She walks up your back, her tiny feet pushing into the natural rungs in your vertebrae. By midnight, though it seems later, her feet are moving further up the spine, then something flashes in her memory – in her dream – and they run up clear to the shoulders. Her feet are blunt, the toes curled in fear, and the push so that the torso rocks, re-settles, then rocks again, so that it is not a painful stamp, like someone climbing stairs. After the first few hits from fisted feet, you come to life. (more…)
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Scrawled on the mailbox side over the metal rivulets was the old man’s last name. Though it belonged to a long lineage of back-broken men and sad women, the broad blood-colored paint strokes of his own making on display at the end of the driveway made the name belong to only him, and not even to the grandkids who sometimes watched him work.
He’d painted it on a Saturday morning in a half-lit garage, where he did all his building and fixing, that smelled like 100 year-old limestone sweat and oily work tools. He had sturdy hands, his fingers calloused and often bandaged. Sometimes there were open sours smeared with some red first aid goop that his grandsons thought particular to old wisened men from another generation. They’d watch him in the narrow tool shed next to the garage sharpen lawn mower blades standing in shooting orange sparks, his face not changing. The boys, if they were older by another five years, might have seen him as the composite of the concentration and the lostness of old age, but instead saw him as still. His work was done in quiet, repaid with a handshake from a neighbor happy to mow again or a smile from a little boy grateful to have a bicycle tire patched, and when he was done, he was usually hungry. (more…)
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Backs belonging to the lake houses face the cove and the tree-shaded hills. Backyards with elaborate decks and outdoor furniture and umbrellas look over the boat docks and welcome guests out for strolls along the lake. Long stairways lead down terraced hills to fence gates carved in wood and or set in wrought iron. Around the lake top, light shimmers in patterns as the branches let flashes of sunlight through in sharp, definite cuts. (more…)
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His snoring filled the car, the same air exhaled and pulled in again by a little nose hiding under honey blonde hair. His mother buttoned his coat on him before he climbed in the backseat and the top button was left undone, enough room allowed for his head to slump comfortably on his shoulder. The billowed coat was too warm for the weather, but made a soft pillow for his fat cheek to rest. We were always cautious with our children. (more…)
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I first saw the house as a boy so my memories are tied to boyhood perception, cloudy and footed in snow just as the shape was on the hill. Houses can not lurk but they can be thought to be haunted by previous proprietors or by memories, and when an entire family has lived in a house for close to 70 years, the thoughts almost come to life when the door is pushed open and the bodies step back inside the past. (more…)
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