Gone Lawn 67 : Laura B Weiss

She doesn’t know why she bought a cantaloupe on that blustery January morning after the storm, why she lugged that scaly melon home from the market, down ice-slicked streets and past snowed-in houses to where she lived on the far side of town. Maybe that cantaloupe was a prayer for summer, for sun, for her man, but she would have settled for the promise of a healing spring. Maybe that melon meant memory, an ode to last summer, when her man pulled weeds, planted berries and corn, cultivating his crop deep into the fall until husks littered the depleted soil. Maybe she set that melon on her kitchen counter hoping when she cracked it open, she’d smell July’s honeysuckles, taste August’s berries, but on this gray January afternoon, this supermarket melon, this pale winter fruit, played her the fool because when she bit into it she tasted nothing.

Last summer she laughed when her man wobble-spun peaches across the kitchen counter. She flicked blackberries at his chest. He wiped sweat from his snowman-white face, then hurled berries back at her. His red blood cells were dwindling, but we didn’t know it back then and tattooed with purple and coral fruit-ink, we collapsed in a giggling heap on the kitchen floor. August sun burned through the window. Later, we two shared the moon.

In the market on this January morning, skull-hard peaches, shipped from distant lands, rose in piles. She bought the cantaloupe, hoping it hid beneath its scaly exterior sweet flesh.

Now, this afternoon, more snow fell and she sat trapped in her house, while ten miles away in his hospital bed, plasma dripped through a line into her man’s skeleton-gray body. If only she was a snowy owl, she’d fly through the curtain of white and carry her man home.

Laura B. Weiss is a fiction writer and journalist with work in South Florida Poetry Journal, JMWW, Flash Boulevard, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Five on the Fifth, 10 x 10 Flash, The New York Times and Interior Design, among others. She was a Publishers Weekly book reviewer and BLR (Bellevue Literary Review) reader. She was also a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow and is the author of Ice Cream: A Global History (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press 2011). Her Instagram.