from Replacement

By Kathy Lynn Harris, Copyright 2002

  Josephine called at 2 a.m. to tell me her cat was dead.

  I mumbled what I hoped were coherent words of sympathy while I rubbed my eyes, laid back and watched the swinging of the ceiling fan above my bed. The man next to me snored. He smelled, I'd just noticed, like cigars and smoked salmon. He grabbed his crotch periodically while he slept.

  "God," I whispered, mildly disgusted.

  "I know, hon. But it was his time to go," Josephine offered.

from Shelling Time

By Kathy Lynn Harris, Copyright 2000

  "Honey, pass me the green bowl, would you?"

  I handed Aunt Bessie the chipped ceramic bowl dutifully collecting the purple-hulls we were shelling—but not before I ran my fingers through the coolness of the raw peas, feeling them slide through my hands like tiny pebbles in a running creek.

  I sighed one of my sighs. Aunt Bessie raised one eyebrow, and I noticed how her shoulder-length hair—still cut in a 1960s pageboy—framed her face. Each strand, it seemed, caught its own ray of sunlight and spun it into white gold.

  Aunt Bessie always said age has a way of shaping your feelings and your thoughts and your dreams into tiny, plastic compartments, categorizing each into those worth storing and those worth forgetting over time. These mindful immortalities, she said, have purpose, picked like strawberries from fields of moments—some green, some ripe velvet maroon, some perfectly red. And I suppose she should know. At ninety-eight, she's had her share of Tupperware—though many must have melted through the years in the hot Texas sun.

from A Matter of Belief

By Kathy Lynn Harris, Copyright 1998

  They told me he died at base camp. Peacefully. But I don't believe them. It was gruesome; it was violent. Maybe he fell thousands of feet, maybe miles. Maybe his spine cracked from the impact. Perhaps nature's ragged sculptures of ice penetrated his lust, or left him dangling in mid-air, staked through the heart.

  His mother is here now, has been since the funeral. I stare at her across our tiny kitchen table and notice her black linen dress is beginning to look worn. I know before she speaks the grating of her voice, how it takes every inch of my tolerance and twists my very being into tiny knots.