101 Words

The war had been over a year before we were allowed home. Some things hadn’t changed: the front window didn’t close and the dining room wall was stained where Giovanni “decorated” with crayons. But the house was a shell. Doris Holburn had our dresser. The Millers were using Giovanni’s bunk bed for their young twins. Mr Ainsley had Mama’s tables, although he claimed he inherited them from a rich aunt. Our dog turned up months later. I put every piece back until the house was exactly as it had been before the war. It made no difference.

Giovanni never came home.

This evening while browsing through my old vinyls, my fingers drifted onto Thin Lizzy’s ‘Sarah’. I froze for a moment, petrified by memory, caressing grooves as familiar and yet as faded as the memory of your emerald eyes and the taste of your ruby lips. We had dreamed to its song, your hand in mine – my girl, my Sarah. We would see the world one day and build our lives in the image of our hopes. That was before he parted us. Now I wonder where you are, but I will never know until I join you on Death’s grand voyage.

The ex-footballer’s wife was cold. Shrugging her shoulders in her mink, she stared across at the distant executive box and remembered sipping chardonnay in the warm. Her husband roared some obscenity at the full back, totally engrossed. He was no longer famous but she knew sometime in the game a camera would seek her out. Now he was the bait and she was the cheese, it was her turn to get some attention. She peeled off a glove and took out her cell. Googling her name, she found the website TWILF and smiled, waiting for the zoom lens to find her.

Patrick was a roguish lad, alone in the world but for his mother. Come winter, he fueled their fire with palings stolen from their neighbor’s fences. The drunkard, Beavis, almost caught him last week, but Patrick was undeterred. He tore loose another paling and saw through the gap Beavis pounding his wife with gnarly fists. Patrick remembered then: another angry man, another frightened woman. He landed that paling not in his mother’s hearth but to Beavis’ head. As he helped the battered lady to her feet, he fancied he’d meted out justice and thought he’d like to see his father again.

They found the nine-year-old little girl’s body wrapped in cellophane, tucked into a back passage of her favorite seafood restaurant. She was wrapped tighter than the stiff lipped tilapia they used to cultivate their fresh fish special. Her father, a lumber mill worker, saw her lying there disposed of like shameful debris, arranged in a position where one could see the murky outline of finger marks on her gray tinted neck. The day she was born her half-drawn moon eyes drank in his face. The day she died those same eyes, calm and quiet, made him question everything about the world.

Look…y — you don’t have to do this. I could — I could pay.

I have no interest in money.

A car? I could get you a real nice car.

Nicer than the one you arrived in?

A woman? I’ll get you one. Any kind you want.

I have the only *kind* I want. Arlea’s the reason you’re here.

Arlea? From the clinic? But she’s —

She says you’ve already exposed your wife.

I’ll stay away from her! Please…

And the others?

I’ll quit! All of it. You don’t —

You’re lying. And it’s too late now. You might want to bite down on this…