YOUNG CHILDREN RAN RECKLESS

She had been working since morning, and the night before that, if working was what it could be fairly called, sitting in the chair that had been her husband’s while he was alive, pulling up the top shell of the clam of the computer, and typing sentences, one first, then another one, counting them at first because it calmed her and then letting the counting fall away until they became numberless. That was when she forgot about the pains in her hips and back, forgot about the cracked back tooth that needed fixing, and when she remembered afternoons of sitting on a lounge chair while her young children ran reckless in the back yard, chattering happily, throwing balls and water balloons, screaming when a wasp’s nest was discovered, thinking about the night before or the night to come, when she would make dinner, serve said dinner, sit up late with her husband watching TV, wait until he dozed off, and then sneak across the street to find and be found by the neighbor, an older man with a mean aspect who the kids reacted to much the way they reacted to wasps. That man had died roughly a decade ago, and that was the death she truly mourned. Her husband, eh. He had been a good man, kind where it counted, and she had buried him with a curious lightness in her heart, a sense of a job well done.

@2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas