Cheryl Snell
First Date
“You got kids?” she asks him.
“Who knows? I came of age in the sixties,” he says with a wink. “You?”
Her kids had made themselves scarce after they warehoused her, so she tries a lie on for size. “I’m nobody’s mom,” she says. The lie is a snug fit.
“So what made you finally say yes to me?” He is the only man at the nursing home who still drives at night, but she can’t very well tell him that.
“I only said yes to dinner,” she reminds him.
One booth over, a woman is curved against her young man like a comma. They are both wearing wedding bands, but the rings don’t match.
“Hey, pretty mama,” the old man growls, comically imitating the young man.
“Hey baby,” she coos, playing along. She takes the man’s raw hands in hers. The gesture startles him, but he’d be the first to say it’s not his first rodeo. He gives her a slow smile, a light he’ll keep on long after the young cheaters have left, fortified for their fight to be together but leaving separately, the woman leading with the bump she’s already named.
Creeper
She returned home from visiting her mother to find her rosebushes dead. She knelt down to hug them, and looked closely into their collapsed petals. Dead.
“Why didn’t you water them?” she asked her boyfriend.
“Didn’t get a chance. We had a heat wave while you were gone, and they all died, like overnight,” he said.
They entered the house. “What about my plants? Did the heat wave get inside and turn off the AC? Each one is withered!” She squinted at the bent stems with her blurry eyes.
“Weirdest thing─ they all shriveled the second you left. Must’ve missed you. So what’s for dinner?” he asked brightly.
While they waited for the delivery man, he said, “How is your mom? Which one of the kids is living with her now?”
He liked to poke fun of the fact that the siblings kept coming back home after divorces and firings. She stared at him as he mocked them; as his face went in and out of focus; as the doorbell rang.
After they finished their cartons of Chinese food, he went into the mud room and wordlessly handed her the watering can. It was empty, of course.
She filled it and went outside to try to coax her bushes back to life. On her knees, hands deep in soil, she looked up at the ivy she had planted not long before. It had scrambled up the siding fast, and now smothered half the house like a dark curtain coming across someone’s field of vision just before blindness sets in.
Higher up, a sling of moon pantomimed a warning about time, and she saw that although the roses had given up on her, the creeping vine had not. It had even grown a little.
Cheryl Snell’s poetry collections include chapbooks from Finishing Line Press, Pudding House, and Moira Books. A full length volume, Prisoner’s Dilemma, in collaboration with the late expressionist artist Janet Snell, won the Lopside Press Chapbook Competition. Cheryl’s work has appeared in a Best of the Net anthology and been nominated seven times. Her collection of novels is called Bombay Trilogy, about the Indian diaspora. She lives with her husband in Maryland, twelve miles from DC.
