Fiction Fix Seventeen

5
Fiction Fix
old dandelions and sending them aloft like
tiny flocks of birds.
She clings to this hope as she reaches for
Norwood’s hand. In the near-dark, he is unresponsive,
not taking his hand away but not
returning the pressure. Gail fights the familiar
anger. She is afraid of what is coming.
Living like a woman on the run, staying with
her sister, installing her children in a spare
bedroom. Feeling her heart turn over at the
absence of Norwood’s sounds and smells—
the gentle hum of his desktop computer, the
crinkle of his newspaper pages, the peculiar
scent of his shirts that has not changed since
their twenties, a thing which seems magical to
Gail, since she has used a half-dozen different
detergents on those clothes since they first
moved in together.
Too prideful to say them, too frightened to
pretend them away, Gail holds the words in
her mouth: I don’t care if happiness has gone and
left us a suicide note. I don’t want to do this.
And then drifting from the woods around
the river, silent and elegant as jellyfish, come
the lights.
❧
When the fireflies begin their dance and
everyone falls into their collective hush,
Norwood remembers the lights his younger
sister used to string across her dollhouse
during the holidays—tiny colored bulbs
that blinked on and off in unison. As a boy
he pretended to find it irritating but secretly
loved it, feeling that the energy of those
lights set the room quivering the way he
would quiver just before a baseball game.
He is pleased with the memory. His hope in
bringing his son and daughter here was that
he could give them one final and beautiful
experience while their family was still whole.
He imagined them remembering this years
from now and saying to each other, Dad wanted
to give us that.
He has convinced himself that they will forgive
him for leaving them with their mother.
He will see them on weekends, as often as
he can; he will take them on trips. He has
this speech carefully prepared for tomorrow
morning. But Norwood is a man who understands
the importance of history, and he is
determined to expose them to a phenomenon
they will remember for the rest of their lives.