Open Window

It was just past midnight, and the woman was looking for sugar. Digging all desperate through the pile where she thought she had kept it—a brownish grocery bag drowned in sugar. She knew she didn’t really know where it’d gone. Last time she saw the sugar was nineteen ninety-two. On that day, she remembered she’d slept until 12:17 PM. Her favorite alarm clock then—the big red one Davey gave her—had died after the boy moved to Manhattan and gave up on coming back and healing the thing up. Ever since that loss, the dust in her apartment had grown so dense it lined her lungs in a lethal winter coat. Even though, since nineteen eighty-three, the lone apartment window had been wide-open. Anyhow, she’d forgotten this—it’d been covered up by stuff far too long. 

By the end of the night, the woman found her sugar in stack number ninety-seven; she resigned to her bed. Wrapped warm when she fell back to become among her Coke bottle caps, expired cereal boxes, and the tiny, plastic balls of ballpoint pens where she had forgotten her bed once laid. 

Ezra is a ninth grader at Lafayette High School’s SCAPA Literary Arts. Ezra is the Finance Director for High School Democrats of America, and he aspires to elected the Governor of Kentucky. He brings a skill set framed around a drive to affect change in Kentucky, and he channels that through his writing.