from Love Notes (a postmodern story)

1.

     She kept going to the back of the narrow space to where she kept her nicer dresses. If Paul came home to Juniper in the casual linen dresses, often stained with the jobs of the day, he would be appalled. She took a green dress off its hanger and slid it smoothly over herself.
     She reemerged to be greeted by James, her older son, looking up at her with her own doe eyes. He held up a toy tank, from which a part had snapped off. She smiled gently and bent down to be eyelevel with the little boy.
     “Do you need mommy to fix your tank, sweetie?”
     James nodded slowly and pushed the toy toward his mother. She took it from him and turned it over in her hands, finding the slot for the broken piece. She noticed that there was a small man painted on the window, smiling as he operated the machine. She closed her eyes for a moment and wondered if that was how he had looked, happy while engulfed in such a big, scary thing.
     She opened her eyes again and put the pieces back together. She held the tank out for her son to take without bending down or looking at him again.
     “Thank you mommy!” He hugged her legs tightly and ran back into the living room.
     June nodded and bent over to reach under the bed for a pair of black high heels that Paul liked on her. She put them on without sitting and made her way back into the kitchen.

2.
     With nothing else to do, she slid from room to room, brushing her fingers against the couch, a sculpture, the fridge, a chair, until she reached the bedroom. She sat on the bed where she had the night before and looked at the spot where Paul slept. There was no evidence that such a mountain of a man ever laid in that bed, the sheets were so perfectly smooth. The bed felt vacuous without his body filling it.
     She got up and smoothed the sheets before stepping into the closet. She liked how crowded it was. She was small enough to just fit in with the clothes and shoes and boxes.
     She traveled through jackets and ties and dresses to the very back wall and sat next to a pile of shoeboxes, most of them empty. She counted third from the bottom and pulled it out slowly, so as not to topple over the rest of the stack. She removed the lid and placed it on her other side and looked at a pile of letters that were starting to age.
More carefully than she did anything else, she took the first letter out of the box and unfolded it. Her eyes started skimming over the page and it was just a moment before a smile parted her lips and curled up comfortably. She looked like a little girl reading her first ever love note and she might as well have been.

Summer

1. (Glowing)

We were drunk.

Drunk on

summer and

sun and

stars in a clear sky.

They made us dizzy.

There were

sparklers and

pinwheels and

firecrackers that blew

up the red

hot July sky

and filled our eyes with flashes

They made me cry.

We were drunk.

Drunk on

dandelion wine and

chlorine and

bathing suits.

There were stripes and

stars and

blue,

white,

red and

gold-yellow bursts

overhead that kept us

dizzy

all through the seasons.

2. (Fading)

The sun is turning the sky purple

and there are explosions of leaves overhead.

There's a boy with a glowing hand and glowing eyes

drinking dandelion wine straight

from the bottle.

He's staring at the sun and holding my knee.

In the twilight, he's closer

to oblivion, where he'll learn to glow

all over.

It's the end of summer and I can smell fall in the air.

It's the end of something new and I want to glow too.

But the boy won't share his liquid gold

that holds him fast with strings of reality,

and instead, his grip on my knee tightens.

The sun slips behind the hills in sync

with the last line of light slipping through his teeth.

The glow of his eyes leaves then too,

lending itself to the stars,

who shine for me now instead.

3. (Evening)

Three months after

we finished playing out games

and lighting fires

our hands still

felt like dirt and

smelled like rubber.

When we entered the October country

we knew we couldn't last much longer:

You with your Catholic Saints and

Roman candles;

Me with my fireworks and

waterfalls.

Your old dandelion wine did nothing

to protect us or keep us

together anymore.

Your hand had lost its place on my knee.

I was too drawn to the magic of fall

and you wanted to live in summer forever.

So cold winds carried me off

along with purple leaf explosions

and golden dreams

while you stayed behind

in the soft grass of the past

sipping your spirits, pretending

I was still there.

In the winter

I'll light a candle

for the dead or the dying,

and listen to the wind

whisper your name.