I thought I’d put that baby to bed.
I received a call from area code 561. I know more than one living in that zone, but rarely speak with them, at least not on the telephone. There is, however, a particular person, with whom I don’t speak at all.
Folding laundry, my phone rang. I looked down and saw the dreaded 561. My initial reaction was worry. Why? Why would I be worried? He’s been dead to me for years. Figuratively speaking.
Death, figuratively speaking, is not really death though, is it? No. Literal death is quite different. Something I didn’t realize until my phone rang yesterday.
Implicit in figurative death is time. That there is still time. Hope still dwells, where I thought there was none.
Hope, in this case, is a kind of sickness. A kind of dementia. Nothing really changes here, only the numbered years. Static Flux. Hope is a sad reminder of what will never be, what never was.
The baby is awake now. …not screaming yet, but soon, unless I can lull her back to sleep. When the real death comes. I’m afraid. There will be no calming her.
S
Hi there, I quite enjoy your writing – it’s very different, somewhere between short fiction and poetry, or both – how would you categorize it?
Many blessings
Steven
Hi Steven, and thank you. I don’t categorize my writing, not because I’m above it, just because I’m completely uneducated on that front. Actually that’s not one hundred percent true. I tagged both The Gorgon and Static Flux as poetry, for SEO expediency really. My book, The Red Speck, is definitely fiction. What kind of fiction? A question that drives me to distraction, I simply don’t know the answer to that either. Magic realism has been suggested, fantasy, new age… What do you think?