Kickstart my heart. Do it. I’m staring into your eyes, daring you to take action. My dad’s excavator hat flashes in my mind, pushing us to “get to work.” You know how to do it. Your hands find the gears with gliding smoothness, and you look at me out of the corner of your eye…
The day the crows came changed everything. The revelations of events scattered across the timeline of her life. Out of order as they were, they returned nevertheless, like breadcrumbs in her mind. It was the same night the blue lights flashed in his eyes. It felt like her daddy’s belt across her backside. Something ripped…
The words had lost their meaning. That’s how it felt the morning I went to say the phrase I’ve used so often that its truth had begun to shake. It quivered from out my mouth… “It’s okay.” Hollow tin-can, it fell out right flat. As fake and off-key as the sing-songy tone I use to…
Sometimes, Mawmaw’s way of speaking says it best. I hear her say things, and they feel right. They spill from out my mouth, like I’m pouring them from one of her huge canning jars. It ropes down the side of the glass and onto the countertop. Mawmaw’s eyebrows jump as she watches the whole thing…
The warmth of my mug has become a game of hot potato between my hands. They’re cold till they’re burning. Till they’re cold… Somewhere in there, they’re just right. So it’s worth the effort as I look through the kitchen window and stare up at the light. It’s trickling in between the leaves of the…
Pressure is bubbling up inside me. My ears feel it building, wanting to pop. Electric currents lace through my fingertips. My hands lay heavy in my lap with the weight of that invisible movement, so I pick them up and turn them over as if I’m inspecting them. It crawls under my skin, going all…
The first time, you stood back in a kind of awe. Don’t you recall? Me in the Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt with the sleeves cut off … my yardstick arms elbow-danced in the stove light as I made us breakfast. Delight flickered across your face. It sprinkled around your apartment like fairy dust as…
Day was still night, but it was all the same to him. He couldn’t go back down now that he was up. Couldn’t turn off now that he was on… I remember that feeling from when I was a child. My eyes wide under the covers. My ears listening to the predictable breathing beside me….
I’m navigating waters I thought I’d tempered a long time ago. It comes to me in waves … or like the winds of March, going out like a lion when I thought all that early snow would mean it’d be a lamb. It’s not. I trusted a fairy tale – an old saying into which…
Something drops hard in my stomach. It almost keeps me from eating another bite, so I simply sit with it. Wait till the feeling passes before anything else may begin. It saps me. As if a knot in my stomach pulled loose, a thread is unraveling at my feet. Had I sewn it? I’m pondering…