the drug for OUR TIME

I have been writing like mad although have posted no evidence of same, I wanted to finish a story that has turned into a novella I am going to submit it to a contest. Started six weeks ago so that’s why no litbits but I’ve been dying to write them but didn’t want to change the energy because it was really working for me with that novella, it’s resting for a few days before I give it a final edit and then off it goes end of January.

So here’s a little soft and slow story that’s been brewing and came out all at once this morning when it was dark and silent.

If you signed up for the Beelines In Winter chapters, I will be posting weekly once its had a rest and a final edit, if you haven’t signed up you can send me an email – sherry@litbit.ca – here all it means is that I will notify you as new chapters are available. If you missed it. here is a link to Chapter 1 for a taste.

Hope you enjoy this and thanks for being here.

The Drug for Our Time by Sherry Cassells

She whispers good morning, a single dose, and then twice more.

Whispers take up more space than voice, they contain all states of matter, I wait for another but three is her limit, not sure I could handle a fourth, there’s a brink to joy, that’s the point, it needs to pool. 

I say it back when I can, a tinge of voice in my breath, good morning, it’s everything I have.

There is no diminishing of the darkness, it holds without increment as it goes from solid to liquid to gas, my heart beats in threes like a waltz.

She has fallen asleep in this meadow of ours.

I hear the single column of her snore like a faraway plane, I stay pooled, it takes everything I’ve got to stay two three, but there’s an approaching interference, once it stirs it amplifies – our children – I feel the bedroom door open and one kind of magic exits as another piles in, they are like hot water bottles, messy and damp and smelling of earth and dog and something sweet, the airplane stops, circles, lands, she laughs, it’s a perfectly silent thing but it takes up space and is magnificent. I pocket it.

I make it out of the house, my feet upon the sidewalk, I try to stay in the lines. At the bus stop I do not look back. I am afraid there will be no house, no bedrooms for the invisible children, nowhere for my pretend wife to live. I take the third window seat as always, turn my head eye level to the truth, my skinny cat sits between books on the windowsill of my small apartment, dingy and cheap because it’s hard to sleep against this busy broken street, I think the drug for our time is imagination.