Tag: real world

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An Overcast Morning

Day 487

I think I said all I need to regarding steampunk kittens yesterday. Now that’s covered. I can move on.

“Dammit.” John’s head sunk to his hand, “Every time. Every single time.” He clamped his hand tighter over his face and ground at his temples.

His copilot, Varsha Smith, regretted not waiting one more minute before entering the cockpit. John was blustering and she’d not yet tread this ground successfully. If she didn’t end up listening to him whine for an hour she’d ended up getting yelled at for the same length of time. It was a pattern she recognized; she wondered if he did too.

“Wall or sponge?” Varsha asked.

He met her eyes and neither looked away, but John’s attention was elsewhere, like he was solving a quadratic equation in his head: first, outer, inner, last… She decided to help him get to the solution faster.

“Do you want me to be a wall to punch or a sponge for you to cry into?” Harsh, but real.

His face hybridded between a boy caught lying to his mother and one getting a bike for Christmas. Finally, she’d slotted through. A spark of fear dropped in lap like a hotly ashed cigarette. What hell lay in wait in their relationship now?

215 words

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Two Empty Hands

Day 485

Today’s entry is needfully short rather than functionally so.

Morning’s moisture skimmed the yesterday-mown grass. Sunlight blazed through that dew in haphazard splotches and streaked over the drier foot path. The child insisted she was to be seated next to her Father–but not that close.

She extended her fisted hands. “Which one?”

He taps the left–his left. “This one.”

She opens it empty.

He taps the other. “That one.”

She opens it empty and laughs.

“You got me!”

The little girl grabs his hands formed them into fists as best she can, “You do now?”

99 words

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A Hump of Green Crabgrass

Day 444

One of the sadder and likely unnoticed bit of community missing from Suburbia is the alley. Two grey gravel ruts divided by a hump of green crabgrass and punctuated with muddy-water puddles that know all your backyard secrets would do more to melt the plastic neighborhood than any number of rec-centers.

Streetside you prune bushes and mow lawns and paint trim. You primp marigolds and hang wreaths and put numbers on your mailbox with gold-on-black stickers from the hardware store over there a ways. The street is your lying face that says, “We’re all fine in here. Nothing to worry about. We’re just like you are over there.”

The alley whispers that you’re never gonna take the tarp off that motorcycle. That you get dirty, sweaty, and red-faced when you plant tomatoes. That you don’t like trimming after you mow. That you drink beer in your kids’ plastic pool in your underwear in July. The alley is your truthful backside that says, “We’re all fine in here. Nothing to worry about. We’re just like you are over there.”