101 Words

Free will is a gift, and we live as our hearts desire. Forever hippies, taboo’s foes, we say love is our God, and believe that babies bring an end to liberty. Childfree, we run away, just the two of us. This is our choice and nobody should judge us. Nobody should care.

Then the two of us jam into the van in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. Two bottles of wine drain empty as cheesy radio songs melt our minds together. You forget your pills; I forget my rubbers, and the choice is no longer ours.

There are windows in the room, curtainless with wavy glass tucked beneath the sloped ceilings, and cracks between the wide boards that let the moon shine in rivulets across the floor. You lean, naked as a fish, against the wall, doing a handstand to cure hiccups. A leaf sticks to the bottom of your waving foot. I pluck it off and you laugh so hard, the hiccups fall right out of you. We put them, along with the leaf, into the stream of moonlight where they become giant koi, playful as puppies, swimming around the bed, leaping to lick our faces.

“Momma, where do white rabbits go when they die?”

Grief rolled over me in waves, sucking me down and squeezing the air from my lungs. My daughter, eyes too bright in her thin face, looked up at me. Her favorite rabbit, Snowball, had passed in the night. Wrapping her slight body in my arms, I buried my face in the scarf that covered her bald head.

“White rabbits go where they can run and play and live happy forever.”

“Is that where I am going to go when I die?”

My heart shattered.

“Don’t be sad, Momma. It’s a special place.”

The house stands seemingly happy. Painted blue, it bleeds into the sky, camouflaged, hiding the deep red hurt inside.

“How do you appear so serene?” asks the inside to its out. “How do you not give credence to the suffering inside us?”

“I must maintain hope,” the outside says. “The pain within our facade is already causing stress cracks and chipping in my optimistic veneer. My face was once a cloud-like cream. Now my blueness, though mistaken for a kind of cheerfulness, is actually a shade of sadness.”

“When she passes, ceases her struggle—let us rebuild, recolor, and reinvent ourselves.”

Made a grocery list

Made a new list: ‘Items from Previous List I Still Forgot to Get’

Made a list, used it as a bookmark, got bored by the book, and lost it

Made a list of things other adults claim they do: change the filter, fold socks, take coffee out of microwave

Made a list of ideas to make my brain like other people’s

Tried not to make a list of everything I attempted that did not work out

Made a list of therapists—saw the third one

Third one said, “Got a suggestion; have you tried making a list?”

Lizzie paints delphiniums on the wall behind our bed, blue to match my tattoo. She draws us in purple. When I protest, she flicks paint at me. “Now it’s correct.”

I steal the brush to paint stars in our eyes and moons on our breasts. With a pencil from the nightstand, she draws a moustache on my purple face, the one on the wall, and shrieks as my bright blue handprints find her body.

Dork, she writes above my portrait. Nerd, I write above hers.

She kisses me, her lips leaving a trail of little blue flowers that will never disappear.

“Hello, Gavin darling,” said Belinda, breathless. “Sorry I’m late. Sarah didn’t show up for work, and I had to take three extra patients.” She sat on the stone and unpacked the lunch.

Gavin was silent.

Belinda bit into her tuna sandwich. “I ordered new curtains for the kitchen. Little green leaves. Won’t those look nice?”

Gavin did not reply.

She munched quietly for a while, then wiped watermelon juice from her chin. She said to him, “Wow, time to get back to work already. See you tomorrow, love.”

Belinda patted his stone, mounted her bicycle, and pedaled out of the cemetery.