by Laura Hardy
The guests were tall like church pews. Devouring stale crackers, giving their bad breathed goodbyes. The iridescent pearls at my mother’s collarbone bit at my flesh. I studied the splintering prayer bench far from my dangling feet. The Autumn air had stolen the moisture from our skin. Cracks in my fingers became salted cracks in the concrete. My eyes traced them to the water’s edge. Gold and blackened leaves waltzed over the plastic blue cover. Below the surface a shadow of the dead rippled my skin. Fear itself whimpered explicitly from the balding trees that grains of sand were pounding at the bottom of my own hourglass. I ran back inside as wind chimes played their funeral march.