Tongue Tied

For Marissa ****************************************** She sees him everywhere. When she’s folding laundry, and she notices that his clothes are absent. When she’s picking up toys and she wonders if he would have liked to play with them. When she’s strapping the kids in the car and sees his empty seat. She couldn’t have imagined before that her heart could break so many times in a single day. Every day. How difficult it would be to navigate the ever present grief. Even when she’s not looking for reminders, they’re there. Like when a friend has a new baby or she hears a song on the radio or a familiar verse is mentioned during a sermon. It’s like her heart is instantly there, in those moments of fear, suffering, longing and desperation. She doesn’t have to try to remember. Some things are always there, just underneath the surface, easily erupting. There are days when she can’t believe she’s able to get out of bed. But she knows she is not alone. She knows every moment had a purpose. Ev...

It’s sort of sad how this doesn’t make her sad anymore. She steps blithely through the crime scene and catches the familiar sound of glass crunching beneath her boots. It should disturb her that she associates the taste of coffee with gruesome scenes of homicide. It should make her never want to drink the bitter brew. But here she is, downing her second cup this morning. Her mind goes into auto mode, sorting and cataloguing the details before her. She takes stock of the body, the wounds, the shell casings littering the area, the direction of the glass from the broken window. It isn’t hard for her to piece together what happened here, to imagine what sort of evidence the M.E. will find. She’s already mentally formed a crude sketch of the killer; not an actual face yet, but a profile. His habits, his history, his methods, even his motives. Nothing ever surprises her anymore. Well, almost nothing. “I see you’ve already got one.” She turns to see her partner smiling behind her, clutching t...

“You can see him now, Mr. Richards.” The young nurse motions toward the closed ICU door. Joe wipes his moist palms against the thighs of his jeans and stands slowly. This is it , he thinks, running a weary hand through his hair. This is the last time I’ll see my father alive . With shaky fingers, Joe pushes open the large door and is greeted by that signature hospital smell, a medley of antiseptic and the odor of illness, of a body failing at life. He forces himself to look at the form of his father in the bed, barely recognizable after losing 30 pounds. Wires spider web around his gaunt face as machines proclaim his heartbeats with an alarmingly slow cadence. The whoosh of the respirator pushing air into weary lungs forces a burning lump into Joe’s throat. He knows his father can’t speak to him. He doubts he will even open his eyes, let alone be conscious of their final meeting here today. Joe senses that whatever it was that made his father the man he has known all his life has alrea...

Morning milk coma. Tantrum. Narnia: Fringe for children Seth's awesome pyramid Did some painting outside Never ending laundry. Collected leaves Thing One's leaf rubbing Awana night Castle with Homegirl. The end

Suddenly, the dark night air had gone still. Very, very still. Caroline’s fingers gripped the flashlight handle. The sound of her own breathing was all she could hear. She froze in her tracks and felt as if a host of unseen creatures surrounded her. Watching. She shook her head as she mentally refuted her own paranoia, mustered her bravery and took another step. The crunch of her tennis shoes on the gravel path seemed as loud as gun shots. Caroline forced herself to ignore the throb of her own pulse in her ears and trudged forward. She loved this cemetery. For three years, it had been her place of solace, away from the chaos that was her life. She would come here and spend hours reading headstones, tracing her fingers along the worn letters that summarized with brief names and dates the expanse of a person’s life. It was as if the stones spoke to her, telling her stories of the occupants. How they lived their lives. The people they loved. Whether they were rich or poor. How they died. ...