air catches in her throat
as she steps down
off the back porch step
to survey the grassy area
beyond the porch she never seems
to have time to sit on
her nostrils fill with
the hope of spring
the step creaks
today
but long ago
maybe not so long ago,
the wood held strong
from the nails pounded into by her father
her memories can see electric lights
strung so high
between trees that were once there
a magnolia
that let blooms fall down
with edges just faded yellow brown
like old pages
left to tell a story
that she'd almost long forgotten
at the back of the yard the gap in the fence
still there but the grass grown up
no one had ran back and forth between
for so long
on the air still hangs the word of the song
that she keeps playing again
and again
it's melody
caught in that space
near her heart
as she can almost just
humm the words
and just one
breath away from spilling past her lips
she can recall it all
back when things were simpler
when her shoes were buckled
by her mother
and daddy swung her round in the air
when a boy had sang that song with her
and sat cross legged with her under the tree
when she was simply
sister to her sister
not surrogate daughter
when she was just
Becky
the person who made herself forgot
this lifetime lost
this childhood love that never
came to fruition
who
walked through a life
but never truly lived it
and faced one another
never truly came to know
the heart songs
that the boy from the tree days had been singing...........
Chapter One: Becky Begins
The world only extended as far as the walls, to the curtains but not beyond. The panes of glass kept clean but not looked out of. There was more, they visited and on occasion vacationed but the world as they knew if truly began and ended here. It wasn’t until they moved her sister to a home that things gradually started to change for her.
A crystal shoe, with tiny rose buds sculpted at the toe. Caleb had given it to her right after the funeral. She’d always loved shoes. Shoes seemed to her like mini works of art that one could not only get something practical out of, for everyone needs shoes right? But they could be beautiful in their own right. Even when your jeans didn’t fit, shoes normally would. They weren’t flashy like jewelry either. They didn’t hold a place in anyone’s normal line of vision so they could go by subtly and just be perfect in a small secret way. The shoe figurine was supposed to be Cinderella’s shoe, or she had thought she remembered that the gift box had something like that on it. That was so long ago. Thirty two years ago, back when that boy, Caleb, was still here to be her best friend but he'd moved on to brighter shinier things, back when she couldn't see past the box of her life and something that at the time she thought was important.
She’d been living with Sue since, well since always. When Momma and Daddy died it had only been natural that they’d stay in the house together. Sue had been twenty two and Becky had been sixteen. Sixteen in 1967. Not sure why he'd thought a shoe would make her feel better about her parents dieing. He was younger than her after all, by two years, still enough boy to believe that a fairytale could fix it all maybe.
Becky had never thought that Alzheimer’s would leave her ultimately alone. That at fifty four her sister would slip into her own fantasy existence where she rarely even knew her? Now here she was really alone, sitting upon the same bed she’d slept upon as a child. The house paid for, her job stable, yet alone, staring at a crystal shoe that did somehow give her comfort. The shoe had sat upon her dresser top for a lifetime and now in her hands she couldn’t help but wonder how the light might play upon it if she simply sat it in the window? Sue had always been worried about peeping Toms and perverts. “Besides, we need to keep the curtains drawn to keep the heating and cooling bills down,” she’d always say when Becky talked about how dark it was in the house.
Today, on her bed, with this shoe, heating bills no longer seemed like a good enough excuse to live inside the dark. So with her sister only just settled in a comfortable room Becky crossed the floor, drew back the curtains and sat it in her window sill, right up front for all the world to see, peeping Toms and perverts, the like and what she found was not a chill, but a rainbow scattered throughout the room to adorn her before plain walls. A rainbow that perhaps he had known about when he first gave it to her but that she'd never allowed herself to realize until she was too late to go chasing them.
Chapter Two: Sue
Sue had always been so frugal. It was understandable really. Back then and even now she supposed it was hard for two single girls to make it alone. Sue had done her best really. The life insurance had covered caskets and the morgage but little was left after taxes and such and there simply wasn't much to spare. Still though even in the late sixites she'd managed to finish up her schooling, driving herself back and forth to the college in Springfield during a time that transient students weren't in existence yet. She got her teaching degree, a job at the high school and made sure Becky was at school on time and had clean clothes to wear even if they were a little out of style.
Maybe it was that penny pinching that left her somewhat reserved, so quiet, so seemingly unaffected by the world outside their four walls. She'd never had more than a date or two in all the years between Becky's sixteen to now fourty eight, instead she preferred to stay home, her only break from that were the one to two times a week she had dinner with Colleen from the library, her best friend and the only person she'd ever seen Becky laugh with until tears ran down her face. Colleen who seemed to be as lost or more so than Becky over the loss of Sue...for that's what it is really, a loss, this slipping in and out of existence only just recalling her name every now and again. Death might have been easier.
To be continued. ..
Copyright Amy Morgeson February 28,2010
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