Attic

The pages are brown now

Brittle

The binding is frayed.

She holds it together with a rubber band.

We are in the attic

When she finds it

Between a dusty diploma and a picture of a blond baby on a horse.

The musty scent of the past has always frightened me

Until the odor of her anticipation catches in the air

And I am comforted

As though I smelled her chocolate chip cookies baking.

We sit at the poker table

(That has never been played on)

And she opens the front cover

A crack

Greets her

A baby on the beach

Wearing only a wise expression.

Nanny always said I looked like an old lady when I was little

But I knew that already.

We browse through her life

It’s unfair

I think

That she should know anyone so completely

While all I have to understand of hers is

The yellowed remains.

it's an unsolvable conundrum

I have seen it all before

The frozen images

The past wedged between the covers

Straining to explain itself

But failing.

Finally we reach adolescence.

Mother never had a gawky stage but she said she did.

The boyfriends, who are accountants on Long Island,

Smile at us, idealism and mother in their eyes.

Part 2

“There I am”

She says

Pointing to the trim figure,

Third from the left

On the table.

Books of matches, playbills, pressed orchids

Pressing on her perfect skin.

We are almost at the end,

Which is the beginning.

Daddy enters the pages

And her turning hand slows.

He has proposed when

We reach the last page.

We linger

She is reluctant

To get it in the box

To give it back to time

Which pulls at its pages,

Wearing at the past,

Forbidding her to make it the present.  

Flash Issue 10