7 Reasons to Let Go

As I mentioned yesterday, some of my art/writing did well in the Scholastic Art and Writing competition. I thought I'd share a bit of that here.

The following was my "Flash Fiction" submission. I'd write about it, but I like the idea that you get to read it raw. I'll write about it tomorrow.

7 Reasons to Let Go

1. Early in the morning the children shuffle outside, heads low, windbreakers zipped up to the chin. They stand in three great lines that wind through the parking lot: a three headed snake, a Ceberus, a hydra. The lines ripple and dance like wind on water. The principle rings a bell that echoes close in their ears, bouncing off the soft gray sky. “We remember,” she chants. The children stare at their shoes and wonder what they are supposed to remember. Most of them don’t understand.

The silence is broken as a blue windbreaker takes off across the lot. A streak of electric color sandwiched between asphalt ground, asphalt sky. It takes two teachers to bring him back. When they find him around the corner, he is sitting in the middle of the street, one arm folded around a large stray dog, speaking to the animal in a low voice: the sort of voice Noah used to charm the beasts aboard his ark.

We are being punished. God sent the flood; now fire.

2. I couldn’t give a date to Pearl Harbor. I couldn’t tell you when they dropped the bomb, and I have never lived in fear of another one blazing out of the sky. You see, we were not that afraid generation. Our fear came after.

3. “Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200-500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item, and remember what it looked like with just a second of observation, or memorization, is an example of sensory memory.”

This is why you close your eyes and still see the scene in front of you burned onto the inside of your eyelids. It’s an optical illusion, this kind of memory.

4. It would not be until years later, in the middle of the night, that I would realize it was an attack. Built the buildings too tall, I had thought until then.

5. A rock comes flying through the storefront window. How dare you? it screams through its mouth full of teeth. How dare you hang at half mast grief that is not your own? A woman cries; another ushers her daughter along, forgetting the child has grown too old to hold her hand.

A man stands still, one hand still pulling open the refrigerator door. His breath materializes on the glass before his face as he lets out all the cold. They already took him! The rock continues screaming. And for you to take the pain that is mine and make it yours is unbearable, unrighteous-

The man finally unfreezes; the door slips shut. The cart is left in the middle of the aisle. It drifts like an uncaptained ship, rolls down the gentle slope of a market on a hill.

His mother died eighteen years ago. March 13^th, the sort of day when nothing happened. He’s glad they don’t put out a flag each year for her. He doesn’t think he’d make it through the day.

6. How are we supposed to “get over” this?

7. Ten years and she still wakes gasping, haunted by dreams of documented, ten-second journeys. The air is too heavy. It presses, presses, till her skin threatens to rupture. She shakes and wails and stifles the dark root of a scream lying hollow at the base of her throat. He strokes her hair, rocks her back and forth. He grips her by the back of the neck and shakes her. Thank God, is all she can say. Her eyes close. Thank God, thank God, he died with the wind on his face.