Twelve Stories

Lydia Copeland

I put on one of my mother’s night gowns. Somehow we ended up with a whole box of these when we moved. Everything else is in a basket by the door waiting for the laundromat. It is cold, and it feels like my husband doesn’t love me anymore. I place a tea kettle in my son’s room to help his breathing while he sleeps. Today we made diamonds with our fingers and black birds with our thumbs. We ate lentils and French fries. My son talked a long time about fish, which he calls “bish.”

I turn my phone off and on, take a bath, check for missed calls. I know my husband is not thinking of these things. Maybe he thinks of French gray on driftwood or maybe acute angles, but not the sound of me across the river, holding out as long as I can. In bed now, I think of the ear bones of trout, polished smooth like water-worn stones. My father kept these in a bottle in his office next to a jar of India ink and a handblown Tyrannosaurus Rex. He showed me their growth rings, one for each half-year. A message, a memory of every algae, every open mouth. I used to hold them to my eye and try to see the Tennessee River. When my mother tossed out the bones, my father locked himself in the basement and placed pond samples under a microscope. My mother folded bread dough that day, put on a record, opened the windows, and then clicked the bones in her pocket and tossed them in the driveway. To her they were only rocks.

I want to tell my husband there is still truth between the two of us, still lips that close a circle and share a breath. In a photograph, his arms, in my sweater, lock around my waist. I’m fatter then, but happier. I have a blue scarf in my hair and black bangs. We stand on top of a mountain, wearing each other’s clothes and posing in the wind.

_______________

Lydia Copeland’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Quick Fiction, NOÖ Journal, Dogzplot, elimae, FRiGG, Pindeldyboz, SmokeLong Quarterly, Grey Sparrow, Night Train and others. Her chapbook, Haircut Stories, is available from the Achilles Chapbook Series, as well as part of the chapbook collective Fox Force 5 from Paper Hero Press. She works at the FIT Library in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.