Tag: micro monday

Drunk Husband Crashes Yard Sale | Alice Kinerk

You decide to hold a yard sale, because it’s a nice thing to do, a homey, all-American thing to do. Also, you’re broke. You place a classified ad, mark the date, start stickering. 

Night before the sale, Drunk Husband goes out drinking, and by dawn has yet to return. Nothing unusual there, but given his recent promises, it hurts.  It’s for the best, you tell yourself. He’s sleeping it off somewhere. With all the hauling to do that morning, all the folding tables to set up.  Linens, CDs, tapes, pot holders, trivets, posters, books, magazines, clothes, garden tools, shoes, clothes, unused wedding gifts and parental cast-offs, beach stuff, utensils, plant pots. Everything out the door, down the steps, onto the front yard for liquidation purposes. 

It’s for the best. It is. It is. It is.

But then, Drunk Husband is rounding the corner. He’s tipping back a paper bag, stiff-legging it. Trespasser! he bellows at the old lady Q-tip who is your first customer. He’s half a block away, bellowing. 

Then he gets close, hovers over her like an interrogator. The Q-tip drops an eggbeater and beelines it to her Cutlass, drives away.

Another customer appears.  Scene repeats.  

You tell Drunk Husband to go to bed, but he doesn’t hear you. Instead he does a King Kong through your cityscape of folding tables, picking things up and dropping them. 

You cajole. He refuses. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Until finally, mercifully, he does go. He stumbles inside to use the bathroom, some time passes, and he doesn’t return. Peace falls again upon the yard.

More customers arrive. Sales are made. 

But then, from inside the house, the bedroom window opens.

Trespassers!  

It won’t be the final time he hurts you, nor the worst. But one day, twenty years later, remarried, middle-aged, you will watch the sunset through wildfire smoke, and this is the image which will surface.  Drunk Husband’s face in the window that morning, round and red like the sun is now. Just as angry.  Every bit as impossible to contain.

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Not Until Fish Fall From the Sky | Kale Choo Hanson

Nina, I won’t let you marry him until fish fall from the sky, my father says as we sit on the back deck, him on a lounge chair smoking a cigar, and Ian and I standing on the threshold of the sliding glass door. Ian shifts beside me, his ears growing pink. Let’s just go, he whispers. But I’m not ready to leave. I had known my father would say this exact thing. He said it at my cousin’s birthday party when asked to try out the bouncy house, then again at the church auction when offered a cocktail with fruit in it, and then again when my sister Ella had saved up her waitressing money to buy a used Volkswagen Bug. I won’t let you drive that thing until fish fall from the sky. 

Ian is a good guy. He has a job as an accountant, keeps the philodendron in our kitchen alive, and listens to my stories like he’ll be quizzed later. It would all be fine if my father hadn’t caught him in the basement last month, polishing his piccolo. No man plays the piccolo and is proud of it, my father says to me later after a dinner of stony glares and silences. He was in marching band, he’s a great musician, I say. My father shakes his head and points at the sky. Fish, Nina. Fish. 

But today, as I stand on the back deck, clutching Ian’s nimble, piccolo-trained hand in mine, watching my father puff cigar smoke from a smirk, I am ready. Well, we are ready. I snatch my phone from my pocket and send my sister a text. I hear a grunt from the other side of the house, the front driveway perhaps. I brace myself for impact. 

The salmon, silvery and dead-eyed, lands on the side table beside my father. His beer, a gold cigar clipper, and ashes from a tray are launched into the air. His cigar flies from his hand as he jumps to his feet. The fish is much bigger than I had expected and I am impressed that Ella had cleared the whole house and almost landed it in his lap. What the hell? My father says as he stares down at the fish, his eyebrows narrowed and his smirk replaced with a gaping O. He doesn’t lift his gaze until we smell smoke.

We discover later that the cigar had rolled underneath the deck and into a pile of dead leaves. We get a lecture from a soot-covered firefighter. But before the red engines arrive— as we wait in the front yard watching the house erupt into flame, Ella, Ian and I with our chins tilted up in disbelief— my father is behind us, facing away from the house, feet bare at the end of the driveway, holding a 6-pound salmon in his fist, opening his mouth to say something and then closing it when nothing comes out.

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Closure  |  David Obuchowski

The envelope was already partially open, the flap peeling up as if maybe you hadn’t licked it enough for it to stick. But after I read your letter, that couldn’t have been the case. You wouldn’t have gone to all that effort and then not have sealed the envelope properly. It must have been the adhesive. Cheap glue. Or old perhaps. It must have given way when it was already in transit. Had you seen that it wasn’t sealed, you would have taped it, ensuring the letter’s safety. So it wasn’t your fault. Not that you’d agree. From what you wrote, you’re all too willing to blame yourself.

Well I saw straight away that it wasn’t addressed to me, that it was for someone who lived five blocks away. A stranger on the same postal route as me. The mailman must have been in a rush. Or he must have been lazy. Or he must have been careless in his sorting. Or maybe that loose corner of the flap had just enough adhesion left in it to stick to a piece of my mail, like the seeds of a weed that cling to your shoelaces and the hem of your trousers. Hitchhikers we called them when we were kids. When you were a kid, you never would have imagined pleading for your own freedom. And yet.

So, for whatever reason, the envelope came to me, a stranger to you—not to him, a stranger to me, and a person who you hoped would become a stranger to you once again.

Had the envelope been sealed, I would have scrawled on it wrong address or misdelivered and placed it back into my mailbox for the error to be corrected. Or perhaps I would have even walked it over to this nearby stranger and slipped into his mail slot, or beneath his door. Maybe I would have even written a note on it. Mailman delivered this to my house by accident. Cheers, a neighbor.

But instead, I could see your neat cursive hand in navy ink. I could make out words. Love and sorry and time and wrong and happy and sorry and sorry and sorry again. Well, I had to read the rest, didn’t I?

Three pages. Six, considering they were double-sided.

You tried to take the blame. You cast yourself as the villain. But that’s not what villains do. He was luckier than he knew. People like him always are. You gave him everything he ever wanted. So why give him one last thing? Why give him your navy ink, your neat cursive hand, your stamp that says forever for a letter that yearns for never again? 

Closure is too precious for the likes of him. Let him wonder instead.

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