Black Star

In a secret compound, hundreds of feet underground, Wayland Smith used a clean, microfiber cloth to polish the bomb he’d worked so carefully on for the past few months. It was a new technology he had used, a technology that the rest of the world didn’t know about yet, because Wayland had conceived of it in his captivity and had been forbidden from sharing his secret with the world. When it was unleashed, of course, it would be no secret that this bomb was stronger than any nuclear weapon ever made, and it may just in fact destroy the world.

Wayland was a scientist, and up until a few months ago he had lived a relatively normal life outside of his work, which was always intense and impossible to speak about with anyone else. It hadn’t been a secret back then, that he was working on explosives, it was just that talk of chemistry had always bored people so much, he never bothered trying to explain to his wife or friends what he was doing at the lab all day.

Looking back, Wayland realized this may have been his biggest mistake. Perhaps if he had told Mary what he had been working on, she would have encouraged him to find another project. She probably would have told him it was dangerous, and she definitely would have told him that he should do good for the world with his talents, he should work to create and to help people, not to destroy and kill. She would have been right, and Wayland may or may not have listened to her. But he never did tell her about his projects, and so the day the President’s brothers came to his lab to pick him up, he was surprised.

Wayland didn’t recognize the men walking into his lab. He looked up briefly and said: “Please leave, there’s restricted access on this floor, you aren’t supposed to be here.”

But the two men walked right up to him and opened a briefcase on his worktable. One of them removed papers and handed them to Wayland as the other spoke.

“Do you know who we are?”

Wayland looked up at the man and squinted through his glasses. The men did both look familiar, but Wayland couldn’t place them.

“Just read it,” the man said.

Wayland was annoyed at the interruption, but he became quickly intrigued when he saw that the top of the page was stamped with the seal of the President of the United States, and that it looked like the letter, which was demanding he come to the White House immediately, was legitimate.

“Is this some sort of joke?”

“No, Mr. Smith. You need to come with us immediately.”

Wayland locked up his lab and followed them out, of course not knowing that he would never return.

At the White House, he didn’t have to go through security. He strolled with the two men right into the West Wing and was deposited into the Oval Office, where the president shortly met him. Still, Wayland was annoyed at being pulled away from his work. He couldn’t even feign awe, he didn’t even try to pretend that he was impressed or grateful. He just wanted to know what was going on.

North Korea was going to attack America, the president told Wayland. They had nuclear weapons and were threatening to use them on Americans, and the president had heard of the secret project Wayland had been working on, a project that Wayland hadn’t even bothered to name, but the president called it Black Star.

Wayland had tried to argue with the president that the bomb wasn’t ready, that there were still serious problems that needed to be worked out before he would even be convinced that it would work, and even then, Wayland professed that he didn’t want the bomb to ever be used, and he tried refusing then to be a part of it.

But it didn’t matter, what Wayland said. 

The two men who had brought Wayland to the White House entered through a door behind him. Without a word, one of the men handed him a slip of paper, and Wayland glanced down.

It was a picture of Mary, his wife. She was sitting in a cell of some sort, on a small metal bench with no mattress, and she was looking up to the security camera in the corner of the cell that snapped the photo.

Wayland’s eyes flicked back up to the man, and he instantly realized who the two men were. The taller one, who had handed him the photo, was the White House Chief of Staff, and the other was the president’s personal assistant. 

The man said: “We have your wife in a secure location. You WILL comply with orders from the president, do you understand?”

Wayland understood, and he had gotten right to work.

Now, the bomb was ready and the president’s brothers in crime were on their way down to retrieve it.

Wayland kept polishing the bomb, and with his right hand, he squeezed repeatedly on the handle of the hammer he was holding beneath the table. 

The door opened suddenly, and Wayland tensed, coiled for the strike.

Fuck the bomb. It wouldn’t work, anyway. He had made sure of it.

Wayland smiled as the men proceeded toward him.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Wendryn challenged me with "Wayland the Smith in the modern world. What would he be like here and now?" and I challenged Sarah Sparks with "We don't need Wall Street's Occupy movement, we need Tyler Durden's Project Mayhem."

Deceitful

It had been a month since Hannah’s disappearance, and for the first time since his wife had walked out the front door to (maybe) never return, Evan went to Moe’s after work instead of going straight home as he’d been doing.

Work was wearing him out. He had taken two weeks off after Hannah disappeared, but the time came when he realized that even though his boss at the high school was understanding about his situation and was willing to give him all the time he needed to cope, staying home alone and thinking about Hannah was worse than facing a room full of teenagers and thinking about Hannah. Somehow, the kids helped drown out the little voices in his head, the ones that never stopped chattering about the wheres and the whys.

Usually, Evan would go right home after school. Sometimes he would stop at the liquor store to pick up a bottle of vodka or two – he’d been drinking more than usual since Hannah disappeared – but most of the time he would go straight home, start drinking, and eventually heat up one of the many meals that had been cooked and brought over to him from well-meaning friends and family members. He’d been eating more this past month than he had since college and the pounds were starting to stick on hips and belly. Hannah would be so disappointed with him, he always thought as he reached to brush crumbs from his shirt, or when he would look in the mirror hours after eating and see that he had ketchup stuck in the corners of his mouth. Grief was making him sloppy, and so far he hadn’t managed to care enough about himself to do better.

If Irina hadn’t called, Evan would have gone home as usual to eat his fill and drink until he got even more sloppy, but Irina Culver was Hannah’s literary agent, and she needed something that was on a disk in Hannah’s office, a disk that only he could get because it was locked up in one of her filing cabinets.

“I’d rather not come over and invade your privacy,” Irina told him on the phone. “Will you just meet me somewhere in town?”

Evan knew that it was a bullshit excuse. Irina Culver didn’t care about anyone’s privacy, especially the privacy of any of her clients or their families. Irina didn’t want to come over for the same reason that so many other people didn’t – they felt uncomfortable being in a woman’s house when no one knew where she was. It was never Evan’s house, not really. Even though he was the one whose name was on the mortgage and it was his teaching salary that paid for it, it had always been Hannah’s house. When people came over lately, most of them wore a face of guilt, like they were intruding into the residence when no one was there, even though Evan stood right beside them.

“Let’s meet at Moe’s,” Evan said without thinking, and it was only after he had hung up the phone that he realized he’d made a terrible mistake and couldn’t even call Irina back to change the location, because he didn’t know her number. He could find it, of course, but that would mean digging through Hannah’s things in her office, and just getting a disk out of her filing cabinet was hard enough – those were her things, her little babies that she nurtured and worked on to the point of ignoring Evan for days.

The next night, Evan walked into Moe’s with a sense of dread. Maybe Amy wouldn’t be there. He hadn’t seen her in over a month, not since Hannah disappeared, and for all he knew, Amy could have gotten another job or just have changed her schedule. When he walked in, instead of sitting at the bar he took the closest booth by the door. That way Irina would see him as soon as she walked in, and maybe they could get this business over with quickly before anyone spotted Evan.

Amy wasn’t working the bar, that much Evan could tell. It was being tended by Moe himself, who gave Evan a solemn nod and raised a glass to him. A moment later, Moe brought a glass of vodka and tonic to Evan’s table and walked away without a word. Evan  hadn’t talked to Moe in a month, but it was obvious that everyone in town knew about Hannah, and Evan was very grateful to not be questioned or otherwise bothered by the man he’d begun to consider a friend. Men knew better than women when to keep their mouths shut, and to wait for delicate conversations to be brought up rather than engage in them.

Irina walked in when Evan was about half finished with his drink, and she slipped into the booth across from him, looking all business.

“Did you find it?”

“Yeah,” Evan said, taking the compact disk from his pocket and sliding it over the table. “May I ask what it is?”

“It’s related to Hannah’s last book, Those Girls. She was screenwriting a commercial to speak out against high school bullies. It’s a shame she won’t get to be in it. I always thought she had a face for the screen.”

Evan stared at Irina, whose face took on a shocked look, as if she herself couldn’t believe what she had said.

“I’m so sorry Evan. I’m so sorry. I mean, the filming won’t begin for another few weeks, so of course there’s a chance…”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Evan brushed off her comment with a wave of his hand and then put his empty glass down at the edge of the table, praying inside that Moe would replace it with a full glass before Irina had the chance to say anything else. Unfortunately, it was Amy who replaced his drink a moment later, sliding a full glass of vodka onto the table and whisking up the empty one as quickly and quietly as a magic trick.

Evan and Irina looked up, and Amy smiled at Evan.

“Hi,” she said, ignoring Irina. “How are you, Evan?”

“I’m…”

“Well, I’d better get going,” Irina said, standing up and gathering her purse in her arms. “It was good to see you Evan, I’ll be in touch,” and then she was out the door, fleeing Evan as so many people had done under pressure lately.

Evan’s gaze moved to Amy, starting at her legs – he wondered why she was wearing shorts in the middle of winter, no matter how hot it got inside the bar on busy nights – up to her slim waist, to her perfect young breasts, to that face that used to make him smile uncontrollably, the face he used to think he loved.

“Hi Amy,” he said.

Amy sat down in the booth where Irina had been a moment before, reached her hand across the table and tried grabbing for Evan’s hand, but he didn’t let her take it. Instead, she gave his wrist a light squeeze. Her eyes were searching him, trying to figure out what he was thinking and where she stood now that his wife was out of the picture, and Evan could barely hide his disgust and shame. His skin was crawling under her touch, and so he pulled away.

“I heard about your wife.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I’m really sorry,” Amy said, and Evan laughed, a mocking scoff that he instantly regretted.

Amy’s face sank and lips trembled. He’d never seen her cry before, but Evan imagined that this was the look a twenty-two year old girl’s face had before she fell apart.

“I was just so worried about you,” Amy said, her voice soft. She looked around the bar, making sure no one was watching too closely before she went on. “I thought you might call me, or something. I wanted to help you, to be there for you if you needed me. You never returned my texts or my emails, and no one had seen you around.. I just didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what was going on. Are you okay?”

“Amy, my wife disappeared.”

“I know,” Amy said, sitting back in the booth, pulling farther away from him. She looked out the window next to her, and Evan saw one tear fall down her cheek, but nothing more.

He finished his second drink, putting the glass down with more force than necessary, and Amy’s attention snapped back to him.

“More?” she asked, and Evan nodded.

Amy got up, taking his two empty glasses with her to the bar. So Evan watched her walk away – watched the muscles in her calves flex, watched her breasts bounce with each step, watched her ass shake, making every head turn that she passed.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Lilu challenged me with "Screenwriting a commerical" and I challenged Liz Culver with "You wake up in the middle of the night and there's a T-Rex standing outside, peering into your bedroom window with its huge, unblinking eye. What do you do?"

Speculation

It was loud in the house; the mourners clomping around the hardwood floors created a cacophony that set Evan’s head to pounding. He sat at one end of the couch in the living room, only looking up to make brief eye contact with the few people who walked up to him and began conversations of their own accord, because what could he possibly say to anyone? He’d just buried an empty coffin, empty but for Hannah’s pristine wedding dress, because somewhere out in the world her body either lay or moved, undiscovered.

A little girl skipped up to the couch and plopped herself down at the other end. Her hands, Evan could see, were sticky with frosting from one of the cupcakes that had been laid out on his dining room table. The girl scooted toward him, smearing pink frosting on the couch Hannah had always made sure was perfectly clean. She would never have let anyone eat in this room. She would be having a fit if she were there to see this girl messing up her couch.

“Is this your house?” The little girl asked him, her eyes wide and curious. She was maybe four or five years old, and Evan had no idea who the girl belonged to.

“No,” he answered. “I’m just visiting. Hey, want to do me a favor?”

“Sure!” The little girl said, an excited smile spreading across her face.

“Go get me one of those little cupcakes over there? They sure look good.”

“They are good,” the girl said, holding up three fingers. “I’ve had two already.”

Evan smiled as the girl scampered back to the dining room, and got up from the couch quickly. He kept his head down and didn’t make eye contact with anyone he passed as he moved through his house and went out the back door that opened onto the stone patio.

“Oh, God,” Evan said under his breath. There was only one person sitting on the patio and it was the one person Evan had no interest in talking to, but he knew he was trapped.

“No God here,” Detective Belarus replied as he exhaled a lungful of smoke. “God’s away on business. Stuck with me.”

Evan collapsed into a patio chair opposite Belarus, reaching across the small patio table and nodding towards the detective’s shirt pocket that bulged with a cigarette pack. Belarus passed one to Evan, then slid a lighter across the table. After Evan had lit up and passed the lighter back, Belarus spoke again.

“Quite a turn out.”

“My wife was a nice woman. She was a well-respected writer. No reason there shouldn’t be a lot of people attending her memorial.”

“Just didn’t expect you’d have such a big reception afterwards.”

“I didn’t want to, trust me, all this is thanks to her sister.”

“Bet you just want to kick everyone out of your house and get back to life.”

“Hannah’s been gone three months. I’ve already gotten back to life. I wish we hadn’t done this.”

“Interesting choice of words there, Mulraney. Hannah’s been gone, you say. Not Hannah’s been dead.”

“Well, show me proof that she’s dead and maybe I’ll change my words, but you and your people haven’t been able to come up with much of anything, have you?”

There was so much more Evan wanted to say to Don Belarus, who was the lead detective on his wife’s disappearance, but he bit his tongue. He had already been through the wringer with Belarus more than a few times in as many months - apparently when a person disappears, the spouse is always the first one questioned, the first one suspected of any wrongdoing.

Heavy silence hung between them. The men smoked and put out their cigarettes in the ashtray on the table. Time passed without them talking, and Belarus lit up again, passing the pack and lighter back to Evan. He took another cigarette gratefully. He had stopped smoking years ago, before he and Hannah had married, but he’d picked up the habit again recently, figuring he had nothing else to lose.

“What’s that like, burying an empty coffin?”

Evan almost choked. “Are you fucking serious? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Belarus laughed. He had always been a mean one, had suspected right from the beginning that Evan had done something to Hannah - killed her and hid her body, hired a contract killer, scared her off - something. He had never given Evan the benefit of the the doubt, and it looked like he wasn’t about to start now.

“Just curious, just curious. Doesn’t happen every day; I might not get the chance to ask anyone again.”

“Well you know what, Belarus? I hope you get to ask Hannah one day. I hope you get to ask her ‘What’s it like knowing your husband buried your empty coffin?’ Maybe one day I’ll finally get you off my back so you can start doing your job and find out what really happened to her.”

Belarus leaned toward Evan and spit on the patio. “I’m workin’ on it.” The detective’s voice was low and gruff. Evan could see that he was angry at himself for having so little to go on and it gave Evan a warm pulse of pleasure, quickening his heart.

Belarus sat back and then turned his head sharply to the backyard. Evan followed his gaze and saw a flock of wild turkeys making its way across his lawn and towards the bit of woods separating his yard from his neighbor’s.

“You ever think that’s how she did it?” Belarus asked, and Evan looked at him. “You think she just got up out of that car and walked into the woods on her own accord?”

Evan didn’t say anything, so Belarus continued.

“Sometimes I wonder whether that’s what she did. I think about her sometimes, Hannah. Sometimes when I shouldn’t be thinking about her, like when I’m eating breakfast with the wife or when I’m driving my boy home from school. Not on the job, you know? Sometimes I think of reasons she might’ve done it. Like you were beatin’ on her, or maybe she had some secret lover that she was running off to meet and maybe she got eaten by a bear or something. Sometimes I think we’re going to find a pile of her bones in the woods with teeth marks on them.”

Evan narrowed his eyes at Belarus, and then turned to look back at the turkeys disappearing one by one into the trees. Belarus wouldn’t stop talking for anything, and really, Evan didn’t mind all that much. At least Belarus had the balls to say what he knew everyone else was thinking. They didn’t find her body - what can anyone do but speculate, often and imaginatively?

“I think about the shoes sometimes,” Belarus said matter-of-factly. “But lately I’ve took to thinking that they are just an anomaly in the case. She could have had other shoes with her, right? Those were just beat up old Cons, and there was snow on the ground. She could have had other shoes, snow boots, stashed in the trunk.”

“All of her shoes were in the house except for the Converse she was wearing when she left. I’ve told you that a hundred times.”

“What, Mulraney? You expect me to believe everything you say?” Belarus shook his head and gave a throaty chuckle. “That’s cute. But really, you can’t expect to believe everything your wife said either, right? How are you to know whether she didn’t just buy some other shoes, paid cash and walked out of the store with them an hour after she left the house? You don’t know about the shoes, because there’s nothing to know about the shoes. The shoes don’t matter.”

“How could they not matter?” Evan asked. He was exasperated and growing tired of this chat with the detective, but on the other hand, this was the first time Belarus had ever really opened up to Evan outside of the station. He had expected Belarus to be cruel, but he had never thought him to be cunning. There had to be something about the shoes that mattered. Besides that stupid book, the shoes were the only things Hannah had left behind.

Belarus shrugged. “So maybe they do matter. Don’t know the how or the why of it yet, that’s all.”

They watched the last of the turkeys disappear into the woods. Voices from the house carried out from the house - “Where’s Evan?” They heard someone ask, and Evan looked over his shoulder nervously, praying no one came out to find him.

“Some people, I think, just don’t want to be found,” Belarus said, and Evan stood up. “And sometimes, things just disappear. That’s it. Poof - they’re gone, and you can’t ever find them.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Evan said, walking out into the yard, leaving Belarus and the mourners behind him.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Grace O'Malley challenged me with "God's away on business" and I challenged Sir with "I want the operation, but she doesn't. We are at an impasse. Being conjoined gets old, you know?"

Hannah

A year to the day he had buried her empty coffin, Evan Mulraney saw Hannah sitting in the living room chair when he walked into his house after a long day at work.

At first he didn't notice her there. Evan walked into the darkened front hallway, took off his shoes and left them on the rug by the door to dry, hung his raincoat on a peg, and turned to lock the door behind him. It wasn't until Evan had his hand hovering near the light switch that he saw the figure in the high backed Victorian chair by the windows. It looked like a tall woman wearing a long white dress, sitting as if waiting for something.

“Hello?” Evan asked, and only after his mouth was closed did he realize that no sound had actually escaped his lips. Evan’s whisper was caught up in his fear, and he trembled.

'Shake it off,' Evan thought to himself, 'You're seeing things.'

Maybe he would have been able to brush it off as a figment of his overactive imagination, maybe he could have passed it off as a blur on his contact lens, but when he flipped the light switch it remained dark in the house, and as lightning flashed Evan knew that the woman in his living room was no figment of his imagination.

Evan dropped his briefcase at his feet; it clattered to the floor and broke open, spilling out his papers, sending his cell phone and a pack of gum skittering across the hardwood floor. His heart was pounding so hard he imagined that whoever was sitting in that chair must be able to hear it, must be able to see, even in the dark, his shirt fluttering with every beat in his chest.

Evan took one step back, that was all he could manage. He leaned against the wall behind him and stared into the living room, at the woman, the thing in that chair.

It was Hannah. But it wasn't Hannah.

A year ago Hannah had left home. It had been an unseasonably warm morning nearing Christmas, and she had left to run some errands. She was just going down to the craft store for wrapping supplies, and maybe she’d stop and have a coffee at her favorite little cafe in town.  ‘I’ll only be a couple of hours, I’ll be right back,’ she had said to him as she walked out the door.

He reported her missing that evening, and it was a week before they found her car abandoned on the side of the road in a town two states away. They searched the car for evidence of her being taken, and indeed it did seem that she had been snatched from her car, because all that was left of her belongings was a pair of Converse shoes and a book titled ‘The Memory or Lies,’ a book he had never seen before, a book he couldn’t imagine her reading. And of course, Hannah wouldn’t just walk off into the woods with no shoes on in the middle of winter.

Then, days after the car had been found, a police officer came walking up to the front door holding a cardboard box in shaking hands. Inside, there were Hannah's well worn shoes and the book he didn't understand. This was all that was left of her, and he knew she was dead. They had searched and searched for her, but eventually Evan gave up. She had an empty casket in a plot at the town cemetery, a stone marker with her name on the grave, and yet here she was.

It was Hannah. But it was not Hannah.

“Yes it is, Ev, it's me.”

'Run,' Evan thought to himself. 'Either there is a ghost in your house, or you're going completely crazy. Which would you rather be? Haunted or insane? Either way, you don't want to be here, alone with this thing.'

Alone like he had been all year, in this house that was too big for him without his wife in it as well, the house that was really too big for both of them, before Hannah had disappeared. They used to yell to each other from opposite rooms of the house and hear their words get lost in an echo of hard wood and the living, breathing space. Some days when they were both working at home, when Evan was in his office off the bedroom and Hannah in her own downstairs by the kitchen, they could go hours without seeing each other. A few times Evan even forgot that Hannah was home, and those days he’d get a funny feeling like he was forgetting about something important, like he had missed an appointment or stood up one of his buddies. Hannah would come up into the room behind him and he would scream. He knew she was there, but she wasn't there. That's what this was like.

“I'm just imagining you,” he finally whispered.

“You're not. Would I lie to you?”

“Yes,” he answered. “You said you were going out for scotch tape and tissue paper, and that you'd be right back. You never came back.”

“I've missed you, Evan. All I do is think about you.”

“You're not real.”

“Why don't you believe me? I'm right here. I've always been here. You're just trying to forget about me.”

Evan took a step forward, wanting to see her face, needing to know if it was really her. There was just enough moonlight through the dwindling rain clouds to make out the shape of her face. Her long neck, delicate ears, high brow, straight nose. The curve of her lips was the same as Evan had burned into his memory, the one thing he'd tried the hardest to hold on to - his wife’s beautiful smile and the light in her eyes. But there was no light in her eyes. She sat in darkness, and even though it was Hannah (but it was not Hannah), he knew she wasn’t real, she was just a ghost.

“I don't believe in ghosts,” Evan thought to himself, but she heard.

“You don't have to believe in ghosts, Evan. I am right here.”

Inside of Evan, something broke. That cage he built around his heart, that lock he put on that particular place in his throat where the sobs can easily escape from, it broke open after a year of keeping himself mostly together.

“You said you would be right back! Where did you go? What happened to you?” he screamed, finally. Raised his voice and let himself be heard, let himself say the words he's been asking himself for a whole year, the words he stopped asking other people (his family, his friends, the police) a long time ago because he got too afraid to hear what they would have to say, what horrible scenario they would dream up that particular day.

“What happened to me?” Hannah repeated flatly, not human. “I'm here Evan. Isn't that what matters to you? Isn't that what you have been wanting since the morning I left? Haven't you wanted me back?”

Evan was sobbing. He was bent over at the waist, holding his arms around himself, holding himself up and together. He thought that if he screamed loud enough, someone must be able to hear him, certainly if he was this frightened, someone would save him, they would have to.

No one came.

When he looked up finally, through a haze of tears, Hannah was walking toward him. She was wearing her wedding dress, the dress that they had buried in her coffin because her body had never been found.

“I’m back, Evan, and don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Indie Adams challenged me with "all that was left of her belongings was a pair of Converse shoes and a book titled 'The Memory or Lies'" and I challenged Kat with "Are my parents ever coming home?"

Where I'm From

I am from the green Cape atop the hill, from the house with shuttered windows and the cold stone porch. From the creaking old wood floors and the doors that never locked, from the scent of lemon Pledge and apple pies. I am from the town too small for its own high school, from the deep woods where hunters give no pause before shooting dogs they think are deer. I am from the rocky cliffs and mossy woods, from the worn dirt paths and clear streams. I am from the earth.

I am from steaming pots of chili and pans of lasagna. I am from red brick linoleum and vintage Pyrex bowls. I am from mismatched furniture and crocheted rugs, from the warm belly of our dog, Misty, from the lingering hope that she could live forever. 

I am from the red, Radio Flyer wagon being pulled across the lawn to my grandfather’s greenhouse, I am from the twisting grape vines and apple trees, from the thorns of rose bushes my great-grandmother tended until she couldn’t anymore. I am from the backyard that fell away into the earth, I am from excavators digging for buried treasure. I am from my grandfather’s musty basement workshop, from the strong arms of the only man I will ever completely trust.

I am from snowstorms that kept us locked in for weeks, huddled around the woodstove playing Little House on the Prairie. I am from Hidden Acres and campfires, from catching lightning bugs and star-counting. I am from Gladys, Robert, Barbara, and Patricia. I will never belong to anyone but them. 

I am from a history of happenstance, I am from secret dreams and secret lives. I am from a series of unfortunate events and from an ache of missed chances and dashed hopes. 

I am from the bedroom where I cried when my grandparents moved away, from the lonely halls of the nursing home where I watched Nana die. I am from silence and regret for things silenced. I am from loss and learning and laughter. 

I am from Salem, I am from the town cemetery where our plots have already been bought and marked. I am from the place my family returns to, not often enough. I am from the home I know. I am from somewhere I want to get back to.

This is a meme that has been going around blogland for quite a while now - the original prompt can be found here. 

As I wrote this, finally, I started weeping - the tears are still coming, actually. I have to call my grandparents tonight. I didn't realize how much I missed them until I started writing about them, and now I just want them home. This was an amazing experience, writing this little piece.