a package from home

This is a short one, that’s how it goes some days, I never pre-determine the length of a story I just write until it ends, and sometimes the ending is served up unexpectedly, I don’t always bite, but this one seemed perfect, so I took it.

I used think differently, but brevity is not a cop-out.

Thanks for being here.

A Package from Home by Sherry Cassells

We’re more than a week in and people are still saying it’s already September as if there’s some injustice involved, as if it’s their first time around, as if they don’t have a calendar and nobody else does either.

I got a package from home yesterday, just call me Julie Andrews, it’s all brown paper and string but flattened under crisscrossed layers of packing tape, it’s the size and shape of a baby and the same soft fullness if you know what I mean – sorry, it’s too early for a good analogy – my name is messy but beautiful, my address blobby but neat, Aunt Grace still uses the cartridge pens of her youth, the ink’s black but feels green, letters like stems, she’s right-handed but her writing leans backward and it’s always been chunky and bold as if it’s trying to sustain its angle but now there is evidence of a struggle, it’s fainter and straighter and smaller, an airplane smokes through my head, I need to visit.

I know what it is, this hard/soft annual package – it is a carefully-folded hand-knit sweater in a shade of green – but I am at the moment without the courage to open it.

This is not exactly procrastination; it is self-preservation.

I know that semi-colon looks like it’s winking, as if to indicate there’s a bit of a joke there, but there isn't, there is a very real chance I would die from not a broken heart but a carefully folded one.