Find Singular Balance

   Her Pop looked flat. Gray and flat, like a deflated balloon with her dad’s nose.  It took Xenia a few minutes to get to the bed, wishing life into him but dreading that he might wake. One heart attack two weeks ago had made urgent everything unfinished in his life. His eyes fluttered open. “Did you find him?” he asked. 
   She considered not telling him--or of lying. She smoothed his hair while she decided. “Yes,” she said, and she thought of the other old man she had traveled to Berkeley to meet, leaving Philadelphia’s frigid snow to find a ferocious green and plum blossom scented hill and a house above the university. Down the hill was where the old man taught philosophy to students learning to judge right from wrong. 
   Xenia mulled over the secret that her late mom kept all her life--how it was like one of the tulips in the vase by this bed, so complex and passionate, but without defining odor to betray it. Xenia’s Pop was not her pop. Her ace reporter big brother uncovered the other man, even though there had been no sign since their mom’s return from driving him to the airport one summer night in 1954. Xenia was the accidental result of a lover’s farewell, or maybe a quarrel, on the way to catch a flight out of town. Were there two tickets or one? 
   Her mom missed her period for more than a month and then almost left Pop out of shame and regret. But Pop put his arms around her and comforted her. He said he’d adore the baby, too. They went on to have a third child: the brother who was now so jolted by Pop’s revelation of mom’s affair that he refused to talk to any of them. 
   Xenia leaned in to her Pop’s pillow. “I didn’t like the Professor,” she said. What she didn’t say was that the old man agreed to lunch at a restaurant but her half siblings from his marriage were off limits.    
   “That’s okay, Kiddo,” Pop said with a deep breath. “I’m the one who wanted you.”

Made Up

Hospitals are so upsetting. The wrinkled white curtains, the chilly air, the clinical requirement to disrobe. Faith wished herself anywhere but here. She shivered and pulled her sweater over her head, trying to remember why she had agreed to surgery. This moment was so excruciating, so humbling that she almost decided to get dressed and sneak out through those curtains, let the cancer take its terrible course, not intervene at all.

Faith bit her lip and forced herself to conjure a reason to persevere. She pictured her darling lover on the other side of the fabric, breath held, poised before slipping his hand into the hemmed split to enter where she waited in naked anticipation. She said “Billy” in a whisper and his name warmed the air.

Out in the concrete garage, Billy frowned and looked down at the roses and ranunculus he held. Their bright pink, yellow and green looked like candy. He twirled them three times and made a wish as he stepped into the harsh bustle of the hospital.

Push Over

It might be his brother’s hair or eyebrows. It might be a garage or a field. There is always something. Ask any man what he set on fire as a boy and he will tell you a story. Ask a woman and there is no telling what she will say.

If you asked Thomas, he’d talk about being nine, in his bedroom, playing a game of light-the-model-airplane that went horribly wrong. His dad came home just in time to heave the blazing mattress out the window. When Clara heard this, she emptied her face of expression, though her eyes glittered. It didn’t happen when she was a child; it was when she was forty. It wasn’t a lighter. It was a gun.

Her best friend’s grown, troublesome son kept pestering her daughter Simone who was in ninth grade and luscious. Clara was popping kettle corn at the farmers’ market when Simone called on the cell phone. Simone said this boy was outside their house, knocking on the door, blowing pot fumes and murmuring something through the mail slot about a pussy party.

Rage burst in Clara like the explosive punctuation of the popcorn. She stripped off her apron, rushed home and charged up the front steps, her key stuck out like a pistol. She grabbed the young man and shoved him into the house, herded him through the family room and into the bathroom, shouting at him the whole time, livid. Then she slammed the bathroom door and secured the padlock that was still there from fourteen years ago, when she and Thomas had childproofed the first floor. She strode out the back door, past the bathroom window where her prisoner stared through the curtains, furtive and scared, baby-faced but mean.

The target still leaned on its stand in the yard. The gun was under the stairs. Simone cheered from the upstairs porch, leaning over the banister to see the backyard shooting gallery and the target shaped like a man. Pow. Clara gripped the pistol with both hands and shot part of its head off. She squinted hard over her shoulder at the boy in the window and turned back to the target. Pow, pow, pow. She shot its fucking head off.

Today's Word: Limen

Limen, threshold of response.

1. Flat tire, took off the bike wheel, sooty hands. How tiny was that villain, the piece of metal that punctured my ride.

2. Earl Grey tea has a calming perfume: bergamot, a kind of citrus. I detect its lemon-lavender fragrance in the steam from the cup twelve feet away.

3. Six handsome men in their forties on the train car I’m in. Nice suits, sharp haircuts, shiny shoes. Two are seated, eyes closed. Three are standing, gazing at devices they hold cupped in their hands. One is reading a Venetian mystery by Donna Leon. I attempt to peek at each of them without appearing to stare.

4. The escalator delivers people in two lines from the train platform to the sidewalk at 1.05 miles per hour. At one point we are neither below ground nor above it, we are in the perfect middle; or are we?

5. The beggar sitting on the ground at the top of the stairs seems young and robust except for his eyes, which are bloodshot and look in two different directions at once.

6. Across the street, a tender green spray of Japanese maple shows off its spring transformation at the base of a mirrored skyscraper. It wasn’t like that yesterday.

7. Walking to lunch, twenty-three people passed me going the other way. Eleven of them wore sunglasses. One block was filled with a rich, deep, skunky scent of cannabis. A friend told me that the pot clubs grow marijuana in cellars all over downtown. The next block, fried chicken.

8. At the end of the day, the small song of zippers throughout the office as we pack for home.

Yellow Gets Around

   Like all colors, I was born in the sun. I am bold and primary. I confess I am not much for family. My pale siblings either stink of urine and repulse me, or they bore me. My scent is of freesias in the spring, tangy and sweet. When it rains, you will find me curled around a pretty girl protecting her from the damp. Or I might be an unfurled umbrella brightening the gloomy street.

   Often I spend time on the sidewalk, showing off the latest style of inlaid rubber wheelchair ramp with cushiony raised blisters and a gentle slope to the street. I don’t care for the old-school curbs the city makes me enhance, but I love those ramps.

   City engineers want me to marry Black. They say we make the most noticeable couple to the human eye. I’ve dated Black and the truth is he’s way too leery to be any fun. He’s always spelling out the words SLOW or CAUTION when he gets near me. I’m not interested in Green or Red, either. Too often they use me to moderate their perpetual bickering about whether drivers should stop or go. They need me because I’m bright, but I would rather scoot down a spiral playground slide and carry children as they romp.

   I don’t crave attention; I want to be rich. When I met Diamond, people called us Fancy Intense. One time, the state treasurer of Denver, Colorado found us in a safe deposit box of unclaimed goods. You might have seen us in a show on PBS. Don’t even ask how we got in that bank. I really can’t recall. He said we were worth $15,000 as an antique ring and could be sold to benefit the people. That was a wild weekend.