"I don't care if is door.
Or a window. It's nothing but a thin sliver of chance." Momma
perched on the edge of her green recliner, the gaps in the vinyl
mended with duct tape. She was always fixing things that way, doctoring arguments and things broken with patches or kisses floated through
the air upon a ring of smoke.
I pushed aside the tarp covering the
cabin's entrance and stepped into cool mountain air. The tips of the
pine needles birthed fat drops of rain. The birdsong was tentative
and cautionary.
"You leave me now, you ain't never
seeing me again, you hear?"
I headed down the mountain. The rain
transitioned from drizzle to downpour. My mother would say it was a
sign; brittle bones tossed tossed into the air and falling to the
earth to arrange themselves into a pattern of significance that I
chose to ignore.
I made a life for myself, a life of
paper-cup coffee and croissants, buttery and light. A life without
patches and the runes of my mother's life.
I'd just cracked open my fortune cookie
when my secretary walked into my office. You will receive good
news today.
She handed me a
thick yellow envelope and watched me tear it open.
A thin sliver of chance is like a
piece of chocolate pie. All it takes is a little bit. I'm proud of
you.
My mother had died three years after
I'd left, fully aware of her illness. The doctors had spoken to her
about chances. She'd tried to patch up her body with herbs and
tinctures and incantations spoken by moonlight.
As I had looked forward to the
flowering of my own life, I'd neglected the signs of my mother's
winter. I'd refused to notice the slowing of her step, the
concentration in her speech, her thin and translucent skin.
Not everything can be mended with
kisses and duct tape.
But perhaps brittle bones have more
power to intone the future than fortune cookies.
As I'm in the process of packing too
many boxes, I cheated this week and wrote to two prompts:
And...
For
the Scriptic.org prompt exchange this week, FlamingNyx
at http://flamingnyx.wordpress.com
gave me this prompt: You take a deep breath and the crisp air
that fills your lungs makes it clear that winter is coming. Play with
this: Reminisce about the summer that has passed by too fast, the
autumn that never was or the imminent winter. You can take it
literally or figuratively.
Kelly Garriott Waite on Google+Labels: Fiction, scriptic.org, Trifecta Writing Challenge