Holding

Cold turning warmer
Hands clasping, grasping
Thoughts turning faster
From despair to feather-light hope

Time has no matter
Feelings, memories abide no schedule
In quiet, calm cuts through mire
A soul in trouble looks to words, colors

Feelings replace thought
Giving form to hope
Time moves forward to face anew
Or aside to make way for old

Hands holding tightly
Bind now to here
Easing fear
Together.

They walked together quietly. Their breathing, the gravel crunching under their soles and the wind rustling through the grass in the field nearby provided the only sounds. The scene above was that of a sky colored in what looked to be the Crayola crayon entitled “Robin’s Egg Blue.” A few cirrus clouds and a small grove of trees at the edge of the field dotted the landscape. Some of the leaves were just beginning to change color as the wind was just beginning to have a crisp bite of the fall to come.

She reached for his hand. He gently accepted and held hers in return. They continued to walk, each in their own world of thoughts and memories. He was thinking of their son’s Little League game where he got a triple, got a runner out at first, and couldn’t help his youthful exuberance and smiled and waved to him. She was thinking of their son’s little face looking up at her while nursing. How he would grasp and pull at her hair while she felt the tugging at her breast. She could feel that familiar tingle even now, walking down a dirt road, almost twenty years later.

They had driven their boy to school and helped him unpack some of his boxes. She wanted to make his bed, arrange towels, put up pictures. Her husband had to gently pry her away from the boxes, reminding her that a boy in college could probably figure out his own system of organizing his things. She joked that that’s what she was afraid of, but her son looked at her and saw the joke was a shallow one. He asked her for some help in hanging posters and putting up pictures. He let her make his bed. He said he would put the other stuff away after they left. They all did much better at lunch, laughing and relaxing over food, an almost comfortable routine of a family meal, with just a hint of the spectre of separation looming.

As they had driven home alone, just the two of them, they had filled their time with talking, music, anything to try to shake the feeling they had left a piece of them behind. Once they had gotten home, it was far too quiet, with their daughter visiting friends and their son now away at school. So they decided to take a walk.

They had walked together a lot when they had first been married. Somehow over the years, simple quiet walks had gone by the wayside. Their time had been full. Full of noise, toys, laundry, sports, schools, driving, errands, lessons, work. They had been warned they would feel empty when their children left. Somehow this was not the case. They knew they’d miss the day-to-day view of their son’s face and voice and presence, but they were so proud of what he had accomplished so far, they could not but help being happy he was exactly where he wanted to be. Not many people could say that. He had overcome many obstacles and worried to get to college and there he was!

The last view of him as they drove away reminded her of how she felt when she waved to him on his first day on the bus going to kindergarten. They would face another farewell next year with their daughter and that would be its own bittersweet milestone. But for now she would walk with her husband, holding hands, navigating the rough road together.

gravelly snow
grey streaked skies
bleary, red-eyed
no beaming smiles, lips grimacing
grey-green skin blends with grey-brown hibernating grass
no glowing skin exposed
to the sun
all covered up in sweaters
and scarves and gloves
nothing left open to chance in the cold
cars all have salty brown patina, same color on ground and sky

colorless days make us thankful for long nights
where behind closed eyes colors explode like
shards of light, warming all the way
up through the fingertips
skin making warmth like swirls of writhing colors
carries us to the next day
like a memory of a summer’s night

People from nearby towns felt it was their own secret treasure, the bakery at the hospital. The sweet old Sisters of Mercy all wore white cardigans with angel pins attached. Their carefully coiffed hair seemed to be tinged a hue only slightly lighter than their matching blue dresses. They reminded people of their aunt, grandmother, Miss Marple, or the strange cat lady who lived down the street. Only the mildly retarded gurney attendant thought of Aggie, Cleo, and Truvie as Macbeth’s three witches. Most people would have never guessed he read or understood Shakespeare. They would have been correct. He just looked at the pictures and read the captions of the graphic novel version of Macbeth, not knowing the story was centuries old.

The three crones always arrived at their bakery cart in the hospital lobby promptly at 7am. They offered lemonade in summer and hot cocoa in winter. They always seemed to have batches of cookies baking or cooling throughout the day until they closed up shop at 4pm. You could smell the delicious allure of macadamia nut, chocolate chip, oatmeal, peanut butter, and sugar cookies from the parking lot.

Aggie, Cleo, and Truvie had a system for differentiating their batches. They used various color ties to close the bags, sort of like bakers tabbing loaves of bread with different colors to mark the days of the week. Except instead of tabbing for weekday identification, they used the ties to mark which poison had been added to the dough.

For instance, most children, several nurses, and some doctors were sold cookies with white-tie bags. These were clear of any drug or poison. If there were terminal pediatric cases, orange ties were given, along with a healthy (actually the opposite of healthy) amount of a drug that would encourage swift and painless death. The biddies saw nothing wrong with this scenario; on the contrary, they saw their toxic cookie sales as their gift to those needing to be relieved of troubles, pain, and sometimes their lives.

Salespeople – pharmaceutical reps and Girl Scouts horning in on their territory – were given green ties. Somehow, the Sisters had stumbled upon a perfect mixture of medicine and cookie dough to illicit severe stomach flu symptoms, not lethal but certainly annoying. Blue ties were for the most serious cases. The cookies in these batches contained enough life-ending drugs to do their work in a matter of days for those who were in real physical turmoil without any hope of recovery.

Nobody ever guessed at the three Sister’s real objective of Mercy with their cookie sales. They were very careful to rotate affected batches with those clear of any drugs every couple of months or so. They did not do this because it was morally reprehensible but rather so they could keep their recipes secret from any copycat cooks. They long ago lost track of the number of “gifts” they had bestowed on the suffering over the years. Since they had come up with the idea of baking “with a little something extra,” twelve years and possibly hundreds of the afflicted had been affected by their generosity.

The little bakery cart turned a good profit for the hospital’s auxiliary club. People ordered dozens of the biddies’ creations for events and parties. When business seemed slow at the hospital, the ladies introduced bags of snickerdoodles bound with yellow ties to the mix. People who were sold snickerdoodles would eat them and not be able to think of anything but when they could eat them again. With crumbs still adorning the corners of their mouths, they would be jonesing for their next fix. You could say, correctly, that they were addicted to snickerdoodles. The Three Sisters were especially pleased with these “yellows” as they called them for they had come up with their own secret recipe, combining chocolate, nuts, and drugs in such a fashion that they became almost famous in their community.

To help spread the good word about their wares, Aggie, Cleo, and Truvie came up with cookie coupons that were distributed to incoming patients and visitors alike. Hardly anyone could resist a “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” deal, especially with freshly baked cookies. Business was soon booming. The witches added an oven to their cart. The hospital added nurses to their floors. The hospital grew as a teaching hospital, with a large influx of residents to help take up the glut of patients that soon became the norm.

Cleo was the only one of the three ladies who occasionally thought twice about the direction their bakery business had taken over the years. She worried that too much mixing of dough and drugs hurt the integrity of their baking. They weren’t really scientists after all. She had heard of euthanasia and Dr. Kervorkian and did not agree with either tenet. She liked the fact that those who were suffering did not have to suffer further by making agonizing decisions of whether to live or die. She and Aggie and Truvie took that burden away and helped them. Yes. That was it. She really saw them as Sisters of Mercy.

And a gooey, fresh, scrumptious cookie is as good a way to go as any.

She adjusted the strap of her bodysuit. The sequins were digging into her shoulder again. She glanced down at her cleavage, making sure everything was securely tucked away into the costume with just enough of the creamy swell rising above to be enticing but not indecent. Men would inevitably take notice but children of all ages would be mesmerized as she juggled flaming batons atop the high-wire.

As she sat in front of the mirror, she looked at her overly made-up face, resplendent with hues only found in nature on the tails of peacocks. She slicked on one more dab of lip gloss and smiled; teeth were all clear. She ran her fingers down her long, dark ponytail, thankful for the return of her natural color. He had always hated her dark hair so she had bleached it for years. Funny how the light hair made her world seem dark and her dark hair was comforting and made her feel light as a feather. That feeling helped when she had to concentrate on her balance on a thin wire over 100 feet above the ground.

She checked her smartphone for the dozenth time in less than an hour. No message yet. How much longer would she have to wait? The friend that worked for the lawyer was to let her know as soon as the sentencing was handed down. It should have been over long ago. She looked at herself in the mirror again carefully. The makeup covered the smudges under her eyes that betrayed her sleepless nights. As shaky as she felt though, once she climbed that ladder and lit the batons, her nerves were always steady. She woke with a purpose each day: to hear the gasps and claps that let her know her efforts were appreciated. It was something that gave her joy.

BUZZZZ! She jumped involuntarily and checked her phone. “Jury and judge coming back now,” she read.

She closed her eyes, tried to take a deep breath but it got stuck somewhere in her throat. Her mind took her against her will, much as he had done in that cabin, to dark places in the past. Why hadn’t she fought harder or tried to get away earlier? She mentally berated herself again for blaming the wrong person. HE was the bastard who had done this to several other women before her. He had pushed her into believing all sorts of lies including how she was nothing and could never escape. But she had.

Once she had gotten away, she realized she had acquired a set of balls that he seemed to have no use for; in her mind, only an impotent eunuch preys upon those he sees as weak. She sort of laughed to herself and thought, I took his balls as he wasn’t using them, the coward. She had shown bravery as she recounted to police all the details she could recall. She had gone back to the circus as soon as her body had healed, intuitively knowing it would also help heal her soul as well.

She stood and walked to a small flap in the tent. She peeked through and saw the man with the tigers, using a whip to guide them to their spots in the cage. Like a carefully choreographed dance, the powerful yet seemingly languid beasts circled the man and took their spots atop some stacked chairs. So much strength constrained by some bars of a cage! Hopefully soon he too would be held at bay in a cage.

She glanced into the stands and noticed a group of children. A school group, by the looks of the matching bright red shirts they all wore. They were laughing. She craned her neck and saw the object of their mirth: three clowns were chasing and tripping each other in the next ring. She looked back at the children. Their faces were almost glowing. She couldn’t remember feeling a joy that could and should be taken for granted. If not for her friends, she knew she wouldn’t even have the hope of finding that joy again. But as she shed her pain and shared her trials, she connected with others and found everyone had their own tales of woe.

One of the clowns’ wives died last year after a three-year battle with cancer. An animal trainer just found out last week that her husband was leaving her for a bank teller back home. A backup dancer who needs to have knee surgery is worried about insurance. The couple who get shot out of matching cannons together just suffered a miscarriage. So trite but true, friends sharing makes burdens lighter.

Buzzz… Buzzz… She had been daydreaming about her first job as a high-wire act for the circus when her phone buzzed and vibrated on the table.

“Guilty. 99 Years. No parole. Breathe!”

Whoooosh! She could finally release the breath she had been holding. She felt so light she thought maybe she’d float to the very top of the Big Top. Two Years. Over 2,000 miles. Lots of trips up the ladder. Lots of balancing on a thin high-wire.