By: Cheryl Snell

Another Wrinkle in Time

She’s prone to losing things. A tooth here. A word there. Her flesh still contains the memory of them, and yet they are lost. Fat tries to smother the memory and redirect attention. It embeds new wrinkles in old rolls. Who knows what we look like on the inside? Doctors are not fazed by pink organs going gray, red blood slogging through blue veins. If the docs only knew they didn’t have to fix everything, that some of us want to see what actually happens next, they might lose a few things too. The scalpel. The botox. That funhouse mirror.

Shortcuts

Mom never took them. Each night she’d carry her pink curlers to the bathroom and watch her reflection roll her hair into the tight shells that defied her straight hair. Clicking the fasteners into place, she’d mutter a warning for them to stay put. I’d have nothing to do with this ritual once I found out that scrunching my damp hair produced similar waves. But Mom kept doing it her way, so by the time I was the one who was doing all the curling, I’d lost interest in shortcuts. I wanted everything I had to last a while longer.

Starter Marriage

Their attic apartment overlooked a garage littered with trash cars. Nights were filled with fire; he slept through whole days like a bat. The night their bed broke, she slid luggage packed with everything they owned under it. I’ll fix it later, he said before he drove off.

She didn’t know how long she would search for him in the back-lit windows. If she hadn’t seen silhouettes dancing to music muted by the slow flow of glass, she’d never have noticed how close the moon came to crashing, though she could have grabbed it in her fist if she wanted.

Burgling the Cats

Evening darkened the walls but we were not ready to sleep. I thought I saw you put on a cat burglar costume, but that didn’t make any sense so I asked you where you thought you were going. You said you could only give out that information on a need-to-know basis. So you lead a double life now? I said. Is it designed to keep us apart? No, you said, I keep secrets for your protection. That way you can truly believe what you see is what you get, never-mind the reason all these cats are coming out of nowhere.

To the Trianglist in the Back

But how could you not see even one potential future in this orchestra? You switched majors cautiously, standing in line at the admissions office, stopping only when your counselor declared you had no aptitude for this instrument or that. And sometimes there were large tuxedoed creatures following you onto concert stages and into practice rooms and church basements with a conductor’s baton. You practiced your syncopation in order to feel steady again. One of the maestros could have given you your big break, you pointed out. It didn’t matter which one it was, you could have grown into the fame.