101 Words

Visits are different now. They live in the same house, but something has changed.

Every time I leave, I take a memento. Once it was an old family photo, one I’d never seen. Another time, a candy jar that used to sit on the kitchen table. How many times I’d lifted the lid of that jar, exploring its contents with child-like wonder.

Now they give me little keepsakes and hugs. Their eyes speak of secrets I don’t want to know. “Someday,” they say.

Someday…

I’ll sit in his chair. I’ll open her music box and bittersweet memories will fill the room.

The road out of town loomed ahead. Away from this town of closed minds. She often drove to this point. But never any further. She wondered what it would be like to cross that line.

That line to freedom. That line to the unknown. A world where pansexuality was just another sexuality. Not some “weird cult” as Old Ned Flanagan said in the pub. Community atmosphere, yeah right.

But she was in limbo. Would it be any better out in that big world? Would there be another Old Flanagan out there? Probably.

So here she was yet again. At this crossroads.

They wag heads. “So sad.” Pinch away tears. “Too young. Was cancer that took her.”

They kneel beside my shell, then slump back to metal folding chairs, heads bowed.

I stand unseen on gaudy, tear-soaked carpeting then float from this place of too many flowers. I am the sky. The wind. A whisper like soft breath on shoulders. That streaming light in the night.

They lumber through nine to five. See the world as asphalt and power lines. Hold their cheeks at the thought of me.

If only they knew, I flutter at their backs as they fold over my grave.

I am tree. Yes. Tree know English. English hard. Tree take very, very long time to learn English. Only one day a year tree can speak. Yes. Tree can speak. Speak on first day of spring. Yes. Yes. But only speak if spoken to. Make it very hard. Many years humans spoke to tree. Tree very fluent in Latin. Can speak poetry in Latin and sing songs and make speeches. Tree was big hit. Made breakthrough in Classical oratory. But tree never hear Latin today. Now strange English. And no one speak to tree anymore. They have forgotten how. Tree lonely.

A dead body breathing strolled the path down Aurora Avenue. Her skin burned, tingling, peeling from the long trek without sunscreen. Heart rate accelerated. She could almost taste the vinegar. Heroin. Oh, sweet heroin. She’d feel alive soon.

In that dealer’s car, she could wait no longer. Spoon? Check. Syringe? Yes. Frantically boiled water splattered onto her hand, shit, she said, what a waste. Into the cooker it goes, sucked up, tapped, bubbles gone.

Arm going numb from such a tightly-wound tourniquet, the needle dangled from clenched teeth. Liquid relief found its way into her blood stream. Now, she could breathe.

I shave my legs and slip on the miniskirt. I paint on illicit lipstick, a flick of eyeliner. The mirror highlights the curves of my bared shoulders.

Then, I hear a soft pinging sound; it’s my phone alarm warning me. I quickly wash my face, hide the skirt, and put on my jeans again. I make it to the kitchen table just before she walks through the doorway.

“Hello, Hakim,” my mother says, setting down two grocery bags on the counter. She pulls out a bag of shiny red apples and puts them down next to me. “How was soccer practice?”