Figured it was about that time again, but today I offered a twist: the words had to be two syllables or fewer. And I got some great ones.
In case you are completely lost, over on Spoutible I put up a spout asking for words that I now will incorporate into this post. While they don’t have to be used in a story, that’s the way it’s gone so far, and I think it’s fun. Hopefully you think it’s fun too.
I’ll put the word list at the end of the story so it doesn’t interrupt the flow. Ready? Because I’m not!
Here we go anyway:
The first real day of Spring may have been up for debate, but the weather had no such qualms. The lakefront showed it, too, long swaths of grass, new and splendid; the paths full of runners and joggers and strollers in the middle of a weekday. Songbirds, freshly awakened, twittered and zoomed from branch to ground to branch to sky in their madding zigzag.
She chose her own slab of rock, still chilly from the recent cold, up a tad up and to the left of a male couple lying on the concrete, shoes off, taking in what sun there was with the weather turning. She rustled through her paper bag.
Somewhere behind her rang the thud of a softball against a bat, chain link rattling as indistinct cheering drifted closer. Like a mundane magic act, from the bag she produced a sandwich made from last night’s ample leftovers: skirt steaks with garlic and lemon butter, sliced thin.
Ahead, the gulls swooped and dived, plunging into water that still looked like winter and probably still felt like it, not that they would notice. Some emerged like heroes, fish in beak, proudly back to the sky, but others came up empty. They didn’t seem to mind.
They just plunged again.
She tried to enjoy all of it happening around her, to feel the breeze and hear the sounds and not feel the disappointment ringing hollowly in her chest. She knew last night the call would come as it usually did, her son telling her at six o’clock that he, her daughter-in-law, and her grandkids wouldn’t make it for dinner at six thirty. That something had come up.
Something almost always came up, when it was left to him. Amanda, his wife, was another story entirely, because if she set a place and time, there they would be, the kids dressed and ready for the activity, snacks in her bag, a quick smile on her face and a tiredness around her eyes she remembered well.
Maybe it happened over years, or maybe it was like an inescapable fate, the kind that no matter how you try to avoid it, whatever you do ironically brings it on. She couldn’t pinpoint it, she couldn’t name it.
Maybe it was her own vision that had changed.
But year by year, that kind little boy with a joy and curiosity about the world became narrower and flintier, icier, more aloof, until all she saw in him was the man she married and came to wish she hadn’t.
The decades were different; the city had changed; and yet there he was, fully grown, his gaze almost always inward, his wife and children accessories she’d wondered more than once if he was in the process of changing.
Bad ideas recycled from ages past spewed from him when he did show up, sitting at her dining table, leaning back in the chairs he presumed to be his, no matter that she was still living. He admonished his daughter almost every time she spoke, and now when she was around him, she sat in those ridiculous prairie dresses, her eyes wide, her bow ever slightly askew, silent.
When Amanda brought her for their outings, she was a tiny chatterbox, full of facts about the animals at the zoo, or the dolphins at the aquarium. Running through the Botanic Garden, overflowing with questions about the flowers and the bees.
Her brother, though, had lost that young kid sweetness for a stoic heaviness that didn’t suit his small frame. She could see him watching his father, studying him, trying to get it right.
He hadn’t been like this, her son, when he left for college, or even after grad school, when he’d gotten his MBA, while Amanda kept their new family afloat, bookkeeping, taking on part-time work at a neighborhood craft store.
But bit by bit he became less of who he was and more of…this.
At the end of their day trips, she’d give Amanda some cash. “For something fun,” she’d tell her sometimes. “Buy something for yourself,” she’d say, when the weariness wafted from Amanda like the mild scent of her soap.
Her secret hope was that Amanda would squirrel the money away, get enough together she wouldn’t have to live like that as long as she had, becoming less of who she was and more of…this.
Her sandwich finished, she crumpled her bag and hefted herself to her feet, glad she hadn’t gone further down the cement risers. She smiled at the nearby couple who smiled warmly back.
“Have a great day!” one of them said as his boyfriend waved.
“You too,” she said, brushing off the dust, taking in the water wide as a sea one more time before her quiet walk back to an apartment that was entirely hers.
Our words were: Splendid, grass, hope, steaks, shoes, madding, lemon, butter, softball, hero, Spring, grandkids, Sandwich, recycled, garden.
A Bit to Read 
Leave a comment