"For all todays," she whispered.

She couldn't see me smile in the dark, but my hands pulled her near as hips rocked, joining us.

My lips rested against her ear; I answered with a ragged exhale.

Then I breathed her in.

She smelled beautiful, and felt so sweet. She sounded gorgeous; she looked like a poet's hymn.

We harmonized wonderfully. Ours was an ageless song, yet, youth recited it best.

She and I, a perfect chorus.

Until we forgot the words.

"For all todays," I whispered.

Today was thirty years ago, and I no longer make promises she can't keep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNwgOkl5nRY

MIND: Don’t do it.

ME: But he asked me about my writing which is essentially asking about ME, so…

MIND: He, just like your reader, does NOT need to know every single thing about you. You have this bad habit-- you tend to divulge way too much too soon. Retaining some mystery is a good thing, trust me.

ME: I’m an open book.

MIND: And not a very good one, honestly. Mediocre at best. Entirely, way too much, over-the-top hyperbole. Sloppy form. Typoes. Enough tired cliché to choke a horse. Anyone with literary chops that reads you winces. You try too hard.

ME: It's called being earnest.

MIND: This is you: ‘please clap’.

ME: Stop.

MIND: You stop.

ME: “I love to write about feelings. I mean, I really FEEL feelings deeply, so I write about them. Mostly deep things about deep feelings… Sometimes feelings just well up within me and I have to let them out in a poem. Ohh, and I love to write about nature, too. Nature is so beautiful and makes me feel free so yeah, I write about that also.”

MIND: Holy shit. You really are a real boner killer.

DATE: *fidgets intensely with phone*

MIND: Evasive maneuvers deployed *face palm*

DATE: “Shit. I’m so sorry, I gotta take this call…” *promptly slides out of booth*

MIND: Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a runner!

ME: Wait—no. You’re wrong, Mind.

MIND: You do realize there was no phone call, right?

Many minutes pass…

ME: He’s not coming back, is he?

MIND: Nope.

ME: I’m going to remain alone for the rest of my days, aren’t I?

MIND: Now dear, don’t you worry. There’s sure to be other guys out there who like girls that write plodding, banal rubbish about their feelings.

Also, on a completely unrelated note: let’s swing by the shelter to check out those cats for adoption.

"Speak plain," she says with a point at the chair next to her. I nod and sit.

"They sent me to ask."

"I know."

"Well?"

"Well, what? I ain't got all day."

"You know why I'm here."

"Don't mean you're off the hook. Say yer piece."

She's near blind and as old as the sea pines that sway next to her porch. I can hear waves crash just out of sight. The gray boards of her old shack hang on to flecks of white paint. There's a glass of sweet tea that sweats in her hand.

I pause, watch the beads, catch my breath.

She waits, and a grin tugs at lips that have not known teeth since Bill lied and a girl kept her dress.

Her skin was once dark as the night, but it is a deep shade of gray now. She's sick, old, and rough.

I hate what must be done.

"Go on, boy. You know my pa built this place when beach life was hard. Not one white man would live here back then. We ain't had no lights. No john. Just that shit shack, there." She points to a place that used to be, but was now just sea grass. "Tell me what your ma is too 'fraid to say."

"It's time to sell, Great Nan. Live with us."

"How much them men say this time?"

"More than we can spend."

"No. Here is mine. Here is where I will live. Home is where I will die."

I sigh.

She takes her last sip of sweet tea as I reach in my bag.

I watch the sweat drip from the glass and land on the floor as I stand and walk to her chair.

She looks up at me, and I swear I see a smirk as the clear bag wraps her head.

It's more than we can spend, but I will do my best.

If there's one thing I've learned from my mom, it's that we should seize the day, because tomorrow isn't a guarantee.

I hope she gets to see Hozier before dialysis.

My mother loves Hozier. It's almost unhealthy, the level of dedication she has to him. Stephen King once wrote a book about a number one fan, and while I don't think my mother is in any danger of hobbling the poor Irishman, I do think that if she were closer to his age she might debase herself on his tour bus.

I'm happy for her, really. It used to be that I'd call and she'd launch into some story about a friend-who-fell-away-but-resurfaced in her life. The most dramatic one was the pretty lady I remember coming over to study college classes with mom; she was good looking, but god, she was kinda mean. I was a little kid, maybe six, and that lady was such a sarcastic ass. But I sorta liked her anyway, because I was an asshole right back. Anyway, that lady popped back up in my mother's life a few years ago (whoa. Doing the math, it was actually a decade ago.) Anyway. She was always drama. Way too much.

I'm glad mom discovered Hozier.

It wasn't that long ago that she spent a week in Manhattan to catch a couple of his shows. I think it was right before pandemic lockdown, maybe. Over Thanksgiving break? Hell, I can't recall. Maybe it was last year. Time is a fuzzy thing sometimes.

Here's what I do remember. In our most recent conversation, mom mentioned several meds she's taking. I looked them up.

A few years ago, she had surgery and as a bonus she grabbed an infection that required some serious antibiotics that absolutely wrecked her kidneys. So, they're shot to hell. She has managed to make it this far without dialysis, but based on our conversation last night, it's just over the horizon.

Her mother died several decades ago, and my mom has already outlived her by five years, and I know that clock is weighing on her mind.

I started harassing mom to get her passport squared away at Christmas last year.

She reported last night that it is now in the hands of the State Department....10 months after I began my campaign to get that shit handled.

I hope it's not too late.

I'm believe he will announce more European tour dates soon, but I can't even buy her plane tickets until she has a passport ready to go.

My stepdad has kept his up to date and prepared for travel, so he'll be good when the time comes.

I need those kidneys to hold together so she'll be healthy enough to go.

I want to send her to see Hozier in Ireland before dialysis, but if I'm being honest, what I'm really saying is I hope she gets to see him in concert before she's gone.

"Imagine a guy at a party telling you a story from his childhood. He really wraps it in nostalgia, complete with sights and sounds you can identify with from your own background. You're feeling the warmth and the comfort and the almost thereness of what he's describing, even though you've never actually been to the place he's telling you about. It's like you could have been there, and maybe you were someplace so very much like it."

"Kinda the what Stranger Things did with the whole 80s vibe. Even 90s kids could identify, because a lot of the stuff was similar."

"Exactly. Now, picture all this warmth and comfort and then it just...vanishes."

"What the fuck?"

"Yep. Gone. Oh, the sunshine was perfect? Well, here's a thunderstorm, suckers."

"But, why would anybody like that?"

"Because in the thunderstorm, hiding between lightning strikes, is a darkness that contains toothy things that need someone to eat."

"I don't see how that's appealing."

"We all have teeth. Maybe we're someone's monster. I remind people that sometimes memories have teeth, too, and sometimes I show that what's hiding under the bed can be real."

"Does it hurt?" I ask while watching her.

"Only when I think about it." She winces.

"Oh, damn, I'm sorry."

She laughs, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear as she tosses her insulin needle in a sharps container. "It's fine. I'm used to the whole thing."

"You started when? At ten?"

"No, I was twelve. Right after this." She traces the line of a scar on her thigh. She was riding a horse, and it walked her into the tin eave of a low-slung shed. The cut was scary deep and crazy long, running from her hip down and across the thigh well short of the knee. "It was that trip to the hospital that we discovered the diabetes, so I guess it was a good thing I was nearly murdered by the horse."

"Was it the horse, or the roof?"

"I think they were in on it together." She grins, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek.

I smile back at her, and the kiss becomes a hug.

"Well. I'm glad they didn't succeed."

"Wow. That's just about the sweetest thing you've ever said to me."

"Not true. I've said you have fantastic bazongas, and that's a pretty damned sweet thing to say, I think."

It's true, she did. Maybe still does.

"Wow," she chuckles and smacks me on the arm. "Remind me again why you haven't swept me off my feet?"

We both laugh, and I look away.

It's true. I have. I know it, and she knows it, but she knows that I've pretended I haven't. It's best that way.

Does it hurt? I never ask anymore, because we don't talk.

Only when I think about it I say to myself, as I scroll past her name in my contact list.

"What was that?"

The night sounds normal to lakeside had stopped. Summertime cicadas and bullfrogs sat still beneath an oppressed quiet.

"It sounded like the back door," he whispered, sliding from the bed and into his jeans.

"Do you think it's Andy and Debbie fooling around?"

"Why would they come to our cabin for that? They have their own."

There were definitely booted footsteps in the hallway.

"Shhh," she said, suddenly glad the lamp was off.

Breath held, they froze in place, eyes glued to the bedroom door.

Silently, she put her umbros back on and slipped into her Reeboks. Kneeling, eyes never leaving the doorway, she felt near her suitcase until she found her purse. The reassuring hardness of her keys silently pressed against her hip when she put her neck through the strap.

There was the unmistakable sound of the other bedroom door being flung open. Quiet was a brittle thing, shattering with the gunshot of splintering wood.

Knowing that hiding was wasted energy, Trish stage-whispered to Rick. "Oh my god, do something!" Not waiting on his reply, or watching to see what he did, she turned to the half-opened bedroom window. Without needing to lift the glass, heedless of the screen, she scrambled out and through.

Concentrating on moving quickly and quietly, she pretended not to hear Rick jump into the hallway and shout a challenge to the intruder. She had no way of knowing that the sounds of the little Ford Pinto starting to life (on the first crank of the key) didn't carry into that cabin by the crystal clear lake.

Trish wouldn't find out until much later that Rick had died valiantly, if oddly. No one ever mentioned just how or why it was a closed casket funeral.

What Trish did know was that the moonlight was bright enough to drive without headlights. She never once looked back or hit the brakes. When her tires met asphalt, she flicked on the hi-beams and punched it to 80 until she reached the sheriff's office.

While she often mourned the loss of her friends, she never lost a minute of sleep over her actions on that Friday.

For the rest of her long, happy life, what she could never quite explain was why the sight of hockey players in goalie masks sent shivers down her spine.

Charon is weirdly pronounced given the spelling, Thanatos is too close to Thanos of Marvel fame, Reaper is ... yuck, and Grimm is too fairytale. So, Ferryman fits fine and acts as a decent surname should cause arise. I was drawn to that grouping of related names because of the material I tend to create. Aspects of the afterlife, forces of good or evil, and the character Death all appear in a number of my pieces.

A lot of my content, both posted and otherwise, leans toward the horror side of the boat.

We all ride the ferry eventually, so why not a tale or two during the ride?

The angels of memory never were.

Wings were shadows, smiles were

toothy grins.

That halo was the glint and glimmer of a glamour,

spells woven,

magic cast.

But the incantations were real.

How else to explain disappearing

into air

so

thin--

breath barely catches?

Penitence and sin, forgiveness and spite,

our communion was

a twilight mass

in the shade of live oaks

on

a bed of dead leaves.

Sweet southern sunshine,

whispers of heaven

held back by leather and lace--

these were the prayers.

The angels of memory never were.

Devils are in details,

and I

remember those

better than most.