As Bill lay on his back, he stared up at the yellowing ceiling, noticing for the first time in forty years a single crack that ran the length of his bedroom. He hadn’t noticed it before and thought to himself that it needed to go on his to-do list. He had been noticing a lot of things lately, since cancer had eaten away at his beautiful wife, Lisa. Bill took notice of how long the nights were without her and how the simple act of eating breakfast took on a lonely air. His walks through the park got shorter as the weather turned colder and he knew deep in his heart that she was there walking with him, admiring how the trees had turned the bright shades of red, orange and yellow as summer did its yearly death dance into fall. Bill hoped, as he walked along that trail, that Lisa was in a brighter place, for his was a much darker one, since she had gone.

 
Todd Banks is a Michigan based screenwriter who dabbles in short fiction. You can find him wherever cold beer is sold.

 The word you used when we began this dumb journey.  It wasn’t promising.  It was a silo tipped over by a tornado, a grocery store with rats on conveyor belts.

 And it wasn’t bad.

Parts were honey on a grapefruit.  So you were right, a little bit, it was promising.

We started out sharing the three necessities for romance with me: a love of comic books, especially Peanuts, a love of Barbara Stanwyck films, and a hatred of the outdoors.

We were doomed when we got to the part about trees.  “Oh, the weeping willow is just like my heart, all sway and drag.”

“Jesus,” I said, “you’re only a willow in that you’re so messy that I have to clean up after you.”

You could have soldered my ass to a workbench and fired a blow torch on it.  I said I’m a birch since I’m not thick-skinned and can deal with cool weather.  I’m no birch.  They grow outdoors.  I know I’d recognize one if it were pointed out to me, but who thinks about things outdoors?  There’s mosquitoes there.  Animals with sharp teeth.  It’s better to make some popcorn and watch Double Indemnity.

You stormed out saying that someday you’ll “meet a hot guy whose greatest joy is clear-cutting forests.”

I suppose you meant that birchy me wouldn’t survive your big equipment.  Another thing—why did you say over and over how nice you are, how your students think the world of you?  Nice rots in the fridge.  Right beside an open jar of Promising.

You have that goopy sentimental side, and by the way, weeping willow, my Aunt Franny!  HA!  You don’t weep.  You don’t bend.  But you see yourself as this gentle tree.  You had a garden.  You tried to make yourself go outdoors to water and weed, but you preferred the La-Z-Boy, the Best of Schroeder in your lap.

Maybe promising was a dream we both had on the same night.  We woke and the best images in the dream faded before we had a chance to write them down.

Some dreams make you wake up tired.  Like trees, they seem firm and larger than much of life.  And beautiful—but we kept the shades down on each window, kept the doors shut.  When the tree guys came with huge blades, our promises looked like stale bread with green stuff growing on it.

 
Kenneth Pobo won the 2009 poetry chapbook contest from Main Street Rag for his manuscript Trina and the Sky.  It was published in 2009.  In 2008, WordTech Press published his book called Glass Garden.

 


 

 

 

In the corner of the kitchen, just in from the snow, wearing your long highlander coat. You were without a hat. Your hand, thawing in the pocket of your jeans. Your winter skin, fingers spent as a spindle. Later we hung a drawing in that space with unsmiling eyes and the parted lips our parents asked the artist to re-imagine from a school photo. You had been sick that day and didn’t feel much like smiling.

The clothes in your closet have a smell. Your whole room is sweet as maples and browning leaves. Wool sweaters, coats with the messages still inside, hunting vests and the box of Christmas pocket knives, medications in yellowed labels with someone else’s name and number.

When you were a baby we thought you’d go blind. Our parents bought sticky patches and lined glasses designed to strengthen eye muscles. You exercised by watching fingers move around the room. Then later, your doctor fixed your eyes. And you in the out-patient bed, waiting for your whites to clear and be white again, watching our parents put ice chips into your mouth. We all listened to music videos on the hospital television.

Once we melted crayons into pegs on the radiator pipes of our old room. Sea green and goldenrod swirled down the white metal and into the adhesive of our carpet. I painted by number over there all winter and watched horses come to full gallop or nuzzle maternal necks. Our ceiling tiles and posters were warped from the steam. Our windows like something out of a book, the sugar coating of gingerbread houses.

From up there in our room, we would watch friends circling bicycles in the pine needles and standing up on pedals in winter boots. Our cats creeping along the sides of the house, nosing the chinks in the mortar. The neighbors’ car warming in the drive.

In the summer we scaled the Oak tree next to our house and sat on the roof. Dangling legs over the edge and listening to our mother yell up to us about calling the fire department. We looked over our town, into the fenced in back yards, into secret swimming pools and someone’s rainbow garden.

Lydia Copeland’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Quick Fiction, Glimmer Train, Dogzplot, elimae, FRiGG, Pindeldyboz, Twelve Stories, SmokeLong Quarterly, Night Train and others. Her chapbook, Haircut Stories, is available from the Achilles Chapbook Series, as well as part of the chapbook collective Fox Force 5 from Paper Hero Press.  She works in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.