Rhyme and Harmony
Approximately a half-day before you died, I finally retrieved the hammock from my car and strung it in a park five hundred miles away. I’d bought the hammock in September, then the weather had chilled. Through the deeps of fall and winter, the bright canvas stripes reproached from my trunk.
I was nervous; I’d never looped a hammock from trees. It shouldn’t be so warm, a day and a half still of winter.
Never Quarter
The unexpected road trip was the first in my new car, and much like a wintery weekend away with a new lover, we were still learning how to feel together, fit together. I didn’t speed until near the end, but I did narrowly avoid collision most of the drive, distracted not so much by thoughts of the dead I was going to visit but the living to whom I shouldn’t tell this tale.
Vallie Lynn Watson is the author of the novel A River So Long (Luminis Books); her Pushcart-nominated short stories appear widely in literary journals such as Hobart, PANK, and Bending Genres. Watson teaches fiction in the MFA program at McNeese State University, where she edits the magazine Boudin. She hunts for seaglass in her spare time.