Nate’s flight was late landing, it took forever to get off the plane, and then his bag didn’t come out.
“Son of a bitch.”
Continue reading “Baggage By Richard Jones”
Tag: loss
Hourglass by Ken Goldman
“Time goes, you say? Ah, no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.”
Henry Austin Dobson
“It strikes! one, two,
Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough.”
Ben Jonson
Howard removed the hourglass from his mantel, and placing it on the table he watched the grains shift. He had bought the object – a ‘grotesque egg timer,’ Camille once had called it – at some roadside flea market for fifteen bills. Yes, it was cheap and the gizmo looked cheaper with the winged cherub clinging to it, a golden Cupid with arrow in hand. But there was something almost sensual about the piece, something womanly with its figure-eight shape and an erotic symmetry as its contents shifted. Beautiful, really. And a little sad too. Because when you thought about it, the passage of time was always a little sad.
Howard recalled some genius once saying that the only thing constant in life is change. Like those shifting sands, time had altered things significantly with Camille. Similar to that tacky “Days of Our Lives” tag line – – the soaper was one Camille never missed – – like sands through an hourglass these were the days of Howard Jamison’s life, all right. He watched every grain shift from top to bottom as he had watched those days of his life with Camille spill through his fingers.
During their early times, falling in love happened easily. The young man’s electrified hormones overpowered his reason from the moment he noticed how nicely one golden haired Rutgers coed could fill out her ass tugging mini. For Howard that red hot emotion required a full thirteen minutes past “Hello” inside an upscale Manhattan pub, the time needed for Camille Dorsey to finish her merlot and flash a 100 watt smile his way. With a simple touch of her hand Howard felt his heart race, felt the muscles of his groin throb. If she would have allowed it, he would have taken the young woman right there on the bar’s counter, sending the beer mugs and wine glasses flying. But he had waited maybe four weeks before the two officially sealed the deal with breathless promises moaned beneath Howard’s sheets.
“Oh God, Camille, I’ll always love you!” His words just spilled out bypassing his brain completely, a new experience for the young accountant whose usual thoughts required mathematical precision. Then, music to the ears of a young man in love – –
“Yes…Oh yes…”
Beautiful and sad, the memories. Maybe behind everything beautiful lurked sadness. Howard watched the hourglass’ shifting grains, remembering an early fantasy from those golden days.
Camille wears a uniform from her Parochial school years, one of those Catholic girl’s kilt-like skirts with a crisp white blouse and green knee socks. But the skirt is rolled all the way up and young Camille’s very white panties are fully exposed. Howard reaches for the warm spot beneath them. Camille protests, of course, but her objection lacks earnestness and lasts only for a moment. Noticing the hint of moisture in the material, Howard savors a faint and wonderful whiff of femininity just before he takes her.
With no coaxing from him, the memories came. As an adolescent Camille had attended Our Sisters of Mercy School for Girls. Most males would have considered the green plaid skirt and drab knee socks as unflattering and ugly, but not Howard. Through his adulthood he would have selected that Camille wear her Catholic Girl’s School uniform over anything from Victoria’s Secret. And during one very special night Camille had slid into that very outfit of Howard’s fantasy. The uniform fit perfectly, and (true to his erotic reveries) white cotton panties had replaced Camille’s usual silken undergarments. She protested Howard’s purposely fumbling advances through giggles, as any good young Catholic girl should, although the woman who wore that outfit on that night had been seven years clear of those Sisters of Mercy. Afterwards she had joked, “What would Jesus say?”
“I believe the man would have given me a high five,” Howard answered. “Sister Agnes, however, probably would have put your shapely ass in a sling.”
They both laughed. Soon after, they married. Cue Celine Dion’s number and roll the closing credits. The End. Time to exit the theater all warm and fuzzy.
But not quite. The real end came a few years later…
***
The grains shifted inside the twin spheres and most of them were gone from the upper portion. Howard sat transfixed, remembering how his love for Camille had somehow evaporated. Or maybe it had merely passed through time’s hourglass to become something else, sifted to a fine dust that easily blows away.
Yes, their love had become something else, but what?
Watching the shifting grains dribble beneath Cupid’s bow, Howard remembered another fantasy from those subsequent less-than-golden days.
Howard straps his wife to their bed and works over her naked flesh with the nub of a lit cigar. She screams while he laughs, shoving the entire Havana stogie down her gullet. From nowhere he produces a lit stick of explosives sputtering flame like a Fourth of July cracker. This he also rams into her mouth and waits for the woman’s brains to explode and fill the sky with crimson goo, creating his own personal Independence Day, his unique fantasy payback.
“Cheating whore! Miserable spoiled cunt!”
“Lying bastard! Go screw another secretary!”
The searing of Camille’s flesh remained only a fantasy. But the accusatory words, those were very real. With a delicious irony that their respective lawyers found both amusing and profitable, few of the couple’s aspersions proved inaccurate. Time, that notorious indian giver, had reclaimed whatever love once had existed between them. From behind a polished mahogany table Martin Shengold from the legal firm of Matkoff and Shengold had a term at the ready for the couple’s shared misery.
“Irreconcilable differences. It’s an all-encompassing description, Mr. Jamison, legalese, if you will,” the attorney announced alongside an expressionless Camille. Howard could have sworn he saw blood dripping from the man’s teeth. “Alienation of affections would also suffice, but that sounds a bit harsh, don’t you agree?”
At one hundred and fifty dollars an hour Howard agreed, silently nodding like a moron. He also would have agreed with the suggestion this man swing from the ceiling fan by his testicles.
“How much will these irreconcilable differences be costing me, Mr. Shengold?”
The man offered a smile and jotted a figure on his note pad, slipped the paper across the table. Somehow Howard managed not to laugh out loud.
“You feel like adding a vital organ or two with that request?”
No smile from Camille’s attorney this time. “It’s a fair figure, Mr. Jamison. I mean, considering the circumstances.” Howard turned to his lawyer. Attorney Michael Broder offered no words of comfort.
“The courts usually favor the wife,” he told Howard. “It’s the system. We can walk, of course, but these things tend to drag on, and it will probably come to the same thing later. Your wife’s terms are not uncommon. It could be worse.”
“Yes, she could have asked to have my gonads made into earrings.”
“You can keep the dog,” Camille added. “For when Emma visits. She loves little Bieber, you know.” She smiled broadly, turned to Shengold. “Our Emma just loves that Justin Bieber.”
Smiles from the two attorneys. It would have made a nice Rockwell painting had the late artist shown an interest in painting human snakes.
Howard hated the dog, an obnoxious toy poodle who barked incessantly at him. More than once the little fucker had pissed into his shoe. Camille hated the mean tempered canine too, so here was another “Gotcha!” for her. But Howard had no fight left in him. On a grey December morning, ten years of marriage would dissolve with the stroke of a pen. House, car, even custody of his own child — Poof! these all would be gone, like those grains of sand that passed through that cheap hourglass. Cupid’s golden arrows may have once hit their mark, but Howard knew their long lasting effect had been two dysfunctional hearts left to bleed out over this polished mahogany table.
“I want my hourglass,” he had insisted, not even sure he knew why. He felt a great pit had opened, swallowing everything he had owned, and he just needed something – anything – he could point to and say, “Yes, this still belongs to me!”
There was the chance Camille would fight him for the timepiece simply because she could, but as it turned out she had no problem with the request. She leaned towards him, whispered so only he could hear. “It’s yours. Because if you didn’t take that piece of shit, I would have put in in the trash.”
Howard would not have admitted it to anyone who asked, but at that moment he realized why he loved that damned timepiece as much as he did.
He loved it because Camille hated it.
He stood up, turned to Camille and Shengold. “About these papers, I’ll get back to you, okay? Fuck you very much.”
And he walked.
***
The grains shifted more quickly through the glass now, and wasn’t there something poetic in that? The less time that remained, the faster those grains seemed to pass through the hourglass’ aperture. The bottom portion had filled almost completely, but enough time remained for one last memory.
The phone call…
It had awakened him at the ungodly hour of – what had the digital clock read? – 2:37 a.m. For some reason he remembered that.
“Is this Howard Jamison?”
“Who–Who am I speaking to–?”
The caller ignored his question.
“Your wife is Mrs. Camille Jamison?”
“My ex wife. Or soon to be. We’re separated. She and my daughter are staying at her sister’s in Glenn Echoes. What is this abou–?”
“Mr. Jamison, my name is Officer John Tandy. I’m afraid there’s been an accident involving your…involving Camille Jamison.”
The rest became a blur of policespeak gibberish, but the details that Howard managed to understand shook him awake.
“Car accident on the Interstate…your wife…so sorry…need you to come to County General to identify the remains…”
The woman on the slab inside the morgue was Camille, all right. Apparently she had been drinking, having come from Moxie’s, a local hot spot for cheaters and the newly divorced. Her Honda had swerved into the oncoming lane of the Interstate and into the path of an eighteen wheeler hauling Jersey produce, whose shaken driver was full of unnecessary apologies. Camille never stood a chance. One look at her ruined face told that story. For one horrific moment Howard thought it resembled an overripe tomato that had burst open.
Deep shame glutted his thoughts. Among Howard’s recent fantasies, one had involved cutting her Honda’s brake line. Pissed off to his limits he had almost done it, too, weeks earlier during another of his own benders. But he had remembered little Emma and decided maybe the alcohol was doing his thinking. Still, Howard could have sworn that fucking Bieber looked at him kind of funny that night as if he knew, and the mutt spent hours growling his displeasure deep inside his throat. Howard kept him locked inside the bathroom all night to avoid looking at him.
Camille’s unforeseen death brought with it a myriad of decisions. The divorce papers had not yet been signed and he remained her legal husband, so those decisions fell on him. Howard decided on a simple funeral but no burial. Some family, some friends, a somewhat forced eulogy.
“She was my wife, the mother of my child. I loved her. I’ll miss her.” Short. Simple. And except for the wife and mother part, essentially bullshit. With a phone call to the crematorium and the selection of an ornate urn — the marmalade colored ‘golden sunset’ model — it was over.
But not quite.
Howard wanted to be there to see, and he was careful to select the last dress Camille Dorsey Jamison would ever wear. Asked to remove anything noncombustible, he noticed she had not been wearing her wedding band although he still wore his because it never occurred to him to take it off. He removed a necklace that had belonged to her grandmother, placing it into a plastic baggie with some of her other jewelry to dispense to Camille’s sister. None of this thoughtfulness lessened the intense stare Howard received from the bald headed man at the cremation chamber who ran the show.
“You’re certain this is what you want?” he asked, straightening Camille’s blouse for her 1800 degree Fahrenheit trip into the next life. “Usually we don’t dress them — especially not like this.”
“It’s something personal between my wife and me,” Howard told him, deciding it would not be tasteful to ask if they had dressed her in the white panties he had left with the mortician. The bald man wiped his forehead and took one last look at the young woman dressed in her Catholic Girls’ School uniform. He looked like he might smile but covered his mouth before it showed. Yeah, he probably knew about the panties, Howard figured. He handed the man the golden urn and stayed to watch Camille’s pinewood casket slip into a tunnel of flames.
The rest was ritual-by-the-book : a call from Edwin Fleuhr at the funeral home to come and collect the urn that now contained Camille’s ashes, the requisite expressions of sympathy from the mortician and his comment about the tasteful selection of the vessel Howard had made for his wife’s remains, then home to place the urn upon his mantel for friends and family to see. Howard could not resist a peek inside the urn. Its contents had been sifted thoroughly into a fine grain-like powder, and like the container that held them, Camille’s ashes were as golden as the sun except for a few flecks of green he figured were the remains of her Our Sisters of Mercy uniform.
“Beautiful,” he found himself saying aloud. It seemed a shame to hide her ashes inside a container where he could not always see them. Considering this, Howard saw no reason why he had to.
***
Bieber was in growling mode again. His eyes shifted from Howard to the hourglass and back. His growls grew deeper.
The grains had run out of the top portion of the glass, some of the powdery substance clinging to the sides. Time had come to flip the thing over, to start the whole process again. Howard turned the timepiece on its end. The winged Cupid was supposed to shift his position and turn over also, but the stupid cherub remained hugging the glass upside down. Maybe there was some meaning to be found in that image of Cupid with his bow, ridiculously hanging on to the timepiece like some kind of wounded bird.
The image was something to consider as Howard watched the object his late wife truly despised, watched the golden ashes (with flecks of green) again sift through the thin aperture inside his hourglass.
Howard had to smile. He could watch the shifting grains all day. And maybe he would.
Bieber’s growls did not stop.
Image by günter from Pixabay – sand inside an hourglass with tiny sparkly bits.
When I Almost Became a Monk by Harrison Kim
I stopped drinking after my younger brother Cody chose assisted death. He was paralyzed from the neck down and never able to get high again because of it. That gave him courage.
Continue reading “When I Almost Became a Monk by Harrison Kim”
Beside the Dying Ash Tree by Michael Bloor
Andy put down the phone on his sister, though she was still sobbing intermittently. They’d already been talking for half an hour; he realised that there was no more comfort he could offer, til he saw her tomorrow at the undertakers. And he needed a break to process her news of their father’s death. So, booted and rain-proofed, he headed out the door for a familiar walk beside the river.
Continue reading “Beside the Dying Ash Tree by Michael Bloor”
Fisheye by Jade Lacy
The last time we stayed at Popo’s house, I was five years old, still in the cradle of memory when truth and story become mixed up in an inseparable mosaic. It’s hard to say what I remember and what has been spun to me as a family tale, more real than my own hazy recollection. Maybe if I had been older I would have more to tell. Or maybe it would be all the more clear how much of Popo’s life had slipped through the cracks of my young, distracted mind.
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A Telephone Call by Stephen Silvester
In a tall narrow house by the sea lived three women of mature years, comfortably or uncomfortably settled in their maturity. The house belonged to Agatha, who had lived in it for the greater part of her life, which she never failed to mention whenever the topic came up in conversation. ‘And I shall die in it,’ she would add with grim satisfaction. ‘Don’t be so morbid,’ Marjorie responded every time. Marjorie was a widow, not so much merry, as relentlessly cheerful. After the deaths of Agatha’s parents, within a few months of each other – whether from loyalty or cluelessness their daughter could never make up her mind – she felt the house to be an echo chamber of her thoughts and memories, and so placed an advertisement for potential cohabitees in a magazine for ladies, and ended up with Marjorie and Dorothy, a retired teacher of geography. Marjorie occupied the front room on the first floor, but she was rarely in it, except to sleep and read a little before doing so, preferring to spend the greater part of the daylight hours walking briskly, every day and in all weathers. Dorothy, on the other hand, rarely left her room on the second floor, where she sat scanning the horizon with her telescope. Agatha, who for some reason couldn’t stand the sight of the sea, was happy to stay in her room at the back on the first floor. The three women got on well enough. They shared a living room on the ground floor, at the front of the house, where Agatha sat with her back to the window, pointedly so.
One morning, when it was Marjorie’s turn to make the morning coffee, Agatha stomped into the kitchen and said ‘You’re wanted on the telephone.’ It was an accusation. The telephone. They shared the rental; it was a good thing, they had agreed, to have one in case of emergency. None of them used it, ever. There was no one to call.
When Marjorie returned to the living room, the other two threw covert glances in her direction, not wishing to display any curiosity, but the synchronous return of coffee cups to saucers gave them away.
‘Yours is over there,’ said Agatha, nodding towards the occasional table next to Marjorie’s chair. ‘It’ll be cold by now.’
Marjorie sat down, reached for her coffee and downed it in one. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ Agatha interpreted this in her own special way.
‘Well, well, well,’ said Marjorie a matter of seconds later, to no one in particular, though she wasn’t in the habit of talking to herself. ‘He’s taken his time.’
‘Who’s taken his time?’ Agatha pounced irritably. ‘To do what?’
‘Raymond. It must be …’ – Marjorie made a none-too-quick calculation and concluded incredulously – ‘… more than forty-one years since I last saw him.’ She remembered Agatha’s supplementary question. ‘To get in touch.’
‘You’re right. That certainly is quite a while,’ Agatha responded drily. Dorothy, who was following the exchange as unobtrusively as possible, had not previously suspected Agatha of having a sense of humour. ‘And who might’ – Agatha contrived a tiny stagey hesitation as if the name were already fading – ‘Raymond be?’
‘My sweetheart.’ Dorothy could not contain a quiet drawn-out ‘Aah!’ ‘Well, not exactly. I was very fond of him, and he was crazy about me. Perhaps he was just crazy, in fact,’ she added with a nostalgic chuckle. ‘Wanted to marry me, but …’
‘But what?’ Agatha and Dorothy asked simultaneously, with different tones and intentions.
‘My parents didn’t approve. Raymond sang and played the ukulele and the accordion and worked at Butlins. They thought him unsuitable for their daughter.’ A pause for reflection. ‘He always made me laugh. He was a charmer. But unsuitable. So I married Kenneth. In 1950. He was in insurance and in the City, which my parents thought had a more respectable image. I suppose it did. It was a respectable marriage. It was all right.’
‘Were there …’ Dorothy began, then tried again. ‘Did you have children?’
‘No, it didn’t turn out that way. It wasn’t that he had anything against them. In fact he was always very active with the scouts. It was just the practical business of making them. He wasn’t very keen on that sort of thing. Preferred a book at bedtime. “Tales of derring-do,” he called them. But anyway, for better or for worse, we rubbed along together, until two years ago.’
‘That’s when …?’ prompted Dorothy.
‘Yes. After thirty-eight years of marriage. I was wondering what the anniversary between silver and golden was called, but by then it was too late, and in any case Kenneth never remembered any of them until after we received cards, and they stopped after my mother died and my father lost his memory and there was no one left to …’
‘How did he …? I’m sorry, I mean what was the …?’
‘A strangulated hernia. From lifting a lawnmower, a motor mower with a nearly full tank. Don’t ask why. I never did. To prove something, perhaps.’
‘Men,’ said Agatha. ‘Typical.’
‘We never know,’ Dorothy remonstrated, ‘why anybody does anything.’
Marjorie understood her imperfectly, not knowing whether Dorothy was talking about the choice of husband, the endurance of the marriage, or the banality of Kenneth’s death, but felt a general sympathy in her. She had sensed this for the first time when, coming out of the bathroom on the second floor, she had seen Dorothy through her open door, engaged in her survey of the horizon, and had dared go in and interrupt. She walked quietly, but not silently, to Dorothy’s side. Dorothy looked up and smiled.
‘You must find it very peaceful.’
‘Yes. Though it would be nice to see a few little puffs of smoke now and then, as in the old days. Now monsters – juggernauts, more appropriately – move inexorably from left to right – or from right to left – as a statement, a stately and indifferent statement, of their existence. But there we are. One lives in hope. A little puff, a sign of life on a human scale, would make one’s day.’
‘How far can you see? Can you see the Atlantic?’
‘In my imagination. I would have to move past the English Channel and the Celtic Sea first. Even with something more powerful than this’ – she patted the telescope affectionately – ‘the horizon would still be only ten miles away. Can’t see over the curve, you see. And I’m not sure I’d want to. This is enough. Better than the view from my little flat in Highbury. In fact, infinitely better, except that one can’t see the infinite from here either.’
‘So you just watch the world go by?’
‘Yes. A little bit of it. The rest, as I suggested, will have to exist in my imagination.’
‘But you taught geography … Why not really travel, to see the world for yourself?’
‘Travelling involves other people. I have always felt uncomfortable when I am in close proximity to them. I don’t understand why, but that’s the way it is. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I have always lived alone. The idea of somebody else in my space, touching my things, disturbs me. It’s different here, we keep ourselves to ourselves. Most of the time.’
‘But you must have had some sort of social life, I mean colleagues, friends …’ Marjorie was innately, unshakably, disposed to the bright side.
‘Hardly interchangeable,’ said Dorothy. ‘I attended gatherings at work only when my absence would have caused a problem, then left as soon as might be considered acceptable.’
‘Friends, then,’ Marjorie pursued, unable to stop herself, and at once wished she hadn’t, sensing she was pushing too far,
Dorothy considered this, looking into Marjorie’s anxious eyes and then beyond them towards something infinitely distant. ‘I had a friend once. I thought we were … close, but of course we couldn’t be. Life sometimes rushes impetuously down a cul-de-sac, then backs up and goes on. Everything must come to an end.’
Marjorie was silent for a moment, then, as if to check that she had understood what she had heard, said in a small voice, as if to herself, ‘So you can never travel except through your telescope and your imagination?’
Dorothy smiled. ‘You will probably think that cruel, but I’m strangely satisfied with my life. No, not strangely at all. Quietly.’
‘So what did this … Raymond want?’ Agatha was still irked by the presumptuousness of the telephone call. ‘To reminisce over old times that were hardly any time at all? And, more importantly, how did he find you after forty-one years?’
‘Through Mrs Bubb. She was my next door neighbour. I wrote to her as soon as I arrived here, to let her know my address. Just in case. In case of what, I don’t know. I only ever received bills and statements and I’d tidied all that stuff up before I left. And when we had the telephone put in, I wrote again to let her know the number. To be complete. She sent me a lovely little note saying she hoped I’d settled in and was enjoying the sea air. Beautiful handwriting she has. I never knew. Well, there was no occasion to see it before.’
‘And what brought Raymond to Mrs …?’
‘Bubb. He saw the funeral notice in the paper. I don’t know how. Said he didn’t want to intrude on my grief so soon after, so he waited. Delicate, I thought. Sensitive. Never used to hesitate over anything. Jump in with both boots, would Raymond. Maybe this time he was scared. Anyway, he waited too long. He found my old address somehow and went there, to find that I was gone. I can’t imagine how he felt. Or rather, I can. Mrs Bubb saw him there, standing on the front path, staring at the empty house. She took pity on him, believed his story at once, and trusted him with my new address. She didn’t know about the telephone then. He said he’s thought about writing, but he’d never been much of a one for letters. In fact, I don’t think I ever knew him to write anything. What he meant by thinking about writing I don’t know. He was put out of his misery when Mrs Bubb passed on the telephone number. He’d given her his, just in case. Just in case again.’
‘And the end result of all this fascinating toing and froing?’
‘He wants to see me. He’s thinking of coming down here, but he needs to know that he’ll be welcome. I said I’d think about it.’
‘That’s good. It’ll give you something to occupy you. You’re restless. You can’t stand still. Always on the go. I’ve often thought that if you stopped for a moment you would seize up. Or think.’
Marjorie was determined not to rise to the bait, and diverted the exchange in a direction she knew would annoy. ‘It’s being so busy as what keeps me cheerful. Do you remember Mona Lott?’
‘Oh yes,’ volunteered Dorothy. ‘On the wireless. ITMA. It’s That Man Again. Very … jolly. Enlivening. Though I must confess I didn’t always understand it. Topical references, I suppose. But I seem to remember it was being cheerful rather than busy that did the trick.’
‘I listened to it once,’ said Agatha. ‘That was more than enough. Pandered to the lowest senses of humour.’
‘Well, it made me chuckle,’ said Marjorie.
There was quiet for a moment as the three women mulled over their preoccupations, but Agatha was not one to let things settle.
‘So an ancient sweetheart appears from nowhere and suddenly you are all a-flutter.’ It wasn’t quite clear whether this was an assessment or a question. Marjorie didn’t react immediately. Instead she considered Agatha’s life; it seemed to involve nothing much more than concerning herself with the maintenance of the house and the provision of day-to-day necessities, always turning inwards, towards the town centre (‘I never see you on the front. It can be so refreshing, bracing,’ Marjorie had remarked to her once and received only a cold stare and silence in reply), retiring after the evening meal to her first floor room at the back. What she did there was unknown.
‘Have you never had a sweetheart?’ Marjorie asked calmly. Agatha’s face reacted as if to a slap.
‘No.’ A staccato, definitive reply. ‘Never felt the need for one. Didn’t see the point. Oh, Cyril introduced me to his friends, and once or twice we went dancing, but they were silly boys. Not a patch on Cyril.
‘Cyril?’
‘My older brother. Born in 1925 and dead in 1944. His ship went down in Lyme Bay. All those exotic spots in the world where men can blow one another up, and he has to die so near to home.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Marjorie.
‘No point in being sorry. That’s what wars do. Kill people. But that wasn’t enough for the sea. Oh no, it had to take my little brother, too. In the first year of peace. A sunny day at the seaside. Bognor, it was. He had one of his asthma attacks. There was nothing I could do, I wasn’t a very good swimmer. I saw him go down three times. He wasn’t quite fifteen. I’ve never been in the sea since. It’s full of dead people. Well, not quite full. They found Michael miles down the coast. I hate the sea. Can’t stand the sight of it. The sea is death.’ She paused for a moment. ‘The irony is that when my father took early retirement – he was something or other in the Civil Service and had commuted between Merstham and London every day of his working life – he decided that we should move to the coast. Here.’
Nothing more was said that day beyond the customary civilities at the table and other necessary or accidental occasions of contact. The following morning Marjorie served the coffee, even though it wasn’t her turn, confident that there would be no interruption; she had told Raymond not to contact her again before she had made a decision.
‘I intend to speak to Raymond today,’ she announced. ‘I’m inclined to say yes.’
Agatha shook her head slowly. It would disturb things, upset the fragile balance that still held.
Dorothy beamed. ‘Good for you. I think it’s a lovely idea.
Agatha said ‘It would be silly at your age. You don’t know anything about him.’
‘Yes I do,’ Marjorie retorted. ‘He’s eighteen and he loves me and he’s heartbroken, though he laughs it off with a song and a dance.’
‘Take your chance for happiness,’ said Dorothy.
They are both right in their different ways, thought Marjorie. Perhaps it would be for the best not to resuscitate the past. But on the other hand I’ll never know unless I see him.
Image by Alexa from Pixabay An old rotary dial telephone in grey with gold trim.
Riptide by Manoela Torres
Today we celebrate Bella. Our beautiful, breathtaking, beloved, buried Bella. Our connection was less affection than ancestry, the sort of intimacy that shared blood makes inevitable.
Born less than two months apart, we were always together. Twins they called us, until our features grew too distinguishable to sustain the lie. I was small and sturdy, my skin the deep tan that made Nai Nai click her tongue and mutter about rice pickers and fieldwork. Bella possessed that particular alchemy of mixed blood: jade eyes set in porcelain skin, her father’s Scandinavian height stretched over her mother’s delicate Chinese bones, creating something that demanded worship.
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Are You Going to Kalamazoo? By Christopher Ananias
Tonight Jack would talk to the ghost. He took to the street. The warm wind is blowing on his face. Splash—pound—Nikes scrape the edge of a curb. Whoa that was close. He lets his mind wander down into his feet. His mind is splash-pound.
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Death on a Full Stomach by Christoper Ananias
The two men sat in the dim kitchen. Drinking. Dark clouds hung low in the gray sky like they wanted to open their bellies. Cigarette smoke curled from a glass ashtray. Larry Miller got up from the yellow Formica table and pointed at a steak bone on a plate in the sink. The white plate was smeared dark with A-1 Steak Sauce. Larry said, “That was Jenny’s last supper. A T-bone steak, a baked potato, bread n’ butter, and a Coke.” He seemed proud to Thurman like he wanted Thurman to appreciate it.
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Rescue by Michelle Stoll
I got the idea to resurrect Paul because eleven years had passed since we’d spoken, including the year he’d been dead, and I wanted to tie up loose ends. I never liked the way things with us ended. Exploded is a better term. I blamed him, even changed details of our story to make myself feel better when I told it. Now, I wanted to do better and set things straight.
When I say bring Paul back, I mean in a loving way. “Jesus wept,” is the shortest verse in the Bible. It’s just before he calls his friend, Lazarus, out of the tomb. Nobody called Lazarus a zombie that I know of. I think he was happy to be back. Maybe a little disoriented, but happy to see his friends and family. Although my history with the church was no love affair, I had a fondness for things like compassion and hope. Lazarus was a hopeful story, and I believe in second chances.
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