You agree to go only because your mother wants you to. You don’t understand why she wants you to be there. You’ve never sussed out why she still is. Fear, mostly. Being with him was always a tiny bit less scary than facing the world on her own. It used to make you angry. Now that you’re grown, you understand, a little. But only a little. What did she give up? No one will ever know.
Into the well she went tumbling past the dusty stone walls. Hitting the bottom with a heavy womp. The scream pulled from her throat rattled up the well. She moves each arm and leg searching for something wrong but all bones seem intact. The dust settling on her dress and skin makes her cough a hacking cough. Oh My.
Whenever I think of my brother, I remember that fall afternoon and the big blue Plymouth sedan. Nick was in Korea, and I was walking home from school like every other day. Not in any hurry, just kicking at the leaves, thinking about baseball and that new girl in my class, and why did Sister Rose always have to be so mean.
After the War my uncle Rimley disappeared into my closet and we never saw him again. Oddly, whenever I told someone this story, the first question I was asked was: what kind of name is Rimley? His mother probably thought it was pretty for a child born pretty. He was no longer pretty when he returned from the war, more wound than anything.
I've lit the candles and incense, rung the bells at the small shrine in my studio, bowed my head, all as if I'm about to start work. The sticks and the needles stand ready, lined up in their boxes; the ink in its jars, rows of blue and black, yellow, green, aqua, red.
“Marry me.” Perhaps it is the limnetic sound of lush rain that motivates Amanda Crowder to importune her lover, Orville Miller. The sound is an evocation; they stand in the middle of a large, rectangular-shaped field of corn, the rain effect composed by a southwest breeze rustling the slender, brown, heavily leafed stalks, this middle week of October.
He sits cross-legged on a small patch of flattened, hardened ground under the branches of a four-hundred-year-old beech tree. His wife stands before him, her linen bag swinging from her shoulder, ready to leave before he does. He too faces the splintered trunk of the tree and touches each of the small seven markings – scratches its surface with his fingernails, blisters of blood leaving their trace.
Our neighbor Deb created quilts for the homeless, stuffed them with a batting of love, stitched on each a dozen pink hearts. Eager for Christmas, she allowed herself just one early gift, a trip to the clinic where micro-lasers would slice away parts of her body she no longer loved, sculpt a new holiday Deb. The doctors called what happened a pulmonary embolism, a clot that moved from a leg to her lung.
It’s dark and raining when you get to your car. The traffic lights next to the office fracture across your windscreen in shining, blood-red droplets, and you’re reluctant to turn on the wipers to clear them away. As you near home, you remember you need milk and pull into the petrol station.