I had been Deceived

   When I pushed open the door with a boisterous creak, I knew what I'd see.  I just wished I were wrong.
   Clothes were strewn, blanketing the floor and hanging from the ceiling fan.
   It was the most disgusting sight I had ever seen.
   When my eyes finally reached my husband, he had a diaper in one hand and phone in the other.
   "Oh, thank God you're here," he said.

Long Time, Not Long Enough

   "Oh, yeah.   Things are great."  If I could say anything more sarcastic I would be shocked.  "What about you?"  But there's no way that I could be talking to anyone more oblivious and self-centered as Natalia.
   "Fantastique!"
   Oh, god.  French.
   Natalia fluffed her pink hair, "Just living the dream."
   I dearly wished her mountain of a ring would snag in her hair.
   Sucks seeing exes at class reunions.  

Yellow Hummer

   I was in a car crash once.
   I remember tasting blood, my heart stopping, glass shattering--the only thing I hadn't expected was the shakes.
   My heart pounded against my rib cage like the wings of a hunted turtle dove.  All the heat in my body rushed to my head, flooding it with confusion and leaving the rest of me shivering.
   It was the coldest I had ever felt, until I was standing in my living room and saw a yellow Hummer barreling straight towards me.  

Lesson for the Day: Listen and Learn

   Shelby asked, "Daddy, what does languid mean?"
   "Uhh," her father's brown eyes opened wide, "well, we should probably look it up in the dictionary."  He kicked in his recliner and walked to the bookshelf across the room.  "Where did you hear that word, honey?"
   "Mom told aunt Cheryl you've been languid ever since you said, 'I do.'  When was that, daddy?"
   "The only day I've ever outsmarted your mother."

The Wood

   As children, we'd always spent our summers playing in the wood.  Two scrawny boys could hide behind many a tree.
   Our father didn't see much harm in it, but he and mother would bicker and on occasion scream and holler over our being in the wood. 
   Whenever we could make out the words they were shouting at one another, we would run farther into the wood.  It may not have been the brightest idea, given what lay hidden in the deepest parts of the wood, but we were too young to be frightened and not old enough to be wise.
   On the days that it rained, we would stay indoors.  Father would read the paper, and mother would grin into her needlework.  When she would look over to us, on the floor and bored with our card game, she would smile with all of her teeth and then go back to grinning at her needle and thread.
   On one of those rainy days, father grunted and ruffled his paper.  It was something that he had done often, but he had never folded up the paper in a hurry and told mother to follow him like he did.
   We'd heard their bedroom door close, but try as we did--we couldn't hear what they were saying.  We looked at one another, and with that look we both thought, at least they're not yelling.
   They never told us what they'd talked about, but we were never allowed to go into the wood again.