Dear JoJo,Burn me. Burn these words that you’ve written to me. Burn the salt of tears. You can’t come close to this heat. You can’t know the fire that rages in me right now. Is it humanly possible to burn this hot without your insides melting, molten?
When your letter was left at my door, pages and pages of your mind spread out as wide as a canyon, I spent two days rambling over and under your sentences while tears stained the landscape. How did you know I was still here? How did you deliver this from so far away? I haven’t been able to forget that day you stopped me to ask directions to the church, thinking I was a local. And I thought you were Italian, but come to find you were from the same city outside of Prague as my great grandmother.
And now you have left me the weight of the past and I have to burn the remnants. I wish I had told you sooner that your love had been replaced, or at least smothered by something different. You thought I had children and married, but I actually had a child with no marriage. She works in that little café we once met in for tea after I met your mother for the first time. Sometimes I miss your mother, her wisdom and her tea cakes. I still have her recipe and made the tea cakes for Anna’s 18th birthday. I have decided to leave Prague now. It is time to return home to New York. You would have enjoyed New York, but those boots of yours wouldn’t leave the continent, would they? I wonder what would have happened if we had moved to New York, if we would have survived in America. Maybe the freedom frightened you. I wonder now what your new found freedom has in store for you.
Travel lightly my love,
Sara
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2 comments:
She dangles men like the gold rope earrings she wore that day—easy and loose. Ironic then that she managed to lose one, sending the boys scrambling to dig around in the seats in the back of the limo—like some bimbo had been there for a little afternoon delight, and we had to find the evidence of the tryst before the little woman did. Several of the women there that day might have fought to be with the bimbo, but no one in the room would have been caught dead with a “little woman” in the traditional sense—some of them wouldn’t know what to do with a woman of any kind, even if she came with an instruction manual.
But that doesn’t matter now.
The broad was part Carrie Bradshaw, part Carrie Fisher—lots of city and sex with a bit of Cosmo and princess; she could leave your thinking inky, with a funny feeling that ran deep. I remember that she had a thing for butchers—the more butch the better—that made her crave meat more than she should, but from what I remember, she handled meat with ease. Sometimes she lingers in the meat market at the ferry building—a better choice than some of the other meat markets that draw people in.
I wasn’t sure I had it in me to tell that the earring she lost was dropped in the house before we left for lunch that day…I think the wine made her thinking inky and gave her a false memory that the limo ride back might have been more eventful that it was, but then again who hasn’t been fooled by a strong memory now and again.
But that doesn’t matter now.
I can only imagine the quizzical look my message would cause her, like some photo effect on a built-in Macintosh camera.
But, that might be all that matters for now.
(Flash! 314 words)
Dear Anonymous, ahhhh, thank you for your inspiration for "no outlet." Perhaps you'd like to join me for the flash 69. No, it's not what you think you dirty little mind. It's a story in 69 words. Up for the challenge?
By the way, can I get my earing back?!
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