She hadn’t slept well for twenty years. It wasn’t
something she thought about. She tried to keep her
demons to herself. When she did try to describe them,
if only to herself, she called them The Lost Hours.
At night, as she struggled to find sleep, she counted.
Not sheep, but the hours forever gone. Wondered what
she might have dreamt if only she’d had the chance.
In a cabin along the Portneuf River she stayed awake for
seventy-two hours. Curtains billowed in the dry, Idaho wind.
She tried to imagine the river as it flowed north to The
Snake.
Tried to find peace in its slow determined movement.
Livingston and Bozeman, finally Missoula. She found she
missed her quiet river. Its minor relief.
Summer passed. Then autumn. Winter’s forever grey sky. In
spring snowmelt carried her where she needed to be.
Life Instructions
Please, won’t someone write my perfect
instructions. Deliver them on the mRNA
Express. I’m waiting. Ready for even a rough
first draft. Worry about the plot’s through-line
later. Trust the instructions offered a solid
beginning.
We all need help. A path to follow even it’s
not entirely of our own making. It’s still us.
Our DNA.
Our proteins.
It’s all we have. Most of it will always remain
a mystery.
Accept it. The mystery. The not knowing.
Thought not a way out. Thought turns in
circles. Circles close in on themselves.
Closed should never be an option.
Touched
I can always sense them. More their soul
than their brain. What in their darkest
corners they try so hard to conceal. By
then it’s too late. I’m too far in.
Do they remember their brother’s hands?
Their father’s? Their sour breath.
Touched by men who were no longer holy men.
Not that they ever were. Released by The Servants
of the Paraclete. Not cured. Not even punished. Set
free to inflict damage that can never be erased.
Memory not a friend. Not for those who live every
day and especially night with their wounds. Or for
those where it is so deeply buried. Who, when they
get too close, remove themselves. Dissociate, a
therapist would call it.
I’m not a therapist. Not even close. I’d rather not feel
their pain. I’d prefer to close my eyes. My ears.
I can’t.
String Bean
Was there nothing about him she remembered?
His face a blur. His rail-thin height stretching so
high. String bean, she thought. Someone once
made them fresh from her garden. A woman in
a white dress. Yes, the white dress.
This woman wore white, too. Reached gently over the
bed’s rail, turned the little of her there was left to
gather.
The string bean still there.
Was her father a minister? A preacher? Did he
send this man and this smiling woman? Something
about a church. A gentle voiced man telling stories.
What stories? Did she believe them?
Did she need to remember? The good. The bad.
The forever gone.
For Herself
Her father was an architect. Her mother a biologist,
who in her lab, adjusted life to her liking. Even in
their very different worlds, aesthetics was their
guiding light.
Worlds she wanted to understand with words
and sentences. Embrace it. Live it. If only for herself.
She was their daughter. Expressed their genes. Her father’s
in the forefront.
With the little time they had, they loved her dearly.
Her father was given an important project. One that paid
well and would bolster his fame. Fame and glory. Is there
a difference? In the end, fame won out.
Mother toyed with nature. Perfection her goal. Extend
life to its outer reaches. What was the final measure,
she wanted to ask. Did her mother worry that question?
Do god’s question? Surely, they don’t worry.
She wrote it all down. Found the words. The sentences.
The ending remained murky.
Philip Dean Brown - has had
short fiction published in Voices West, Farmer’s Market, and Strong Coffee. His story Helpless won a PEN Syndicated Fiction award. The story was selected by
Mona Simpson. Recently, he has had poems in Subterranean Blue Poetry; New
Reader; The Mojave Review and Sin Fronteras. His short story Sun in the
East, Sun in the West won 3rd prize in Typehouse Literary Magazine’s open
fiction contest, and appeared in issue 12. His short stories have recently appeared in
The Blue Nib and Switchblade. His haiku was chosen by the Old Pueblo
Poems competition and was on display in downtown Tucson last summer.
Currently he is working on another set of linked stories, and in the in-between moments, he write poems.
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