Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.
Pearls are sand. She buries her toes again into the castle. Thousands of future pearls lie here at my feet.
We’ll be rich when we unpack. At least til I clean up.
Don’t you dare sweep away my memories!
I’ll buy you the real thing. Besides, I heard most pearls today are farmed. If you carved away the nacre, you’d find a bit of mussel shell at its core, not sand.
Pearls are sand.
* * *
In those days my grandmother ran out of bread, she would toast hot dog buns for us, while Ronnie Milsap played. A treat, I enjoy the memory of this so much, I would never think of recreating the recipe and sharing it with my own kids.
She has waited patiently for thirty years to join her husband. We have only sparing memories of the man, who must have made us very happy if you are to believe old photographs. Not old enough for black and white, but genuine tones faded by time into sepia. One, under the Christmas tree, that she allowed me to take when I moved away for college. The other, of me in cowboy boots and hat, saddled atop his broad, tanned back, she framed and held onto.
* * *
Once, we drove through Albuquerque during the annual hot-air balloon fiesta. I had a speech to give, and decided to make the drive from Kansas. Lovely how the landscape changed on cue. We didn’t need an atlas to tell us when we were in the Oklahoma panhandle. We didn’t need it to announce New Mexico. The map made no mention of the utter destitution that is the 60 mile stretch of poverty from Santa Fe to its largest city.
Would you ever want to ride in one of those? I asked.
Those, she pointed through the wind, her hand through the sun roof, tracing the outline of a hot-air balloon in the inexplicable shape of a squirrel, Are suicide.
* * *
During those years as an EMT, there were a dozen calls that couldn’t really be called emergencies. We took our time in the ambulance, navigating undeveloped roads, ducking underneath trellises overgrown with butterfly bushes, knocking on doors out of habit. We had time to attempt our best guesses, to recreate the scenes as we imagined them, until the coroner completed his long drive in from Olympia.
Wait, what do you think of this one? ‘Knowing that her husband could never satisfy her like the man in brown, the lonely housewife received one final Fed Ex special delivery before ending it all.’ Pretty good, huh?
UPS.
What?
It’s UPS that wears brown.
Oh. Whatever. Your turn.
I was never very good at this game.
Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.
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