Our Closet, by Michael Solender
Eternal Question, by Michael Solender
Arachnophiliac, by Jim Wittenberg
Go To Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Our Closet
Michael Solender
Our closet has one of those clinical harsh florescent lights that cast sinister shadows on green paisley party dresses and shabby shoes worn thin from my pacing while my wife shopped at the mall. Commanded this morning to engage, the filament popped with a snap that had me reflexively reach for my bum knee, blown out in a pick-up hoops game with the neighbors kids.
Absent the usual glare and illuminated only by an across the room sixty watt, I spied a tiny ballerina plie then spin on the top shelf amongst the azure and teal silk scarves and jeans abandoned several cheesecakes ago; she was adorned with a pastel bow in her hair borrowed from a single Jimmy Choo that hurt too much to wear.
I was enchanted with the suppleness and intensity of her movement and slowly edged to hide myself askew from the jam as not to disturb her.
“Honey!” shouted my wife as the ballerina looked up and caught my eye, “Are you gonna fix that light or-what?”
“No hon,” I said, as the ballerina disappeared behind my flip flops, “I don’t think I will.”
Eternal Question
Michael Solender
“Dad, they said eternity,” Charlie’s eyes pierced right into the core of my soul as he asked the question I knew I could never answer satisfactorily for him, or myself for that matter, “What’s eternity?”
I bent down so he could see the ambiguity in the response I was struggling to give him, he was old enough now to recognize that there wasn’t always tidy answers to every question and while he couldn’t articulate it for himself, he knew in his own way that uncertainty and shades of gray would be far more common in his life going forward than they had been for his first twelve years on this earth. “Eternity is forever, son.” I said hoping he wouldn’t ask me to define it beyond that but knowing he would.
“If it was eternity before you were born, and it’s eternity after you die,” Charlie paused and closed his eyes tightly, conjuring up his own imagery to associate with this concept of time with no end, “Then when you die you just go back to the place you were before you were born, right Dad?”
“I don’t know son,” I gasped, as he was anything but precocious but had just defined mortality for me in the most spiritual and elegant way, “I just don’t know.”
Arachnophiliac
Jim Wittenberg
She remembers seeing the shadows of children. A closer look and they weren't there.
The disposable wristwatch she wore was stopped. Her cell phone's display screen would not respond to the caress of her fingertips. Damn, she thought.
"Is this where Jason wants me to wait for him?" The silence in the alley was the only reply to her softly whispered query.
She felt chilly. She was grateful her mother had instilled in her the need to always have a sweater at hand.
Then she felt an intense pain in her shoulder. She turned, trying to see what was attacking her, but her responses were slow. Her brain went numb.
If she saw anything her eyes couldn't explain to her what it was.
* * *
Brenda woke in darkness. She hung in midair, held in some type of net. She tried squirming, but whatever it was that held her tightened. She wanted to cry, to shout, to scream until the world ceased all its activities and focused on her.
"Trying to move will make it worse."
It was his voice. Jason's voice. Brenda wanted to ask him why he'd been late. She wanted to ask why he had asked her to wait for him in an alley. She wanted to ask Jason what was it that had attacked her. She couldn't find her voice.
"Don't try to speak. The paralysis eventually affects every part of y0u, including your voice. Your thoughts are racing. Expect more of that. My wife's poison won't kill you immediately. She always keeps her food alive until she and the children have finished eating."
Paralysis? Wife? Poison? Food? Children? Brenda was overwhelmed with the questions filling her head.
She heard the happy chatter of young voices, and something began crawling all over her. Brenda saw a swarm of spiders and each one had the face of a child.
"I'm really sorry," Jason whispered. "But if I don't provide the wife and the kids with their meals, they'll devour me instead."
