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Enough
This is what she did before she stepped in front of the semi. She walked into the bar, six or seven steps behind the waitress, three ahead of him. He was talking on his cell phone. She walked with her head down, an apology to the waitress who was nearly done with her shift and hoping to hurry it by walking faster. She took the booth side under the TV, he the one facing it. She did this because of the one time she didn’t. The TV was tuned to a soccer game. She anticipated his scowl before it appeared and almost allowed herself a smile. He told the waitress…
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In Reflection
In the mirror across the bar she is twelve. She is standing in the wings of the Big Top, breathing the scent of hay and earth and animal with deep, happy inhales. She hears the crowd’s cheer rise and fall in waves, pictures a man and a woman flying through the air in matching blue and white costumes. She looks at her own costume. It is pink. Color, Maya, color! The circus is all about color! It is the voice of her father, a voice she has never known but somehow recognizes. I want to match you and mom, she says. But you match Kimba! “Another?” She is back in…
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Fourteen
My mom is a lot prettier than she thinks she is. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who knows this. Last summer we went to the Grand Canyon. We couldn’t afford plane tickets because Dad’s company had to close for a whole week in February and he didn’t get paid. I thought, “that’s like five snow days in a row!” but I didn’t say it out loud because Dad was extra quiet when he told us. It was a long drive from Wisconsin. I could tell you the states we drove through. Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona. I could also tell you how many times my…
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Horizon
The metal bench is an eyesore, its patina not the lovely green-gray of time-weathering, but the red rust of saltwater and circumstance. Situated halfway between the ocean and the sharp, wind-carved ridge separating the reedy grass from the wide swim of a sandy beach, it leans slightly forward, anchored to a buried block of concrete not much longer or wider than the bench itself. At high tide, its thick legs disappear from view, leaving a latticework of seat and back, an iron net for wayward seaweed, a royal perch for white gulls. Most people give the bench little more than a curious glance. Most people are visitors here, vacationers who…
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Somebody Once
Still holding tight to his egg-stained fork, Graham ran the back of his hand across the counter, feeling the grains of salt roll under his skin like sand. He imagined rubbing the salt into the wound on his leg. “More coffee?” The server behind the counter should have been a sour old lady with a southern drawl and a smoker’s cough or a pretty young blonde trying and failing to corral her sexuality with a ponytail rubber band. But it was a man. A young man with dreadlocks that surely violated the health code by the way the natty strands flew around the room with every nod of his head.…
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The Monster Is Not In the Closet
He looked like Gollum. Not the Gollum from the movies. His skin wasn’t leathery or gray. He didn’t move like a monkey and his ears weren’t as big as saucers. And not the Gollum from the books. She hadn’t read them. She could have because she read well above her grade level, but she believed they were all about monsters and she didn’t like monsters. Not even heroic ones. No, the Gollum he resembled was entirely the product of Holly’s imagination – something she pictured after her cousin had tried to scare her with a story about a monster that lived in her closet – a spindly, spider-like creature with…
