© Werner A. Low
Evelyn leaned closer and looked at him as if she suspected a dry joke. “What you mean to say is that it looked like the one you saw when you were a kid?” she said.
Alan shook his head slowly. For the second time. “No, that’s not what I meant to say. I meant to say that it was the same leaf.”
“The very same one?
“Huh huh.”
“But Alan, that was – what? – fifty years ago!”
“I realize that.”
“Well then, how could it, how could it possibly be the same leaf? I mean, where would it have been all those years?”
“I don’t know. The same place all dead leaves go, I guess. And maybe where the new ones come from, too.”
“You mean like, resurrection? Of leaves! Come on! But, no, wait a minute, I can see how the leaf you found on your way home that day might have decomposed and returned to the earth, and then the new one was born this year, and it was like a resurrection. Is that what you mean?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying, Evelyn.”
“Tell me again what you are saying, Alan.”
“I’m saying that when I was walking home from the train I spotted a leaf on the sidewalk – a red maple leaf with a certain, very perfect interaction of oranges and yellows and red. It looked familiar, but when I picked it up I knew, instantly, and profoundly, that it was the same leaf I picked up that afternoon fifty years ago, on my way home from first grade.”
“The same leaf?”
“The very same one.”
Evelyn’s eyes had gone flat. Like she was just looking at a wall.
“You remember,” he said, trying to bring her back, “the Indian Head penny I found by the river when we were hiking?”
She nodded, a little suspiciously.
“Well, a hundred years earlier someone had flipped that coin into the water, making a wish. Or maybe it just slipped out of their pocket as they leaped from one boulder to another. Either way, it was the same penny when I found it in the mud, four generations later, worn on one side by the flow of water, but the same penny.”
She didn’t show any reaction.
“Or, you’re the same woman I married 27 years ago. You’re older now, and physically different in some ways, but you're the same person at heart.”
Evelyn took a breath, looked left, and then right, as if hoping to find an acceptable answer. But didn’t.
“It was the same leaf, Evelyn. It had the same, spicy smell. The same surprisingly solid heft. It touched my palm in exactly the same places. I’ve seen a million red maple leaves in the last fifty years, and none were like this. None came even close.”
“But couldn’t it have just been an identical leaf?” she asked, or pleaded. “Why does it have to be the very same one, Alan?”
Alan looked frustrated. Like he was going to lead Gwen through the same Geometry proof for the third time.
“Would you agree that no two snowflakes are exactly alike?” he asked. “Or any two fingerprints?”
“And, therefore, no two leaves are exactly alike?”
“Right.”
“That may very well be true, Alan. But I would challenge you to show me the differences between all those snowflakes, and those fingerprints, and leaves. I mean with just your eyes. Without a microscope or something.”
“It wasn't just my eyes, Evelyn. Or how it felt in my hand. Or how it smelled.”
“Then what was it?”
“It was also my heart that told me that it was the same leaf.”
“Well, then,” she fairly snorted. “That’s another story, isn't it.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, certainly. I mean, first you’re saying that it was physically the same leaf. Now you’re saying that it was emotionally the same leaf.”
“But they’re the same thing. They have to be. For the world to make sense.”
She searched the corners of the room again, nodded softly, as if someone had whispered something to her, then focused her eyes on him.
“Alan, did something happen at work today?”
His face hardened.
“I hate it when you do that,” he said.
“When I do what?”
“When you slide off onto some other angle. That’s what people do all the time, you know. They slide off the deeper questions, and grab hold of trivial matters, that can be resolved with logic. Then we feel secure when it all seems to make sense.”
Evelyn looked down at her hands. She reflected for a moment, nodded to herself, and then looked straight at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right about ducking the harder questions. We could do a better job of that. I know I could. I know what you mean, and I’m sorry about that. But you're not leaving me many good choices here.”
Now he was the one who looked skeptical. “You know,” he said, nodding his head in an unfavorable manner, “As I came up the steps I was hoping that you’d be thrilled, that you’d greet my news with a wide smile and say, ‘How wonderful! What a miracle! Fifty years ago you found a beautiful leaf, and instead of gluing it onto construction paper, you released it, like a bird, you said. Now, that very same leaf has come back to see you. What a joyous gift!’ That’s what you would have said in the old days, twenty five years ago, when we first met. Where did that spirit go?”
She lowered her eyes. “I don’t know, Alan. I don’t know.”
“You know, sometimes it feels like maybe you’re not, after all.”
She looked concerned.
“Not what?”
“Not the same woman I married all those years ago. Or maybe” – and now he let out a small, pained laugh, and then looked not down, or even sideways, but up, over and beyond her, shaking his head – “maybe you never were.”
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Finally Did It
© Phyllis Mass
Well, hallelujah she finally did it! Took her almost a year and a half but she did it. And it wasn’t breaking her hip that did her in. It was turning 85. From then on, she was a downhill racer on a slippery, slope. The prospect of her being 90 made living impossible. Old age for her was intolerable, an anathema, an affront she took personally. Here, she imagined she was still a willful colt frolicking in the pasture when in reality she was an old, ornery, swayback nag limping and waiting to be put out of her misery. One minute she was an elfish sprite, next she was an ancient gray-haired crone, a stooped over specter with skin shrunken, hanging in folds and a face with more pleats than an Origami class. Pleats, her mother’s word for wrinkles.
Do you think she really cared that everyone told her didn’t look a day over 75? Do you really think it made her feel any better? Hell, it was pure torment, living amid an endless sea of antiquities. Wrecks of the Hesperus, she called them. A Stygian trench of wheelchairs, canes, and walkers, a limbo of droolers clucking on about this condition and that, a bottomless purgatory of adult diaper wearers ruled by Brobdinagian aides who transported them to and fro. To be reduced to this! Her! All those vacuous people endlessly babbling on and on about their offspring and their doctors, thinking that a sojourn to Walgreens or Stop and Shop in a broken-down wreck of a mini van was their apotheosis. Space taker-upers and oxygen depletes she called them.
She said it was an infernal old age home when they moved to the Sunset Acres, but did her sister listen? No. Now she hears sister Clara’s moving because she’s seen the heavenly light and heard the gospel. She hates to be an I told you so, but one has to know when it’s time to take one’s leave. She doesn’t remember who said it. Perhaps, it was Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker who said that after three days house guests smell like rotten fish. Boy, were they right on the money about that one!
Well, as you can imagine, things are fairly quiet for her now. Not a lot of annoying noises. No loud TVs, radios or blaring rock music, no fluttering curtains to drive her to distraction and no violin music to get into her very core. Frankly, she’s relieved. She won’t ever have to feel that way, or any way again. It’s one of the host of benefits she derives from being in her altered state. And joy of joys, not one health fanatic here to nag the life out of her about not eating and drinking. And, after a year and a half, that’s huge comfort, except for the occasional train passing by. When her family bought cemetery plots back in 1955, her brother-in law was most concerned with securing higher ground so that rainwater wouldn’t collect and settle while they were at their eternal rest. They never thought to inquire about a train. It never occurred to them that Kensico Gardens had its own train station. It wasn’t all that fancy. In fact,Valhalla, NY was really God’s country back then.
She hates to complain, because she’s really so comfortable now. Her French Provincial sarcophagus is cozy. It reminds her of a Venetian water taxi, elegant, comfortable and smooth. Its refreshing satin sheets, and Eternal Beautyrest, not too firm and not too soft, just perfect for her kind of deep, delicious slumber. She wants everyone to know how happy she is with her plain linen shift. For a minute there, she feared she’d have to spend her forever looking like a refugee from the Plymouth Rock in that elaborate handmade sheath with the enormous pointed collar and Battenberg lace cap the salesman was pitching. Here’s to simplicity and the good sense of style that prevailed that day. And, while she’s on the subject, she appreciates being sent her off with deck of cards so her sister Anne and she can play poker. However, she thinks it might’ve been wiser to include two decks because until someone else arrives, and she’s not rushing anyone, her brother-in-law, Anne, and she constitute a threesome. Solitaire, of course, is always an option, but sometimes alone time weights heavy. By the way, she thinks that another stroke of pure genius was sending her off with the Sunday Times Magazine Section and a stiletto sharp Number 2 pencil for the puzzle, so she assumes, and she’s just guessing, that the reason her eyeglasses were omitted was an oversight. Is she right?
One last thing, while she wholeheartedly approves of the tasteful granite monument, she really doesn’t care what goes on it. The usual Beloved Sister, Devoted Aunt routine is fine with her. What she does care about is this: Under no circumstances is her date of birth to be carved into that granite. She never told a soul how old she was and she sure as hell doesn’t want her age made public for all eternity.
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Website Artwork: "Caught in Gravity" © Denny Marshall