Fishbowl
We're talking about boats. About how they float and what happens when the sink, what if they could fit down the drain and disappear. Like what happened to Slippy, our son says with a grave nod. Slippy the goldfish, Rest in Peace. Alistair sees the world as having grave consequences, for fish, for boats.
I tell him that the plastic boats in our tub are safe and cannot slide down the drain or turn belly side up as he sleeps. What about boats in the ocean? He asks, and fishes too?
Through the wall, I hear you clicking through channels and I don't know what to tell our son about watery graves or how fish carcasses smell when they wash up on shore.
Don't worry about it baby, is the best I can do.
He's four and from his throne of bubbles he raises his brow at me, and I know that he knows I'm full of it.
~ Read on at Word Riot.
Easter
*
They slit them right in the middle of the market. In the middle of the vendor’s tables, of onions and tomatoes and dirty radishes. Blood soaked into the cracks of the concrete, and pooled in murky clots beneath the white morning light. And right there, between ruddy potatoes and piles of brown sack cloths, the townspeople bent down, lifted the small bodies up over their shoulders and strode out, crimson streaked wool on their backs, the sun in their eyes.
I hurried past, clung to the fringe of the square and did not stop for bread or eggs. For lunch I would have coffee and the heels of yesterday’s loaf.
That’s nothing, I was told by Collette, you should see what they do with the pigs.
~ Read on at Elimae
Shoes, Falling
You don’t realize just how trusting you are, until you fall. Until you’re walking through the door of your apartment complex and you place one foot in front of the other, without thinking for a moment that the very ground might fail you, until it does. Until you’re reaching for your mailbox and you feel yourself sink, no, fall into the basement. And you look up, at the hole over your head, at your mailbox key dangling from the lock, at the ceiling far above.
~Read on at The Summerset Review
Overnights
A moment ago, we were making love. Now the room has cooled and you’ve pulled yourself together to hustle off. There is a draft that blows down from the window beside the cherry wood dresser and I gather the blankets to myself. They smell like they need to be washed. It is early March and you don’t close the window or speak a word before you pull the door closed behind you.
My mother can read people like tea leaves. She sees faces, reads futures and tells me when I come down stairs that I am pregnant. You’ve only just left; the cool air from the door swinging closed is still hanging in the room. I hear the car door slam and the engine rumble and tell my mother she is talking crazy...
~ Read on at JMWW
Milk
Joy didn’t tell her husband what she had seen. That while standing in front of their bathroom mirror, scrubbing her face, brushing her teeth, he was
there. Not a shadow in the bathtub, but a boy, couldn’t have been more than five or six and pale, nearly iridescent, looking at her over the glossy white
lip of the tub. The toothbrush fell loose in her mouth then dropped to the tiled floor by her toes. She blinked, rubbed her eyes with the pits of her palms
and then peeked again. He smiled at her and then leaned forward, out of view. She heard the splashing of water. Then nothing.
~ Read on at The Battered Suitcase
