The sale bill hangs on the diner’s bulletin board. Even from across the lobby, even partially covered by a handwritten looseleaf advertisement for babysitting, I’d know that house anywhere. I see it in my dreams sometimes, even now, decades later. Shannon and I climbing the back porch steps after school, playing fetch with her dog in the yard, or studying at her big dining room table.
“They’re selling it,” I say out loud.
“There’s no one left,” Shannon’s voice says, but that can’t be. She’s gone now. Gone from rooms, gone from grass, gone from a house that dreamed us.
Tag: memory
Day 75: Girl
Rana is a tiny, blond eight-year-old with persistently bruised knees and a lisp. After church, we sat in a Sunday school classroom coloring cardboard Easter eggs with markers. We talked about her favorite book, how unfair it was that her brother went to the dinosaur museum, and what she wished she could have for supper.
“Ice cream!” she shouted.
A murky memory surfaced of myself at her age, lighting our gas oven with a wooden match.
I studied her hands with their fragile fingers streaked with Spring colors, thinking: give her all the markers. All the museums. All the sweets.
Cynthia Hamill 