Tag: short story

Just a glimpse

I stood on the deserted beach watching jagged, angry shards of ice, deposited by the waves, stack up on each other.

Like brittle, living panes of glass just waiting for a pair of feet to shred.

It was brutally cold and every breath hurt to take in. The thick velour scarf my mother had given me before she died sat frozen at my lips. My fingers inside my wool mittens had gotten too stiff to feel.

I worried for a moment that I might not make it back inside.

But I had to see.

His ship broke open the cove just as the sun made a sliver of fire on the horizon. The ice cover on the bay wasn’t thick, so I knew they would only make one pass.

He stood, behind the rail, alone. A lantern hung by his side. His breath sent plumes of vapor up into the first light of morning. And the breaking sun made the sliver of skin visible around his eyes glow.

My heart pummeled against the inside of my breast.

He lifted a gloved hand to his mouth, pulling the fabric loose so that I might see his smile. It was too far to see properly, really. But my memory colored his lips and made the silver in his whiskers glimmer.

I waved and giggled. I wonder if the sound made it to his ear. I imagined it could, somehow, and whispered my love into the wind.

I watched until I thought I might break.

But I knew I would do it again tomorrow, if it wasn’t too cold. A glimpse was better than nothing. It was enough to stoke the fire in my belly.

Enough to warm me through another day.

Was it was the same for him?

I wonder.

A dance in time

Rain Dance 03 by fbuk via DeviantArt.com

For me, it was just another day. A wonderful, exciting, beautiful new day.

Mav woke up at 5:45. As he slathered his cheeks in preparation for a shave, humming a tune that heated my cheeks, I made my way down to the kitchen smiling.

Mabel had stayed with a friend the night before, but she would be home for breakfast that mid summer morning and I was excited to make my little announcement. I hoped the kids would respond as well as Mav.

I started the percolator and was pulling out my frying pan when Marcus’ feet slapped hastily down the polished oak steps.

“Ma, what happened? What’s going on?”

His voice was too high and when I turned, his face was as white as porcelain. We’d just celebrated his fourteenth birthday a few days before, but his wide eyes and trembling lips made him look much younger.

“What’s wrong, dear?”

The sun was rising behind him, and it startled me to see sunshine in my kitchen so early in the day.

He grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the side door. As he flung it open, we both froze staring out at a sight I still cannot explain.

Maverick’s parents had bought us the property as a wedding present. It was a slice of a pie shaped meadow in the center of a beautiful ancient forest with trees topping out 40′ above the grass. We’d built our home alongside 13 other young couples, unknowingly creating what we would later call ‘Pinedale Oasis’. A sweet little neighbourhood that grew to the north and west, out of the trees and toward the city.

But ours had remained the last house, butting up to the woods to the south and east. Our kitchen door and window were always shaded from the sun by a thick copse of pine trees less than ten feet away.

Staring out at a hill filled with homes behind white fences and punctuated with tall oak trees, my mind couldn’t quite make sense of the landscape.

“What happened to the trees?”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The backs of twenty houses stood in my line of vision, all with tiered wooden porches supporting big tables with umbrellas and massive shiny metal boxes that must be for cooking because they all had knobs that looked like the ones on the front of my new six burner stovetop.

A couple of them had pools with Caribbean blue water sparkling in the rising sun. I watched a woman doing laps in one of them until she spotted me. She climbed out of the water in a bright pink bikini and stared at me with the same expression that I must’ve been wearing.

Mav’s voice broke through the haze. “What in heaven-”

“Dad, where did they- What is- How?”

Marcus’ hysterics brought me back to myself. I turned and told him to go put on clothes as I dashed up the steps to dress myself.

“We’ll just have to go ask them.”

—

The early morning heat loomed over us as old neighbors hugged each other and tried, noisily to make sense of this. The crowd from the new neighborhood was larger, but quiet. Most of them held shiny and strange flat boxes, some put them to their cheek and spoke into them while others jabbed or slid over them with fingers or thumbs. I even saw some of them holding them up at us like cameras, they even had what looked like a flat lense on the back.

Maverick kept his hand on me protectively all morning. It was comforting, even as it added a bit to the fear.

The blonde woman who had been swimming had walked over first. She had what looked like a rhinestone in the crease of her nose and several tattoos down each arm. It was unsettling until I realized many of the others did as well.

“Where did you come from?”

It was the question of the day. One I couldn’t answer.

Our phones hadn’t worked. But the electricity did. Dan Bradbury had turned on his television to static, but the radios all revealed we were no longer in 1967.

When the police arrived, they brought medics and firemen with them, which I thought was strange until Marcus whispered in my ear. “Maybe they think we’re aliens?”

When I could finally speak to tell an officer my name, his wizened eyes were filled with fear and pity and something else.

Understanding? Recognition?

—

Mav wrapped both arms around me as we listened. Marcus sat on the other side of the hospital room with his head in his hands. My tears wouldn’t stop, and neither could my mind.

Fifty years prior to that day, our beautiful, quiet neighborhood had vanished. Without a trace.

The site was studied for decades. Scientists from all over the planet ran tests and studies. They searched for us.

My daughter searched for us. For decades.

She was living in southern California with her second husband. Twin girls from the first had both gone to Stanford and were now pursuing doctorates in different fields in different parts of the country. She also had a son with the second who has Down Syndrome and is named after his grandfather, but with an easier nickname for him so say.

Her voice sounds just like mine.

But older.

She’s about to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. But, as she told us she and Pete would come up with Rick on Saturday, I felt my sweet little girl bursting through the speaker. She wanted her mommy.

“Oh, Mabel. I’m so sorry.”

The tears caught, and her restrained demeanor broke into hiccuping sobs and the muffled questions of a young man who didn’t want to see his mother cry.

Marcus raised his head, his eyes reflecting his sister’s pain.

He stood and came closer. “Maby, it’s Marcus.” He cleared his throat and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I’m glad you’re ok.”

A tremor in his voice that vibrated through the fabric of time made her stop crying.

“You’ll be ok too, Marcus. I promise.”

They released me from the hospital late that night. We left stunned by the medical advancements of the past fifty years.

Three of us were brought in for observation. Mr Winstead had a heart attack when they told us it was 2017. Franny Gilson fainted and needed two stitches. And me.

—

Mabel is a gorgeous woman who doesn’t seem old enough to have grown children, except for the tiny wrinkles that flank her eyes and the grooves that frame her mouth. Rick is kind and sweet, his speech is nearly perfect and he loves to talk. He works at a store called Walmart and recently moved into a full time position which he loves.

His father could not stop staring at me. My daughter and I look very similar. Twenty years apart, instead of 30, and in the wrong direction. I can’t even imagine what it was like to meet us.

I couldn’t find a way to tell her about the baby. We talked for hours about everything. Just not that.

Mav had spent the four days before her visit sorting legal and financial stuff. He was exhausted, but was positively fascinated by Rick. He and Pete worked to explain modern sports, satellite television and something called Fantasy Football.

Marcus was lost to it all. Swiping his finger over the glass of his sister’s Smart Phone, he seemed to be absorbing all of this new technology much faster than me. As they sat, hunched over the device, I felt my heart break for all the years she lived without us.

And then he said it.

“Our brother will grow up with all of this. He’ll never know life without it.”

My doctor in 1967 called it a change of life baby. But fifty years later, it wasn’t unusual to have a baby at 40.

That night in the hospital, we got to see his little face, his perfect little body of 10 weeks, his amazingly tiny heart thrumming along as if nothing had ever happened. As if he hadn’t just vanished and reappeared 5 decades later.

The rain started just as she looked up at me.

He chased her outside, shouting for her to wait. It was like watching a film. The sound distorted by the rain as she cried out and fell to her knees. The way he looked back at me.

He picked her up. Held her to his chest.

There was no age between them as I watched her collapse against him. They just stood there, hanging onto each other.

And then, she laughed.

The sky above them brightened despite the downpour.

It was magic.

I won’t deny it’s been hard. On all of us.

Mav had to train for a new job. Marcus had to adjust to modern schooling which took tutors and counseling. We were paid for interviews, but not a lot, and for the next year, it seemed everyone wanted a piece of us. Sometimes, it still does today.

But when it is hard, I look at that photograph.

A picture I took, on a weird device that I didn’t know how to use, of my children.

Dancing in the rain.

And it’s magic, still.

Christina

https://www.deviantart.com/art/the-box-326060573

1.

On a morning in January that was cold enough to hurt your lungs with each breath, I left my mother’s house and planned to never return. Despite the fact the I was only fifteen, I managed to cut her out of my life like a surgeon removing a cancerous growth.

As I sat in the judge’s chambers six months later and watched him sign my freedom onto a seemingly ordinary piece of paper, I was surprised. It had been a little too easy.

Unless you took into account the medical records and hundreds of abuses missing from them.

All she had done was glare at me that day. She hated me, which used to terrify me. But that day, I was glad of it. No one could mistake that rage, and no way would a judge let her argue her way back into my world.

The lawyer watched my mother leave, then stood and wrapped me in a hug that forced the judge’s gaze away.

“I don’t know how you brought yourself up out of that, child.”

Her voice was damp and heavy with emotion, which is what had drawn me to her in the beginning of it all. An advocate for women and children, I’d seen her speak at a school assembly when I was 11. And that day, Nancy lit a spark inside me. Every trip to the emergency room and night without dinner just fanned that flame.

I knew I would eventually be rid of that life. And this angel would be my salvation.

She pulled back but laid her palm against my cheek. “Now, are you sure you’re all set, baby? You don’t need any help with the apartment or getting to school and work?”

I smiled at her. If she knew how many times I’d wished she was my mother, she would’ve probably invited me right into her home, forcing her five boys share two rooms instead of three and telling her husband to get ready for a daughter.

But the goal had always been emancipation. Independence. Freedom. So I closed that book before it was opened.

I shook my head, pulling myself away and picking up the paper the judge had just stamped and signed.

“I’ve been doing it for months now, Nancy. I’ve got this, I promise.” I couldn’t help the teenage petulance in my voice, but it was gone before the promise, and so was the pity behind her eyes.

“Ok then. You’ll come have lunch with us again next Sunday, won’t you?”

I didn’t.

We lost track of each other as the years folded over me, giving me a diploma, a different name, a bachelors degree, an amazing job in informational engineering that let me work from home and maintain a safe, steady new life.

It had made me sad, but she was part of the old life. A life I had to leave behind.

2.

Her name flashed across my phone screen one Monday afternoon as I was prepping a code report for a client. It took me almost two minutes to stop shaking.

I hadn’t looked over my shoulder in years, but the association Nancy held within the cold, damp basement of my memory dragged everything right back up those steps.

CALL ME, TONIGHT, JENNA. I’VE GOT SOME NEWS.

I didn’t want any news but knowing there was news twisted in my stomach until I thought I was going to be sick.

I’d chosen to be Jenna Jacobs. I thought it was fun, the perfect, anonymous name for a freshman at the University of Illinois. I hadn’t really thought about how it would work for the rest of my life. But, just like your given name, you don’t think about it. It is simply an extension of you.

But imagining what news Nancy might have to share, I felt my given name burrowing up through my skin. Like something alive that had simply been sleeping for the past 13 years.

I could hear her growling it as she trailed the buckle of my dead father’s belt against the tiled floor. I could taste the blood where I would bite my tongue to keep from screaming. If I shouted or moaned from the pain, it was like pouring lighter fluid on dying embers. I could feel the change when the rage would break open and she would throw down the belt to beat with her fists. I could smell the sickness that would ooze from her when her body could not handle the adrenaline any longer.

Or maybe, that was my own.

Brian found me when he came home at 5:15. I’d cleaned up, but blacked out in the shower. The memories hadn’t come up in a long time, not like that. But the fear creasing his beautiful face helped me put them back away.

“I’m not her.”

He wrapped me in my pink terry cloth robe, a laundry accident when I was 16 that had become the only possession I could never let go of. And it was just the thing I needed. The perfect symbol of how far I had come.

“No, you’re you, Jenna. But who are we talking about here?”

I explained what had happened after I received the text. He knew more than anyone about my past, but no one would ever know just how much the woman who gave me life had also taken from me.

He pulled me into his lap as he sat on the commode, his lips pressed to my forehead and his arms offering me a kind of safety I didn’t allow myself to imagine was even possible for a very long time.

“I could call her, Jenna. You don’t have to talk to her.”

But I did. Or my old name was just going to creep out and swallow me up all over again.

He cooked macaroni with hot dogs while I stared at the screen in my hands. I loved him for knowing, without even asking, just what I needed in every moment. And after he served me a golden heap of comfort and sat next to me with a bowl of his own, I used it as fuel. Every bite and smile and touch making me a little bit stronger.

Until I dialed.

3.

She was dead.

Maybe some part of me knew, but I think I’d always expected her to haunt me. I’d imagined it so many times as a girl that I’d actually prayed she would live forever.

She didn’t.

Nancy sounded exactly the same. Her voice had lowered a tiny bit and she didn’t hover within the niceties as long as I’d expected. She just sighed and said it.

“She’s gone, now, Jenna.”

I didn’t feel anything except the odd awareness of her using my new name. I had her on speakerphone and stared at Brian as she repeated herself.

“She’s dead, your… mother. She died last week in hospice and the police contacted me because… Oh, child. She left you that God forsaken house.”

I laughed, and the sound startled all of us. But I couldn’t stop. I giggled again, a feeling I couldn’t describe with a poets tongue bubbled up from within me. “You’re joking.”

I shook my head trying to free myself of the hysteria, but it ballooned and my laughs turned into sobs and back into laughs. Brian tried to shush me, stroking my hair and eventually pulling me into his arms. His murmurs in my ear settled my voice, but not my heart.

Was it celebrating? I thought it might be leaping out of my chest. But at the same time, my throat was closing and my eyes were leaking.

My mother who never loved me was gone.

And now, she never could.

Nancy had given Brian the details. Who to call and what to do next. I could handle the sale completely from here without ever having to step foot in that house again. There was no funeral to arrange, no family or friends to contact. That had all already happened. And the judge only opened my records to my lawyer, so no one from Evanston would ever know.

But the house was worth a decent amount of money.

A lot more if it was empty.

I took the phone from him and listened as Nancy sighed again. “Baby, I would handle it all for you, you know I would. But I’ve got grandbabies now. I’m retired and I just don’t think I-”

“No, Nancy. I would never ask that of you. I just-” my voice left. My head throbbed with the weight of the day.

“You think on it, darlin’. Darnell could help you if you decide to clean it out. He runs a moving company, so he knows a couple auction houses. We could just have them come in and take it all.”

Brian’s arms came around me from behind, holding me together when I felt like I might literally fall apart. I didn’t answer for long enough that he took the phone from my fingers and ended the conversation for the night.

I heard her tell him to give me a squeeze from her, and watched him lay the phone on the island in front of me.

“There’s something there, isn’t there?” His voice was soft, full of longing to erase this for me. To solve it.

I turned to look up at him. My arms were too heavy to lift, but I wanted so desperately to be normal. For him.

Sane.

But as I nodded, she leaked out again.

And as much as I didn’t want to set foot on that house ever again, Christina wanted to go home.

4.

Brian brushed my forehead against his lips, his fingers wrapping sweetly around the back of my neck as he held me tightly to his chest.

“You don’t need to go in. Just tell me what it is that you want out of there.”

If I’d only known.

But I pulled my hands up between us, slipping my fingertips into the curly bristles of his beard and looking up to meet his misty gaze. I shook my head.

“I have to do this. I have to put it away for good.”

He didn’t know what I meant, he couldn’t have because I didn’t. Not really.

But the house seemed to know.

It wasn’t the place I’d left. She had changed almost everything and it was something of a relief. Until I saw the first photo. And, then, all of them.

School pictures, candid shots of us on Dad’s boat, sweet poses of him twirling me or tossing me into the air, angelic smiles and tiny, toddler kisses on his cheeks.

Every single one with a thick black mark over my eyes.

I don’t remember him like I should. I’m not even sure what happened, but I know he died.

And that she hated me the very next day.

I touched each photo and felt the anger build. Brian’s, not mine. But when he pulled one off the wall, I grabbed it from him before he could smash it.

“Don’t look at what she’s done. That’s not why we are here.” I hung it back on its nail and ran my finger over the glass, pointing to my father’s gorgeous smile. “Don’t you see it?”

Brian’s fury crumpled into confusion.

“No, Jenna. All I see is cruelty and devastation.”

I walked through the hatred and felt it fall away like cobwebs. I touched another photo of him and her, no daughters eyes to blacken. Just his broad, brilliant confidence, and my mother’s sweet, doting grin as she stared up at him.

He’d been fiddling with the boiler in the basement that day. The cold bit into my fingers and toes the night before. I remember how proud he’d been to have fixed it.

But he kept going back down there.

I turned to Brian and he raised his brows at my expression.

“The basement.”

5.

It was covered with a tarp. She’d written on it, “Do not touch! Never open!” And as we unwound the plastic cloth from around it, Brian thought out loud that perhaps we should heed the warning.

But she wouldn’t have let me walk away.

The box was far too old. Like it had been there for centuries. It was a wooden crate, nailed shut and left to disintegrate, but somehow remaining, year after year.

My father had obsessed over this. It was what had killed him, I was sure.

It was warm to the touch, and got hot when I laid both hands on it. It was magnetic and electric, and I sat down, pulling it into my lap.

“Jenna, I don’t think you should open-”

But it opened.

And he was gone.

6.

She stood in front of me. A six year old with patents that loved each other and her. A child with a beautiful bright future, unmarked by the scars of death and abuse.

I saw what she could’ve been, should’ve been. I saw her grow into a stunning woman. The picture of feminine wealth. She was so beautiful, and I saw her celebrate and explore her beauty. I watched her become a lover then a mother. I saw her learning from her mother’s lessons, and it became too difficult to watch.

It could drive someone crazy. It probably had.

She made me watch, made me see wicked things and wonderful things. Some where so exciting I almost lost myself to them. The pleasure was sickening, and amazing, and excruciating, and delicious.

But it wasn’t mine.

I pushed the box away, and stood up fast as I stared at it.

It was still closed. “Didn’t I open it?”

Brian moved toward it, but I stopped him, putting my foot on top of it.

She appeared again.

“Don’t you want to know? There’s so much more. You could’ve been so much more!”

I shook my head. Slowly at first, then with something akin to confidence.

“No, Christina. You could’ve been so much more.”

I stepped back and took Brian’s hand.

“I’m exactly who I should be.”

7.

There was a long wait before the auction. I went back a few weeks later to destroy the crate, but it wouldn’t break or burn. I couldn’t bury it or sink it.

I couldn’t let anyone else touch it, I was sure it would turn them as it did my parents.

I don’t know what my mother saw that made her hate me so much. I’m not sure I want to. But I know I don’t want another soul crushed by it’s prophacy.

So I moved it. I had to.

And there’s only one other person in the world who knows where it is.

Fortunately, she’s trapped under my skin.

And inside that awfully wonderful little box.

Bubble

Pop Pending. by amie-faerie via DeviantArt.com

Waiting is a game best left to the protagonists. They are methodical in their introspection, which of course is fascinating. But only in small doses for those in the world stripped of will and purpose.

The good guys can tolerate the doldrums of time wasted. For the rest of us, the ambling majority, the true posture of patience is pretty much impossible.

But give us something sweet to suck on while we wait, and that is a whole different story.

I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last. It started with a ride on a bus. I sat two rows behind them, sweating and cursing under my breath when the bus overheated one Wednesday in August.

Her laugh gave me something to absorb besides the sweltering heat. I was drawn in by her luscious disregard for her surroundings, and I listened as he told a story about punching a brute at the top of a hill, one summer day just like that one, then watching him stumble down the rocky face, crying for his mommy.

I could almost hear the little bully’s wails in between her giggles and sighs.

And that first drink led me to follow them off the bus. All the way to her home.

He kissed her against an elm tree growing thick and full next to her front steps. The branches cradled their shoulders, hiding their lips from view. But I watched from a tree away as her leg wrapped around his, drawing him closer and closer until there was nothing between them but heat.

Guilt and embarrassment took me right past them at a pace that left me breathless when I turned the corner.

But weeks, then months passed, and I found myself there. Again and again. Waiting for another sip, another taste. One more glimpse of someone else’s delicious world.

I stood at the gate to the tiny alley that ran beside her building, the angry bite of late autumn making my cheeks and fingers red and raw, and I watched. He scraped a thick layer of frost from her windshield while she teetered on the stoop, sucking on one of those horrid skinny cigarettes and touching her bare throat.

She never dressed appropriately for the weather. But I suppose some people just carry too much heat inside their beautiful bodies to be bothered by the chill in the air.

They did this often, and despite my every attempt to give up this deplorable addiction, I continued to ogle them nearly every morning. My alarm went off at 5 and I was perched in my spot at the edge of the alley by 6:20.

Unless I’d fallen asleep in her back garden.

He would finish with the scraper and slide it into his back pocket. She’d toss her filter in the street. He’d bend to pluck it out of the gutter, shaking his index finger at her until she stepped off the curb and stuck her tongue out at him. Giggling. Cheeks rosy from more than just the temperature.

She was as predictable as ever. But not him.

He shook his head this time and stooped down so that his eyes were level with hers. He whispered to her, I could never hear what he said, even as the depth of his voice rumbled through my belly, but she cupped her hands in front of her and lowered her eyes. So obedient.

His gaze skimmed the street, forcing me back into the shadow of the alley, as he slipped the butt into her palms, drawing them together and lifting them into the air above her lowered head.

Like a magician’s assistant in a turn-of-the-century sideshow, holding up an invisible apple for the blade or bullets first strike. Trembling with something I felt in the pit of my own belly.

I imagined what he might be saying into her ear. “Don’t drop it again, little girl.” I didn’t need to see his face. It was branded into the backs of my eyelids. I could never be free from it.

His long, slender fingers played in her hair while he slipped his other hand beneath the hem of her skirt.

I’d never seen her protest, but there was a first time for everything. She whimpered and said something that brought his eyes back to hers, as his fingers tightened in her hair, tugging her head up to meet his glare.

My own thighs trembled and I used every ounce of my willpower to hold back a groan.

I knew it was wrong, this sick fascination with him. And her. I’m not insane, after all. Just a lonely voyeur with too much time on my hands.

But I had gotten more brazen, watching their windows and sitting on her back stoop to listen to them make love as I touched myself in the dark. I could envision the actions that went with each sound, I could imagine his expression in the amber light they always left on, as his fingers squeezed the sides of her throat and his body pressed against, inside, and around her.

I could even feel his fingers just then, as I watched them in this stolen moment, half a dozen yards in front of me.

He bent forward and kissed her on the cheek as he pulled her arms down and plucked the cigarette from her palm.

The look on her face made me whimper.

“Have a good morning, Lil. Don’t be late for work.”

He always was so fucking frustrating with his exit.

She saw me that morning. I’m sure she had a thousand times, but that day, she locked eyes with me. And I felt something inside me break.

I tried to turn and go, but I was frozen. Locked in the gaze of this woman I wanted to be. Coveting everything about her, down to the smooth, olive skin she got to live inside of. She stared at me long enough that I thought she might scream, or call to him. But she only stood there.

It was the first time I’d ever seen him turn back to her after saying goodbye. His exit was final, always. But this time he turned, walked back to her, and dropped his forehead to hers. And I heard him as if his head was bent to my own.

“I need you.”

Her eyes found mine again as that tiny, mischievous smile played on her lips. She slipped her fingers into his beard, kissed him in a performance worthy of an ‘R’ rating, then broke away breathless.

“Let’s call in sick.”

And from that day on, that wicked woman became my dealer in a drug that I’m not sure I’ll ever be strong enough to kick.

I’d never hurt either of them. After all, if they were gone, what would I wish for?

Nothing is quite as colorful and vibrant and real as someone else’s bubble. Even if you have everything you could ever want, there’s someone, somewhere, with more.

Fault

Devon Smoking by hatemypoisonedkiss his DeviantArt.com

I watched her face glow behind the red embers of her cigarette as she pulled the smoke deep into her lungs. Exhaling a smooth stream into the darkness, her skin returned to a shade of porcelain reflecting the moonlight.

She licked her lips as she stared at the smoke floating away from us. Her mouth twisted as she caught me staring.

“No lectures today about my health?”

Kelly’s eyes were soft, a shade of maple syrup with flecks that sparkled like the stars. But the night made them gray.

I let my gaze fall to the beer in my hands, picking and peeling the golden paper, revealing a slippery, green glass bottle beneath. I held it up between us.

“Who am I to lecture anyone about their vice?”

I tipped it back to my lips and let the bitter, crisp tang wash over my tongue before swallowing several times until my head swam and the bottle was empty.

I cracked another open before looking at her again. Her hair was parted with a zigzag and twisted into two haphazard knots. She’d tucked the wispy strands of pale blue that had escaped behind her ears. It made her look younger. Vulnerable. Sexy.

She lit another cigarette.

“We don’t have to do this right now.”

Her voice was tight and crinkly, like a Mylar balloon being filled too full. I winced and tried to turn away, but her fingers slipped around my jaw as she scooted closer to me.

The concrete felt like an ice cold promise beneath me.

“You don’t have to decide anything, Will.” She swallowed, tracing her thumb over my lip, then lowered herself to her knees on the sidewalk beneath my feet. Shifting between my legs and tossing her cigarette in the grass, she took my face in her hands. Her voice went up like it always did before she cried. “I don’t need anything from you. Just let me love you.”

A tear slipped down her cheek.

I closed my eyes from the weight of everything. I could pull her against me and lose myself in the dog-eared comfort of us, our story written on pages too fragile to be erased and rewritten. I could…

I opened my eyes as she dropped her fingers to my chest. “I can’t, baby. It would be like-”

She pushed me, rising to her feet. Glaring down at me, her nostrils flared. “It would be like it should be. It would give us more time. It would-” her voice broke and with it, something in my chest burst.

I sagged forward, staring down at hands that had crushed her heart without even holding it. Fingers that had skimmed over another woman’s body, held another woman’s face, made another woman shudder with ecstasy.

“I’ll forgive you!” The volume of her voice made my head snap up and my eyes dart around the empty street. “I will change. I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”

Her sobs cut her pleas into confetti. She fell again to her knees, wincing this time, but grabbing my shirt and pulling herself against me. “Please, William, please. You can’t do this! You just can’t do this to me!”

I’m not a cruel man. I never was. I could have stayed that night, chosen to do the “right” thing. And maybe we could’ve made it work.

But as I pulled her up and held her tightly, I saw my life, my future pass before me. Months or maybe years of mistrust. And the quicksand my infidelity had trapped me in would eventually suffocate me.

She sobbed into my chest as i tried to find purchase on solid ground. It was the first night of many that I would hold her and will her to be ok. Without me.

But the one thing I didn’t think about that night was loving her.

And that was all I should’ve thought about.

Her hair is dark violet now. Straight and sleek, framing her beautiful face like a piece of art. She stopped smoking and started running.

With him.

For him.

I watch her now, every evening, pass by the park where I proposed.

Sometimes, I can’t breath, her happiness hurts so bad. But that’s my fault.

It’s still my fault today.

It will be. Forever.

For Her, For Him, For Me.

Damien dropped the multi-tool, the heft of it slapping the gravel with a rough thunk. It sparkled in the waning light of dusk, it’s diamond cut ridges reflecting onto the device it laid beside

He had been painted in pinks and purples as we worked, but the sky continued to fade and the light couldn’t reach into his skin any longer. His thin blond hair went flat and gray in the dark, and his flesh, normally peppered with amber freckles that made me want to smell it, taste its spice, now took on the mottled simplicity of quarry stone.

I watched his fingers work.

“You ready for this, Pickle?”

His voice sliced through me like a hot knife. The beam from his heavy MagLight danced across my face, blinding me for a second before he lowered it again.

His torch blue eyes held me. Like a candle holds a flame, every muscle in my body worked to keep me from flickering.

I stepped toward him and opened my hand for it.

“I am.”

My voice was like a trumpet against the woods, and he slid the device into my grip. My heart raced as his fingers tightened around mine, his body moving closer. A breath caught in my lungs as the vague citrus hint of his cologne mingled with the acrid scent of his sweat.

“Good girl.”

I waited for him to let go, but instead, he pulled me closer. I could taste the cola we’d shared on the drive, still sweet and thick on my tongue, and wondered if it would taste different on his. The ruddy fullness of his lips made me tighten my grip on the black box, as it fell to my side.

His fingers rose to the back of his neck, unfastening the thick chain that sat there, a tiny vendor key hanging just between his collarbones on his slender but toned chest. When they came around my own neck, refastening the clasp, my thighs pressed together involuntarily.

Touching the small round shaft of the key, I wondered if he’d felt my heart racing beneath my breasts. If my unsteady breath was obvious. If I would collapse from the weight of my want combined with the heft of the responsibility he was placing around my neck.

His voice in my ear was just like an electric bass, strumming right through me.

“When you come back to me, I’ll give you something better.”

—

A film of smoke was the only evidence of the poison pumping out of that wretched place. He’d slid the gas mask over my face as he whispered my instructions. I knew some of the others received instructions too, but mine were different. And he wasn’t with any of them.

I felt it. When he spoke about the conspiracy, what they were doing to us, I felt the delicate wire of synchronicity between our souls. It wasn’t just physical attraction.

But I wasn’t naive. I knew his fingers dipped into the coffers of his other followers’ desires. I also knew that we all wanted him so desperately because of the melanocortins this plant pumped into the air, water and food.

As I stared up at the massive stacks, holding the device that would either change our existence forever or kill us all in one night, the doubt started to creep up my spine again.

My momma had worked in there. She loved that job.

Or so they said.

She died in her sleep. But they didn’t know I’d seen them. They didn’t know I had her diary. They didn’t know what she’d left for Damien and I to figure out.

I looked up into the trees and saw him.

His smile pushed down all the doubt. All the fear. All the hate.

It was all for him.

—

The train approached must faster than we thought it would. I thought someone might have seen me, I thought someone might try to stop it. But there was no one.

Just Damien. And me.

His mouth at my neck and his fingers between my legs.

The first explosion was beautiful. The second deafening.

Then, everything just collapsed.

Except me. And my momma’s mask.

Damien died on top of me. He made me leave on the mask.

“I know you thought it was for me, Pickle. But it was always for you. It was all for you.”

 

 

The Last Bite

Snow White by AniMal-e
Snow White by AniMal-e via DeviantArt.com

There are moments in life when your children stop being tiny extensions of you. They come in minutes at first. Then days. Weeks. Months.

Molly refused to let me hold her after her second birthday. Balling her little fists and bellowing in defiance, her hot, sour breath blasting me in the face whenever I attempted to pick her up.

“I do it. No grab me.”

Her independence was a double edge sword, driving her to develop maturity beyond her years. It made caring for her simple, but I longed for her affection. My best friend’s daughter would splay her fingers across her mommy’s cheeks and whisper. It made my heart ache.

I soaked up cuddles brought on by fevers and earaches, cherished moments instead of anxious interruptions. I may have wished for nightmares, relishing in her need for me during the lonely hours of the night after her father left us.

By the time she became a freshman in high school, however, our lives ran in parallel. I had swallowed the bitter pill of resentment because it was candy coated in the freedom to go out on weeknights or spend long weekends in the mountains without worrying. I trusted her in a way most parents wouldn’t.

She crawled into my bed that night, waking me from a sound sleep, my mind couldn’t process the adrenaline that pulsed through my system.

She smelled of leaves and the clean, electric scent of rain. Her skin was wet but warm where I lifted the backs of my fingers to feel her forehead. Instead of brushing me away, she buried her face in my chest.

“What’s wrong, Mol?”

A broken, breathy sob shook her whole body as she crumpled handfuls of my nightshirt and pulled herself further into me like she might hide beneath my flesh.

“Molly, you’re scaring me. What happened?”

I reached over the sliver of bed she occupied to click on my side lamp. She shrank further into the bedding and her sobs grew harder and faster.

As my eyes adjusted, I tried to push her back so I could see her face. She clung and fought, but the livid purple color of her cheekbone gave fury to my need to see.

“What the- Molly, look at me. Now.”

She turned into the pillow releasing a hiccuping groan but exhaled in surrender, turning red-rimmed, storm gray eyes toward me.

The left side of her face was one giant, swollen, mottled bruise. Her lip and brow were split and clotted. Clumps of mud matted her hair.

“How bad is it, mom?”

She choked on the words, a breathy whisper working against the parched rasp of her normal voice. She peered up at me, trembling, and I met her gaze with an instinct I’d thought disappeared long ago.

“Just bruises and cuts,” I lifted my fingertips to run over her damaged skin. “But no broken bones, I think. We’ll see the doctor tomorrow to be sure.”

I kept my voice steady and soft, despite the rage that boiled inside my veins.

“What happened, baby? Who did this?”

Fear flashed in her watery eyes before she buried herself in my breast again. I pushed down every urge in my being, knowing the best thing I could do was stay with her. But the need to say something was strong.

“You cannot let him get away with it.”

She sobbed for a long time, clinging like I was a life preserver. In the muted light, I stared at the picture on my night table behind her. A preschooler swinging her feet on either side of a massive branch, up high in a big old tree in front of an orchard we’ve visited a dozen times.

Molly was holding a huge red apple, the size of a man’s fist, three perfect, round bites already missing from its flesh.

She climbed that tree by herself at four and a half years old, ate that entire apple, plus half of another she picked for me, and wouldn’t even let me help her down.

When I looked back down at my little girl, now a brazen, vicious teenager, she stared back at me with wide eyes, blood in her teeth.

I pried her hands loose from their grip on my shirt and examined them. Three nails broken past the quick, knuckles cracked and bloodied, her right index finger broken.

She swallowed, gazing at the backs of her hands as she flexed her fingers.

“He didn’t get away with it.”

Beyond the Microscope

Waiting room by Jozefmician via DeviantArt.com

Analise stepped into the waiting room, feeling a bit lighter than she’d left it. She exhaled weeks of anxious waiting, and her sigh shifted her husband’s gaze from the tiny screen in the palm of his hand.

Curt slid the phone into his pocket and straightened in his chair.

“Well? What did he say?”

She sat down next to him holding the papers out for him to read. He frowned before taking them.

“I’d rather you tell me.”

His tone was soft but firm, the gravel in his timber stealing any emotion from his voice.

She’d loved that stoic depth when they were dating. He’d seemed impenetrable, unshakable. She didn’t witness a crack in his armor until their wedding day, but once she saw it, she desperately wanted what was underneath.

He was never prepared for that, though.

It had taken him two months to ask her on a date, but only four to propose. And after they said their vows on his 29th birthday, he’d whispered a hundred times that night that she was the best present ever.

Her sister had warned her not to expect the honeymoon to last forever. But when she woke, naked and tangled in hotel sheets two days after her wedding to find him showered and dressed, reading a newspaper and guzzling coffee, she hid her disappointed tears beneath the shower.

It wasn’t that he was ever unkind. In fact, he was the perfect gentleman. But she rarely got the glimpses of that man who was so smitten he couldn’t take his eyes off her on her wedding day. She could probably count them on her hands.

She sighed, looking up into his bright, cool eyes.

“Well, he said I need to have a procedure to remove the growths, but he says it isn’t cancer.”

In a flash so fast she almost missed it, his face crumpled with relief before settling back to his normal, stony expression.

“So they are growths, but not tumors.”

A statement, not a question. But not without a tremor in his voice.

She’d lived too long with the desperation to make him feel, and had been defeated too many times by his dismissals and robotic responses. So she hadn’t tried to see beyond his shell for a very long time.

Suddenly, it was all she could see. “Were you worried?”

His eyebrows knitted together, for a moment glaring at her furiously. But his words came out in a choked whisper. “Of course.”

Twenty-four years, two kids, two houses, a dozen cars, a handful of tragedies, and she’d never seen tears in this man’s eyes until today.

“I’m not a boulder, Ana.”

It wasn’t the first time he declared this, pointing at his chest in defiance. She’d said to him a few times during the first few years of their marriage that he must be made of stone. The first time he’d said he wasn’t, they were watching Titanic. He’d wrapped his arm around her as she sobbed, staring at the screen in disbelief when Leonardo DeCaprio froze. She’d looked up at him, startled, and his face blanched as if she’d struck him.

She realized now that it had always been those moments where she experienced some significant emotion that she caught those glimpses inside his heart.

He smiled so broadly the day she first held her son that she thought his lips might crack. He shook with fury the day a drunk driver had sideswiped her, forcing her off the road and into a ditch.

When she’d stood on the kitchen table, shaking in terror as a mouse raced across her kitchen floor, he’d stalked that pest like a lion hunting prey to feed his family.

And when she told him she had been to the doctor for a biopsy, he held her so tightly that night that she had to tell him she couldn’t breathe.

“You’ve been a bundle of nerves for weeks, of course I was worried.”

Lifting her fingers to his cheek, she longed to push him for more. To let her tug off that armor and snuggle into the softness she so desperately had hoped was underneath. Or warm herself against the fire he kept secretly to himself.

But, as her heart pummeled against her lungs, she knew that would only encourage him deeper into himself. So, she kissed him quickly before taking back the papers and folding them into a little packet.

“Ok. Well, the biopsy came back clear. But the growths are fibrous polyps and my endometrial lining is very thick. They will have to do a D&C, do you know what that is?”

“That’s what you had after Joel.”

The memory of Joel’s birth and the hemorrhaging that had followed burned behind his eyes.

“Yes, but this will be scheduled in advance and without all the hysterics.” She giggled, covering her mouth with her fingers. “Quite a bit less dramatic.”

He slumped and laid a hand on her knee. “Less scary, you mean.”

Lifting her eyes to meet his, she held her breath for a moment.

“I thought I was going to lose you that morning, Ana.”

She’d never thought about what that day had been like for Curt. Her whirlwind first pregnancy filled with difficulties, followed by an emergency cesarean birth. She barely remembered the bleeding or the surgery that followed. She barely remembered any of it, truthfully. The memory of Curt handing her Joel 24 hours later overlaid everything else. The bliss of motherhood giving her amnesia to everything that had happened in the days and even weeks leading up to that moment.

She stared at him for a long moment. “You’re not going to lose me now, either.”

His face went slack before his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “Good.”

It was hardly a word, more of a release of breath pushed through the crack in his facade. She dropped her fingers to wrap around his in her lap, then drew her leg up beneath her so she could lean into him.

She thought about the way she’d always examined those cracks in his exterior, as if through a microscope. Trying to find a way in.

She’d been missing the fact that she was already in.

Every morning, he rose before her, showered and dressed, then waited for her to wake, ready with a cup of Earl Grey with two sugars. She focused on the fact that he wasn’t in bed with her instead of the big picture.

He held both of their babies for days before she could, but handed them over without question once her body and heart could handle it. She’d envied how they idolized him as they grew, and spent countless hours quietly at his side building, fixing, and painting. But if she’d just stepped back, perhaps she would’ve understood that he was keeping them out of her hair.

He never wanted to take exotic vacations, always opting for weekend trips to the country or the beach. But maybe it was never about the money or time off work. Maybe he just wanted to keep them safe and close.

Everything she ever saw as a dismissal could’ve been his simple way of showing how much he cared.

Reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear, she watched his eyes follow her fingers, and she saw the same glow in his eyes that he’d seen on her wedding day.

“They will call me to schedule the procedure.”

She went on in a soft voice, to explain the surgery center and the outpatient procedure that should only leave her a bit sore for a few days. She slipped her hand under his arm and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. After she’d finished, he sighed another affirmative and pressed his lips against the top of her head.

“Let’s go somewhere nice for lunch. I’m in the mood for pasta.”

She looked up at him, her forehead lined with confusion. “Don’t you have to go back to work?”

Curt shook his head and kissed her again, this time on the bridge of her nose. “No. You’re stuck with me for the whole afternoon.”

“But- You don’t have to do that. I mean- You never miss work.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t always find out if my wife has cancer or not, either.”

Scanning his face, Analise grinned broadly as tears pricked her eyes.

“Thank you.”

He shook his head again as she hugged his bicep again. But then he stood, pulling her into his arms and holding her there long enough that she heard the nurses sigh and whimper behind the counter. He pulled back and cleared his throat, wiping his eyes with his thumb.

Raising up on her tip toes, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Let’s go home instead.” Pressing her lips to his ear, she told him she would make him pasta.

“Then you can take me to bed.”

Back

No matter where you go, there you are. Artwork by Josu Urrestarazu Garcia

She sat on the stoop and stared as I wrestled my suitcase through the door. Her eyes peered at me from a face swollen by a long night of tears and pleas. But she was silent now, clutching a cigarette like it was a life raft.

I hated when she’d smoked, but I could complain no longer. And as I reached the bottom step, turning to look at her again, she closed her eyes, pulling a long drag from the filter between her fingers and turned her head to the side. We’d said all that could’ve been said, twenty years of marriage rolled into a tight ball and tossed at our feet. But it still felt odd, leaving without a kiss.

“Goodbye, Marilla.”

Not a kiss. But I did always have to get the last word.

My own shaky voice rang in my ears as I walked down the shaded boulevard our house resided at the end of. A knot in my throat, the wheeled case behind me, a couple thousand dollars and a credit card was just going to have to be enough.

I could maybe catch a cab at the main road. I could’ve called for one, but something itched at the soles of my feet. The bite of freedom needed to be walked on. ‘Determined’ had not been a word used to describe me until late. But I had a dream and a pocket full of will. That would just have to be enough.

Marrie hadn’t understood this new creative ambition. An accountant is, after all, the general definition of boring. Honestly, I truly had been. Studying the news and stock markets with such intensity that I could never be bothered with hobbies or side business. So, when I sat on the bench in the back garden sketching and smoking my pipe every weekend throughout one summer, she’d thought it was a side effect of our recently empty nest.

One humid evening as she flipped through a magazine at the kitchen table, sipping on a glass of tea, I sketched her. She’d looked so soft and serene, and the resulting painting won me a display at a local gallery that autumn.

But when she saw the image, she crumbled.

“You’ve given me so many wrinkles. Why have you made me look so old and sad?”

She didn’t look old to me at all. Sad, maybe, as the loneliness of losing our children to adulthood had sagged against her from the inside, despite nearly nightly calls from our daughter and weekend visits from our son. But to me, that sorrow was beautiful. An attribute that can only be worn by a woman during the sunset of her life.

She forbade me from sketching her again. Refusing insistently and abusively, calling my talent ill-formed and amateur.

But I found willing muses then, in other venues.

The night before I left, I’d been unwilling to listen to her apologies. The longing for complete freedom to explore this new purpose gave birth to a vindictive cruelty of words that spewed from my lips as if I’d hated her. A year of hiding my work and lies curdled the adoration of her I’d held for decades. And the glory of retribution for her degradation of my art was addictive.

But as my feet fell into a soft rhythm on the concrete and the sun warmed my face, I felt the edge of my speech cut through my mind, the memory boomeranging back into me.

“You’ve stifled me for long enough. I am a man with art in my veins and I’m not sorry for ways I chose to bleed it out of me.”

Her voice cracked as she asked me how, who and when.

“Those women saw the gifts I offered them instead of the lines I painted on their faces. And the joy of their bodies in return might seem to you as my taking advantage, but I held them each in such reverence.”

The begging turned into convulsive sobs. But she was missing the point completely.

“Marrie, if you could only feel the pleasure of seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes, you would have never turned away.”

She’d sat at the end of our bed, gazing at the tissues in her hands.

“If you’d just explained. Carl, I could’ve-”

“No. I shouldn’t have to. You could’ve been my muse. You forced this upon us. Not me.”

It had been a cold thing to lay blame upon her, my righteous indignation at her ignorance giving voice to the devils of my conscience. Under the blaze of day though, my guilt sprouted wings and prodded me to look into the light.

On Ferry Street, I looked up to witness the broad colorful swath of a paraglider skimming through the crisp darkening clouds of October. Marilla adored such sights, and the desire to share it with her broke open inside my chest.

What had I done? Where was I going? Was I really so stubborn that I couldn’t draw her to please her or help her see the beauty within herself, as bright and expansive as that patchwork wing above?

A handsome young man in glittering white stood beside me, looking up and smiling.

“Wherever you go, there you are,” he said.

It was a mere whisper, but it vibrated through my skull like a gong. I turned toward him as recognition surged through my nervous system. I followed his gaze as he swiveled and his eyes fell on something in the distance, behind me.

A crowd was forming on the sidewalk I’d just stepped from. A frantic woman called for help. A teenage girl dialed her phone as she kneeled. A young man ripped open a coat…

My coat.

I sprung forward, stopping near the edge of the circle of strangers all gawking at the crumpled face I knew so well. The face of a stupid man who’d wasted the last night of his life breaking the heart of the only woman he ever loved.

“Aneurysm,” said the man in white with a lilt in his soft but booming voice. “Even if you’d stayed, you still would’ve died.”

I turned to face him, still feeling the weight in my hand of my wheeled case and now tasting the bitter plastic of my pipe pinched between my lips. The world around me faded into a whimsical scene, stalled as though captured on a canvas.

He strode away from me, up a road I wasn’t sure I was allowed.

He beckoned me to follow.

But all I wanted was to go back.

Beneath

ramada
The Ramada Plaza Hotel of north Columbus, closed in 2015

I’d heard the rumors. Some of the guys on the force think it’s funny to try to scare the female officers. But, I would say, after seventeen years of experience, women police are far more difficult to rattle than male.

We probably have more fears than our male counterparts, but we simply cannot show them.

Dan was trying to bait me, no doubt. Our afternoon assignment was to clear out the squatters in the abandoned Ramada Plaza hotel. The property owners had security, but once a month, they’d ask for a sweep. And we drew the short straw that day.

“Patterson, code 4.”

The hotel was supposed to be on a low-use power setting, operating hallway lights, exit signs and the fire system 24/7. But even this seemed to be faulty, as I exited the 2nd floor and jogged down the steps in the dark, my feet spotlighted by my Maglite.

“Please answer me.”

My ears rang with the bang of the door behind me as I exited the stairwell and jogged over the matted, thick carpet between peeling wallpaper and doors marked with large, gold plated numbers in the one hundreds. My whispered pleas where only met by the squelching of the carpet beneath my shoes.

“Officer Patterson, please respond.”

The crackle from the two way echoed through the first floor hallway. No power on this floor either. I stopped and started to close my eyes. But the silence around me begged for my full attention.

He’d said we should stick together, but I wanted to get in and out and had felt the vile, moldy stench infecting my uniform before we were even inside. No one in their right mind would sleep here, breathing normally was impossible.

I thought we’d be out in fifteen, so I’d decided to split up.

But as I had kicked around crack pipes and used condoms in my twentieth empty room, there was a laugh through the two way, a gasp and a sigh. Then, complete silence.

Half an hour later, I wished I’d listened to his sorry, lazy ass.

“Dan, please. If this is a prank, it’s over. I’m calling for back up.”

I stood at the front of the damp, putrid lobby, praying for his laugh to bark through the speaker at my shoulder.

But the only sound I heard was my own breath. And the pop of electricity as the lobby, too, went black.

Reeling into the daylight felt like being born. The front door swung open so easily, I half expected to find Dan standing by the cruiser, eating one of those God awful protein bars his vegan wife makes for him.

But the car was empty.

I fought back tears as I sat in the drivers seat. Pressing insubstantial buttons on the laptop screen, stomach acid rising in my throat and my skin itching with some combination of the late summer heat and the layer of mold spores that must be invading every pore. I could not give myself the opportunity to second guess. It had been nearly an hour.

“Better not be fucking with me.”

I cleared my throat and took a deep breath, closing my eyes to the setting sun glaring across the windshield.

“Tango Echo, officer needs assistance at 4900 Sinclair.”

I waited, an odd light grabbing my attention from behind the glass inside. Green and hollow, like a hot air balloon, but as it grows brighter, I’m fascinated by it. I stand and move toward the door, the dispatcher’s voice chirping over the call, asking me to repeat. The sun seems to be setting too fast.

Stopped, halfway to the door, I felt the ground beneath my feet shudder. The vibration was electric in it’s intensity, invading my skin, penetrating my tissues right through to my veins and nerves.

My vision swam, the light changed, became all I could see.

It is twenty three steps to the door.

I know this because I fought my own feet for 22 of them.

I heard the sirens blaring up the highway that zoomed across the back of the hotel. My puppeteer maneuvered my body as though I truly was held up by strings. I couldn’t stop staring at the light. I wanted to be in it. Under it.

I needed to.

When I found him, in the center of the basement, the light pouring from his pores, I understood why.

But by then, it was too late.