And also with you

After you die, Mag told me, you're reduced to a cold mess of body parts. You stop being a person. You're just a cluster of cells. Inanimate, your body is something separate from what it was when you were alive. You're an empty shell, and just like that, the shell has nothing to do with the creature it once contained. And that was the real kicker, she said, that even if she put all his pieces back together, her dad wasn't in there anymore. Gluing together a shattered jar won't bring back the bit of life that once lived there.
His body was on the floor, still dressed in his Easter clothes. His hand was limp, but his finger was still looped around the trigger. There was a lot of blood, bits of brain and bone, Mag said. The same things that make up my head, or yours, or anyone's. The same things that were working in me so I could process the scene, so I could scream and scream and cry and call out, "DADDYDADDYDADDY, I LOVE YOU, DADDY NO, PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE,"—my parts that made me scream for God to help me, my parts that are the only reason that I can conceive of a God, were firing faster than I can understand, while his were spilling out onto the rug, soaking into the floorboards. A mess of parts, disassembled and broken. And they'd been in tact just minutes before, keeping him in there. He'd been in there, and these parts, his shell, his jar, had been able to pour my cereal, to drive me to Church, to sing the hymns with me, to put both hands together and pray, to say "Amen," to take his neighbor's hand, to say "Peace be with you."

A stranger speaking in tongues

Your lips: not thick, not supple, soft,
your slick tongue strong as a slug,
too much gum for some people
but I appreciate all that pink.
Each of your teeth like a baby pearl
sharpened into something squarish,
and each not quite but almost white,
so perfectly spaced that I find myself
sinking into each sliver of a gap
every time you slip on that sly smile,
parting your lips just to purse them again
and parting once more to please me,
but tonight I'll only see your sick grin
in memories meant strictly to tease me.

Worth

I can't believe I found this! I thought it was gone forever. It's not very good, but I wrote it a long time ago for someone . Ah, nostalgia. This is my first Dez and Lia story. Dez (sometimes called Carmilla or Carmella) and Lia (sometimes called Kit) are reoccurring characters in my writing. 

Once upon a time there was a very pretty girl whose hair was made of gold.  Though she was more beautiful than any queen, the girl came from the poorest family in San Quirico, a tiny town outside of Florence. Signora Guinizelli, knowing that she would eventually be forced to give up her youngest daughter, named her child Desideria.

Something Like Belonging

The doctor exhaled deeply as he leaned back into his seat. “I’m in a field of petunias.  I’m fishing at Lake Tahoe.  I’m at home in my Sleep Number Bed.  I am relaxed,” he thought.  Really he was hundreds of miles off the ground in an unsettlingly uncrowded plane, and this fact made it impossible for the doctor to relax.  He discretely reached into the pocket of his khakis, wrapping his fingers around a little plastic bottle of Xanax.  He looked around the cabin to make sure that no one was looking at him, but just as the doctor was about to twist the lid off of the bottle, he noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats over. 

The woman had tiny black eyes hidden beneath enormous puffs of wrinkled skin.  At first, the doctor was unsure if the woman was really looking his way or if the shadows cast by the bags around her eyes simply made it look as though she was staring, but the mere thought of someone watching him was enough to make him withdraw his hand from his pocket.  The doctor picked up one of the ancient magazines from the back of the seat in front of him, flipped it open, and pretended to read an article about poverty in Burundi.

The woman had been staring and continued to stare as the boney, graying doctor feigned interest in a magazine article in order to distract from his obvious discomfort.  The doctor reminded the woman of her second husband, who had spent most of his life worrying about money.  “Hilda, I just don’t know if we have the money to be buying the deli cheese,” he would say to her, as if the seventy-eight cent difference in price could be the difference between a comfortable retirement and sleeping in an alleyway for the rest of his life.  He had been a dentist, and he had died of a heart attack at age forty-one, never reaching the cushy retirement that he had worried over for most of his life and without ever truly being able to enjoy a slice of deli cheese.  Hilda had always felt sorry for her second husband.  She felt sorry for the doctor, as well.  She had a thought that she would go up and sit next to him.  She would put her arms around him.  She would say, “hush,” and everything would be better.  Hilda decided to remain in her seat. 

The doctor looked back at the woman, hoping that she had finally turned away or fallen asleep.  She had not, but when the doctor looked back at her, she caught the nervous desperation in his glance and turned to look at someone else, hoping to put him at ease. 

There was a girl in a wheelchair toward the back of the cabin.  Her legs were long and spindly.  She had all the appeal of a spider dying a slow death due to malnourishment.  The girl in the wheel chair looked bored, as teenagers often do.  She would have liked to listen to her headphones, but she had forgotten to pack them.  Had Hilda known, she would have offered up her headphones, but of course, there was no way for her to know this.  Hilda continued to stare.  A thin middle-aged man in a royal blue tracksuit, perhaps the father of the girl in the wheelchair, sat next to her. The father sat rigidly in his seat, a brutal hunger forcing his face into a scowl.  Hilda thought of putting her arms around the father and telling him “hush,” the way she’d imagined comforting the doctor, but the “hush” was not quite enough.  Hilda would have to kiss his forehead; she would have to say, “Regardless of what you think, you are loved.”  She thought that if she did this, he would turn into a teddy bear, something soft, something less angry.  As Hilda tried to imagine what the father would look like as a teddy bear, he turned to her and glared fiercely.  Caught by surprise, Hilda felt a tickle when the glare hit her.  She made a sound—a half giggle, half gasp.  It went like this: Gah-aah!


****************************************************************
To read the rest of the story, visit https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/175850 or look up Calla Lilies by Holly Combs on Amazon.com and download the e-Book.