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(Something new for me: a 50-word submission for fiftywordstory.com, featuring one of my idols, who I wrote a poem about here.)

“Being an aerospace engineer wasn’t enough: he had wings in his garage. Doped fabric tightening across spars on sawhorses. But a heart flutter snatched his license away. Family pictures reflected his torment, fettered to the ground. I cried when he left us, but happy he got his wings back.”

I was perhaps 6 or 7 when I first visited the garage. The wings were suspended at about eye level for me then and smelled of something worse than turpentine. But they fascinated me more than anything in my young, turbulent life and set the stage for my learning to fly a couple of decades later.

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(A Six-Word Memoir for one of their monthly contests entitled “Really Good / Really Bad Love Stories”.)

Perhaps the Principal was simply anal: every teacher at my high school arranged their students alphabetically . . . as if to break my heart.

For four years I sat behind the same girl, our last names spelled close enough to ward off any interesting interlopers. I got to know her voice, her laughter, her odd quirks, her moods, her smile that got prettier every year. She enjoyed my attentions, laughed at my guarded hints, even teased me about it; but despite how well we got along, her head would only turn for the boys in class. Our last names kept us in close proximity class after class, despite my need to move on to allay the pressure in my chest. Year after year I watched boys come and go, hurting her the way I never would, watching her not learn from their mistakes. By graduation, even my mother knew her name, shocked when I pointed her out. I always seemed too shy to aim so high.

That day the pain subsided and life went on as if nothing had ever happened. Then, many years later, we fell across each other online. She’d married badly and was unhappily stuck. She was just as pretty as I remembered her and I said so. She teased me like old times, and for a moment I wondered if she might have had second thoughts about us…

Broken hearts can haunt us forever.

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(A Six-Word Memoir for their monthly contest entitled “Old-School Nostalgia in just Six Words”.)

Growing up in the 70s, with a recently-divorced mom trying to fend for four pre-teen kids (and adopted stray cats), we would come home from school, or not, and have the house to ourselves. Now they make movies about a child left in a house alone (Gasp!), as if it’s a thing. Somehow we survived. We didn’t burn down the place, or poison ourselves, or decapitate each other by accident, although I once put a rusty nail through my hand digging in someone’s back yard. Back when it was okay to be somewhere in the neighborhood playing until sunset, without a worry or a cellphone. At dinnertime, the sound of adult voices calling kids’ names echoing over the block. It makes you wonder what has happened to America that there are so many dangers we have to keep our kids safe from now. I wonder, is this called progress?

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(A Six-Word Memoir for their contest “What’s the Family Resemblance in Six?”, and relating to the poem posted here)

It had been three years since they heard from me, I had been so afraid to tell them I’d escaped the closet they had unknowingly locked me in. But here they were, searching for me, afraid for me, needing to know I was okay. I was better than okay, I told them. I was finally happy, living my life. When I reconnected with my family, I told them the truth, because that’s what you do for the people you love. They feigned acceptance at first, but then it became clear: their religion proclaimed that my death would have been better news. It’s ten years later: they search no longer, afraid of me, the deadly rainbow in their black and white world. I still love them, but they’re too busy mourning the death of someone who never existed, the shadow in a dark closet. Family unable to see the light.

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(A Six-Word Memoir and a shorter version of this post)

One of the ironies of my life, living in the Pacific Northwest, where the water is iceberg-cold on the hottest days, are the beaches of Ocean City, Maryland, where I nearly met my premature end drowning at the impressionable age of four or five. Despite still harboring an irrational fear of swimming decades later from this unfortunate start, I still pine for the childhood days of half-buried siblings, silicon castles, creosote smelling boardwalks, splashing surf and heavenly cheeseburgers crunchy with windblown sand.
Life can be funny that way.