MeeAugraphie

Sharon’s brother knew why she was afraid of clocks, but he never told. In fact, he never let on he even knew. Oh, he teased her unmercifully about it in front of the other kids. After all, he couldn’t let on he knew.

MeeAugraphie
09/20/07

“I am normal. Stan. You are the one that still pulls the crust off your bread like the brat next door.”

“I don’t like crust,” he spit out in a tone as uncivil as any other morning after trying to make love in a bed full of her stuff.

Sara mumbled to herself something on the order of “and this tart doesn’t like you,” but he had already walked out the room, carrying his breakfast, a hot dog and bread, sans crust and the ever present bottle of ketchup. Sara just grabbed her chocolate milk and pulled her Maeve Binchey book from beneath her feet, setting it on her lap, then reached for the piles of CD’s she lined up down the center of the bed each night before bed, except the nights they had sex, of course. Last night, after sex, she had moved them to her side during, and tossed them more haphazardly than normal down the bed’s center.

Yes, Sara and Stan had fought over those CD’s. She said they were there to keep him from rolling over onto his side and snoring. He told her she was full of it… and that other it, too, but her family wanted to hear the story, too. She told him that he had plenty of room to sleep comfortably in his half of the bed, after all, she did have a king sized bed and he was so scrawny he could have slept in a full size bed.

We never figured out what magic she had (or, as Tom put it, what she was holding over Stan) because he stayed. Every night he slept with Pink Floyd, Uriah Heep, and Barbra Streisand and a couple hundred others between him and her. Each morning she would sort through them, moving some from one pile to another, ordering them according to her mood for the day. Once she had them sorted, she put three in her 3 CD changer at the foot of her bed.

While he was showering, she picked up her book and opened it at the bookmark, the birthday card from her ex-boyfriend. It was designed to look like a CD, and Stan never knew the difference.

Married to a Crabber

One barge. One ship. One distress flare sent out in harsh conditions, yet it was just an ordinary occurrence on the Pacific Ocean.

Sore men spent days, their shoulders to the wind, their mind on their job as the hearts of their families at home bore the brunt of the emotion. Some, at home, dealt with their feelings by cleaning yet another floor or watching another soap opera character repeat their words for the fourth time. The children found things to hoard, whether it be candy or another hug from Mommy since Daddy wasn’t home. Although barbecues were lit, it was rare any celebratory gesture would be made, like lighting a torch and sitting outside on a cool night.

Instead a woman might carve a world of imagination and folklore and the brown bear’s lair for the children to live in while he was at sea. Some may show scorn at her strange ways of coping, she noticed, but that never tore at her heart. It was the fare to be paid by him she worried about.

She dreamed not of ocean’s waves pulling him to sea, she dare not breathe into her psyche that thought. Rather she breathed of deep gorges gouged into mountains, the lord of the land above them all, daring them to climb out. This beast stood above them all, ready to snare them as he had snared a unicorn and banned it to books and dreams.

It was her youngest son who woke her, shouting with the flair of a precocious child, (he was). He leaped onto her stomach gently, though, as lightweight as a hare to beg for hugs and kisses.

The gorge left her thoughts, just as it did the special mornings that fate was marvelous enough to send her child to distract her — before her hand unconsciously reached for the comfort that was not yet home. Those few times that instinct allowed her heart to soar, rather than warn of dangers lurking on the Pacific.