When he was young, he asked his mother to replace the chairs in his room with suitcases. I can stack them up and sit on them, he said. If they’re packed at all times, I’m always ready to travel.
She obliged, taking him to thrift stores in search of cheap suitcases. His room began to look like a left luggage office.
What if you can’t take them all? she asked one day. There are so many here.
But I am already on the voyage, he replied. I haven’t had to leave anything behind yet.
He spent their vacation taking videos of the mountains. He watched his footage in their hotel room in the evenings, while she drank glasses of wine and read her book on the balcony.
She grew impatient by the third day, angry that he was filling up their camera cards with high definition files.
Why not just take a photo? she said. It’s not like they’re moving.
Oh, but they are, he said. It’s just that they move slowly. If you wait long enough, you will see what I mean.
…..
This story first appeared on 100 Proof Stories+, a new publication I’m curating on Medium. If you want to tell stories in the 100 Proof style and have photos to go along with them, I’m accepting submissions for this new venture.
In a landlocked town in a landlocked state, he built a ship in the backyard. He hoisted the sails on windy days, and it strained the hawsers that held it to anchors sunken into concrete. He polished the figurehead he found leaning against the wall of his father’s garage and installed her, her face to the sky, her breast to the fence between his yard and the neighbors’. His wife called him Captain after that, and some days, after she left for work, he called in sick and spread out his charts, planning his next voyage.
She remembered fishing the big river with her father, the tiny fish gasping in the air. He released it from the hook, tossed it back. Let it get bigger.
But it was my first catch, she whined.
Love, too, proved slippery as a small fish. She tried every line and net she could, but love escaped her efforts, or was just too small and had to be thrown back.
She heard her father’s words: Let it get bigger. Somewhere, beneath the murky waves, love grew day by day, just waiting for her boat to linger at the surface.
He scrimped and bought a small bunch of chard, some broth, a box of pasta, but it was enough for dinner. He had unearthed a bottle of wine he had stashed away for a special night, and he’d lit a candle to cozy the small room.
Are you more afraid of what might come later? he asked. Or of losing touch with what came before?
She didn’t like to think about either, she admitted finally, but only because she’d had too much wine. I would rather just stay in the now, she said. I like it here very much.
He fights sleep with furrowed brow, pursed lips turned down. He rages against it, scratching my face and grabbing my hair as if his tight grip will wrest him from the grasp of Nod. But we are learning each other, he and I, and his nightly storms are like those roll in before baseball games in the summer. This is all going to blow over, my friends and I said, driving toward the stadium through thunder and lightning and sheets of water. His storm passes, too, giving way to smooth-faced sleep, his arms relaxed beneath the swaddle.
Have you ever seen water burn? he asked, and she shook her head, because everyone knows water doesn’t burn, but, rather, turns to steam, and that was when he struck a match and tossed it toward the lake below, and the flat water lit, making a sound like someone punched in the stomach, and everything she had known to be true evaporated before her eyes.
100 Proof 