Somewhere A Goose Was Flying
a short story by Tommy Paley
“Everything you have been saying has been false,” she said to me, sweetly, when I returned home from buying crackers.
Somewhere a goose was flying.
“Hey babe,” I said attempting, and failing, to sound ‘hip’ or ‘cool’, “let’s take it slow. Like real slow — I’m talking molasses.”
Typically she loved when I referenced food in our arguments, but not now. Her face was as readable as something with no words.
Pine needles were gathering outside on our walk way sort of like how dogs did only if they were thinner and pointier.
Attempting to look through me with those intense eyes of hers made we wish I was wearing less suggestive shorts.
Just yesterday she’d baked me loaf after loaf of bread either because she thought I liked bread or as some form of perplexing punishment.
Her mom was the kind of pharmacist who was actually a florist.
Florists often heightened my social anxiety while also exponentially lowering my desire for flowers.
“I know you wish I was more exotic,” she yelped displaying that she had no real idea what I was actually wishing for as well as quite the talent for yelping.
My grandmother once worked on a jigsaw puzzle for 5 months before deciding to run away to join the circus.
“Sweetie,” I said as if I’d just devoured a bowl of sugar cubes “nothing could be further from the truth, though, it is really hard to say unless we were to measure”.
She rolled her eyes before sighing once, twice and then a third time, making it very clear that, for the time being, she was done eye-rolling. “Always leave them wanting more,” my uncle would say right before disappearing for months at a time.
I slowly poured myself a glass of juice, attempting to convey both the angst and the thirst for juice that I was currently feeling.
Blood coursed through my veins and, to a lesser degree, my arteries, though I had badly failed high school human anatomy.
Drinking the juice, I remembered the good old days when our love and the juice flowed freely.
“No need to be a prickly pear,” she replied.
She was right, there never was a need to be one.
“I’m sorry. I got all this from my dad.”
My father once chopped down the tree in our front yard thanks to being given the wrong anti-anxiety medication by his doctor. My mother cried for precisely 5 minutes.
The end had been on the horizon for a long time.
Sordid details of our issues were on the lips of everyone. Also on their lips was discounted lip balm as well as heavily chapped areas which partially explained the balm.
“It’s all shades of purple — violet, lavender, plum,” she said while leaning against the wall.
A tear formed; we used to lean against that wall together while vowing never to vocalize shades of any color. It’s why we first fell in love.
Snow began to fall outside. A woman walked by carrying a large wheel of cheese. My lower extremities suddenly felt really heavy.
“A tour of the art gallery. Our first date. I remember you wore a yellow hat that screamed ‘I’m wearing a yellow hat’ while also more quietly saying “if you actually hear me screaming, drop what you are doing and proceed directly to the nearest health care professional.”
She nodded her head and with each nod I saw the woman I fell in love with because that was her, right there, nodding her head.
How I wanted to grab that head and kiss it all over like I used to.
Water once made us so wet, even when we asked it not to.
I walked over to her, a few feet feeling like miles or kilometers for the metric fans out there and whispered “cows go moo”. It was an inside joke that made both of us long for rain.
~~~~~
(*Author’s note: This story was created using the following 12 random words: false, slow, pine, loaf, exotic, juice, prickly, sordid, violet, snow, tour, cow)
Anyone else want to try: Indira, Mark, E. Scott, Louise, Jake, Stephen, Matt, Aura?
