PD LYONS

★ ★ ★ ★

FLASH FICTION

Image by Melissa Mullin

‘Trees Like These in Winter’

Used to walk by trees like these, even in winter when they were black like the stone walls beside them. It was a time between houses. I was alone except for a couple of friends who had taken me in, not so far from where I used to live. When I was still married, the wife and I, we’d ride these dirt roads of New England. Thick second growth woodlands, occasional colonial ruins, old fields skeletal marked, ubiquitous stone walls in the middle of everywhere and nowhere. We’d race on the open stretches sometimes. She always won, even when we’d swap horses.

So eventually along this old, straight, tree-lined dirt road closed to modern traffic, I’m walking on my own that perfect strip to race. Hoping since it was now deep winter, she’d have stayed home, or if she did ride by she’d not recognize me, or that maybe if she did come by she’d stop and not go on ignoring me? But it was cold deep winter and I knew she didn’t much like that. She might be sat by the fire. Possibly in town. More likely down the islands where it was plenty warm and people knew her.

Made my way to someplace I knew existed, the crook of a stone wall, to flick, fumble, and eventually light a sacramental cigarette. To the east, to the south, to the west, to the north; as above, so below; as within, so without. On this smoke, that is my prayer.

For this snow, this wind, this gunmetal sky, this cold, cold, cold against the small heat of my beating heart: Thank you.