e r i c    b e e n y

Creak
 

The birds sound like little helicopters. How the first day you’re alive is the first day you’re capable of death. How you’ve always had that capability. That potential. Rosa doesn’t want to wake Merrill. Rosa tiptoes past the room.


Merrill spilled wine at dinner, and Rosa thought of her garden the way the wine bloomed across the tablecloth.


“Shit,” he said.


His father used to tell him war stories. How the sun is only one star out of a still unknown number of stars formed from a still unknown number of stars that have already died.


How stars give birth to themselves without making a sound.


How it’s not their fault.


Merrill asked, “Tell me again what happened to your arm, daddy.”


He picked up the wine glass and put it in the sink. How light travels through time. How young light seems, how old stars are and how so many might already be dead and how their light is still alive.


What is that, Merrill thinks.


Merrill washed his hands in the kitchen sink, looking out the window. It was dark. Birds at night. Little helicopters.


Rosa came up behind him, put her arms around him and whispered into his ear something she’d asked him to tell her again in the morning.


Rosa tiptoes. The floor creaks.


Rosa says, “Shit.” She doesn’t mean it.

 

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Eric Beeny (b. 1981) is the author of The Dying Bloom (Pangur Ban Party, 2009), Snowing Fireflies (Folded Word Press, 2010), Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press, 2010), Pseudo-masochism (Medulla Publishing, 2011), Milk Like a Melted Ghost (Thumbscrews Press, 2011), and some other things. He blogs at Dead End on Progressive Ave. http://ericbeeny.blogspot.com.

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