“We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled.” - Bill Watterson

It is my dream to have one of my illustrated stories published.

"Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitened on a cliff, soaring fire that sways and sings, and children's faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup." - Sara Teasdale

"Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit." - e. e. cummings

"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder." - M. C. Escher

 

"There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound." - Thomas Hardy

The Goodbye Rose

 

By

 

Melissa Ulrich

 

 



          In the corner, dirt clods skirt a faded green compost bin. Sometimes it smells like old banana peels, the sickly sweetness of rotting fruit flesh reminding her of the sweltering embrace of summers spent in the orchards on her grandparent’s farm.

In the narrow alley, half a rake leans against the gritty wall and an empty glass bottle of nutmeg, its label peeling at the edges, hides by the steps.

Spider silk laces the door frame like the intricate doily that covered the gleaming cherry wood chest in her grandmother’s room. She remembers tracing the design with her chubby little fingers as a child, fascinated that it held together. It looked so fragile. Her very breath might dissolve the careful knitting.

Here the sun slides between the cool brick buildings and dances on her skin. This is her refuge. The wind and sound cannot get at her. Here memories settle on her shoulders, like the soft pink and blue afghan her grandma knitted for her ninth birthday.

***

She remembers the loving murmur of her grandmother’s voice, her elegant hands light as a butterfly, caressing the lumpy butternut mass of her first attempt to braid her own hair. She remembers practicing on the thin snakes of dough her grandmother rolled for her when she made English shortbread cookies, always flaky and warm, hatched with a fork and all graced with a dollop of homemade strawberry jam.

She remembers her grandmother’s steel grey eyes, fixed on the horizon. Every summer sunset was spent on the front porch. She would sit out there and snap beans, always finishing the task as the dragonflies hummed in the dying light. With a small sigh, she would rise from the yellow rocking chair my grandfather made for her so long ago, a birthday present from their early days of marriage. She would open the screen door and slip inside without looking back, the soles of her shoes worn thin, delicate, like soft petals brushing, leaving no trace.

She remembers spending hours wandering throughout the house, discovering her grandma’s touches - the delicate fringe and silk braid on the embroidered pillows, exquisite with scenes of grazing sheep and blue breasted birds with luminous orange eyes perching on apple blossom branches and the empty glass perfume bottles, pearly green and shimmering on the ledge above the sink, filled with dried nuts and tied with satin ribbon. Her grandmother made everything beautiful.

She remembers the first time she had ever hugged her grandmother. She was four years old and weary from an afternoon spent searching through the sodden piles beneath the trees. When she handed the glistening ruby red leaf to her mother, her mother's eyes merely followed the muddy tracks across the kitchen tiles. Her mother grabbed the mop and dropped the wet leaf into the sink.

She remembers how she felt when her grandmother rescued the leaf from the sink and carefully dried it on her blue sprigged apron before fixing it to the refrigerator with the crocheted hen magnet. She remembers eagerly touching the knotted white yarn of the hen and the glossy black button eye, so often kept tacked high out of her reach so she wouldn’t fiddle with it.

            Her grandma had touched the leaf gently with one finger, tracing the delicate veins branching out. She remembers gathering the blue sprigged apron with one fist and leaning against her grandma.

She cannot lean against her grandmother now.

***

A herd of round shadows skip across the field, driven on by the wind. She rolls down the window, her arm riding the warm current, palm tilted up and soaring. The gravel glistens in the sun and pops under her tires as she pulls into the parking lot. A dark mass of bodies cluster near the cathedral’s cobblestone steps. White tissues kiss cheeks. One by one, faces emerge and stare at her just as sunflowers stretch to find the light. Words would come later. Touch was all she could offer. Her thin fingers grasp at a fencepost bordering the path to the church. Its blue, brittle paint chips off, littering the ground like seeds sown by a careless farmer. She holds on.

Many speak at the service. Quavering voices recall love. Echoing in the chamber, they stretch to fill the emptiness. She walks forward and looks down at her grandmother. Light falls smooth over her faded collar and downy white hair. Pink scalp peeps out, freckled with countless years of dalliance with the sun. She could be sleeping. There is youth in that softest smile.

The parade of black inches forward, a caterpillar on the wide yellow green lawn. Thin white chairs surround the plot. A few final words scatter across the hot rising wind and tree limbs strain to catch them.

The rose is translucent pink, the shadow of her flesh staining through the petal. Small oval scars dot the stem where the thorns had been. She slowly stands, her black skirt straight and smooth. Sweat trickles down the back of her knees. Soon it would be her turn. Only a few steps more. Just as others had before her, she holds out the rose above the deep hole and lets it fall.

The rose thuds heavily upon the smooth, oak coffin. Maybe her grandmother could feel this sound. She knocks on a door that will never open.

Finally, she cries.

"Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf." - Albert Schweitzer

“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.” - George Eliot

Stars embedded in velvet so deep I can only see them when I close my eyes. I search the pure ink for form, but I’m falling forever into this, even as I clutch the dry summer grass and your hand.

"There is no grief like the grief that does not speak." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

           She always had tangled hair and grape jelly skids on her shirt. Her knees were always covered with Ninja Turtle band aids, because those were the only kind she liked.

She picked at her scabs, feeling deliciously horrified at the oozing slime under the body’s latticework. It was a challenge to peel an entire scab off in one piece. Pearly red beads made strings down her shin, the only jewellery she wore, and she traipsed with her freshly uncovered testament of a bicycle stunt gone wrong. The wooden ramps on the gravel driveway ensured that there would always be a scab of some sort to pick at.

He only noticed her when she tagged along. He didn’t want her around. She was only his friend’s little sister, anyway. One day, he tramped off in the woods with her brother. She struggled to keep up. He told her to get lost. She was just a little punky girl, after all. That made her more upset than being little. She was not the kind of girl he noticed.

The leaves were wet and her trainers were rubbed smooth from dragging her feet on the pavement when she rode her bicycle. She slipped down a shallow bank sprouting naked bush and roots. She scraped clods of mud from her knees and dared to look up. Their eyes met. She wiped her palms on her yellow jumper. Muddy paw prints stained her ribs.  She didn’t cry and her face throbbed with the redness.

“Tough girl,” he grinned, making her feel strangely taller.

Her hand ached. A thorn was deeply embedded in her fleshy part of the thumb near her palm. It was so long she could see the pink prick where it just came through the other side. She wanted it out of her, this foreign horrid thing, but there was nothing to pick at. It festered out just before Christmas. She gave him the thorn and he put it in his pocket. After that, she didn’t have to struggle to keep up.

 The years marched by and they remained friends. It never became anything more than that to him. She positively ached to hold his hand, but her fear of losing him was too strong. She couldn’t bear to risk their friendship.

Sometimes, when he tried some dangerous bicycle stunt or skid his skateboard down a staircase railing, she felt smothered by a shapeless fear. She pulled at its darkness, trying to shape it. She wondered what premonitions looked like. She couldn’t pick the thought out.

Two days ago, he had tossed that roguish grin of his at her from over his shoulder as he walked away. She had just beaten him at chess for the very first time. She could still hear his teasing tone. His chuckle. The thick, tousled curls caressing his forehead. The flecks of gold in his eyes.

“That’s the first and the last time you’ll beat me at chess” was what he said.

She had woken up the next day with the hope that he would come over for his rematch. When her mother handed her the yellow phone, the voice on the other end seemed to speak another language. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Something inside her droned that banal rhyme over and over until her quaking stopped.

Her mom drove her there. The school billboard was filled with the details of the memorial service. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. The sidewalk was there when she opened the door and the car door slammed with a squeak like it always did.

She was late. She was never late to anything, but she had to use the bathroom like she always did before class. Just in case. Her flip flops slapped against the silence. The keening in the bathroom was just the hand-dryer.

She was wearing the intricately braided necklace she bought in Hawaii from the carefully saved babysitting funds. The sharp shark’s tooth dangling from the end of the necklace rested on her breast bone, just beneath her clavicle. Sometimes she would touch it, the sharpest tip, to make sure it was there. She was there.

After the service, when they would come, one by one, to embrace her, she could feel them press against her necklace. It was a sharp pinch of tooth biting flesh. Maybe those embraces would blunt the sharpness and file away the bone. But it didn’t.

She tucked it in her shirt. The tooth was cold. She wanted it close, nestled where no one could see or feel it. That was the last day she ever wore that necklace. She buried it beneath some worthless used stamps in a black shoe box under her bed.

 

 

"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment." - Henry David Thoreau

 

 

 

Pots of thoughts,

Bubbling rind,

And framing bone,

A steaming mind.

 

Clicking off,

Fading fire,

Shut the lid,

On that desire.

 

Peek inside

And poke around.

An empty pot

A hollow sound.

“It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space.” - Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

No course chartered

On this forest of dreams

There is no wind

To free

My

Mind.

 

Of all the moments that matter,

Why does this one stand out

Like the beacon saving the ship of hope?

How I listen for that call

To raise the mast

In the full wind of progress

Towards a destination I long to be

For eternity.

Answer me,

Tell me that this isn’t a ship in a bottle.

 

 

Shuddering in

The wind’s relentless caress,

The bough begins to sigh,

Groaning and swaying,

Singing its own soft lullaby.

Sometimes I feel I am a tree in

A windless world.

“Don't wish upon a star. Reach for one.” - Catherine Marshall

“It is not everyone,' said Elinor, 'who has your passion for dead leaves.” - Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

 

The air was thick and smeary.

The rain,

so soft,

seemed to be floating,

never falling.

It crept under her umbrella,

teased the back of her neck,

coaxing tendrils by her ears.

Almost a lover’s touch.

This rain got as close to her,

closer than her clothes,

but she would never tilt her head back,

mouth open wide,

and welcome it into her being.

“If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.” - J.M. Barrie

 

 

           The softness woke me. Millions of wet petals falling from the sky. The soft down of winter's first snow. I snuggled under my comforter, a warm nest still sprinkled with the ends of a dream. The lowing, still gentle, would grow more insistent the longer I lingered.

Snow covered everything and the trees bowed toward the ground. Heavy under the weight of the snow, they seemed friendlier somehow. The thick wool in my blue boots would warm soon and I revelled in the thickness of the snow, the squeaky crunch as perfect prints followed me to the barn. The blue siding glistened in the pale pink dawn, the tangerine sun slipping over the hill, lighting up the pasture like diamonds.

I snapped the overhead light on and filled the old tin can with the sweet molasses grain. Rough, pink tongues pulled at the alfalfa hay in the trough. Tails twitched happily and soft contented moos warmed my ears. The heavy metal bucket rang with the first spurts of warm milk.

“Think and wonder, wonder and think.” - Dr. Seuss