We drive north with the birds on the bare sky of possibility. One by one they arrange in a completed formation making their way back home. I imagine not one stops to complain about being too tired to fly.
Silence eats its way through the first three hours of our journey. I watch the little towns like a spinning carousal evaporate through the passenger window. “In that red house, over there, a mother is crying,” is all I say. This is all I say because I love someone else.
You reach across the emergency break and take my hand in yours. My hand is a dead fish, limp, the life is gone, the cells have stopped moving, and the bones are fossilized.
Tomorrow I end my childhood. Tomorrow we will sit at the table and we will die over dinner, over potatoes and lemon chicken held together by the round orb of the plate.
3 comments:
I'm so happy to be back on here. I turned in my summer grades yesterday.
I'm looking forward to reading al of your work.
Brandi
Welcome back Brandi. Congratulations on finishing your summer courses and I hope the rest of the summer is quite relaxing.
What impresses me about this vignette is the amount that is said with so little. The first paragraph, for example, describes not only the birds, but the feelings of the narrator using the birds as a metaphor. It's so simply worded, yet beautifully written. I'm blown away by your economy of language.
I was tripped up a little by the last phrase "the round orb of the plate" when "a plate" would seemingly serve the same function. But that's just a minor blip in an outstanding piece.
Glad to see a Brandi Kary post today! Welcome back! I hope you've maintained your sanity (or maybe it's better to lose it) while squashed under the weight of your summer classes. I barely held onto mine.
I love your second vignette. I get the sense that tenacity is the enemy here. The speaker's tenacity leaves him/her left driving passenger on someone else's journey, and that last image reads like a prison, trapped in the boundaries of this circle.
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