J.W. McCollum
Dad accepts all offers: her beehives ($120), her boxing gloves ($10), her garden gnomes ($50), her wetsuit ($150), her welding hood ($30), her black Prada ($120). They carry it all away, past the sign in the yard, back to their big trucks, and down the street to somewhere. The place dad bought with Cheryl has a deck that looks on the beach. It has a bedroom and bathroom and an open area where they’ve stuck a fridge and a compact range. Downsize to upsize your life, he keeps saying, something he heard from his realtor.
The kids from the neighborhood joust her squash rackets ($25) down the driveway. They hobby horse her metal detector ($20) through the begonias and torture her mandolin ($40) in the garage. I had no idea she played the mandolin ($40) until Dad carried it down from the attic. Gorgeous. Rosy plumes erupting in the grain. Mother-of-pearl flames on the fretboard. She even wrote a few songs, he says, but Dad can’t remember any. One kid croons Enter Sandman in an awful falsetto while the other headbangs. Another string snaps.
I’ll take the mandolin ($40), I tell Dad. In fact, I’ll take it all. I can fit it: her crossbow ($80), her tiara ($100), her parachute ($75), her leotard ($100) her astrolabes ($200), her jazzercise tapes ($1), and all the other things that are hers and all the things that might have been but we can’t remember.
My boyfriend says the apartment’s become a sad museum. He stubs his toe on the dirt bike ($500) in my kitchen again, and now he’s staying at his place. So I spend my nights in the wheelchair ($50) watching how-to-play videos on YouTube: C D E F G A. I hold the same strings she held, run fingertips across the same frets and wonder what songs she sang, hoping they’ll find their way to me from somewhere. Some chords give me trouble, and my hand cramps after too long. It’s only been a few weeks, but I’m making progress.
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J.W. McCollum is from deep East Texas and writes emails and other things. His stories have been published in Flash Frog Literary Magazine and ScribesMICRO.