101 Words

I can’t believe it’s already Christmas Eve. Tonight we will drive out to South Boise to spend the evening with Mike’s cousin. His wife left him this year and his one request was to host Christmas Eve dinner for the family. I made a green salad; I know everything else there will be unhealthy. The wedding pictures and happy memories still plaster all the walls in his home. It’s been almost six months. It’s pouring outside. As we approach the Eagle Road exit on I-84 the heavy rain turns into a sloppy, wet snow. It’s going to be a white Christmas.

Her illness was sudden, her passing swift.

Insidious in nature, the cancer grew quickly and quietly, consuming her body and spirit until it was too late to even treat the disease. The best they could do was make her comfortable in the end, try to alleviate some pain.

From the day she found out until the day she passed, less than four months.

The entire town came out to honor her life, for she’d been part of the community for more than forty years. Her daughters gave beautiful eulogies, as did her three oldest grandchildren. Well-loved and duly missed.

Hearts wept.

It was crunch time, and we had to make our move. All was dead weight and had yet to be sorted, even the fundamentals.

We would roll our capital into subatomics, cheap and quickly prototyped quantum widgets. We knew not much of it would last, but that wasn’t our intention. Deceitful? Certainly, and its effects were more than a little destructive. It’s hard to justify so much chaos, but if you ask me, chaos was inevitable. We were sitting on near-limitless potential. It was laissez faire.

Amongst all the uncertainties, one thing alone was clear: things were about to get hot…

When I misalign my teeth I hear electric noises. Not like the hum of a motor running, but the popping of an arc welder like my daddy used in the garage when he made things.

One summer he made a cage from discarded pieces of rebar and oilfield sucker rod and angle iron. His T-shirt smelled of August and burned flesh. Some nights when he got shit-faced, he would push me inside the cage and threaten to weld the door shut.

When I am afraid, I imagine I am back in that cage, the door welded shut, and I feel safe.