Mystery Woman PGallaher

            “Have you come to take me home?” my mother asks, in a high and thin voice. My chest, like a balloon, inflates with guilt. It’s Saturday. Every other Saturday I make the two-hour trip and arrive in time for lunch, nursing-home starches, heavy but tasty – yummy yeast rolls and banana pudding, one of the perks of a small-town facility where somebody’s grandmother is the cook. “Not yet. It’s almost time for lunch, and today we’re having fried chicken.” I hear the false note in my too-bright voice. But she lights up. Fried chicken is her favorite meal. Nothing to compare with hers, when she cooked for her family, but good enough. I push her wheelchair toward the dining room and settle her in a line of other residents in wheelchairs, waiting for lunch. Waiting, just waiting. Lots of waiting here. The nurses say she asks the same question again and again. To the doctors listening to her tired heart. The prea...

            She is eighty-eight years old, she reminds me, my small, scrunched-up mother, as round as Santa with hair as white and fluffy as his beard.   “The tenth of February, I’ll be eighty-nine,” she announces.             The car clock says it’s 1:55 as we begin the one hundred-mile trip to my house for Christmas.   This is our tradition since my dad has been gone, six years.   Two years ago my brother David died.   This year I am divorced.   It’s hard to keep traditions going.   I punch buttons on the radio, trying to find Christmas songs.   I settle for a country station that plays oldies – Willie Nelson’s twangy “On the Road Again.” Serendipity.             “Belle has the same birthday as me, the tenth of February. She’s sixty and I’m eighty-eight,” Mother says.   “S...

My father belonged to the generation and culture of Southern men that seriously avoided any talk of feelings. He was no-nonsense, work-from-dawn-till-dusk, back as straight as a two-by-four, but he had his gentle moments. His hands were rough, his arms lean and powerful, and he would scoop me up one-handed after a day in the fields, and I would rub my small fingers across his bristly jawline. He wiped away tears when he left me at college and, later, when we said goodbye at the airport, as I headed for the Peace Corps. My father declared his love for Jesus in heartfelt prayers, but he never told me he loved me. I don’t believe I ever told him I loved him, either.             Our family was poor, though I didn’t know it. I had everything I needed, more than   many families in our rural community. Daddy paid for medicine that other men could not buy for their children. He put men to work when he didn’t need their help. Men w...

My husband is coming to terms with the situation. I can see it in the beam of his flashlight, a half-hearted movement of light that was so purposeful in the beginning. I can hear it in his voice. He’s losing hope.             It’s the middle of the night, and our old dog is lost in the woods.             Ink Spot is fourteen-and-a-half years old. She doesn’t hear or see well, and arthritis has taken its toll on her hind legs. She’s apt to topple over, mid-squat. The noise she makes is more like a moose than a bark. My husband tried to reassure me when we first missed her, pointing out that Ink Spot is too crippled to go far, but that was two hours ago.             Our house is on top of a hill at the end of a steep, winding driveway, a quarter of a mile long. We have four acres of land, most of it wooded. From one ...

The sun is spilling gold around her But he's texting. She might offer a smile that would make him sizzle like an electric wire They might talk go for coffee see a movie take a walk on a path that winds through snow like confectioners sugar frosting He might pull her into the warm crook of his arm But he's texting. They might get married have four children, one who would discover a cure for the most vicious disease of the century They might sleep bodies entwined every night for sixty glorious years And waking every morning, he might see or believe he still sees the girl with sunlight spilling gold around her But he's texting. pgallaher@copyright 2019 Published in Tetrahedra www.phyllisgobbell.com

For my brother, who left this world too soon I did not follow you to the fields to plow the dark, cool soil by night, after a day’s work for cash. But I know how your boy-frame hunched forward in the tractor seat to hug the wheel, how moonlight fell across your bare back, how the engine’s hum mesmerized you. Farm boy, at home in the family fields. I did not follow you on the open road sailing into the heartland to lush wheat ripe for harvest. But I know you drove fast with windows down, wind rushing against your face, plains sweeping toward Litchfield, Des Moines, Moline, big farm territory, wide-open sky. John Deere boy, at home in the vast Midwest. I did not follow you to West Tennessee as you greeted coffee-guzzling farmers mornings in the café, raising a flat palm. But I know the ring of your Hel-lo-o-o! as sunburned faces crinkled - chewing tobacco or smoking expensive cigars - men calling out, Hey Dave!...

TREACHERY IN TUSCANY A Jordan Mayfair Mystery Chapter 1 Sunday morning, my first glimpse of Florence since I was twenty-one. Sunday morning in the spacious piazza , quiet, except for the chime of church bells from an ancient bell tower. My jet-lagged brain tried to take in everything, all at once. No sign to identify the Convento di Santa Francesca Firenze , but the GPS on our rental car had directed us to the imposing fifteenth-century convent. A white Alfa Romeo with a blue stripe and the words “ Polizia Municipale ” along the side pulled away from the curb as we took our luggage from the trunk of our Fiat. A waif-like teenager standing some distance away waited until the police car had departed before she came closer to us. “ Convento ?” I said. She said something in Italian, to which I could only reply, “ Non capisco.” “ Sí. It is the convent,” she said. So my Italian left something to be desired. The girl gave the stark terra cotta façade a...