies rolling along as fast as their mothers can wheel them. This on the river’s edge walk. There is movement everywhere, sticking in the corners of my eyes. I drive slowly, one foot poised on the gas pedal, ready to brake.

Good thing, too. As two geese decide to cross in the middle of traffic, unbound by man’s rules and the white lines of crosswalks. They don’t even look both ways.

Once beyond the traffic lights, pedestrians both human and goose, I can relax. Choose a steady pace, look around at my own choosing to watch the leaves and the skunk cabbage grow.

~~~

106/365  POURING
Word Count: 188

I like the rain because it lets me cry unnoticed. The gray sheets of the day are written with the ink of tears, invisible like lemon juice until the sun shines and the words turn brown with brave reality.

There is a heaviness to rain that draws the soul into the ground. That melts us into blending with the earth. It is practice, perhaps, for the bed we make up for ourselves so thoughtfully that it must last forever. Dirt becomes a musky-scented soil. Pollen doesn’t ride the breeze but rather drips in yellow waterfalls from lily throats.

I crave the promise made by rain, that things once thought dry and broken can turn tender green. I look out past the yards that yesterday were itchy gold and brown and now are soft green blankets. The fingertips of trees with broken nails scratching at the sky have been painted with the harlot red of flower seeds. Shaggy timeworn maple bark, creased by living, cries sweet sap tears.

I like the rain because it lets me cry unnoticed. I like that when it stops the sun comes out.

~~~

105/365  IN THE AIR
Word Count: 326

Spring brings rain and flowers and pollen that makes some people red-eyed and runny-nosed. Even the air smells like a sneeze.

Not me, though. Spring brings me stories. The breeze brings me words.

This morning I walked out into the sunshine and “yellow” hit the side of my head. I turned and saw more yellow coming out of the row of forsythias that line the eastern edge of the yard. I opened my eyes wide and they slipped through and sat themselves politely in the outermost corner of my mind.

I got into my car, nearly slamming the door on a slender green tulip that wriggled itself in with its long leaves. It lay on the mat, catching its breath, its big head an undecided-yet color, lay under my foot on the gas pedal. “Shoo!” I said, “Move!” not wanting to scrunch its valiant efforts with the heel of my shoe accidentally. It pulled itself slowly over the hump and hopped up into the passenger seat. “Buckle up, please,” I said and it did.

The tulip filled the car with its presence; tender, new, pink-tipped, Easter, bouquet. I opened my window and let some of the words blow out. In the city, sounds assailed me with horn bleeps and engine idles and radio songs that trailed out behind hot looking cars like Cameros and such. I pressed the button to slide the window back up but the words just came softer, like bleeps, idles, love.

I pulled into the parking lot and wondered what I should have for breakfast. Bacon, eggs, maple syrup all battered the windshield but I got out and looked around for bagels and cream cheese instead. I spotted some bagels hanging out under the awning at the the entrance and figured I’d get cream cheese inside.

I started to close the door, then remembered. “You want a coffee or something?” I asked and the tulip nodded its head.

~~~

104/365  A SENSE OF IT
Word Count: 256

I stand barefoot on the lawn and feel the grass grow through my feet. Sharp as needles drawing through the flesh and muscle, twisting between the bone to sprout like hair on my skin. The sky talks to the earth in rain-song, notes spattered everywhere until the noise has deafened me to lesser drops of sound. It is a symphony of strings alone, where the rain reaches down to the green growth which reaches up. They clasp hands, form threads, absorbing each other. Strummed by the wind, they twang their joy.

Fascinated, I watch yellow and pink and white buds plump at the branch tips of bushes and trees, pop like flashbulbs and unfurl petaled skirts. Seeds split and sprout in the wet soil of cracked sidewalks as easily as those bedded in carefully fed gardens. Roots race underground to match the flurry of foliage.

I am held fast to the earth by the grass blades which have impaled me. Vines have slyly spiraled my thighs, woven a lace dress of tendrils, tender and strong. The sun shakes the clouds from its face, like cigarette smoke caught in the haze of a late night whisky-soaked room. It hardens raindrops into diamonds that hang heavy and bright on my neck.

All this, this luxury of growth, every Spring morning is happening here if I open my ears, my eyes, my mind to the day. Then I feel you stir next to me, and the rain becomes the grey drizzle of a cold morning in March.

~~~

103/365  FOCUSING ON THE POSITIVE
Word Count: 374

I can stand here and tell myself that I’m beautiful. That I’m a good person, think of others, work hard, am honest and smart but above all, I am beautiful.

That don’t make it so.

I’m five foot four and weight three hundred sixty-seven pounds. I have great eyes, pouty full lips, creamy smooth skin, and shiny thick auburn hair. But the eyes, lips and hair would look much better on a helluva lot less creamy smooth skin.

Why do they do this? They don’t settle for accepting our inner beauty, but insist that we have to accept our ugly outer selves as beautiful too. That’s about as big a lie as the kids they call “special.” I think it’s cruel.

The do-gooders seem to think it’ll make people feel better about themselves by believing they’re no different than anyone else. I think it just makes them feel better about dealing with people who are different. You can’t change a physical appearance by changing the words that describe it. A smile won’t bring sunshine in the middle of a rain. And men don’t call me for a date.

People don’t talk to each other honestly anymore. I’d rather people said, yeah, you’re overweight and should try to lose because it’s unhealthy, and unattractive.

My mother was new school, believed that she shouldn’t say to me stuff like “you have such a pretty face, if only you could lose some weight.” Since she didn’t, I didn’t know that I should. I never knew about the friends in high school who were my friends because I made them look hot by comparison. We believe what we want to believe; I wanted to believe they liked me.

Well I finally went to a doctor who told me the truth. “Have you ever heard the term ‘morbidly obese’?” he said. “Yes, you’re fat. You’re too young, smart, and pretty to be so much overweight.”

“You’re fat,” I say to myself in the mirror. That keeps me on salads and on a healthy, fat-free diet. I’ve lost seventy-four pounds and I’m losing slowly and steadily and I know I’ll be within a normal weight range someday. That’s the positive I’m focusing on. That’s the truth.

~~~

102/365  FINALLY
Word Count: 195

Finally, the world has simmered down to a quiet hum that I can listen to when I want and close my ears and mind when there is nothing I can do about it. There is much less noise from children playing games outside my yard.

Finally, people are accepting of each other, polite to one another, helpful. A man held the door open behind him for me at the bank. A young boy raced ahead of me so as not to make me anxious that I held him up.

At last, there are options to the pain and suffering of a lengthy illness. Insurance companies tell me this is so.

It took some time, but there really is a wider variety of political opinion, not just left and right, but they have names for those like me who’ve found themselves standing on the brink, or as I like to call it, higher ground.

Finally, the good foods, like milk and chocolate ice cream, eggs and tenderloin of beef, cost equal to their pleasures to the tongue.

Finally, I see it all more clearly now, especially when I close my eyes and think of something else.

~~~

101/365  BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
Word Count: 250

From Sister Cyrene in first grade, I learned rejection. She gave me a D in Art because I colored in little circles, something my grandmother had taught me. I stayed inside all the lines. My mother said I was heartbroken and cried.

At the eighth grade class picnic at a resort where they had rides and a swimming pool, I learned not to say you can do something you can’t if it’s dangerous and there’s no reason to lie. I couldn’t swim.

Jimmy taught me not to flirt if I didn’t mean it. I had no idea what I was doing back then. I’d apologize to him if I knew where he was today.

Jobs taught me patience and dedication to doing a good job. Even if my boss got the credit for it. Secretaries, I learned, are valued for their expertise at making coffee and buying roses for the wife and the girlfriend for Valentine’s Day.

I’m happy I didn’t marry Dick, or Dwight, or Danny, or the other Danny, or Walter, or Wayne. There was a reason I was meant to be single until the right man came around. And besides, they’re all dead now and would’ve left me a widow. Instead, they left me with moments that still make me smile.

People are living lessons and swirl together to blend through time. There are hundreds of people who’ve left their thumbprint somewhere on my psyche. And a few who have left a huge mark on my heart.

~~~

100/365  NEWNESS
Word Count: 299

The obvious place to start was by dyeing my hair, which I did, discovering that brown over bleached blonde came out spruce. That’s fine. I’d already cut it so short  it looked like a bush.

Then I had to change body shape, stuffing my curves with chocolate truffles and cheese-doodles between pasta for breakfast and lunch. I had a seven-course meal for dinner and fell asleep every night cuddling macadamia nut shortbread cookies in bed. With a large glass of milk which I used to hate as a kid but for which I have since acquired a taste. Okay, so sometimes I add chocolate syrup. Or ice cream if the syrup runs out.

I switched to burnt orange lipstick which went well with my hair and eyes, since I chose blue-green contacts to wear. I also loaded on shadow and liner which I’d never found time for before.

I was still too tall. That was the biggest problem. All the rest was easily handled with camouflage stripes and diet and smoke and mirrors. But height is only maneuverable upwards maybe six inches at best. I needed to be shorter.

I knew what I had to do, and I wish I’d have thought of it before I put on all the weight. It would have been easier. I wondered if the small radial saw would work. I didn’t like the thought of sawing away endlessly with the handsaw but sharpened it anyway.

Relationships take time to get over, I know that. But it had been six months and I still got a case of the ants every time we ran into each other. You know how it is, when you spot someone first and you don’t know if they’ve seen you yet. It’s awkward.

Well, I fixed that.

~~~

99/365  RHYTHM AND SPACE
Word Count: 180

She was a dancer. She waltzed down aisles at the supermarket, not caring if anyone stared. She pirouetted out doors, often surprising a shopper on his way in. You should see the way she hopped up and down stairs, and the fancy maneuvers she twirled on the escalators at the mall. She was a dancer.

But not really. Just in her mind where the music played. Where the sweet drawn out strings of the violin minced, and the African drums guided her feet to a rhythm not quite in tune with the day.

And she sang. Not songs, but words, conversations. You could ask her a question, something simple, like, “where’s the Marsden file?” and she’d trill out her response. If you weren’t sure where she meant, she would two-step you through the office and bow and dip to open the drawer to pull it out, swaying it back and forth gracefully before you managed a grip.

We missed her when they let her go in the last office layoffs. The space where she was, was quiet and still.

~~~

98/365  RENEWED
Word Count: 226

This morning I woke up in a peony, which is strange because I know I fell asleep in the bowled jaws of a purple tulip. Have I slept through from spring to summer? How can that be?

The air smelled sweet and warm. I stretched and came out face to face with the hot yellow ball of sun. Ants tickled over my toes. I waded through the fluff of shaggy petals until I reached the smooth cups of the outer row and then I slid down the long sturdy stem and landed in the still moist black mulch they laid thick on the flower beds. I stepped carefully between the perennials, pulling at one stubborn sprout of crabgrass that had stepped into this lovely world, as out of place as a beggar might be at a ball.

I skipped across the lawn, softened by the early morning dew and not yet dried out by the breeze and the brazen smile of the rising sun. It was going to be a glorious day.

Up the back porch steps and through the kitchen, up the stairs I happily bounced and stopped just in the doorway to our room. You were snoring softly still and never woke as I slipped into bed and snuggled up against your back, content to wait a little longer for the day to start.

~~~

97/365  FASCINATED AT THE SURFACE
Word Count: 359

Yes, I think I remember him, the boy from three doors down the street. Skinny kid, small, quiet, usually by himself, though I wouldn’t say there were lots of kids around here.

When the police came knocking door to door I tried to place the face in the picture they held out. It took a while. I told them I don’t watch the neighbor’s goings-on like some old lady left with nothing but dead memories and stealing peeks from other people’s lives to zip it up. But yes, I did recall him playing in his yard sometimes.

Well, not playing really. Just sitting on the front step like a put-out cat. Or a glass bottle of milk left on the step before the sun came up, delivered by a milk truck the way they used to do. He’d just sit there, looking out at the street. Nothing really to look at except a car driving by now and then. A bird flying by. I used to walk down to the corner to Abe’s house sometimes and that’s when I’d see the kid sitting there. I didn’t wave or nothing.

So someone kidnapped him they said. Or not kidnapped, because no one called to ask for money, they just found him dead in the woody area of the park, floating in the small pond where we used to ice skate as kids. About a week later, after he went missing.

They found the guy that did it, though not right away. We were all shocked to find out who it was. The butcher in the meat department at A&P. He always seemed so friendly, always joking. If you made a remark about the meat being tough, he’d always say, “Tougher where there’s none!” and he’d laugh real hard, as if he’d just made that up. So they found out he was bothering some of the other boys in the area. They brought him in and he ended up confessing to killing the kid, my neighbor’s kid. We were all so surprised to find out it was him, such a nice guy, a regular guy.

Yeah, I remember.

~~~

96/365  FILLING UP
Word Count: 187

The forsythia branches are dipped in bold yellow ready to splash open. Every day the walk becomes longer, the time shorter, the people stranger. It wasn’t like this before, or maybe the change was so gradual that it went by unnoticed. We adjust sometimes before we realize that we have.

Like my eyesight. It’s been changing over years before I knew that I needed new glasses. And I don’t sleep through the night anymore. At first I thought it was the new tiny print on the bottles and in how-to manuals that are squished to accommodate warnings for idiots and languages off the Dead Sea Scrolls. My doctor laughed, said my arms were shorter with age. I kneed him in the groin. I don’t like stupid humor.

Which is another thing; I think I’m being short-tempered with people and less tolerant of the gum-chewing clerk at the register talking to the clerk in the next aisle, the guy who rides my tail when I’m doing 45 in a 35 mph zone, the priest, teacher, cop who molests a child.

People get stranger, you know?

~~~

95/365  FITTING EVERYTHING IN
Word Count: 288

There it was, at eye level, clinging for life to a swamp birch that leaned into the woods as if it were an old man waiting in line. Spotted plaque of fungus in a bright yellow patch, its feet dug in beyond the depth of papery bark.

I looked up the length of the tree, a long single stalk with a hint of new buds at its tips. I wondered if it knew it were dying. If it could feel the bite of the fungus gnawing at its skin. Surely, even a swamp birch has a right to its dignity at the end of its days.

Birches grow quickly but here I could see the effects of several hard winters, ice storms most likely, that clustered in its far-reaching branches, forcing the tall tree to bend, bow its head under the weight. Most times it had overcome and recovered, slowly straightening its back to stand gently curved but still reaching its fingers into the sky. Sometimes, a branch would break off, leaving these wounds that I saw along its trunk.

There was nothing I could do to help it. The fungus was embedded too deep to flick it off with a knife. I turned and started walking back home, just barely avoiding stepping on a small twig of life. I bent down and recognized the small buds as that of a birch.

I went home feeling much better. There is a natural cycle, and the living things in the world must adjust so that each has its chance at some glory days, each has the right to live life and then it must give back its life to make room so that nature can fit everything in.

~~~

94/365  SO GRATEFUL TO HAVE SEEN THIS
Word Count: 252

The sunset brushed the golden grasses with blood-red streaks. The small pond glittered like blue topaz cut and polished to its crystal finest. Waterbugs ticked the surface, their footprints left in concentric circles growing out from each step. It was the first warm spring evening and some ice still clung to edges of the banks like a piecrust around the pond.

This is where I come to think, to calm the waves that crash inside my mind when too much hits, like a tsunami, threatening all I’ve held as normal. That day it was the upset of bad news about a friend. A phone call, a hesitant voice that’s missing laughter in its smile. Finally stuttered out, the word “cancer,” the way we used to practice dirty words.

I wondered if there was a heaven or a hell, a place for us to congregate and snigger over wrinkles and fingers that stiffen up just signing our name. I wondered if we’d meet or how we’d even find each other with years and millions of dead souls wandering through.

I remember thinking that I should have brought a camera. That I should have captured this one instant to make it last as long as possible. Longer than natural time. Longer than our lives.

Then something occurred to me and made me realize why we can’t go on forever, why this instant can’t repeat itself in exactly the same way. That if it did, there would be no place for tomorrow’s magic moment.

~~~

93/365  NEW WATER
Word Count: 529

Okay, so I’m not really proud of this but it happened and I can’t change it now. I wished my son was a turtle and he turned into a turtle right in front of my eyes.

I don’t know why I even thought of it, why I’d ever say such a thing to a beautiful little boy we’d wanted so badly and waited so long to have. I’d just given him a bath, changed him into clean jammies, and set him down while I emptied the basin into the sink. One minute he was crawling around the kitchen floor, and I laughed and said he looked like a turtle because of the slow way he moved, and the next, well, he was a turtle. Or maybe a tortoise–he was pretty big–but I don’t really know the difference. He was gray and slow and nearly hidden by a big heavy shell.

It took a moment for the sight to sink in, to connect my words with what I saw on the floor. Guilt, worry, fear, all the motherly instincts were right there at the forefront; I’d done a terrible thing to my child. I was a bad, bad mother.

I was shaking, but I went over and picked him up, looked him in the eye, and said I was terribly sorry, that I didn’t mean what I’d said. He blinked and pulled his head into his shell. His little legs were sucked in too, like an airplane retracting its landing gear. I shook the shell, poked my finger inside. He bit me. I’d forgotten he was teething.

What could I do? I carried him around, I sang to him, I rubbed his hard little belly. I gave him his mid-afternoon feeding as best as I could figure out how, and hoped that I wasn’t drowning him in formula inside his shell. I sat on the rocker and cradled him against my shoulder and was really happy when I heard a loud rumbling burp resonate out.

I brought him upstairs and put him down in his crib, unsure about putting him on his back like I always had. But he seemed all right once he stopped rocking so I covered him lightly and pulled down the shades and hoped he would take a nap. I left the door ajar so I would hear him if he woke and started to cry. Or whatever noise a turtle might make when he’s hungry or wet.

All through making a meatloaf and scrubbing potatoes and waiting for my husband to come home I mixed prayers in between my planned speech to explain what had happened. I hoped he would understand. I didn’t even know if he liked turtles. Dinner was almost ready, the table all set, not a peep from upstairs when I heard the car pull into the garage.

I took a deep breath, ran up the stairs and listened at the door before I went into our baby’s room. It was so quiet. I tiptoed up to the crib and God help me, I saw with a huge sigh of relief that he’d turned back into our little boy.

~~~

92/365  SHIFTING
Word Count: 85

She tells time by the shift
of the sun on her bed,
walls soften to sponge,
her bath drawn
of cool melting snow, and
she wiggles her toes
in the earth.

This day has been planned
for a year, the winter spent
in China, fingering silks
of lavendar, purple, yellow
for the bridesmaids,
petal soft white
for the bride

At sunrise she stands
with her sisters
a swirl of colorful skirts
a wedding of
seasons, the crocus
dance on the lawns
in celebration of spring.

~~~

91/365  LISTENING
Word Count: 330

I pulled off the highway into the weeds, shut off the engine, took several deep breaths. I listened to the sound of the cars zipping by, imagining how dramatic and fierce the close call of shifting lanes and cutting off could have been just by the whoosh of the cars, the physical rocking when a semi zoomed by. Imagined myself flying out of the car through the windshield, sharp jaggers of glass studding my face. Then I realized that there was one thread of sound that was steady, consistent and I discovered that I had been whispering prayers.

It’s like a safety switch, a backup system embedded in my brain from being raised Catholic. It’s an embarrassment. That is, if there indeed is a God Who knows all (see that, I just had to capitalize “who” here). It’s that race back into the womb with the first roll of thunder, the first flash of lightning; that fear that brings out belief. Just in case.

Just in case. All our self confidence and our proclaimed cool intellectualism departs when “just in case” is called into play. Like ants we leave no footprints at all in the earth yet our fear of leaving is so strong that we resort to whatever we pull from our bag of knowledge, our own bag of tricks to survive.

So God is the ace up our sleeve, the rainy-day saviour, the ju-ju doll blessed with the power to make time stop, spin around, like changing the callout at a square dance just to confuse all the dancers.

My breath returned to a normal in-out, in-out pattern. My heart stopped its calypso beating on my ear drums. I took a sip of bottled water to bring my dry throat back to life and readjusted my seatbelt and hair. I turned the key in the ignition. And I remembered to leave off on good terms; I blessed myself just in case Someone was listening.

 

~~~

 

Using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, a flash fiction or thought through the days of the year. Click on the images to get to the artist’s page, where you’ll find a bit more about the piece and the source of inspiration. Please note that each month’s work here has a separate page (links are in the right sidebar).

~~~

90/365  FEELING SATURATED AND GOOD
Word Count: 348

I slogged through the marsh to get to the small pond where cattails grew. I wished I’d worn my boots. The water left from melting spring lay hidden just beneath the wind-swept grasses, puddling around each foot as I stepped.

The water wicked itself up from the bottom of my jeans to just below my knees. I felt the breeze blow cold and bitter on my legs. The cattails, though, were supposed to be well worth the perseverance.

As I neared the edge of the pond I could see the cattails stiff and strong and tall. I readied my bag and knife and headed around to the right, where they seemed unshattered by the hard winter.

The pond was sparkling in the late afternoon sun, thawed and coming back to life. I’d wandered out to within its reach, unknowing until its cold tongue licked my ankles. In surprise, I looked down and saw a gold patch of weeds or something just below the surface a few feet away. I squinted, stretched, hesitant to go in deeper since I had a long walk home and the clouds punched at the sun to cool the day.

It looked like a child, an infant, and I held my breath, afraid and yet knowing I must, must know for certain. I waded in deeper, careful of the slippery mud that sucked at my feet, until I was close enough to see clearly and exhaled in relief.

A swirl of golden pond weeds, clumped in the shape of a human child, complete with trails of swaddling cloth wisping away. It already decomposed itself as the soft waves from my own movement disturbed it and was looking more like a seahorse, its arms now disappeared into its body, its long snout and curled tail swimming away.

Sometime late that summer, sitting and rocking in the cool dim of my den, rubbing the bulge of my belly and wondering who and what it will be, I see the cattails outlined sharp and bold against the light from the window; always and ever, cattails alone.

~~~

89/365  CAN’T DO MUCH MORE THAN THIS
Word Count: 614

The day the old magnolia tree became a fire-breathing dragon I was doing laundry and didn’t notice until it had pulled its feet out of the ground and stood there drying off from the morning rain like a butterfly come out of its cocoon.

It was astonishing to say the least. The colors of spring purple and pink flowers–now scales–open up to the sun. The new green leaves just waiting to pop. The branches all gnarled into a skeleton that sang of bravery and endurance. It was awesome to see.

I watched it take unsteady steps around the backyard, testing its balance, adjusting and learning just like a toddler would do. Then it curled up and slept for most of the day, exhausted, I imagine, from the rigors of metamorphosis.

I was a little afraid, but just had to go out there and see it up close. Oddly enough, in its current stance, it looked just like a magnolia tree. I approached it carefully, quietly, ready to run back to the safety of my own kitchen if it so much as looked like it might wake up. I had left the back door wide open and had my running shoes on.

From deep within it came a rumbling that at first I worried might be a growl then realized it was only the soft snoring any dragon might make. I grew braver and reached out and touched one of its scales surprised to find it so soft, like petals. It was incongruous with its rough and sturdy frame. And quite unexpected, from all that I’d read as a child, it didn’t smell foul or evil at all, but rather like new spring flowers.

I hated keeping the secret from my family but I worried that my husband might call the police or the zoo, or worse, try to kill it. The kids, I knew, would enjoy it but their interest would wane, just like it had with the gerbil and then the turtle that got lost somewhere in the house and never was found. The youngest would torment it and from what I’d seen of it, this dragon was not your usual dragon, but a playful, sweet innocent, unused to the cruelty of a two year-old.

Not every day, but almost, I went out and watched it romp around and it got used to me. I’d sit out there with my morning cup of coffee and a cigarette (another secret I kept) and it learned to trust me. It took a while, but Maggie (as I named it) soon came over to me out of curiosity I think, because it thought it was the only one who smoked. It watched me, and learned how to adjust its own flame down from a crazed giant Bic lighter to a gentle wisp of smoke when it was happy.

Then came the day, decades later, when with the kids grown and gone we decided to downsize to a smaller house closer to where our youngest lived. The hardest thing to leave behind was Maggie. I stroked its still-soft scales and scratched its nose lightly as I explained the best I could that we’d be leaving. I don’t know what brought it to life that day so many years ago, and I hoped it would have a friend among the new family that would be moving in. But I suspected different.

Maybe it will come back again some day, but the last morning I spent with my dragon it softly went to sleep as I pet it. When I got up to leave and turned around, it was just an old magnolia tree.

~~~

88/365  SATURATED
Word Count: 128

To watch an eagle hunting is to absorb majesty and grace into your soul. It makes you want to soar, but gently.

To see the dry gray branches of the maples tip themselves in red, finger polish to accent the new dresses that they’ll wear in spring,

To watch thin wisps of clouds move as a synchronized school of fish across the sky,

To catch the scent of green sprouts pushing heads above the earth,

To breathe in a day unlike the days before, sun-drenched and filled with the song of birds that held their breath through winter’s darkness,

To feel alive and saturated with the promise of renewal, is knowing that if not for eagles, man would never have known that he could learn to fly.

~~~

87/365  CHANGING OVER TIME
Word Count: 160

Remember when I was tall? Oh yes, you must! I could reach the top shelf of the cabinets without this dumb footstool. Now I either drag it over or need to ask you to get the beanpot for me. You easily pick it up in one hand, place it on the counter without a word. That stings. You don’t tease me about my height any more. Yes, that stings.

Doesn’t your back hurt from shoveling the snow yesterday? Mine does. Well maybe not all that much. It’s just that I’m not used to bending and stretching like that anymore. At least, not in winter. No, it’s fine, I don’t need Icy-Hot on it. It’s feeling better already. Are you sure your’s doesn’t ache?

Okay, so maybe I couldn’t reach the top shelf without climbing up on the counter. Or maybe it was a different kitchen, my mother’s perhaps, not ours, not here where we’ve lived forty years.

Forty years?

~~~

86/365  CHANGING MY MIND (MY MIND CHANGING)
Word Count: 248

The sun filters through the trees, the oaks that cling to their leaves through winter, the cedars and pines too shy to shed their greenery at all. I love the dappled shadows on the ground, playing with the sleepy moss that’s softly crushed under my feet.

I’m going for a walk because it is so beautiful today. Warm and with a stillness only filled with birds that flitter high above. Red ones–what are they called? And larger blue ones that shriek and remind me of the sound the clothesline makes as my mother pulls in the clothes. Shriek! Shriek!

That’s the house where I was born. The last house on this street before the woods. It’s my neighbor’s house. It’s large and the prettiest shade of soft yellow.

Something is singing up over my head. A small brown bird but oh! Such a voice!

This yellow house here is mine. My husband’s somewhere in the back yard, raking. Or cutting firewood. I forgot what he said he was doing.

The woods are dark but the path is dappled with sunlight. We used to walk through here every Sunday. Past the yellow house where I grew up.

Something skitters onto the path just a bit up ahead. A chipmunk? A squirrel? An elephant? Yes, I think it’s an elephant. It’s gray.

I’m not sure of my way home now, I’d best turn around. And ask directions at that house right up there. It’s big and friendly. And yellow.

~~~

85/365  SPACES LEFT FOR SPACE
Word Count: 513

The tsunami washed into her mind through the eyes, ears, and voice of the media. It splashed into its own space in her mind, ebbing and flowing with each day’s reporting. In the next cell of the block, a nuclear reactor reacted in a cement vault she’d built out of words.

She sighed, shut the lid of her laptop, drained the cold coffee from her cup into the sink. Felt guilty that she had coffee to carelessly throw away. Then she got out her checkbook and wrote out several checks, notes, addresses and sealed each with a stamp that lasted forever, thinking that the world was indeed, as fragile as a square patch of paper with a thin whisper of glue. She stared at the envelopes stuffed full of fresh water, bandages, rice, and wondered if she’d done enough.

Each day she checked on the wars, the rebellions, the uprisings, the struggles, the grim tolls of death. She wore ribbons of rainbow colors pinned to her blouse, one for each cause that she cared about, feeling bad for the ones she didn’t know about but were going on somewhere, with someone, a group she felt she should voice opinion about.

She’d cry at the televised news, at five, six, seven o’clock then again at eleven p.m. Kohl-black streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks in trails like the borders of countries that could not get along. She’d started using eyeliner too, top and bottom, in honor of those women she saw screaming out from their burkhas and veils. The eyes dark and pleading, the fists clenched like a baby’s very first time, untightly, a stray finger out of line with the group.

In the morning she’d sit at the table, coffee and toast without butter–real butter that she had and so many didn’t so she felt she should give it up. And her coffee, now taken black without cream or milk because there were children who needed it more. She’d open the laptop and click onto the internet, her breath held in ready for the news of the day. Refill the brain containers with updates, open doors, enter, close doors, build new spaces to fill. The routine would begin and somehow she’d remember to drink the coffee cup dry, to pick up the crumbs with a licked finger, to wash the dishes as quickly with as little water as she could. Then she’d dress and chin up bravely, heart heavy and weighing her down, go out to work for the day.

She’d catch the news on the radio driving, as new as news could be, newer sometimes than headlines on websites, though email alerts came within minutes of an event. Sometimes she prayed in between flashes, or built new spaces to house happenings as they happened to be. It left her exhausted.

The next day it began all over again and just as on each other day, she never did see the old man in his little spot of space at the corner, his hand out, holding his own empty cup.

~~~

84/365  ABUNDANCE
Word Count: 457

She gathered all her old hair ribbons, the ball of twine from the “dump” drawer in the kitchen, and sacrificed the shoelaces from a pair of lace-up boots she hadn’t worn in many years.

She tied the ends together until she had a length of cord that looked to her to be about enough, and made a loop and knotted one end. Then she went outside, sat down on the back porch stairs, and waited.

The clouds trespassed across the bright blue sky, some hand in hand, some lone and stumbling. She was looking for the softest, the fluffiest, the whitest she could see that she’d be able to reach and lasso.

Twice she went back inside out of necessity and hurried back out, afraid she might miss the perfect one. Her neck ached from looking up. She finally brought out a book and a sweater, as the late afternoon breeze teased her with its breath.

She was deeply absorbed in her reading when a shadow covered and colored the page, changing the words with a much deeper meaning, adding an undertone of a sly and sinister mood. She looked up.

There it was, a cloud, not white but biliously yellow and green, humped like an overweight woman held in by waistbands and bra straps and stretched buttonholes. She stood up and slowly swung the lasso in a circle the way she’d learned when she was a kid. It floated, hovered, anxious to chase and capture whatever it was flung out to catch.

With a single flick back of her arm she sent the lasso out up to the sky, sensing the speed of her prey; the timing had to be perfect.

And it was!

The cloud was stopped and yanked back a few miles in its blissfully unaware path. Taken by surprise, it rolled in on itself, tangling up further with the girl’s tightening ropes. Until, completely entangled and unable to fly, it surrendered to the gentle but firm tug down to earth. It landed in a soft thud. She ran over to where it had fallen.

It looked much smaller than she’d imagined. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

She bent down to look closer. She listened and thought she heard as small weeping sound. The ground was wet with rain. She loosened the cord, unwinding carefully around it. It was softer than anything she’d touched ever before. It shivered under her fingers. She loosened the last loop that bound it, though she held the cloud gently in place.

She stroked it and cooed, hoping to soothe and comfort it while she thought about things. She remembered to say she was sorry to have delayed it, and then she stepped back and set the cloud free.

~~~

83/365  ALWAYS ADD TO YOUR ABILITY TO SEE MORE
Word Count: 230

While he watched the snow flakes landed, some feet-first and some crashed headlong to the ground. Some flittered, sparkled but many who had hit hard simply lay there bleeding. Many died and disappeared.

They sent more troops onto the battlefield, until the ground could hold no more and flakes piled up as war demanded its just due. He wept for loss even knowing that this too would change, adapt, return again full circle.

Lured outside by sun-warmed air he walked the roadway down to the lake. Branches cut the sky into a stained glass window, recalling memories of Saturday confessions in the silent dimness and Sundays when the church would come alive in song and sparkling chandeliers. It amazed him the same thing could be so different. Like the branches, that in another month would burst with leaves and blossoms. The maples would send out their spinning helicopters on the first spring breezes. Some seeds would shrivel, into skeletons and turn into earth. But some would hide within it, poke their sprouts out when the cold was surely over, grow into trees themselves to send out branches like stain glass windows and helicopter seeds.

He walked a long time before he smiled and turned around. Funny, how on the way back home he noticed colors that must have been painted on the scene after he’d passed it by.

~~~

82/365 IT CAME OUT JUST RIGHT
Word Count: 228

She tried every way she knew how to snow. She started with a light dusting that quickly melted into the March warm ground. She scattered flakes like big fat feathers and they built up quickly. But this was near the end of the winter and she ran out of this size soon as most had been spent in January in a joyful frenzy over a couple of days.

She pondered the problem. She needed quantity. She pulled out bags of medium-sized flakes and waited for the wind to go away. She licked her finger and held it out, nodded, and opened the first bag and shook it gently so that it floated straight and steady. She established a rhythm that seemed to be working well.

First the fine needles of the pine trees, then the soft new buds of maples reached up and held the snow flakes in their cold fingers. Still, the ground scoffed at the blanket that she tried to lay upon it.

She got some help from the dying day and with time and dedication, the air cooled the ground enough to make it more receptive to the snowfall. Soon the grass and even sidewalks and streets were hidden by a coverlet of snow.

Mother Nature smiled. She’d wanted to wear the white dress one last time before she put it away for spring.

~~~

81/365  WORTH DOING
Word Count: 283

He was blue and she was green, nature colors, similar in temperament. They got along very well.

They met at a campus lecture on economics and discovered to each’s delight, that they both believed saving was a much smarter strategy than taking risks or buying on credit. They were likely the only two there who did. After they’d both graduated and gotten good stable jobs, Blue asked Green to marry him and she joyfully agreed.

They bought a house before they had their three children as everything was planned out and timed for the best possible outcome as far as need versus want, temporary versus enduring, the future always considered in all major purchases or financial decisions. Anything worth having was worth saving and waiting for; anything worth doing was worth doing well.

Blue had a few flirtations and a single half-year-long affair. He lost his paunch and took on a purplish cast and Green knew something was up. She asked him outright, “Have you been seeing Red?” and he just looked confused and told her no, if anything, he’d lost his anger and anxieties a long time ago.

She wasn’t going to hold her breath and pout. She wasn’t new at this, and so she waited out his mid-life crisis which didn’t last all that long. She didn’t turn with envy and he didn’t get depressed but life had changed for them both until it set itself right again.

One day he brought home flowers, hugged and kissed her and he told her that he loved her very much and asked if she would forgive him.

“Anything worth doing, is worth saving,” she said, though she didn’t feel it.

~~~

80/365  IMAGINING THE PERFECT
Word Count: 397

The sun rose large and deep cerulean blue. It was going to be a super day.

John packed himself inside his briefcase and headed out to work. He liked his job. He liked working with the numbers and making his bosses happy with his results. They trusted him, no longer needing their input to make the bottom line come out right.

John hummed as he worked, his fingers hovering like a Blackhawk over the keyboard as his mind spun through the rinse cycle and numbers stuck in place around the drum. He peeled them off and stuck them on the chart.

“Wow, that’s great, John!” said the Chief Financial Officer. The CEO agreed, once the CFO had validated the numbers with enthusiasm.

John ate the lunch he’d packed and played an online game of Tetris as he munched through a hot pastrami sandwich with melted swiss that came straight out of the small microwave oven he kept inside the briefcase. He pulled out a coke from the mini refrigerator he kept there too and unpopped the cap. Life was good. He was stacking them up well on Tetris, too.
Suddenly there was a knock on the briefcase.

“John?” he heard, though it was somewhat muffled.  “John, are you in there?”

He gobbled the last bite of his sandwich, washed it down with the coke and wiped everything clean. Then he slowly lifted the top of the case and looked out. “Mr. Watson? What’s up?”

“John,” said the CFO, “we looked at these figures again and there seems to be a shortfall of millions of dollars . . .”

John hopped out onto his desk and carefully locked the briefcase behind him. He took a look at what Watson was questioning, the projected budget for the end of the year.

“I’ll get right on it,” he answered. “I’m sure there’s just a tiny slip of the finger that explains it,” he said. For nearly an hour he played with the numbers, moved columns, eliminated and added cells till the spreadsheet balanced with the number they’d approved last week.

“Here you go, sir!” he shouted to catch Watson’s ear as he rumbled by (preferring, as he did, to drive through the office in a semi tractor trailer).

Watson studied it, tried to imagine how it would play out, then grinned. “Perfect!” he said and zoomed off in a big cloud of dust.

~~~

79/365  DOING WHAT HAS TO BE DONE
Word Count: 555

I’m Princess Thundercloud and she’s Mary Sunshine and we’re off to the lake for some ice fishing. We trek through the snow, she leading the way in a blinding bright yellow puff jacket and matching hat and mittens with fluffy kitties printed all over. I’m wearing seven different shades of gray.

She’s talking a blue streak and I let the words pass by my wool-hatted head, imagining them to be dewdrops melting the world behind me and bringing up tulips and daffodils where she’s walked though. That’s how Jenny (her real name) is, warm and funny and nurturing. Pretty, too. Not me; I’m shaped like an eggplant and have the disposition of a plum already turned prune. We’ve grown up next door to each other and still get together each time we’re both home.

“Lacey, come on!” she sings out. Yes, a strange name for a vegetable but my mother had planned on having a Lacey-type baby and didn’t realize until I was two that I was who I was, at best, burlap or cotton twill.

She is stopped, turned and waiting for me to catch up. Her bucket and pole look like beach toys in her hands.

“I’m cold, Jen,” I hint, appealing to the saint who lives within her just waiting to explode out and rise up into heaven someday.

“We’ve got to do this,” she says, “it’s tradition!”

“Well it’s going to end someday anyway,” I say between huffs and puffs, exaggerated a bit for effect.

“Never!” she trills, and I swear the tree next to me shivers and does its damnedest to sprout leaves.

I get an image of her pushing her way through an overgrown forest, her hair sterling silver, her yellow puff jacket like brand new, a big happy smile on her face, and pulling a sled on which sits what looks like a shriveled purple vegetable behind her.

We head out to the center of the small pond and I set up stools and blankets while she hacks a hole in the ice. She could have just beamed a smile down to melt it and saved some energy.

Two hours of “remember when?” and other memories that make her laugh and me cringe and grumble and we’ve got a bucket in which four fish swim in shock.

“Can we go now?” I ask. We’re out of hot chocolate and my fingers are blue and brittle.

Jenny pulls out her pole, breaks it down and sticks her hands in her pockets, but she doesn’t get up off the stool. She turns to me and there are icicle tears on her chin. “Lacey, Tom left me.”

This time her words catch me like darts stuck into my heart.

“The kids?” I say.

“They’re fine. He left me everything intact. The house, the kids, life is the same except he’s not in it.” And then she starts sobbing, big heaving sobbing that echos off the edges of the pond.

I’m on my knees and holding her, rocking her back and forth, maybe too hard because I don’t know how much she needs, don’t know because in all these years, she’s never needed me. We’re like that for a while and I don’t feel cold anymore.  Inside me, I’m a big ripe tomato and not like an eggplant at all.

~~~

78/365  HEALTHY EVERYWHERE
Word Count: 140

When I feel good I am sunshine yellow inside. I’ll smile and it gleams out my eyes. My words bounce and warm whatever they touch and though I can’t explain it, my hair becomes naturally blonde.

There are days when I’m iffy, gray or that muddy mix of pink trying to be green. Green is happy but transient, a hobo who sneaks between winters, reaching out tentative pearls of bud tips on trees, bursting to deep color through summer, changing coats in the bite of the fall.

I feel what I sense is around me. Birdsong starts me singing. Rain makes me cry. Words run in cursive in spirals that loop through my insides, exploring my heart, picking out partners from bins in my mind. I write what the day tries to tell me. I write the color I am.

~~~

77/365  PROCESSING
Word Count: 493

Like a squirrel I stash the nuts into the depth of memory, hoping I can dig them out again or see them grow into a story. I watch everyone, everywhere, and there will always be one or two that look plump and tasty so I blink them onto the film of my mind. Story, I know, will come later.

Sometimes they try to escape, run away and settle into a tale of a New Hampshire moon where of course, they just don’t belong. I’ve saved old Ted Brewster for that, a made-up name for a man who drove up in a truck that could’ve been any color at one time, held together with duct tape in places, but he stopped and changed my flat tire. I’ve cleaned up his overalls a bit for the pages, and he’s aged a couple of years, but he’s comfortably sitting in front of his very own ramshackle gas station smoking an unfiltered Camel.

Some of them meet up and need to be together. Like Dog Girl and Hammer Head. She walked the streets pulled along by six or seven dogs each day. A wispy girl who didn’t appear to have the strength to hold onto a Chihuahua much less the Afghan, boxer, a few terriers, a poodle, and a mutt. She seemed to be unaware she was attached to them, floating through the crowd like a helium birthday balloon. Her name is Rachel.

And Hammer Head, whom I’ve since baptized Julio, is going to be her lover. Hammerhead/Julio is my pizza delivery guy. He’s got nice eyes and deserves to be the romantic lead in a story.

So Julio has had a rough life. His father died when he was only six. His mother held three jobs to keep them fed and sheltered–he has two sisters and a brother I would think.  She, worn down from life, aged quickly. Julio started stealing from the local market and Walmart’s to help out. He’s been out of jail and clean for a year when he meets Rachel.

Just when we think these two have met their soulmates, along comes . . . someone I pull out who struck me with the way he bobbed when he walked. Justin (like Justin Timberlake) has a killer smile and Rachel, being the wisp she is, is caught on the upswing of his bobbing.

Poor Julio. Right now I’ve got him waiting anxiously for her to come home. Meanwhile, via the omniscient narrator, Rachel has dropped off the last dog and is standing on the sidewalk talking to the suave and clever Justin.

Uh-oh, I seem to have hit a snag. That’s not Justin. Who the hell is that? I can see him so clearly but hard as I try, I don’t know from where or when, and worse, he won’t go away.

There’s nothing else I can do once they take over the story except watch and write down what happens.

~~~

76/365  FEELING LIGHTER
Word Count: 319

He is jogging through the woods, the old trail that’s been closed to him through the winter months.

There is a breeze that dances with the leaves, picks them up from where they’ve lain since late December, trapped by snow now melted. He notices that some are still bright green, tries to think back to September and wonders why they hadn’t changed, just dropped without a blush of color.

Up ahead the sun touches off the light frost on the brush along the path and sets it sparkling like those night lanterns people stick along their driveways. Or a Christmas mist of twinkling lights spread over bushes. With the thought of Christmas, his mood darkens, deepens. His pace is unset, unsteady. Lilah almost left him Christmas Eve.

They’ve been married seventeen years. What happens in that time to change the feelings that brings people together? For him, it likely was unrest, an early mid-life crisis making all the efforts behind him thin as air, the dreams still up ahead as heavy as a thundercloud. For her, it seemed to be the routine of it all. Even the most organized of minds appreciates a jolt now and then. A trail that forks off to an unimagined place.

And so after going through avoidance, resentment, silent festering, they exploded and actually told each other what was going on. They looked at what they had established, three kids all doing well, a home with just three more years of mortgage, jobs that had kept them more than just secure.

Then they looked ahead and what they saw was not closed doors and tunnels, but paths that wove off in all directions. Each made a choice.

With that his step grew lighter, more a steady pace. He turned to see the woman who jogged a few yards behind him.

“Hey Lilah, hurry up! Look at the sunshine on the frost up there!”

~~~

75/365  A FINE LINE
Word Count: 148

“Come to San Francisco,” he said. “You’ll love it here.”

She wondered if that meant he wanted her there. I miss you would have been clear.

“Well I can come out for a few days next month,” she said.

“That’d be great! I’ll show you the sights,” he said.

She deciphered his words as he was doing well there, glad he moved, and wanted to show it off.

“Okay, I’ll check the airlines and make reservations for mid-month,” she said.

“Great. Looking forward to it,” he said.

He wondered if she really wanted to be with him or just see San Francisco.

She wondered if she should bother packing that new sexy underwear she’d gotten just before he left. Or even make reservations.

He wondered if she’d wear that new sexy underwear.

~~~

74/365  PRAYER FOR JAPAN
Word Count: 279

In the land of the rising sun the people are strangely quiet. Women sit in lines that move by inches or not at all for a while. They are waiting to get food for the family they consider themselves lucky to have. Men climb in and around the memory of buildings no longer standing looking for sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, and wives.

At the center of town, where the daycare stood next to the cleaner’s there sits a large boat. It’s been through rough seas in its time, out to the boundaries to bring in the fish that is sold fresh all over Japan. It was sitting in port yesterday, empty and waiting.

Cars swimming in schools like white mackerel, twisting through streets, racing each other in somersaults, bobbing like buoys in the waves. White cars and trucks with an occasional red one, a blue, but mostly white, because it’s a simple color, a pure and graceful color, no match for the black raging ocean. They sit like drowned mice, or stand on their faces, lay crumpled and crowded in corners wherever the water drove them and left them behind.

A tsunami is a sneeze of Neptune, a hiccup of earthquake, the flap of a butterfly wing. In its wake it leaves waves of people, working to rebuild the world the water has taken away.

And in the aftermath, a grandmother pokes through what she thinks was her home. She was supposed to watch over him, keep him safe and now she can’t find him. How will she tell her daughter? Her daughter and son-in-law, who, despite her confusion and fears, she prays will be home soon.

~~~

73/365  TAKING IT ALL IN
Word Count: 191

She took a deep breath and inhaled the leaf nubs off the maples, the buds close to bursting on lilacs, the yellow forsythia blossoms that tickled her nose.

As she glared at small patches of leftover snow they melted into her eyes.

She was determined to walk a mile up to the park and back but her legs got heavy with branches brought down by the wind, her arms weary of carrying rainclouds she picked off the morning’s blue sky. She set down her load and studied it closely, selected wisps of fog and ate them without chewing, gnawed on a branch sweet with sap. She stretched to settle her meal and picked up the few things that couldn’t be eaten: a green mitten with stars lost by a child, a red ball unfetched by a dog.

As she walked she grew thirsty. She reached up and pulled down a cloud and sucked out the rain. Her eyes were pale from the snow. Her hair yellowed by sunshine and forsythia flowers.

Back home she skipped up the stairs, refreshed by the adventure, full of ideas she’d taken in from the day.

~~~

72/365  ENJOY IT NOW
Word Count: 387

Samantha was the swimmer in the dolphin tank on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Twelve-hour shifts, three fifteen-minute breaks, and all the fish she could eat. They didn’t pay for the towels and robe but they did provide the swimsuits. On Wednesday she was a shark in a sleek one-piece blue-grey. On Fridays she was a manta ray in a white and black number. But on Sundays, her favorite, an angelfish.

Though as a shark she glided through the tank like a needle and her manta ray was as graceful and sly as a ruffle of fox, when she was an angelfish she strutted her stuff, bright stripes flashing, her big eyes aware, and lips seductively puckered. With barely a slow flip of her fins and a swish wave of her tail, Samantha wove between the other fish in the tank like a goddess.

Her friend Mina who did Thursdays asked Samantha to take over her giant squid. Samantha needed the money, her rent was just upped and her car needed major repairs. She hated being the squid with it’s penis-head and its tentacles dragging like ribbons to tangle her up in the plastic seaweed, but eventually she learned to stay up off the bottom and out-maneuver the sharks–the real ones they brought in sometimes.

With the economy tanking and layoffs of fish and personnel alike, Samantha soon found herself doing seven days a week every week. The others had complained about the low pay, unbalanced diet, wrinkled skin and had left. Samantha crammed to learn the Monday eel, Tuesday’s starfish, and Saturday’s school of herring which involved wires and 650 fake herring and intricate navigational swimming.

While eventually they gave her a raise and let her live in the tank to avoid travel time to and from the display, Samantha grew tired of her job. The constant motion, the stress of avoiding the predatory sharks and the lone killer whale, the quick aging of her skin to a pale scaly blue-white, and the lack of gills all took its toll. The inevitable happened.

One Monday morning they found her belly-up in the tank, her fins nibbled away during the night, her large eyes white and bulging, and they fished her out with a net. She was never replaced.

~~~

71/365  TIME DOESN’T FLY
Word Count: 306

There were wrinkles and bulges pasted on by the Night Gnome while she slept. Her children, who should have been tucked up in their bedrooms upstairs called her long distance from cell phones at night and made her talk to little gremlins they called grandchildren. That’s what she gets for letting them play with flashlights in bed when they were little.

Her husband was sixty-three going on forty-two. Her best friend worked out at the gym every morning and had traded her love handles to the Night Gnome for champagne and honey-mixed hair. Everywhere Julie looked, as a matter of fact, people were not at the stage she thought they should be. Except her. Her minute by minute aging process was viewable in a mirror played out like a movie in slow motion.

She noticed it one night when she undressed in front of the full length mirror in her bedroom, something she normally used for checking skirt lengths or colors of handbags and shoes. She nearly shrieked for as she watched, her breasts started sagging. Her waistline bloomed outward. One by one her hairs turned grey.

It was very depressing, needless to say, so she didn’t spend much time there at all. A quick glance now and then, just to confirm her suspicions. She joined her best friend at the gym. She colored her hair. She bought cross-your-heart bras that lifted and separated. It all helped.

Nowadays she’s noticed that time has nearly stood still. Her kids come to visit and she questions them about homework. She has a crush on the young man who brings her lunch. She believes he’s going to ask her out on a date very soon.

When she wants to she dances and when she doesn’t she sits. But she never ever looks into mirrors.

~~~

70/365  BETTER IS POSSIBLE
Word Count: 354

Neruda’s Ode to Laziness sticks to my ass like a half-licked lollipop I might have sat on while I had Elizabeth down at the playground. Fingers point and giggle and I’ll go obliviously through my day with it smack dab on my behind as if it were gorilla-glued on and I won’t find it until I’m undressing at night and wonder how long it’s been there.

Evening classes are rough. I make dinner for Ted and Elizabeth and run out trailing untied laces and half-off jackets and marital communication that fades as I pull out of the driveway. It’s a race to the college, an exercise in patience to find a parking space, and a sprint to class since I usually end up so far off–off campus that I squint in the distance looking for the familiar shape of the main building and take off in that direction.

I’m only thirty-two yet I’m winded and puffing behind twenty year-olds who saunter–wish I knew how to saunter–into the room on the third floor of the new wing behind the courtyard where we’re not supposed to walk until the newly set paving stones are solidly one with the earth.

Neruda’s a kick. I love how he takes the most common of objects, emotions, feelings and flaws and lyricizes them so that you have a mini-second to recognize the punch in the gut you get from the reading just before it knocks you flat on your butt. But this, his Ode to Laziness, was a black cloud following me through my days ever since I read it.

I tried so hard to reach a goal–seeking inspiration–even as I blocked out life itself from providing some kind of clue. I thought it came from inside, looking deep inside myself. No wonder I had come up empty, for I’d let nothing useful in!

So here I sit, five night a week, taking in knowledge like an injected cell floating in a Petri dish. No longer feeling as Neruda said, “as if my ode was never going to sprout.”

~~~

69/365  OUR LITTLE SECRET
Word Count: 213

It all came down to what happened to be playing on the radio while she was spring-cleaning the house. It was salsa, lively and full of sass and bass.

She was salsa-ing her way through the living room, the duster flicking teasingly at tables and lamps, her hips seductively bumping the corners of couches and doorways. It didn’t matter much that the dust flew around in the air. It was happy and she was sure it would safely land somewhere else.

He walked in hungry and tired. Ten-hour days at the office capped by hour-long drives to and from. He dropped his coat on the back of the kitchen chair as he always did and as it always irked her when he did so and he stood there and watched her dance.

She, oblivious to her audience, moved as she had twenty years ago. She’d loved dancing then, feeling the drums in her belly, the guitar guiding her feet, her hands flowing along with the horns. Then she married a man who hated to dance.

He stepped up behind her. She turned and smiled. He put his hands on her hips and tried to follow the rhythm.  Until she stopped to take dinner out of the oven, they danced.

~~~

68/365  WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT
Word Count: 103

The bushes spring back, shedding their hats and mittens of snow. Cardinals chirrup to wake up the trees that send out buds at their branch tips testing the breeze. Birds fly in pairs, the female coos its too early, too cold yet to think of building a nest.

I walk down the driveway, cross the street to the mailbox. The snow has melted around in a patch, green points of lilies stick their noses out of the soil. How does nature know when to sleep, when to grow, and yet, with all of our own supposed superior intelligence overwhelming our instinct,

I don’t.

~~~

67/365  WHAT MATTERS MOST
Word Count: 93

Ideas flash like a matador’s cape through my life, enticing, taunting, frustrating. Red swirling circles waved in front of my eyes, “Here! Take me! Here!” and my fingers lace through the loops with joyful hope. Springs wound tight uncoil and drift loosely into a space that thickens with smoke and blinds me, stings into tears.

I drop my hands in despair, my eyes in my own disappointment. When I open my fist, all I have is what has always been there and that must be enough.

Behind me the bull paws the ground.

~~~

66/365  INFINITE TIME AND WRITING
Word Count: 115

If my words were harnessed in poems they would flow like the wind to the next line, enjambed stories unstopped by the blade of a page.

If my words were music, they’d sing both the chorus and solo, deep and irreverent as an oboe, joy trilling and climbing the stanzas like a good violin.

If what I write was a painting, pastel at the edges, bold at the heart, colors blending and swirled, unheld by gravity’s hand,

the paint wouldn’t dry in an instant but shine for a while like the new morning sky,

and float between strokes of the brush in different levels, dimensions, and depths,

to lift with the North wind and fall with the first summer rain,

and outlive the last moments of time.

~~~

65/365  CONSIDERATION OF EVERYTHING
Word Count: 174

The rain sinks into the snow, melting it by layers, last week’s, the big one before that, the ice in between, all the way down into January’s first now laying tired on the ground.

Patches of grass scattered like meteor strikes on the lawn. Puddles in the low-lying areas, refreezing at midnight into the strength of compact ice. Here is that one wild wicked windstorm, the snow strewn with tidbits stolen off branches bold enough to try to withstand it.

Just off the back porch, a spring robin’s delight: downy nest fillers of my husband’s haircut sometime in the first week of February. Too early now to start thinking of creating a family, so I hope the hair clings to its hold, ready to softly warm fragile spring eggs.

In late December I watched the snow fall, spread in a coverlet over the bed of earth. Now I see Spring cleaning, changing the sheets to the lighter weight dew of the rain. A reversal of season, everything considered in step with the change.

~~~

64/365  PLACID PANDEMONIUM
Word Count: 259

I didn’t think it could happen but some small voice inside me said try anyhow. So I leapt from the roof grabbing at sky and landed with a soft thud on a cloud.

It was awesome.

The wind blew ever so gently from the northeast and I soon found myself over the city. Philadelphia–from way up in the air–looks sparkling clean. Domes offered themselves as a landing but I was too into the trip. Streets were so perfectly straight, narrow in the back alleys, dark, sometimes the glint of sun caught by an old metal chair that someone had probably thrown out. But clean, nothing like they looked when you walked them at night, alone and cold and friendless.

I peeked over the edge, sometimes scurrying back when it thinned into wisps, trailed off on its own, disappeared into threads, then nothing. I saw my old girlfriend’s house where she was likely in bed with her new man. I wondered if she still has that lavender blanket, or the towels we bought together in Macy’s last year. I wonder if she lets him use them. I suppose it’d only make sense if she did.

I don’t remember what happened, likely a shift of the wind. The pavement so hard underneath me, the trees waving fingers above, nail-polished tips of green.

Tough. Must’ve had a good reason. Didn’t have a chance. Dead.

No, I said, no, I’m not! I just must have slipped, or maybe fell down with the rain. But they were already lighting up cigarettes.

~~~

63/365  ACCEPTING THE SUNSET
Word Count: 204

Gracefully, willfully, easing into the bands of fire of the setting sun as it brings down the curtains black and spangled with stars. The last show.  That’s how I want to go.

Gray hairs came so gradually, one at a time, here and there and unnoticed until they banded into a streak. Fingers stiff in the morning relax with the day’s work. Stretching and flexing into the birds that they used to be, flying swift and soaring. Knees that have finally learned to bend to pick up heavy loads. It happens; it happens.

Old friends are more than just time-honored. Little left to say not just because its been laughed over before. Knowledge becomes wisdom, wisdom useless in spaces where letters are instant, learning is a matter of touch.

Good things become better, more cherished if they’re not forgotten. The sun that has risen a thousand times still surprises if just a shade off, a moment behind.

Voices are softer, smiles are much brighter, laughter comes from inside the soul. This is the journey, more than half over, victory in each step taken not further, but closer to the sun setting in its orangey-fire glow. This is how I want to go.

~~~

62/365  GLIMPSE OF A GENTLY MOVING LANDSCAPE
Word Count: 338

Going through the pictures she found one of the backyard taken twenty years ago when they first moved in. It looked barren, thin sprites of birch, evergreens plopped here and there like miniature Christmas trees on a white tree skirt like the layout of a Lionel train that whizzes through a toy town. It had all grown up since then.

She went over to the kitchen window but it was not enough. She opened up the door to the backyard. It was March and in the middle of its reluctant move towards Spring. The hills were gently rolling down to the woods where dark feathers of branches built in layers to block out the nearest neighbors. They’d planted pines no bigger than a toddler in the hopes of privacy invaded by new houses being built. She couldn’t see the houses now except for kitchen lights in early morning, and the flickering bluish lights of television screens at night.

The garden fence was nearly sunk beneath the winter snow. There was no trace of where the roses bloomed in a little plot of paradise it took her many years to shape into a horseshoe on the hill. Yet all around the trees had reached into the sky, reforming the horizon, raising it higher and higher and moving shadows in the summer nights to places where they’d never reached before.

She felt so small. As small as a child must feel in a crowded room of grownups. It surprised her that her small patch of earth was moving all around her, would go on without her, reshaping this same view for someone else. It would move so slowly that only a photograph could show the changes that the eye and mind would miss. Just as she had learned to live without the noise of children, streaks of snowsuits flying through the scene, and him, who she had thought would live forever, she knew that even trees someday would reach their height and new ones sprout to change the world again.

~~~

61/365  A WELCOME THAW
Word Count: 356

Spinach, yes spinach. The melting snow pulled away from a small patch of autumn-green grass and it reminded her of spinach. She hated the broccoli of trees, the lettuce of lilac leaves, and above everything else, she hated spinach.

Why did everything have a dull edge to it? Why every silver lining cloaked in a cloud? It was her, she understood that; she was an anti-Mary Sunshine, yet the world hadn’t exactly showered her with moonbeams and stars. Everything received had been earned with her blood. Everything gained was at cost. Why should she pretend to take joy in the tiniest of spring promises, the thaw of a small patch of snow that promises spring and yet realistically, will insist on at least one more dump of wet white winter.

So with spinach in mind she trudged through the snow on the sidewalk that for some reason had blown back again and again after each shoveling. This she took as a sign. Give up, it said, protect yourself, and she pulled the walls back around her, slammed and locked both doors in a carefully structured response. Her glass capsule froze into ice and she slid through her day without melting. Efficient, clear, hard-edged, popsicle-person at her best.

Three steps before she reached the end of her day at her own doorstep, she was hit splat! in the back with a snowball. It near cracked her ice wall. She turned viciously, ready for battle.

And faced a small boy in an adorably blue snowsuit, his snowflake blue and white mittens coated with evidence.

“I’m sorry!” he said, his lip quivering, “I’ve never done that before.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” she said, her anger cooling as it melted.

“Honest!” he said. He started to cry.

She walked over to where he stood on the small but growing patch of autumn surrounded by winter.

“Well, this snow is old and hard,” she said. “Let’s go over here, where the snow hasn’t melted much yet from the sun. She scooped up a soft fluff of snow, watched as he followed her lead. Smiled despite her best intentions.

~~~

60/365  THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Word Count: 350

With a photographer’s eye for detail he found the chrysalis of the Monarch Butterfly at the stem of a ripening tomato. Once camouflaged perfectly, as the tomato reddened it became visible, the soft green space capsule with its gold band glinting in the sun. He carefully cut the stem a few inches above the fruit, tied a thread to its end and suspended it from the lock of the window in his living room. He set up a tripod and several times a day he clicked an image to catch its progression.

In a few days it changed, darkening to near black, its shape elongating as its natural rhythm metamorphosed into the thing it would become. Wings sprouted, legs grew, antennae lengthened, all hidden within.

The tomato plumped and colored from yellowish orange to a vibrant blood red.

The photographer caught it all on rolls and rolls of film. Soon it came down to hours, anticipation of emergence, excitement of new form and life.

He watched as it emerged, shedding its home like a skin. A small wet clump of insect that struggled to learn its new place in the world. He watched it unfold its wings, flare them out to dry, to strengthen, to lift it up into this strange environment though its eyes were on the sun that shined through the window.

A slow flap of wings, stretching in incredible beauty. It knew it was no longer a crawling thing, but it knew it must wait, patient, each minute counting, until it could fly.

The tomato too was growing, near bursting. It too knew its time was near.

The photographer knelt close by, knowing this was a moment he was privileged to share.

The butterfly spread its wings, orange and black, like living stained glass. Once, twice, testing the air.

The tomato ripened to its fullest, and, spurred by the flapping of wings, dropped from its stem, and to the horror of the photographer (who forgot at this point to take photographs, so entranced was he by the effect), fell to the floor killing the butterfly beneath it.

(True story.)

~~~

 

Using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, a flash fiction or thought through the days of the year. Click on the images to get to the artist’s page, where you’ll find a bit more about the piece and the source of inspiration. Note that each month’s work here has a separate page (links are in the right sidebar).

~~~

59/365  MISTY ILLUMINATION
Word Count: 553

He landed in a patch of brown dry grass. She was out hiking the trail that wandered the soft hills above her house trying to forget a lost love. She might’ve missed him if she hadn’t looked down just at that point and seen the bright stripes of his hot air balloon, vibrant against the drabness of the wintered ground. She bent down closer to get a better look.

It looked just like a large button, or a swatch of gypsy silk caught on the brittle stalks of a March landscape crying out for spring. It billowed in the slight breeze that tickled at her face. Then she caught the movement as he climbed out of the basket.

He looked young and quite handsome, his dark hair revealed as he pulled off his cap. He turned and looked up as her shadow cast its cool dim around him. He might have thought it was a cloud though he didn’t seem surprised at all to see her. He waved and shouted something she had to lean in closer still to hear.

“Yes, of course I can,” she said. She spoke soft and low. Her first “Beg your pardon?” had nearly blown him and his balloon away. She held her hand, palm up, close beside him and with a little help, he climbed on top. She brought him carefully up to view.

“Sorry, I’ve been blown adrift and am so far off course I don’t have a clue where I might be,” he said.

“You’re in Petersboro,” she answered, “just off of Route 73.”

He frowned and from a hip pocket pulled out a map. “Oh dear, I’m about 150 megamiles from where I’m supposed to be.”

“Where’s that?”

“South Darwin.”

“Oh but that’s just a mile or so from here,” she said. “I can take you there.”

She set him carefully back down near his now deflated balloon and tried to help him fold and pack it into the basket. Her fingers were just too big and she backed off as they both realized she was liable to do more damage than good. Then she picked him up, stuck the basket into her pocket and set off down the trail toward home.

She insisted on giving him something to eat and a hot thimble of tea before they set off to his destination. She was surprised at how much they had in common–aside from ballooning which was his passion and something that she’d never tried.

The short trip in the car was enjoyable, once she turned down the radio volume and the fan on the heater.

She soon found the spot where he and his friends had agreed to meet in a small field off a back road. She set him down within walking distance and helped him strap the basket to a halter on his back. The late afternoon sun caught the mist rising from a nearby pond and it all looked so lovely. A perfect end to the day though she was quite sad to see him leave.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “I promised you a ride.”

“That would be lovely,” she said. She watched as he headed to join his friends, and her heart felt just a bit hollow. But she brightened as soon as he turned and waved goodbye.

~~~

58/365  WHERE WE’VE BEEN
Word Count: 209

The first time I looked around there was so much to see, eighteen years of my life. What I saw was precious in some way, or so awful that I shivered still. A birthday dress of pink tulle dancing. A first kiss from the soft lips of a sweet boy in the shadows of the porch. The man three doors down with his walleye leering.

Each time I take a step ahead it is from the footprints I have left behind. There is a soft depression in a wild daisy-spotted field in upstate Maine where I have lain,you, a young man with a blue-black curl that dangled on his forehead.

I catch the scented lily-of-the-valley that marched upon a cottage where we first lived as man and wife. Green-leaved Lilliputians gathered in a cheerful mob by the front steps, bearing ivory-white bells they rang in Spring.

The white-carpeted aisle at the old stone church where we were married and where I follow you now, draped in purple, hiding beneath a spray of yellow roses and teak. I look ahead of me and there you are, and yet I want to look behind to live instead in places where we’ve been.

~~~

57/365  ON THE MOVE
Word Count: 497

The wind blew circles around her. Snow rose in a fine mist of sunlit fairy dust yet she moved doggedly unaffected within it. It blew harder, hard enough to shimmy the store banners and street signs and make the traffic light dance like a crazed marionette. It whipped at the ends of her scarf and bounced the tassel on her knit cap. She felt like a Chrismas card with a strange message inside. Her mind was made up, her feet rhythmically heading downtown to the First Federal Bank of Pishtalullah which she intended to rob.

It was something she always thought she’d be good at but the need never drove her to cross that right or wrong line until now. She had to have a Prada bag, Louboutin shoes, and a little black dress by the end of the week. It was already Wednesday.

She didn’t even want to go to the ten-year reunion but they’d found her in the bowels of the city, a basement apartment that was all that she’d dreamed of during six years of incredibly expensive schooling. And a job at Bloomie’s, of course not the designer and marketing big shot, but still, a sales clerk, which of course, was just as important, just not as high-paying.

The wind nearly blew her past the bank entrance, then grabbed the heavy glass door from her grip. It slammed open with a bang. Everyone inside turned and looked. She wished she’d already been wearing a Prada bag, the Louboutin shoes. She went up to her regular teller and took a deep breath before blurting it out. “I need to make a withdrawal,” she said.

The girl picked up a form from a pile and slid it over to her. She looked at it then back at the teller.

“Oh, not from my account,” she said and laughed nervously. “There isn’t enough in there.”

The teller stared at her.

“I need about three thousand dollars,” she said. “My college reunion is this weekend,” she added and gave a “you understand,” kind of half-smile.

“Oh,” said the teller.

“I figured if I can get a super handbag, maybe exotic leather so that I can use it for less dressy times too, and a killer dress and really neat shoes with those platform style stiletto heels…” She looked at the girl wistfully.

“Oh,” said the teller.

“Well, I don’t know how I can go in anything I have in my closet…” Tears welled up in her eyes turning the teller, the cages, the tall chandeliered ceilings, the whole scene into a crystal palace before they overfilled and slid down her cheeks.

“I understand,” said the teller, her heart breaking with the familiar pain. She counted out thirty one-hundred dollar bills, scribbled something on the slip of paper and stuck it in her drawer as she handed over the money.

“Oh thank you! Thank you!”

“Go to Sak’s,” said the teller. “Their Prada’s on sale.”

~~~

56/365  MORE WAYS OF GETTING THERE
Word Count: 668

The girl who saved leaves lived next door to my parents since I was eleven years old. She wasn’t that much older than me, maybe three years, but there was a gap beyond age that prevented a friendship, hesitated any semblance of finding mutual interests. Her name was Anna and she was the Pearson’s only child.

Something was not quite right about Anna. She seldom went past the porch in the daytime and I suppose she was tutored at home. Sometimes in the warm summer moonlight she danced on their back lawn. I would watch from my upstairs bedroom window though I don’t think she ever knew. My father and hers had a nodding acquaintance over the picking-up of the daily newspaper. My mother and hers would smile and greet with the politeness of understanding and avoidance, their hearts set their minds to protect mode, which meant that you just never mentioned it.

At first I thought she was stuck-up. Then deaf, and maybe blind too; she never looked anyone in the eye. She would search the ground for fallen leaves, regardless of season, and only within the borders of her own yard. She would pick up certain ones, inspect them carefully, and if they passed whatever standards she set she would slip them into a satchel slung over her shoulder. The leaves that didn’t meet her approval were carefully placed back down on the ground. I offered her a leave once, a perfect, fiery red maple from the tree in our yard. It caught her eye for a moment but she ignored it and me.

My mother explained as best she could, though the word autistic I mistook for artistic and found it dramatically exciting and free. I still hollered hello to Anna whenever I saw her but as I grew up, she was outside less and less and months would go by, a season of snow, before I would even see her again. She had stopped dancing outside long ago.

After college, I never returned to live in the town I grew up in. Visits were rolled in with holidays. Sometimes I’d remember to ask about Anna but more often not. When my Dad died my mother stayed in the house alone for a while before she, too, passed away. It was when my sister and I came to sell the house that I even thought of Anna again.

“Oh they both died a few years back,” my sister said. We were having a cup of coffee–our last in this house before we both left for homes separated by states, next door via email and Facebook.

“And Anna?”

“She’s still there.”

“How? Wasn’t she mentally challenged? Autistic or something?” I said.

“I don’t think so. She was just different.”

We expected the real estate agent but the knock on the door surprised us with Anna. She was older, of course, but somehow she looked younger, much younger than me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. These were the first words I’d ever heard her speak. “I miss them.”

“Thank you, Anna.” I struggled for words. Thirty years had gone by since I first saw her, lovely and mysterious, scanning her lawn for leaves. Her hair was still a brilliant gold that held sunshine in its strands. Her eyes, I noticed for the first time, were a deep grass green. “Won’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?” I asked.

She smiled–the first smile I’d seen on her face though I believed that those nights, when she danced on the lawn silvered by the pale light of the moon, I believed she was smiling.

She nodded, and came in and sat down at the table, looked around at the stripped-down kitchen walls, bare of family meanings, packed in boxes to be taken away. As she reached for her cup, she unshouldered a large woven bag that I hadn’t noticed, and let it slip with a rustle to the floor by her feet.

~~~

55/365  RANDOM VS CONSCIOUS
Word Count: 185

I tiptoe like a spider traversing its web. Sometimes I feel the silk strands with my feet, sometimes only their shadow. Both hold me up as I balance on the tenuous earth I’ve been given to walk. Either is flexible, neither is complete as an answer.

Every day starts out the same; the choice to rise or remain. One morning I’ll bound out of bed like a jack-in-the-box and the day must race to catch up with the streamers of steam from my coffee, the footprints that leap from one tree to another never touching the ground. Another morning I’ll lie there and muse the minutes into the crowd of an hour while the sun glowers through the blinds as if bleeding onto the walls, the floor, the carpet I’ve carried around from one home to another like a great gob of silk.

It’s a toss-up of random wanderings or a mapped-out strategy of life. One or the other, I never know how it will begin but I know it began on the day I was no longer a wife.

~~~

54/365  QUIET ORDER
Word Count: 195

I watch the wind cut spirals in the air, mixing trees and sky and earth together like a marble cake. A spatula knifing through the scene to blend it, meld it, make it one and yet for me it’s never that.

The trees will groan in agony with each swipe of its breath and yet the wind is ever piercing, heedless of the pain. The trees will grow in girth to stand against the force, they’ll grow in height to try to rise above it till they touch the clouds and find them soft, pliant to the wind.

From the sea the spray of water slips into the air, separates and fly like tiny birds to join the sky that mops them up with sponges made of clouds. Later to be returned as wrung-out rain.

It’s all a natural ballet of movement quicker than the wind, slower than time itself. It’s acceptance of something out of my control and still I hold my hand up to the horizon, see the circles, lines and forms that slip between my fingers.

With a sigh, a sense of peace, I join the rhythm of the silent dance.

~~~

53/365  IN THE THICK
Word Count: 478

Chelsea pulled three blades of grass from the thin patch of urban lawn in front of her apartment. She turned them over and over and held them this way and that and then up to the light until she could read them. She let two blow away and reread the third.

Today you will meet someone who will help you reach your goals.

That sounded good to Chelsea who needed a break. Her boyfriend hadn’t called in three days after an argument. Her landlord had upped the rent. Her car needed a new transmission and her cat died. So this fortune told by the grass was welcome indeed. She just had to figure out what her goals were.

In Economics she paid close attention to the professor, scribbling notes that may have been clues to success. Her Algebra test was handed back with an A-minus; would she be someone who would discover new answers to questions asked of the universe? She wondered what the questions were but learned new formulas anyway.

Chelsea ran the register at the bookstore in the mall five nights a week plus Saturday and Sunday from noon until six p.m. She studied each customer’s face, made conversation with each in case they were her savior. She left work disappointed and a little pissed off at the guy who told her to mind her own business when she asked what he did for a living. Then her supervisor had warned her not to “dally” with the customers, to just make sure she tried to sell them something and if that failed, take their money and get them the hell out of the store. She clocked out and talked with anyone she ran into on her way home. She felt bad  when a homeless man gave her an odd look and hurried away.

She made a hot cup of tea and poured in a jigger of rum. It tasted awful so she added some lime juice, then honey, then threw it all down the drain. It was all so depressing. She went through her class notes again but nothing came out as the secret to her success. If she couldn’t trust the grass messages, handed down from Mother Nature herself, what was she going to do?

She found a flashlight in the kitchen drawer, pulled on her jacket, changed slippers to shoes and went down the stairs to the front yard. She searched, shining the light in small arcs until she found what she was looking for. She held it in the beam and smiled and ran back up the stairs and got undressed for bed. On the nightstand she carefully put the blade of grass in a small crystal bowl on the nightstand and shut off the light. She’d memorized the words:

Tomorrow you will meet someone who will help you reach your goals.

~~~

52/365  GOOD ENERGY
Word Count: 176

I close my eyes to the sun and absorb the warm gold into my skin, through my eyelids, my upturned hands. I sit perfectly still, shallow-breathing the air that smells fresh and green, like lilac-tipped branches and the red budded maple holding its own breath for spring.

But the golden glow holds me in its arms, wrapping around in soft breezes, tickling the senses into recall of years of the first warm day of spring that shows up too early, like an unsophisticated guest at a party. But welcomed by those who can delight in surprises.

Like me, now. Having shed the memory of the years of the days where anticipation meant stress, where surprise meant fear of a day’s dust settled and seen. I draw in good energy, to replenish all that I’ve given up and lost.

When I open my eyes the birdsong is still with me, the scent of the day colors the air, and I find myself smiling at the loss of the memory of time spent in lesser ways.

~~~

51/365  LIVELY MOMENT
Word Count: 366

It was hibernating or maybe just hiding. At any rate, no one had seen it since Christmas or NewYear’s or such when the first snowstorm hit and since then, the bush was buried deeper with each layer of snow.

February snuck in with a two-day thaw, just enough to give the bush a glimpse of sunlight through the sparkling white crystals which held it tight in their grip. The little bush pulled one way, then the other, rocking gently and gaining space with each move back and forth. It lost a few needles in its attempts to break free but at last it had a clear view of the bluest blue sky, a puff of white cloud, a breath of clean and cold air.

People walked by and never noticed the bush in the snow piled up by the sidewalk. The bush listened to everything it could catch in snatches of sentences, so lonely it was after the quiet insulation of winter.

“…tonight, I guess.”

“How much are they saying?”
“Another six to ten inches of snow.”
The bush was so disappointed. It had been hoping for spring. It had no way of knowing about seasons, just waited for the warm touch of the sun to know when to smile, when to grow. It was supposed to be sleeping but being the only bush in the yard, it didn’t know this for sure and could do what it liked and what it liked to do was enjoy life.

That night it made up its mind. It reached its branches way up to the crust of the snow, spread its fingerlike shoots out on the surface and pulled, pulled itself up and out. Its feet were cold, but it didn’t need them. It rolled itself into the wind and blew like a tumbleweed away, down the street, down the highways and through the back fields and front yards of hundreds of people who never noticed it rolling by.

Though people thought it unusual, they soon got used to the transplant where it happily settled itself by the warm southern coast and learned to adjust to the climate though it did miss its home just a bit.

~~~

50/365  NEW TERRITORY
Word Count: 335

The wind howled and blew without pause except to pluck at the shutters and shake the windows in their frames as it raced by. Trees bent to the master. Signs fluttered and stuttered their messages to the few who braved the night highways.

Giselle went to bed early, hoping to sleep through the noise that wailed outside the house. She didn’t know exactly when it had stopped but rather, when it was no longer roaring and wild. Giselle woke and noticed just that, the quiet, and was glad that the roof was still over her head. She showered and dressed, had a quick cup of coffee, poured the rest in her travel cup as she headed out the door to go to work.

Outside was quite a different matter. Standing on her front porch, Giselle looked around in dismay. The neighbors were gone, their houses, the street, the whole area beyond her front steps was a completely different scene. To Giselle, it looked vaguely familiar, like the parking lot of the Walmart over in Brighton. But that was ridiculous, no?

Once she got in her car and started driving around it became clear that while it might seem that her house had taken flight in the night and landed twenty miles west, her house was firm in its original foundation. Instead, everything west had been blown as lightly as autumn leaves away to the east.

Intact. Each blade of grass, each road, sidewalk, building and everything in, on, and around them, each tree, every rosebush, had moved as one in the breath of the gale force wind. No one else seemed to have noticed since everything–people included–had moved at the same gradual pace. One can imagine the roots clinging, stone cellars digging in, all slowing the inevitable progress as everything slid away.

Giselle noticed it though. After a couple miles, she made a U-turn and a mental note to turn right out of her driveway instead of a left from now on.

~~~

49/365  WHAT WE TAKE IN
Word Count: 257

She sees tulips. I see birds. Shadows are confusing.

We compromise. We tolerate. We force an enthusiasm; she for baseball, me for the annual Home Show and shopping for drapes. I walk just behind her, ready to nod and agree. I know I should take more interest and yet nothing moves me. The fact of our own home is so far away and I see no reason to decorate now. She does; changing the colors of make-believe kitchens each year as the new trends hit.

She knits during games on TV. “Lets” me go to the local games with the guys. But she’s there on the couch, cheers at mostly appropriate times and doesn’t know when she doesn’t. I’ve explained it so many times and it doesn’t bother me anymore.

I wish I could knit or crochet or weave baskets.

We were walking into the main entrance at the mall when she stopped and pointed out our shadows. The slant of the sun turned us into tulips and birds. There was her hair in the wind, long black and shivering though in reality she’s blonde. My shoulders are hunched, my hands in my pockets; leaves and stems she says. I think of featherless wings, useless to flight.

“Now we’re only looking,” she says, “but I want to get some ideas.”

“They’re laying-off at work,” I say.

She gives me a look that tells me I’m bursting her bubble.

“Your birds look like they’re fighting,” she says.

I don’t tell her that her tulips are wilted.

~~~

48/365  PURPOSE
Word Count: 166

The morning sky is so pink, like an awful Kincade. The snow reflects it in mauve. She reaches way up, beyond her understanding of space and pulls down a gob of corally salmon. She moulds it with fingers long as willow branches into a triangled heart. Then she threads it onto her necklace with a special long needle she made.

She ties a triple knot in the string to hold it in place. To keep it away from yesterday’s moon and a soft chunk of blue sky she picked one sweet-scented mild afternoon. Smiles at the sun she stole in the last days of summer.

She carries it into her kitchen, lays it carefully on the top shelf over the sink. The yellow block of sun winks like a golden eye catching the bubbles as she washes her teacup and spoon.

Then she sits and waits. Thinking of days that will pass before she can gather the green that she needs to complete her season.

~~~

47/365  FEELING GOOD OUTSIDE
Word Count: 256

The snow has pulled back a bit, condensing itself into layers of ice. I believe it will hold my weight.

Without changing my slippers I cautiously take a step and another. Let go of the doorframe and walk out on the shine of the dunes. Rolling out from two feet over the walkway they cover the bushes, changed the back yard into puffs where the wind has left them gathered around patio chairs and the grill. I am standing level with the top of the grill! Then I am flat on my face.

Like a crab I crawl sideways, looking for something to help myself up. It’s too funny, I think; my neighbors still sleeping, my husband already gone off to work. I sprawl on the crust of the snow in a world that for now is much higher. I would finally be taller–if I could stand.

It’s one of those moments when decisions are made. When life can go one way or the other. Woman pulls me one way, back to the large gaping welcome of home that is the doorway into the garage.

Yet Child pulls me another and I turn my back to the door. I sit up, legs straight out with toes pointed, and with a shove and giggles that turn into pure laughter, I slide down the backyard, nearly into the woods. I slow to a stop at the bottom, right into the arms of the Woman who asks, Oh dear, how will you ever get back up the hill?

~~~

46/365  ABUNDANCE
Word Count: 303

Whenever Mariel was ecstatically happy, her hair burst into flame. No one ever understood it and she went to many doctors over time. At eighteen she gave up and learned to adjust to living on the edge of immolation.

She hung with artsy friends who could be counted on for levity and dolor, and anticipated punchlines at parties where she didn’t know everyone there who might have understood her situation. That helped quite a bit but she still carried bottled water for emergencies.

At twenty-eight her lover of three years got down on one knee, whipped out a diamond the size of a chickpea and proposed. “Um, yeah, I guess so,” said Mariel. They both waited. No puff of smoke, no orange lick of fire, but she nervously held a glass of white wine at the ready.

At the birth of their first child the hospital room was prepped as the baby slid out and promptly screamed his first hello. “I would get a noisy one,” she said, a smile sneaking into place until she thought back for a moment on the pain that brought him into the world. Her husband held her hand and beamed. She concentrated on her scowl.

It seemed that Mariel could enjoy brief spots of life without endangering herself and scaring those around her. She proudly watched her children graduate college and marry. Happy tears, she guessed, were safely keeping flame away.

Mariel outlived her husband and didn’t suffer many flare-ups after that. Time eased her burden and she died of natural causes in a nursing home with her family near. They gathered at her bedside, amazed at how her bright auburn hair surrounded her face. It never had turned gray; great joy nor deep unhappiness never having slipped behind the wall she’d built of fear.

~~~

45/365  GOING WELL
Word Count: 190

There is an invisible broadcast of color we leave in a trail behind us every day. Mine is usually a blend of blues and greens, hardly ever red or orange anymore. That happens when you’ve grown up and left adventure to your past.

My days are filled with papers, screens of information, the hum of cars and conversation that flit by. Now and then I pause and look around as if a finger of the day is poking for attention. There is so much to do I bend my head down to the things I know already and can do. Why stick my hand within the flow?

Yesterday, I did. Just to see what would happen if instead of letting time and space run by in ribbons trailing from the people I do not even know, I dipped my fingertips into the sea of colors.

It made me smile. There, amid the royal blues and forest greens I saw a streak of yellow from my index finger. Suddenly from my thumb a vivid red that spread into a disarray of pinks and lavenders. And then, a lovely shade of orange.

~~~

44/365  MAKING THINGS
Word Count: 171

I really have no idea how it works, how the lines and circles, the reds and greens and blues form into stories. Is it my own? Is there some claim I may lay to it or does it float randomly in the wind, waiting for someone to see it. Is ours a case of having not a creative spirit but a mind attuned to forms and colors in the environment? Pulling puzzle pieces from the sky to lay them down on paper?

Yesterday my mind was stuffed with cotton candy news. A plump pillow of comfort and satisfaction. Today I feel I’ve sprung a leak and cotton batting billows out my ears.

There is no relief. Couches, tables, chairs sit in heavy judgment, stale with routine days. I escape the walls to search the trees for answers. I see their fingers playing in the clouds of a sky pinkened by the morning sun.

And there it is, the story floating by, caught on the branches and the edges of the earth.

~~~

43/365  HAPPY CALIBRATION
Word Count: 335

The good days were the diamonds and the bad days were near unbearable. Somewhere in between was where she hoped to softly settle. Hidden from the world since no one else could understand that losing one’s lifelong love was like trying to find something to hold onto in the inside of a bubble. Standing at the ready with a pin.

Colors lost their brilliance, green melted into blue and that, she realized, was the meaning of not seeing the horizon for it wavered in a blending of earth and sky. Every day she poured her morning coffee and went out on her patio to wait for the dawning sun. “I think it’s yellower today,” she’d say to the space that came as day, though she wasn’t absolutely sure there was really any difference.

Weeks and months went by and sunbeams stretched to reach her yet she never felt the warmth of touch they offered. Day was light and nights were dark and in between was just a shadow woven of the two. Change came slowly, a shard of cadmium red within the morning light; a blink of lavender at dusk. One day she thought she saw a burst of orange but it shot so fast between the moments that she worried it was just a wish.

Then one day it merely happened. She was talking to a friend and laughed out loud. From her mouth the laugh spilled in rays of yellow, pink, and fiery red. In near euphoria she watched the rays flatten out in ribbons, unravel to the floor and wriggle across the kitchen tiles. They cut right through the door out to the patio and she followed close behind. While she watched the trees burst into buds and then to leaves. It was as she once remembered a time called Spring.

Though she never found the middle band of white she had been seeking she gave it up completely. She found a happy life bouncing through the shades of color in between.

~~~

42/365  WHAT MAKES IT BETTER
Word Count:  314

What makes it better?

A mother’s kiss on a skinned knee. A hand on the shoulder of a despondent friend. A hug.

Chloe had lost the woolen scarf her grandmother had knitted for her several years ago. She’d worn it every winter. Loved it’s bright bold stripes and its fuzzy warmth. Her neck felt worse than cold without it; it felt bare.

Christmas brought a new and lovely scarf from Santa but it wasn’t the same. Grandma had made the original the year she died. It had missing stitches, a messed up pattern. It was perfect.

Chloe looked everywhere, EVERYWHERE. She asked the teacher, the bus driver, the kids she hung around with at the school. She wondered if someone had stolen it but knew she’d always locked her locker. No one would have really wanted it, and no one really would have taken it just to be mean. It was clearly lost. She had been careless and now it was forever gone.

She wore the new scarf through the rest of winter but it didn’t feel the same. Snow fell and piled up at the bus stop, fell and melted as the days warmed into Spring. She changed outerwear to a lighter coat–one that would have surely clashed with the colors of the old scarf–and stopped wearing mittens, hat, and scarf.

As she waited for the bus a color caught her eye in the muddy sand-mixed snowpile on the curb. She dropped her bookbag on the sidewalk and with her fingers dug a hole around the color. Deeper, deeper, and there it was!

Chloe wore her grandma’s scarf a couple days regardless of the weather. Then she never wore it the next winter or any winter after that. But even now, with three children of her own she takes it out and hangs it by her coat in the hall.

~~~

41/365  LIGHT AND ORGANIZED
Word Count: 237

At two in the afternoon the sun strikes the desk and it becomes time for Carol to write. She breathes quick with anticipation after rising just before noon since the morning is useless and dark in the northern part of the city.

For breakfast she’ll eat soup and a sandwich, then she’ll shower and dress for the day. Comfortable jeans, a baggy sweater and slippers that are shaped to the spaces between her feet and the floor. Then she’ll wait, with fingers poised on the keyboard, breaths now shallow and deep, watching the billowing curtains yellow with warm sunlight, stepping back to let the light in.

Then she’ll type.

It happens just that way, every day. The words come in sentences, lyrically formed. Paragraphs grow as if sprouted from the seedlings of language and watered with creative force. She never notices as the light shifts, for once it has struck, it has already performed its duty.

Though she’ll stop for a meal she types straight into the night, words sliding through dusk and shining in the blackness of the room. Late, very late, she’ll stop, stretch, and yawn. She’ll get up and dress for bed. She’ll sleep in a happy place where words have been committed to paper with more left to say.

Has she clicked “Save”? She doesn’t remember but falls into sleep with a blank screen in her mind, ready to wait for the light.

~~~

40/365  NOT GOING TO BUDGE
Word Count: 225

“It’s just not how I feel,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

“Please,” he begged. “Please think about it. Think about us.”

Somewhere in the course of any relationship is the wall that won’t come down. That needs to be cleared with a leap. For Megan and John this was it. Their Donnybrook, their clash of the Titans. Their life together from this point onward was in danger of being cut short. A job offer too good to turn down in a faraway state. Family too close and friends too familiar to leave behind.

But it happens all the time.

Silence follows the screaming. Stones replace tears. Time ticks forward and leaves change in its place. If the move is made together, one thing will happen. If they remain where they are, something else.

They each weighed their options, each licked at the other’s point of view, tasting it, testing it for palatability. For possible poison. Neither one finding the antidote of compromise.

She nearly gave in, scared but willing to trust him. He almost gave up, disappointed and forlorn. But the branch never reached far enough, the words never said in the hope that they wouldn’t be needed.

Megan and John went their own separate ways. He left for the East Coast and she stayed behind.

To this day they still wonder, what if…?

~~~

39/365  OFF BALANCE
Word Count: 959

I was seventeen when I first understood it. That stick-poking in the brain that says something’s not right. Something’s off-balance. The fluffy pink clouds I had worn on Sundays that only itched and made me feel stupid. The GI Joes that locked Barbie in her castle to gather dust while we went on outdoor adventures.

I was twenty-one when I married. Hal was a great guy; fun and loving, dependable and strong. He never complained about the sex, my lack of enthusiasm that eventually became avoidance. “We’re almost forty years old, for Pete’s sake!” I’d say.

We had two children together who were already on their own when we finally agreed on a divorce. I never did tell him the reason. Still too ashamed to let anyone know, but more, I’d come to understand that this truth, this secret would have been the biggest blow to his ego, to his whole understanding of who we were. I might have come to accept me but I didn’t believe I should make him face the facts. We still loved each other and it was easier this way.

In time Hal met another woman and was planning to marry her. Our kids had settled in different states. It was a good time to break with the past I had known and how others knew me. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I knew that if need be, I could pretend nothing had changed on the short weekend visits and holidays. But I needed a new environment to let this new person I was finally allowing to be, to paint her own walls, sing her own songs, meet new people and make friends that I didn’t have to lie to. I put our house on the market and started looking for a small place up north.

The Maine coast was the perfect place for me. It was as revealing and honest in its nature as I was determined to be. The rocky edges of the coastline drew a hard line, a crooked horizon that wandered at will to be whatever the sea made it. I found a small cottage that suited my own rugged ways. I loved the wool jackets and jeans that everyone wore, man, woman, and child. Long hair, that had never really looked good on me, I realized had also been used as a symbol, a disguise. I cut my hair into a feathery style to adapt to the harsh wind and it felt as natural as the setting. I had found my place in life, my life in place.

And love; I found love in its completeness of being. Caring and compatibility and finally, sensual, sexual love. With Barbara I am what I was born to be. Life had stopped swaying, gradually slowing and finding its balance. I was happy enough to overcome the guilt of the one thing that still stuttered in the conversation with family. I thought I could do it forever. I thought I was doing it out of love.

Barbara is so strong, so confident and I try to learn from her. “Don’t worry,” she tells me, “someday you’ll tell them when the time is right.”

“But I don’t feel good lying to them, and worse, I feel I’m betraying you,” I’ll say. It’s true, burdens have just been exchanged from one way of life to another with the same weight. The same guilt, despite her love and understanding.

Hal and the girls surprised me with a visit one Saturday morning. It was a week before my birthday and they’d planned this as part of a surprise. It didn’t take long for them to see how we lived–how we really lived when they weren’t around.

We carried through our roleplaying for the weekend, I walking on eggshells and scurrying between moments to install myself in one of the other bedrooms then empty it again to leave it for guests. It was too late to worry about closets and drawers.

I’m not good at surprises. It takes me a while to adjust. We got through the day somehow but it was like swimming in caramel candy. I felt a beat behind the moment, even relaxing at dinner with good food and wine. I went to bed early, nearly walking into the wrong–I mean, what’s normally right–bedroom that Barbara and I share. Hal and Barbara were still talking politics when I drifted to sleep.

Some of the awkwardness softened in the morning, and I caught a few winks and thumbs-up signs from Barbara as we walked the high cliffs after breakfast. After lunch, they packed the car, getting ready to leave. I kept looking for a time, an instant, a moment when I could tell them the truth. I didn’t worry about words, just about the moment to start letting them out. It never came, or maybe I once again let it slip by. We all hugged and kissed our goodbyes. The distance between the two of us standing and waving goodbye was like mountains. The car was soon out of sight.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wasn’t ready,” and the girl part of me pushed tears through my eyes. I wanted to reach out and hold her but didn’t feel worthy.

She smiled and came over, wrapped her arms around me and rocked me gently as if I were just a child.

“They all know,” she said. “Hal came right out and asked me and I came right out and told him the truth.”

Suddenly everything settled. I could hear gulls in a far-off cry. I was home. We stood there a while, rocking gently back and forth, holding on to each other for balance.

~~~

38/365  DISTANCE
Word Count: 36

“The world is like a sponge,” she said. “It sucks in rain and snow. It tries to put the fire out.”

“What fire?” I asked her. She was always saying screwball things. Usually I just let it fly.

“The fire that rages in its core. Deep, deep down.”

I tried to explain to her about the water table. Even got into magma and evaporation off the surface of the sea. She pooh-poohed all that. Her explanation was naturally more creative. I also suspect it made it easier for her to cope.

Anne was a foster child. It left its mark. The ground to her was sacred. In February she started seedlings under grow-lights in the basement. If we had a three-day warmth in early May she planted. She wouldn’t wear garden gloves, and once I remember we were in a restaurant and she realized the dirt was still firmly stuck deep under her nails. She hid them in her lap through most of dinner. We laughed about it later.

She’d wash her car in summer rain. Put on a bikini and with a bucket of soapy water wash the whole car till it gleamed, the rain rinsing the suds in stripes down the driveway, into the road. I loved to watch her.

We didn’t have any children and I think that bothered her a lot. She felt it was disruption to the roll of living. “Funny,” she told me once, “how I was an extra child, one that no one wanted, yet here we want one and can’t seem to have one.” Adoption was denied us because I didn’t make enough money. Funny, we would have had that covered but back then, the mother wasn’t supposed to be employed.

It’s spring again and the cellar tables are empty, the lights never turned on above them. I think that this is the worst time of the year. It’s when I miss her most.

The smell of wet earth fills the air from April rains. Above her grave the earth is mushy, like a sponge. It feels warm on the soles of my shoes, like a fire still burning deep below.

~~~

37/365  OUR WORLDS
Word Count: 211

The snow melts into dripping icicles that try so hard to reach the ground. Hanging from up high, a branch caught in flight, an eave of a house well warmed by love and laughter.

It seems to be a living thing, a need to put down roots. Sky is freedom, dreams and everything unknown; earth is anchor.

I count the people in my life who’ve counted in my life. Every smile that’s come my way is yes, appreciated; there are lives who’ve dallied longer than a smile, penetrated more deeply than a conversation.

Today I touched the hand of one such man. It was cold and still. Fingers entwined in rosary beads, as if he fell asleep while praying. I half-expected a twitch of mustache, a dry remark to break the silence of the scene. I held my breath as if I could give him one instead.

Coming home alone as I’ve left a hundred times before, yet feeling different. This time there was an emptiness behind me, a world that moved in different space of time. But then, a scent so sure and strong I couldn’t laugh it off. But laugh I did, as two separate worlds were breached for just an instant and friends touched one last time.

~~~

36/365  BIG SPAN
Word Count: 293

“It’s been a while,” he said. His eyes had what you could only call a twinkle, a sort of exclamation point that put a different gleam on his words.

“Too long,” she said. Not coy, but subtle. Not accusatory and yet it held that tone of wistfulness like when women want a bit more than they think that they deserve. She was like that, steady, sturdy, dependable and self-reliant yet lacking confidence as if those qualities weren’t ever going to be enough.

He looked out of her kitchen window, saw the well-kept yard, the woodpile dwindling low from a long winter that ate through two cords easy. He nodded, turned and told her, “Tomorrow I’ll get some more wood cut and stacked.”

“You don’t need to,” she said, “March is almost half done.” But she knew he’d be out there early morning and she knew she’d be making him breakfast while he did.

She laid out blankets for him on the couch, a pillow from her bed. They sat and talked a long time over coffee at the kitchen table. She caught him up on all the little bits of life that had changed since he’d been gone. He told her very little of the life he’d led as she managed to fill the hole he’d left in her world. Words ran out eventually, what was needed had been said. She washed the cups and turned out the kitchen lights.

“Sleep well,” he said.

“Good night, see you in the morning,” she said as she started towards the bedroom they’d once shared..

“Tess?”

She turned to him, a silhouette in the dim lit hall. He had her heart, always had. She held out her hand and he got up and followed.

~~~

35/365  BY TWO
Word Count: 91

Two trees rooted in the same patch of earth, separated by an expanse of space that are empty of obstacles yet as solid as a stone wall. They reach out to each other, boughs stretching, needles whispering secrets in the wind to one another.

Long days pass, seasons swirling colors of blue sky, spangles of stars, young green grass and woolen blankets of white, yet the trees stand firmly in place. They grow in size and knowledge of the world and of each other.

One day, years in, they will touch.

~~~

34/365  THINGS TO CELEBRATE  (Remembering Kevin  1942 – 2011)
Word Count: 173

When good things happen, fifty thousand tiny fairies help me celebrate. They fly like moths around the party lights, their iridescent wings aflame with reflection.

Things to celebrate, the breath of morning air in spring, or on a winter’s day when icy air transitions from exhilarating to nearly painful. When breath comes in visible  clouds in the air. When living leaves its mark.

A life that touched me years ago, that stayed within my heart. Laughs that echo just as loud through decades as if current. A friend with eyes that lit up when he smiled, and a mustache that I swear would twitch and curl with mood.

Things to celebrate, friends that translate language into love.

Hollow sounds that echo through the chambers of my heart. Beats that bounce with happiness as well as the latest greatest news of life: a wife, a job, a daughter.

Things to celebrate, the breath of friendships that time and death can never hesitate, never end. Friendships that glow with the reflection of fifty thousand wings.

~~~

33/365  GENTLY ACCUMULATED
Word Count: 215

Layers of years like snow falling in flakes soft as feathers. Layers of people we meet that brush our lives with color. We take a long time to turn from a toddler wondering at the flight of a bird, the pop of a bud into a rose, into an adult that sees  things too often in the extremes of black and of white.

Somehow I wanted to think that I saw all the nuances, all the angles and tricks of a situation. Experiences should work to broaden, not narrow one’s focus. The man I thought was the easiest read, the most pleasant, reliable, intelligent, humorous person to show up on the right level of my life was the one I should have married.

Seventeen years, one layering over another like petals with just a slight variation in shade, in shape. Countable, circular, asymmetrically perfect. Like snowflakes that we shake out of our mittens without ever seeing for their dainty quick beauty.

He came back to Denver last week and gave me a call. I wonder what he will look like, be like; I wonder what the years have changed, what have they fine-tuned and deepened.

Is he hopeful–as I am? What will we see if we see with the eyes of a child?

~~~

32/365  SETTLING IN
Word Count: 314

The city was a bouquet of people, not a dozen red roses but an armload of wildflowers picked from the fields. Some loved the taxicab mentality, hop in and out and not knowing who drove you there or who’ll bring you back. Some dart through the streets following its grid like a map, unwilling to cross against lights, try a new shortcut through a parking lot.

Anne was a transplant whose roots found their grip in the north end of the city, where people clung to each other in bunches bound by language and holiday dinners. She brought no traditions of her own but inhaled the aromas that drifted up from the shops that sold strange meats and fish that were brined, pickles redolent of garlic, and cheese that filled one’s senses with pungency, urgency, and places unknown.

She still missed the rolling acres of corn and the nods to the neighbors, even the Sunday routine of services and family all crowded together around a table heavy with roasts and potatoes and vegetables pulled from the garden. It had begun to feel smothering. It was what she thought she had had to escape to exist. Now she felt lonely, the laughter a low hum that filtered through the apartment walls from other families, other lives gathered in concentric circles around her.

One Christmas Day she hung up the phone from greeting her mother, her father, her sisters and brother, an uncle and aunt who’d come hours before dinner just to help out. She watched her small tree blinking its white city-like Christmas on the table, its feet empty of presents. Then she heard a knock on the door.

Anne didn’t know Italian, she’d taken four years of French, but she sang carols along with the family that lived just below her, never minding at how they all laughed at her mangling the words.

~~~

 

Using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, a flash fiction or thought through the days of the year. Click on the images to get to the artist’s page, where you’ll find a bit more about the piece and the source of inspiration. Note that each month’s work here has a separate page, and each month’s stories are linked in the right sidebar.

~~~

31/365  OUT OF VIEW
Word Count: 448

Shelly is just like all of us, you and me, wanting something, whatever it is, that is always just out of reach. A job that is fulfilling, a loving and stimulating relationship, a chocolate covered cream donut in the middle of a snowstorm. Roads are closed; something always seems to come up like a fallen oak in the path, branches reaching every way outward but it’s impossible to get through the tangle. A jail cell, a cage.

What Shelly wanted was to be a ballerina. In sixth grade she took dance lessons because a couple of the girls in her class were accomplished, always given the lead roles even in school plays. They brought in photos and videos for show and tell and Shelly felt her heart pound in a rhythm that made her know she could dance and wear pink fluffy tutus and upswept hair. But she was always a beat behind the music, a step out of place.

Reluctantly she agreed to stop taking dance classes when she was fifteen. It seemed such a waste of money, though her mother didn’t say that directly. She packed away the spangles and tulle and wrapped her last pair of satin slippers in white tissue paper and put it all away in the attic.

She had gone to college not sure if she wanted to be a nurse or a teacher, waffling between courses until she was spit out with a double degree. Jobs were scarce and she ended up taking one as a receptionist where everyone said she excelled because of her polite and cheery attitude at the front desk. So she practiced smiling and being helpful to strangers. That’s just about when she fell off a ladder while hanging welcome banners in the lobby and couldn’t work.

She sat there in her living room, propped on the couch with a cup of hot tea and some banana nut bread. Outside her window the first flakes of a snowstorm were falling. She watched the grey and brown palette turn white. “The world is changing its lifestyle,” she said to her cat. The cat was not interested.

But Shelly saw something in the view that she hadn’t really thought could happen. A complete metamorphosis, not just from acorn to oak, as one might expect, but a total change of clothing, tone, shape and sound to the earth.

“Me, too,” she said, louder and more to herself and the whole world at large rather than whispering it to the cat, who was sleeping. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I will be a writer.” She smiled in fulfillment, satisfied at her conviction. “And then, when my leg heals I will learn how to ski.”

~~~

30/365  UNDERLYING STRUCTURE
Word Count: 199

Like autumn leaves color a lawn red and gold, like snow glazes a world with cream cheese frosting, life changes my tones, thickens and wrinkles me. Turns me outwardly grey.

Inside there is a six year-old playing with dolls in a world she’s created with pink houses and dresses made of bandanas and pins.

Inside there’s a teen who scribbles in her diary about her first pair of high heels, her first dance, her first kiss.

There’s a mother still hiding within me, who worries about her own daughter’s dates. About stretching meals on a dime and ensuring there are green leafy vegetables on the plate. Distance is measured not by miles and states but rather by time in between conversations–check-ins my children call them.

Inside me the sapwood still flows and outside my bark may show cracks but it also holds branches, the building of ideas and the outflow of love.

Inside me the heart beats and the sound reverberates through the layers of structure and is ever amazed at how far, how tall, how deep, that life has become. Still, the branches are reaching into the spaces that I haven’t yet touched and known.

~~~

29/365  WINTER SOFT
Word Count: 313

The harsh edges of the city have been softened by the snow. Rooftops rounded out and dripping into icicles like diamond earrings on each window face. People too are padded, layered into pillows. Yet even in this absence of sharp corners, this land of walking snowmen, my heart aches.

I drive through streets as slick as a toboggan run. In my van the weight shifts, throwing it off track as I corner. Most people aren’t out on the roads tonight but tucked away in the warmth of kitchens, the glow of TV and computer screens. I look for those who aren’t.

Down by the wharfs is where I’ll find the ones who’ve no other warmth except each other to depend upon. Their fear adds to the cold. In my headlights up ahead I see them scattering like mice before a cat. I understand their thinking; pride wins out before the need for shelter. Even if I were the law, even if I falsely dragged them into jail they would curse the roof and heat and food and rather freeze to brittle bone outside as free men.

I stop beside a drum that gives more light than warmth, abandoned though I know their eyes are hanging just outside the circled glow. I unload boxes, open boxes filled with blankets, woolen jackets–those of nylon make too much noise. And food. Campfire fare like franks and beans, beef stew, chicken soup; all easily heated up and eaten from the can.

Before I get back in my van I look around. It is silent, white, but hard-edged ice in this end of the city. Nothing moves, no one smiles. But as I drive away I see them in my rearview mirror. Drawn like moths back to the red glow of the fire, they dance and dress and shout as if it were a gypsy celebration.

~~~

28/365 END OF THE DAY SURRENDER
Word Count: 196

The horizon of snow gives way to the expanse of a sky colored by dusk. At the junction is you, my child of the windblown curls. A fine mist of gold hair that escapes from your warm woolen cap to play in the breeze.

Laughing, with fists full of mittens three sizes too big, a hat that slips down over your eyes, you delight in the winter, find joy in the day. There is nothing but this moment, this instant of wonder, though I suspect you’ve come to expect the warming of nose and rosy-red cheeks, the soft cradling in dry clothing, the hot chocolate with marshmallows swimming around that has ended each such day.

And here am I, a mother alone, one who knows too much of bills and nutrition and watches for sniffles and coughs. One who has worry that gives only slightly to snowy hill sledding and shrieks of speed.

But at night, oh at night, when I kiss you to sleep and marvel at how the thin light draws shadows of eyelashes on your face, and swirls of ringlets on your pillow, at night is when I breathe out in surrender.

~~~

27/365 SLOWLY EXPANDING
Word Count: 133

Today I am an icicle, my tears flow and freeze to form a thickening shell cold and crystal.

Just yesterday I was a fluff of cotton candy. Sweet strands of spun sugar wrapped me in its cloud.

Today I grow in layers, ever outward from myself into the space around me. Inside I am protected, like a tiny gnome who lives within the chambers of my heart.

Yesterday I had a lover. A man who held me in his arms and sang me songs of spring scents and summer flowers and an autumn that never fell to winter.

Today is white and diamonds drip from roofs and downspouts. Today I thicken in a spire of layered ice, waiting for…

Tomorrow and a warming sun and I will learn once more to melt away.

~~~

26/365  PARTS OF ONE
Word Count: 182

Sometimes, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a moment, the scene shifts. A place where I am changes feeling to a place where I’ve been. It’s not light that moves between time, nor the people who move in the spaces around me. It’s like deja vu but it comes without memory, just a sense of a different yet familiar mood.

It amazes me how many parts of the day make up the routine whole. Each in itself like the fanned ribbons that slap the windshield when you drive through a carwash. Segmented hours that undulate into day. It’s how I get through it.

She still is a part of each one. Gone two years now, stolen by fate. The mornings come with a crash at the silence, the coldness of sheets on her side of the bed. That’s when she takes up in my mind. I whisper good morning to the space where she’s been. Somewhere in the shadows she’s sleeping. I swear I could hear her soft breathing.

I reach out and that’s when the scene shifts again.

~~~

25/365  BRANCHES MAKING DRAWINGS
Word Count: 215

She searched the face in the mirror for signs of a beard. Did her eyebrows look bushier?

“You’re nuts.” This from her BFF, Carolyn.

“No, it’s real. Maybe I just don’t have a strong enough personality of my own. It just absorbs whoever I hang with.” Shawntelle gave herself one more close look in the mirror and gave up. “Remember how I started speaking with a Southern accent when I was going out with Ronnie?”

Not a good place to be, at the tail end of one man and setting sights on another. There’s always that transitional stage, where the lines drawn by one haven’t yet faded away. Shawntelle wondered if they could be seen, like tattoos. She checked her arms, her legs, her ass.

They were in the middle of dinner at an upscale restaurant her ex had called “grossly overpriced.” Things were going well. A fine second date. He spoke in a slight Boston accent she tried hard not to pick up. She caught herself twice tapping her fingers on the table in sync with his drumming. She stopped saying, “But of course,” which was something her ex said all the time. It was going okay and getting better.

“There’s something on your chin,” he said, and as he reached over she fainted.

~~~

24/365  OUTSIDE INSIDE
Word Count: 206

Arlene leaves the house two hours before classes begin and sits in the courtyard and reads. She gulps in the day like a big glass of soda, sweetening the morning to something akin to what she guesses is normal. She is seventeen and already knows more than she should.

The sun is a coral-red ball fighting its way between buildings and trees just to shine. “Just like me,” Arlene whispers though no one is around to hear her. For a moment she watches the slow-rising sun, seeing the morning colors fall away into a natural bright yellow. She reaches out to squeeze it between forefinger and thumb, holding it at arm’s length away. It glows like good thoughts.

When Arlene was thirteen, her father left home. She remembered him standing there in her bedroom, hands hanging uselessly, head down and crying. “I just can’t take it anymore, sweetheart. Your mother won’t even try.” She didn’t ask him how he expected her to deal with it. She knew he hadn’t even thought about that.

Arlene pulls her arm in closer, adjusts her fingers to hold onto the shrinking sun. Now tiny, she brings it to her lips, places it on her tongue and swallows it.

~~~

23/365  WHAT I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE AND WHAT IT IS
Word Count: 233

It flaps its wings and flies away just as I reach for it. Feathers left like snowflakes in the room. Fragile black commas and parentheses, a lot of question marks in blue because as I now know, no answered question ever really is.

The past becomes the dream as the future turns into now. What’s happening is a realty that can’t be wished about. We can maneuver through it, make a choice of Black Forest Cake or Chocolate Mousse, regret the Bouillabaisse and will remember that next time, but that is all. In our dreams of what we thought was up ahead we hadn’t yet made up our minds on appetizers and dessert much less the main course. How could we–we hadn’t even read the menu!

Suddenly we’re facing things that are simply done and fall behind us. If we turn around, we’ll see the vortex of our lives. Back there are the boys we giggled about and refused to date. They’re attorneys, corporate heads, doctors now. Whirling still are labor pains, mixing with the first day of kindergarten, the quivering lips of trying to be brave, the prom gowns and the sweet telltale smell of marijuana in the upstairs bathroom.

Now we are alone again, you and I. We look behind in awe. We look ahead without the blur of expectation, the haze of speculation. Instead, everything is delightfully clear and new.

~~~

22/365  OUR OWN SYSTEM
Word Count: 352

There were five of us, now there are only three. My husband died last year of cancer that couldn’t be caught. Our son died after eight months in Afghanistan. The girls are nineteen (Jenn) and seventeen (Sarah). Jenn is already a part-timer at home, spending most of the year at a college that’s too far for weekends, close enough for holiday visits.

It’s strange how very much things change, how they adjust around body count. I remember just me in an apartment alone in the city. Then Carl moved in and when we got married we built our own home. The family room was added when the kids started hitting their teens and discovering loud music. An extra bedroom over it became our son’s new cave and the girls split in half to claim each their own room.

Now the rooms, except two, are empty. I considered moving to a smaller house yet the house has settled around us. After all, we still need a kitchen with a stove and refrigerator and table. It’s just that there are extra chairs. I can’t bring myself to ever adjust that.

I read once that fish will grow in direct relation to the size of their tank and the number of fish per square inch. When Jenn came home for Christmas I asked, “Do I look any taller?” She rolled her eyes, but she laughed.

We spend the bits of time we are three as if they’re the last days of summer. We shop and the girls avoid bringing up the obvious, that Sarah will need some things for college this year. I know what they’re doing, but I am the mother, the only pillar they have now to hold onto. I drag them to the departments they’ve so carefully maneuvered around and start with a bed-in-a-bag and a rug.

When we get home I make us hot chocolate. Sarah sucks out the miniature marshmallows first; she always did that. Jenn looks so serious. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

She smiles in an adult type of way. “You look taller,” she says.

~~~

21/365  FINDING NEW PATTERNS
Word Count: 214

As you might suspect, they change shape at night because by day they are committed to being snow-covered trees. They stand tall and reach for the sky with their arms, catch snowflakes in the curve of their lips, but their movement is subtle, spurred by the wind, lest they be noticed by people.

The young ones are sheltered, protected by parents, uncles and aunts. Grandparents are loving but distant, so aloof and alone in their wisdom and height. Age has earned them respect from the wind, they no longer bend to its whims.

The saplings are fragile but spring back with the resilience of youth. They still need to nap in the warm sunlight and start to fidget at dusk. They twitch in the cold, antsy to whisper, anxious to dance.

But one night I saw them, joyful and free. One night while I saw nothing else but the troubles of our kind all day. There, in the shadow, the trees moved with moonlight. Stealthy at first, growing with confidence even as my own despair of man’s nature ebbed from my mind. I watched in delight, wanting to join them. Seeing the sheer love of being they embraced. Patterns emerged from the black and white world. Jazz hands were raised, and they danced.

~~~

20/365  FINDING A NEW RHYTHM
Word Count: 280

She fingered the strands as if knitting a sweater, which I suppose in some way was what she was doing. A new home, a new job, a new man. All necessary things in her life.

Pink. I think I’ll go pink, she said to herself. It was a color she had always disliked, a goddamned girly color. The color she’d picked the first time her parents had let her pick out the paint for her bedroom herself was celery green. It was her second choice really, since they wouldn’t agree to chartreuse. In her first apartment she painted the walls chocolate, rust, and forest.

My home is me. And she thought of all the great things that that meant. Her friend Cira told her that single meant sleeping the whole night on the couch if she wanted. Meant pastrami sandwiches for breakfast and chocolate ice cream right out of the box. Hot water showers and half the laundry load and no whiskers left in the sink. Life is good, she brightened and hummed to herself as she rolled out the brand new pink rug.

Light and bright shocking pink. She wondered if she could live with it. Waited a few hours before moving the furniture in, the bed against the one large wall, the dresser across from it with the mirror that would reflect whatever went on, and his dresser that she refused to give him because it would break up the set. She sighed. She hated the color. It made her feel better to know that he would too.

Not that he would ever see it. New bed, new men. Then she sat down on the floor and cried.

~~~

19/365  COMFORT
Word Count: 262

Soft as a baby quilt, his love wrapped around her. Colors so pastel they hardly were there. Yet the fiber was strong and kept her away from the world.

She’d had a bad childhood, ping-ponged between parents, each week a fresh start, each weekend a thwack back into reality. Her father, a drinker of the finest Scotch whiskey. Her mother a connoisseur of cocaine. Each held a hatred, each held a love deep inside them, and neither understood it at all.

She’d met him at the community college. He’d stop by the diner where she worked after classes were done. They started dating. He, persistent; her, wary, dropping her veil slowly, ready to jerk it back into place. And eventually, when she learned trust, they married.

He was the hearth to her fire. She unfolded her fists and let bad things drift up the chimney in smoke. He cradled her when she needed cradling, let her smolder up to a point. Logic would come after emotions had broken down into ash. And eventually, when she forgot about pain, they grew into a comfort of oneness that fit together under his shelter.

Time softened, time hardened, time weathered their love. Winter must come, after all. One bitter February day she was fooled by the sun and testing her strength, gave in to the world that she touched. It didn’t take long for the past to fly in like a vulture and pick at her flesh. When he found her she was in little pieces that he carried back home in a quilt.

~

NOTE: First publication rights to Comfort, both Carianne Garside’s image and my story, along with the addition of a poem by Steve Ersinghaus belong to The Blue Print Review, Issue #27 Synergetic Transformations.

~~~

18/365  SURVIVAL
Word Count: 570

Stress, age, meds, insurance, breathing apparatus, survival. As I go up the steps to his bedroom all these things swim in my mind but above all, the one time we became more than close friends.

I hear him before I can see him. Each breath louder, drawing me closer and into a world I don’t want to accept. This belongs to the parents, I think. The older generation. Then I remember; they’re all dead.

His wife greets me, hugs me, brings me first to their kitchen where I deposit homemade banana bread and chocolates. She looks the same, this dear friend I’d wronged so long ago. I lived in their home. Slept in the next bedroom over when I’d been between houses. The first time I’d been homeless. But there are more secrets we’ve kept, more that we, with our eyes, agree to keep buried still.

He could have been laid out in his coffin; that’s how he looks in the bed. Twenty years that I’d missed, twenty years that we hadn’t shared aging. Distance of time, distance of space, distance of choice had reassembled the past into a pleasant memory. We were forever young there. Forever strong and death was still out of reach. Suddenly close, it is a surprise.

Do you remember: the time you took in my cat overnight and he flew up your Christmas tree? The time we all dressed in black and stole apples from the orchard across the street. How we all hit the ground when we saw headlights and you tripped in a woodchuck hole. The next morning we made apple butter. I still taste it.

I try not to make him laugh. He’s on oxygen. His voice a thin whisper between breaths. But that time, oh yes, that time at their wedding when in the middle of their pictures they watched me fly by in my hot yellow sportscar. I’d burned a hole in my dress with the ash from a cigarette blown in by the speed. She shows me the wedding album of their daughter. Instead I see them.

She asks if it would bother me to see her feed him. I say no. She holds a tube up that leads to someplace dark and hungry under his shirt. She tells me he’s gained back eighteen pounds with the formula. We joke about adding Jack Daniels.

Look out the window, she says. The pine tree was my housewarming gift. Now it touches their house with its branches, has filled its rain gutters with its needles. It is unbelievably tall and as threatening as the disease that threatens their life.

There are others there, their daughter, his brother and wife. VNA, OT, RT and other initials, in and out.

We jockey cars in the driveway several times. Inside, each time I go back, I hear the breathing, the struggle. Reality now. Then I must say goodbye. Take care, I say, as if he weren’t every day fighting just to take those raucous breaths that tick like a second hand on their kitchen clock. I threaten to step on his air tube that leads through the house like a thread holding onto the past. He calls me a bitch but he laughs. There is a moment caught in our eyes that flees to a time–then it is gone. There is no past, only present. There is no purpose now but to survive.

(First Publication rights to Survival belong to Pure Slush, March 2011)

~~~

17/365 UNDORMANT
Word Count: 216

The day was unusually warm, April taking a wrong turn into the middle of January.  Lily took it as a gift.

She pulled out her heavy sweater, the one she had knitted for James and he’d left behind, and kicked aside her boots in favor of clogs. She stood on her front step and took a deep breath. She felt new life course through her as if it were an elixir.

The willows had yellowed a bit, the maples looked not as gray. As she walked down the street she noticed patches of grass smiling through a tearing coverlet of snow. Even the snow sparkled in the bright morning sun. She walked several blocks to the park and sat down on the bench where James had asked her to marry him. She had said no.

He was so good-looking and such a sweet, thoughtful man. Underneath he was all determined persistence. They were married just before he left for Iraq. Three months later she received notice that, only five months a newlywed, she had been widowed.

Lily rubbed her belly in that way that a soon-to-be momma does. She imagined their baby curled tight like the buds on the forsythias, waiting for Spring. She hoped that she, like the sun, would be enough.

~~~

16/365  WHAT CAME BEFORE
Word Count:  339

“You cannot be that cold, uncaring!” she had said. With her breath she warmed his face at night while he slept. She spoke softly, touched his brow, felt the heat of his blood as it raced through his veins, just under the surface.

By morning he’d hardened back to stone. Another night she scratched him lightly with her nails, watching as the blood rose to the surface in thin streaks. Carefully she drew the image of a man along the length and breadth of him. She felt his pulse beat in response. The moon cast shadows in the room, left streaks upon the walls and floors and through the dim she would have sworn that he was smiling.

As she slept, her back curled up against him, the warmth grew cold and colder. She woke and turned and wrapped her arms around him. At dawn her fingertips were frozen blue.

For years she tried but nothing seemed to reach him. To sink below the levels to his soul. One night in desperation she drew a thin line on his chest, watched beads of blood form along the cut. She peeled back his skin, cut through the fat and into muscle. She found his childhood, his youth and just before she met him. Like metal shards they formed a cage she’d thought were only ribs. Though she could hear it pounding she couldn’t seem to reach his heart. Dawn broke through. Discouraged, she sewed him up again.

The next time it was easier, the layers separating like pages of a book. She read them carefully, realizing how his life had damaged him. She reached a level where scar tissue, thick and hard, was very hard to penetrate but here was where she felt the beating, the pulsing of the core of him. Patiently she worked her fingers in, around, and through.

Pulling out his heart she held it for a moment in her hands. She cried. The heart beat louder, harder. She kissed it and then gently put it back.

~~~

15/365  CROSS SECTION OF MY DAY
Word Count:  235

I wake, I shower and dress, I eat a breakfast of coffee and an English Muffin with butter, and I go to work. I walk a routine through each layer of my day, each section a separate woman, adapting to fit the environment, dressing to suit. I start out reflective, quiet, alone, in my bathrobe.

The front door is a curtain and I walk out on the stage. I am a professional. I wear grey and carry a briefcase to prove it.

Corporate noise swirls around me. I drift above chatter while exploring the scene. My job is efficiently done, pondered and stressed over, given more than I knew I had in me. The gossip of downsizing clings like a fog on the floor and I listen with only one ear.

I’ve just inserted a new layer of myself between the end of the work day and home. I don’t quite have it down but I polish it a bit more every Friday. The necessary presence at a bar, a scotch and soda I nurse well past the Happy Hour conversation. At home I would only drink wine.

Walking back to my building in lower Manhattan, I feel most of the day evaporate off me in strands that drift into the night. By the time I push through the front door, drop my briefcase and kick off my shoes, I am naked and scared.

~

NOTE: First publication rights to Cross Section of My Day, both Carianne Garside’s image and my story, along with the addition of a poem by Steve Ersinghaus belong to The Blue Print Review, Issue #27 Synergetic Transformations.

~~~

14/365  SURRENDER
Word Count: 236

She walks through the chambers of my heart, opening doors, calling out. I feel her footsteps in a graceful tapping, as if she were dancing, one-two-three, one-two-three. For an hour I close my eyes and imagine her riding the river of loops and twists of my veins.

If it weren’t at her insistence, I wouldn’t go through this. Time has its reasons; I’ve led a good life. But she says that she can’t live without me and we both need to fight this together so we once more can dance. I never could, I remind her, but she only laughs.

She was so young and beautiful when I met her. She still is. Maybe it could have been longer–that is, maybe it will be. And yes, I suppose I’m not ready in some ways, to go. It’s the cure that makes it feel worse than the illness. She looks at me now with a worry I take on as guilt. But damn her, she knows that too and I cannot refuse her her wishes, her wants.

Surrendering, I see her floating through me on a boat with an unpretty chemical name. She smooths out the walls as she goes, denying me pasta, potatoes, and rice. At the end of the hour the boat slows, she smiles and nods with approval, stands up and debarks as she once again enters my heart.

(First Publication rights to Surrender belong to The Glass Coin, March 2011)

~~~

13/365  REVEALING
Word Count: 100

Soft shadows brush the white canvas of snow with odd colors. Pink in the grinning set of the sun. Blue in the time before dusk as the afternoon tires and grows quiet. Royal purple when secrets are told.

They bleed from the core of the heart where the red blood mingles with the blue. Mysteries as hot as pain and colder than ice. Shadows of snow melting to puddles, trying to grow into forgotten come spring.

The last sprigs of life steadfast and silent, fragile yet pliant, willing to bend. We bend under shadows of purple where secrets are told.

(Rewritten 01/14/10)

~~~

12/365 WHITE OUT
Word Count: 324

He noticed the fading of color on his thirty-third birthday. The warm colors went first, the pinks and the reds. The morning sky, the peony bushes, his wife’s lips.

And with it came the coolness of the grass and the trees, the expanse of sky. He took to wearing a sweater.

Which always matched his shirts regardless of what he put on. Or so he thought it did since with a wardrobe made up of greens, blues, and greys, there was little room left to go wrong.

About a month after it all had started, the sun blended into the sky, the sky into the treetops, the trees into the lawn. He didn’t need to wear sweaters but the black, white and grey world he was left with affected his mood. He even thought it affected the birds for the days became quiet and still.

One morning he watched his wife’s charcoal lips melt into her face, her eyes slowly sink into pinpoints. She was talking and he was straining to hear her. He answered her when he could, sometimes just nodding, not wanting to let her know that she was becoming a part of the kitchen, which was now one room with the dining and living rooms gone.

Soon the walls of his house bled into the back yard, and he found his car in the driveway by touch. He drove with GPS guidance, and worked fine at his job by routine. As black became lighter and grey became white, he adjusted.

There came the morning he woke up and saw nothing, nothing at all. He felt his wife move beside him and eased himself closer till he felt the soft resistance she became. She no longer snored, he had noticed, though if he listened real hard he thought he sometimes could hear it.

He reached over and pulled her close to his chest, surprised at how much weight she had lost.

~~~

11/365  GOOD LIGHT
Word Count: 291

The sun rose slowly, sending out fingers of corally orange and pink to explore. He cringed at the icy cold covered hillside, squinted at his own light reflected back by the snow. He blinked the last shred of clouds from his eyes, watched as they trailed off into a sky painted blue.

Night was a strange place where the sun couldn’t go. Try as he might to catch it he failed every morning, just at its tail, just out of his grasp. It circled on the other side of the earth, doing things he only could guess at. Though some stars would gossip and he’d heard that most nights were just like the daytime but dark. But clouds, clouds were his enemy. Even in daylight they teased him.

One small straggler drifted by like a cataract dimming his vision. He glowered and it fled quickly away.

He raised himself up for a better view and gasped. The world had turned white–was the night time that scary? He wished he’d been there to protect it. Where were the golden-green lawns and the tight grid of streets in his favorite little town where on Sundays a bell rang in greeting. He felt like crying but had never himself learned how to rain.

So he smiled his brightest and soon he saw people moving about. He saw trucks redrawing black lines in the snow for other trucks and cars to follow. He saw mothers bundling babies in carriages out for a walk. He saw his town come alive and as he watched it roll away he heard laughter. Inspired, he watched as the next town came into his light and lingered there as long as he could, listening to the melting white.

~~~

10/365  PROCESS

Word Count: 292

She was there, in an outdoor cafe in Zanzibar, sitting alone at a table. The sun struck hard at her throat, lit the jeweled pin on the velvet turban she wore. She drew deeply on a long-stemmed cigarette holder. I watched and exhaled a thin stream of curling smoke. The tobacco tasted like mint.

Many years ago I noticed her at the jewelry counter at Macy’s in the city. Long fingers tipped in plum held out a bracelet made of three colors of gold and a garden of gemstones. She was much taller than I and had the grace I’ve never managed. She played with the bracelet, let it slip through fingers, hang from her forefinger and thumb. An amethyst hopped onto her polished fingernail. It smiled at me and winked.

I followed her colors to Aruba, or maybe she followed me. There were many, many places I’d find her, but certain times stand out more clearly. In Aruba, I followed her through a trail of small shops, watched her select a neon pink bikini, then bought the same one in my size. In Dubai, I ate fresh figs which I’d never thought of trying before. On her plate they had looked so inviting. I still buy them whenever I can.

I don’t travel as much as I used to, which seems strange, now that I’ve retired. I do have a dog that I walk every day in the park at the end of the block. Several times, I did think she was there but it might just have been my imagination. Doesn’t matter anymore, I suppose.

I never had the courage to ask her her name, but I think it’s probably Lady Zorah Van Develdt, or something exotic like that.

~~~

9/365  ACCUMULATION

Word Count: 338

He wore people like jackets and gloves, each person tried on, checked for comfort, for fit, for length. His mirror was an old friend he trusted; his memory, an organized library of experience.

He shed little, altering instead, mending, patching and adjusting for growth. Letting out side-seams and putting down hems. Complementing with colors radically blue which he wore on his left, extreme glowing red on his right. Layering everyone he met like a sweater added as late afternoon feels the rush of cool air with the loss of the sun.

Some he wore daily, like a favorite shirt frayed with use, hand-laundered with reverence. His mother was there, at the core, like a tee shirt next to his heart. His father, a vest of protection and strength. There’s a bloodstained plaid shirt that was his older brother, a complex man of both a passionate and gentle nature. Tim, his childhood best friend was plain white button-down with fading drips of a shared chocolate ice cream cone. Then the seersucker pucker of a teacher who slapped his hands for coloring outside the lines.

As he got older his closet overflowed. He made some decisions, became those he most loved, most esteemed, was most awed by, for all different reasons but all of strong weaves that wore well. Some clung like jersey. Some streaked his skin as he sweated beneath them, flung them away without noticing the colors he’d already become.

He worked hard, did his best, but time picked at threads, pulled at, unraveled the flesh from his bones. Troubles bent him double and he surprised even himself with his reactions. One desperate night he exploded. Clothing like clouds blew away, leaving him naked and cold.

Some blamed his parents, some pointed at friends. Some whispered about Saturday morning TV and some highlighted passages from books, websites, political platforms, the guy down the block.

In the end though, and only he knew this as fact, it was his own mind, his blood, and his soul.

~~~

8/365  BALANCE

Word Count: 301

From his perch high in the pine tree the people looked like ants. Snow streamed out in plumes off driveways but from way up here he couldn’t hear the awful buzzing. It was beautiful in a ballet sort of way.

Jake wasn’t cold. Last night when he’d climbed up he’d picked a sturdy branch to pitch his tent then built a fire. At dawn, just before the snow had flittered to a stop he made a pot of coffee.

He watched the sun shove through the clouds and light the crystals on the trees. Drops melted on his head, sizzled in the campfire. Down below, the world was black and white. An occasional blaze of red wool jacket buzzing up and down his neighbor’s driveway. That was Harold.  Harold was a nice guy, the kind he would’ve enjoyed watching football games with, sharing a bowl of pretzels and a couple beers. But Harold’s wife didn’t like Jake’s wife, Jen, and so they never got together. Harold finished, put the snowblower away and looked around. Jake waved but Harold didn’t see him.

Arguments in marriage happen all the time. Most peter out to nothing and are forgotten. This one though, this time, was one that ate away at Jake and he had needed to walk away a little further than the shop in the basement where he fiddled with things and either fixed or ruined them completely. This one had him climb the tallest pine.

He poured himself the last of the coffee. His neighborhood was striped with roads and sidewalks into a geometric grid. The softness of the newly fallen snow that made it look like one big lumpy cloud was gone. Jake sighed. He put out the fire, packed the tent, and climbed back down to shovel off his driveway.

~~~

7/365 SNOW

Word Count: 373

I never saw the face of Jesus in the clouds. The best I ever got was cottonballs. My mother would scoop down beside me, one hand on my shoulder and the other fingerpointing to the sky. “See?” she’d say, “There’s the panda bear, see his big eyes and fluffy ears?” She tried so hard that sometimes I’d nod and whisper “yes” because she wanted it so bad. My father would lift me up and point. He must have thought I was nearsighted.

I have seen people in snowflakes though. Not every flake, but scattered here and there among the just plain crystals. Full bodied and dressed appropriately for the cold weather with gloves and puffy jackets. They’re very, very tiny and their lifespans are sadly very short. Must be a bitch, taking that leap of hope and faith to hit a sidewalk and melt on contact, like free-falling from an airplane without a ‘chute.

Some do make it and that’s the kick. They talk in teeny-weeny little voices and from what I can hear, are not all that smart. Mostly they just complain about the trip, the change in temperature, and then the sand and salt.

There are a few that stand out from the others, just like people too. I’d gone out in a Sunday blizzard for some bread and milk. Just as I was heading up my stairs, a snowflake landed on my collar and starting telling me about the places she had seen while floating far above the earth. She made it sound so magical. I was so fascinated by the images she drew I almost didn’t recognize the peril as I walked into my own apartment.

Her name was Rhonda. She lived safely in my freezer for most of the winter. I took her outside sometimes at night and we would talk. She told me snow jokes and I would scare her with summer stories. I really liked her.

The last blackout did her in. The ice cube tray was pooled in water. The burgers mushy. I searched hard along each frozen pea and called her name. I never found her.

But each new snowfall I stand and watch the sky, looking for faces in the flakes.

~~~

6/365 SPACE FOR WHAT IS IMPORTANT

Word Count: 302

She touched me, this girl–young woman, really–sitting outside on her front steps every morning. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved lightweight jersey. Her thin arms wrapped around herself nearly double. Her face pale even against lemon-light hair that caught glints of a cold January sun.

I’d nod, then I started greeting her with, “Good morning.” She’d reply with a “Hi,” and a smile. Eventually, I stopped one day in front of her house, overcoming my reticence to frighten her with over-friendly familiarity; myself, a married man in my thirties and her an attractive girl all alone.

“Are you waiting for someone?” I asked her, keeping a comfortable distance between us.

“Well, more for something,” she said.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked her.

“I’m waiting for Spring,” she said.

I laughed and made some silly comment about Spring being quite a distance away and walked on to the bus stop, didn’t think much more about her until I had settled into my seat. Was she being sarcastic? Coy? Discouraging of further conversation?

The next day I drove my car to the office, pretended I didn’t see her on the stairs of her porch. Over the weekend I forgot her entirely. Then on Monday, I once more walked by her house. The stairs were empty. I looked at my watch.

I never did know what became of her but in the first dripping raindrops of April, I saw a U-Haul parked in her driveway. An older man and a thin, blonde teenage boy were carrying boxes down the porch steps. They moved quickly, not speaking. I went by, said nothing. In the late afternoon when I returned, they and the truck were gone.

I wish now I had asked them about her. I wish I had asked her.

~~~

5/365 SOFT RED MORNING

Word Count: 316

The morning light falls in wondrous disarray on the city. Like raindrops it splashes and bounces off roofs, rolls in streaks down window panes.

Jane lies in bed, watching the sun breaking into the room. It doesn’t belong here, she thinks. Night, eternal night is what lives here now.

Jane’s husband has left her. One evening out of a fifteen-year span of domestic content, he prepared his announcement. He crept through a dinner of veal scallopini and three glasses of wine, the last of which slurred into his declaration of wanting a “divorsh,” making her laugh before she understood that he meant it. He then revealed his intention to marry a twenty year-old waitress who served his breakfast every day at a diner and gave him free double orders of sausage. Jane was silent with shock, which he mistook for doubt and so he went on to reel off a list of women with whom he’d had flings over the years. Perhaps he thought it would prove his infidelity and thus his serious intent to leave. Perhaps he was drunk, or merely a complete ass. He slept in the guest room that night and moved out in a week.

Months later, Jane still wakes with a false sense of him lying beside her. Pretends every night that he’s there in the dark when the day has tired of pounding her with truth. Sometimes she hears him breathing, in and out, in and the long male breath out.

She rolls over but stops short of his side of the bed, where the sun has splayed its beams in wide stripes. Her hand slides in slow arcs, seeking, finding space instead. She closes her eyes.

“Don’t touch me,” she says to the sun. “Go back to the hell flame you rose from.” It pleases her to say this. She knows that it’s all she can do.

(First Publication rights to Soft Red Morning belong to The Glass Coin, April 2011)

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4/365 LANGUAGE

Word Count: 298

Her hands flew through the air in front of his face. They fluttered like chickadees startled by hawks. He hated it.

“What? What are you trying to tell me, Jessica?” he asked her. “Just say it.”

Her hands dropped to her sides, shot dead by his arrows.

She wasn’t born that way. At two she had a large vocabulary. He and her mother were so proud, taught her songs which she’d sing in a high angel voice. It was after his wife was killed in an auto accident and Jessica was found hours later, still strapped into her car seat, that she stopped speaking normally. Then she stopped speaking at all.

“Look,” he said, “you can’t keep going on this way. You’re thirteen years old. I won’t be around forever. I know you can talk if you wanted to. You’ve got to break through this wall of yours.”

She didn’t blame him, knew his frustration. It was just that every time she tried a word out in her mouth it twisted like the branches of the tall maples that spread their fingers out to the sky. It gripped her tongue and hung there in leaves of sound that no one understood. She tried. She practiced in front of a mirror. But her hands, she felt, were superior in communicating. Her arms were the paragraphs. Her hands, sentences. Each of her fingers, a word. In unison they sang, not just the songs of her childhood, but every new tune she’d heard. Even the music came through, clicking off her fingernails like birds released into the sky.

Ooom, laaa-gaaa, she carved out, watching her lips move like wings lifting to fly. But it was useless, and she was tired. She knew her mother would have understood what she said.

~~~

3/365 INTUITION

Word Count: 225

There was no reason to check his coat pockets, none at all. She did though, because something told her that she’d find the evidence that would confirm her suspicions. She dug through them all, unfolding bits of paper that concealed no more than a receipt for coffee and toast, or fifty cents spent at a toll booth on the highway he’d said he’d be taking to Denver.

“You’re being paranoid,” her sister said. “John’s not the type to screw around on you.”

“Every man is,” she replied.

So she tried harder, more devious in her plans to prove herself right. She put threads on the passenger seat in the truck, salt on the floor. She checked odometer mileage against maps but he could have a woman on the regular route so that didn’t tell her anything much.

While he was gone she drank a sea of coffee, smoked a chimney of cigarettes. Her eyes sank into black sockets and her clothes hung like drapes on her frame. He worried. “Go see a doctor,” he’d say, but she wouldn’t. He didn’t realize that it was him that was killing her, him that was wrecking their marriage.

She finally divorced him and died three months later. He sobbed as her life slipped away.

“I should’ve known,” he cried to her sister. “I should’ve known something was wrong.”

~~~

2/365 SLOW MORNING

Word Count: 304

The crowd was a cloud of pink and blue puffs moving around her. They parted for her passing and made her think of the Red Sea and Moses and a comic book version of the Ten Commandments she had as a child. From that stuffiness, that suffocating cotton candy, too-many-people-in-the-same-space feeling, she cut herself adrift, ducked into a dark little store she’d never noticed before.

Her senses hit by patchouli incense, by tinkling bells that seemed farther away than this tiny little shop could provide in distance, she stood still, took time to adjust to the quiet, the different world she had entered. She looked around this small desert island adrift in the sea of Manhattan. Well-stocked for an island, hung with colored bead curtains and brass bells of every shape and size, the ceiling was hidden, or maybe it just wasn’t there. She looked for walls, but the moment she came up to what she thought was an ending, it rolled away and presented like mirrors except you could walk through them; they went on forever.

“You’re seeking a bracelet,” a voice came from behind her. She turned to see a very short, dark man dressed in all white.

“Yes,” she said, “a bracelet.”

From a pocket in his long, draped shirt, he pulled out a short length of blue and green stones strung together between fat beads of gold. She held out her hand and he encircled her wrist, snapped closed the clasp, and looked up at her. “Yes, that’s it,” she said, smiled and paid him and left through a door in the far back of the shop.

The crowd was a cloud of blue sapphires, green emeralds, and she walked through them with a sense of peace and satisfaction, as if she belonged.

~~~

1/365 POTENT

Word Count: 180

She remembered bouquets of red flowers with dashes of yellow–shaped vaguely like tulips–and the scent of fresh dew on green leaves. How the colors pulsed and spiraled like pinwheels held to a breeze.

Her head was stuffed full of cotton, or maybe wire filament because it zinged pain that bounced from the back of her neck to her forehead. She imagined a lightbulb but that concept brought a new crash of hurt. Her body was a thing separate from thought, though it moved slow in sympathy to her brain. Her arms felt like oars dipping through oily thick waters, her legs like tall buildings of steel.

It was much later in the day, when she was able to sit up in a chair, when she poured herself tea and bit delicately down on a soda cracker, that she remembered the noise of the party, the dizzying effect of her drink, the sudden darkness of a room and laying on wool, on fake fur, and the telltale squeaking nylon puff jackets,  that she guessed how the bruising had happened.

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