8:45 AM.

I ran out the door running late for school.

Hopped on my tinted green trusty bike and wheeled away.

As I was riding, I started to wonder about-

And then I fell down.

My palms scrapped, but not bloody.

I dusted the pebbles off my palms first and then onto my knees.

I slowly get up and realize-

My bike blew flat.

I checked my wheels and a thumbtack, right in the tire.

A thumbtack.

The only thing standing between me and school is a stupid thumbtack.

So I left my bike deserted, lonely, on the ground.

I had like 5 blocks left.

Block 5- I ran full speed. I ran into the night that was actually day. I passed so many trees, and although I was running, I could see the tree colors and how I remembered the green leaves and how we are in autumn. Now we have yellow, orange and brown, and it is the most amazing thing. The tan tint giving a crunch sound when they hit the rusty floor, stomping on the leaves as I run to school. It’s so cold and the wind started picking up like crazy.

Block 4- I was more tired and I could not even run anymore. I had to reach into my backpack and get my inhaler because I felt as though I would collapse. With the weather now and me running, I couldn’t do it any longer. I’m not a runner, but I am late.

Block 3- I walked, I could not even begin to think of how much trouble I would be in when I step into the halls of hell that is school.

Block 2- I see MaryAnn, the old lady from the right side of the tracks, watering her plants. I stop by near her white picket fence and shout out, “Hello MaryAnn”.

She greets me with a warm smile. I try not to stay for a while because MaryAnn is a sweetheart but a chatterbox. With my luck, I’ll never get to school on time. “I would love to stay and chat but I gotta run, I’m late for school.” I side skip away while looking back, my shoes click as I try to escape her approaching me.

Before she knew it I was gone.

Block 1- I can see the school, but it’s a blur, I’m so tired. I give all my power into full speed but as I approach more, I do a jog. Am I hallucinating right now? Am I dreaming? Why are there chains on the school gate? How am I going to get in?

I run around the corner to the other side of the school to see a crossing guard and I ask how to get inside the school. 

She replies, “Son, it’s Saturday.”

My heart dropped, I can feel my pulse racing. No way did I travel all the way here for a Saturday.

I begin to walk home in sorrow.

My legs droop to the floor in agony and I feel uneasy.

I walk all the way to block 5 and see my bike. My trusty bike. Dragging it all the way back home I just had one thought in my head.

Why is it Saturday and why did my bike have a stupid thumbtack still!

If I rode my bike I would have saved a lot of my energy and I would have found out sooner than now that school was closed.

Maybe if I had checked the calendar?

Maybe if I had checked my phone?

Maybe if I had realized sooner that not many people are outside because Saturday is a sleeping-in day?

Stupid damn not-so-trusty bike.

10:57 AM

They say he died peacefully in his sleep— a heart attack. I had hoped his demise would be long and agonizing— that intolerable old man.

His lawyer gave me the key to his home and three days to remove “sentimental items” before the estate sellers arrived Monday morning.

The large oak door of my old room offered the sound of neglect. A resounding creak shuddered through the hall. Within its walls, I found the remnants of a bitter childhood— the unswept air resting on the back of the tongue. I reserved a moment for my eyes to wander. In the corner of the room, on a short pine shelf with golden trim, lie my collection of feminist novels hidden between copies of Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. In high school, my teacher asked us to write a persuasive letter to anyone we wished. I wrote a letter to my father, quoting Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, requesting he allow me to attend the senior prom on account of my autonomy as a young woman. I never gave him the letter, only imagining the outrage it would provoke. My teacher gave me an A.

Kneeling beside the short wooden shelf, I reached for the thin copy of A Room of One’s Own I stole from the library when I was 12. My fingers, now worn by nearly thirty years of motherhood and ambition, shook with the lingering spirit of resentment. I tightened my grip around the paper spine and set the book down in the cardboard box labeled “keep,” sitting on the rose-printed duvet beside me.

Downstairs I unlocked the door to my father’s study— the first time I’d held the key without him towering behind my shoulder. I was overcome by the smell of whiskey breath and fresh cigars. I closed my eyes, and suddenly I was six, sitting on my father’s knee, trying to read the documents he was signing on his desk. My back was warm from my father’s chest and the fireplace glowing behind us. I looked up at his face, admiring the wrinkles of concentration burrowing into his forehead. “Daddy, I want to be a writer when I grow up.”

“Now why on earth would you do that Elsie,” his voice was rigid; his eyes remained fixed on the documents. I remembered him muttering, “what an obnoxious idea,” as he returned to his work.

When I opened my eyes, I was staring at the red leather chair shoved beneath his desk. I began searching through the wide drawers on each side. From the bottom left drawer, I removed a pile of tax documents, the deed to the house, and my mother’s death certificate. Two sheets of paper fell from behind the stack. I crouched down and picked them up from the cold wooden floor. The first was a letter I had not seen in 27 years. It began, “Dear Father,” with a large red “A” inscribed on the top-right corner of the page. The paper was worn by the oil of fingertips and palms, grasping to read and reread. On the second paper— a letter— addressed to me in my father’s script. I caught only the last line before warm tears flooded the edges of my vision, “And all you wanted to do was dance.”

Jeremy and Lily spent the majority of their days together roaming 14th street and 8th avenue. Jeremy took the G train from Greenpoint, and transferred to the L train, taking it all the way to 1st avenue every Friday. After having to deal with his withering baking internship every week, his weekly retreats to Lily’s East Village apartment acted as a remedy. Oftentimes, It was really the only thing that helped him get through the week. Lily awaited his arrival every Friday- and always had an iced matcha latte prepared for him. She may not have shown it, but Jeremy was also the only thing getting her through the week too after having to deal with the quarrels of her strenuous situation-ship. Jeremy may be gay, and Lily may be a lesbian. But in a way, they were made for each other. They were soulmates. Or soul friends, whatever you may want to call it. 

Jeremy grabbed his Strand tote bag that Lily grabbed for him during the previous summer when they took classes together at Columbia University. He quickly searched for his brown leather wallet. It may have only had twenty dollars and his vaccination card, but he knew he was in for one hell of a weekend. Usually, his encounters with Lily were limited to Friday nights. But this time, Lily’s parents were away for the weekend, meaning they could do whatever they wanted. “Jeremy, make sure to bring the bag with the blue anchors on them, that way we can carry all of our stuff”, Lily texted him. Jeremy packed a backpack and two tote bags full of clothes and hygiene products. He planned to stay the whole weekend. Lily was fine with this. In fact, she was hoping he would. She was deathly afraid of being alone at home in her 5 story walk-up apartment, even though she lived at the very top. She always felt unsafe. Even though she strolled through the village at 2 AM every Friday with cheap diner iced coffee. 

This time Lily hadn’t prepared Jeremy’s iced matcha. Instead, she was preparing a weekend itinerary for the ages. First on the agenda, getting a tattoo. And she was making sure Jeremy was doing it with her. Jeremy had no idea what was coming.

When I was ten my father sent me out to the well in the backwoods of our home to fetch water. It was winter, and the snow burned my bare feet. The neighbors kept hounds in their back stables for hunting in the spring and summer, but every year they seemed to forget about them, and in moments of desperation the poor things would break from their lockups and roam our forest for the last skinny scraps of meat that weren’t able to hide away for the winter. One set its sights upon me and gouged the flesh from my neck and that’s how I ended up here.

I watched from that ethereal place above where everything you touch just barely escapes your grasp, like dandelion seeds in the breeze. I watched as the sun fell behind the white mountains and rose again in the east and still my carcass lay in the snow, the wetness keeping the blood fresh and the frost glistening on my skin like marble. I imagined my family’s search party must have taken all night. Indeed, when my father finally came it was with our own hunting dog, and when he saw the patch of red in the snow he shrieked and fell backwards. Then he came for me with frantic, open arms. I stood and opened mine back but he passed right through me and took my body in his arms and carried me home.

My mother and sister shed their tears silently as they washed me and covered me in a shroud of our warmest blankets. My father had dug a small grave at the base of the evergreen in our backyard, and slowly, like he was carrying a sheet of the most precious silk, he picked me up and laid me in it and buried me in the snow.

It was at this point that passersby had begun to crowd around our home, inquiring about the whole ordeal. I fluttered among them like the shadow of a butterfly, going here and there and hearing this and that. The heavenly veil that separated us warped their sound, and I strained to hear. When someone asked who had died, one old man shook his head.

“Wicked thing,” he said, and spat on the ground. He gestured to the grand old house at the end of the road. It stood tall and black against the snowfall.

“The Baron?” someone said.

He nodded. “Set his hounds on his own slave girl, the one whose parents died last winter. I tell you, must’ve been hard for the poor thing. No family and all.”