Memory of Arms
The neighbor’s chimney cinders the air in a new breed of fall days. I walk through, breathe it in, merge with it. My side of the forest, bare-limbed and damp. Beyond the fence, back fields hold the steps of my children running through, cautious of briars on summer days. And now months later, those same briars keep the bend of feet pressing into earth, the memory of arms parting them careful as curtains. Inside my house, the bed holds the curl of the cat’s body after he’s gotten up and walked away. Tiny paw craters across the comforter. And when my husband removes his ball cap, the cinch of its border stays behind on his forehead. But I am still waiting for the pleasure to return to my body. Small gulps, a knot untying in my throat. The rushing sweetness that left with the good hormones. Where did the sweat and breath dimension go? Where is the shutter part of me?
~
Take the Tour
You see the white dove walls. Crumb-less floors. Piney span of kitchen. Clean linen comes to mind and new bars of soap and pearls, white-buttoned shirt throats. Hear the echo of bedrooms emptied of all dreaming. Feel how easy the refrigerator opens to a world of translucent trays and drawers and cubes. New trim. Painted baseboards. Light switches wiped off finger flicks. In the living room, no trace of the spaces where furniture once sat. The house is a body ready to be inhabited again. Meander room to room, down hallways and through the snap of a screened door, reach the backyard and the dripline of forest where worms exist and dirt, click beetles, pinecones, acorns, walnuts, fallen things. Take the tour. See the underbrush where animals go to die, a soft bunker, where once the warm curl of their bodies fell at peace with the way of things. Find the deer path, where desired direction cuts through the understory, smoothing away the sapling and briar. Stripping, hollowing, erasing. The path leads on, and you want to follow through the pinch and pull of mountains. Thoughts unstring themselves from your mind like a loosening guitar. Notes gone slack in the throat. Twang of your tongue losing its language. Take a look behind you. How is it everything fits inside your eye?
July canopy
Regal moths in sweet gum trees
Clouds, light, atmosphere.
~
Lydia Gwyn is the author of the flash fiction collections: You’ll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Microfictions 2024, Appalachian Places, Elm Leaves Journal, Fractured Lit, F®iction, The Florida Review, and others. A selection of pieces from her new collection “Emptiness, Standing Still” is available in Issue 22 of Ravenna Press’s Triples Series. She lives with her family in East Tennessee, where she works as an academic librarian.