GARDEN ELECTRICITY
Image licensed through Adobe Stock. Edited.
Hand bleeding, he grabs the broken neck of the bottle then tipsily conducts glass shards, cat hair, and spaghetti bits to a pan. He will tidy the corpse of his fatherhood and marriage come morning out back near the baby green pumpkins; how small they’ll still seem under leaves when first oranging, but first steps are always minor in the grand scheme. After he staves off his watch, those gourds will seemingly swell forthwith beside the red brick shed. Though it’s not like they wouldn’t grow if he stared at them. If only he had such control.
Stop.
Everyone must first sleep off buzzes while it storms. Lightning will strike. The iron reddening those bricks will possess current well past sunrise and dissipate a charge in the midst of his most ambitious apology. After Halloween those pumpkins will have survived and he will drag his eldest daughter to Jo-Ann for forty-five dollars’ worth of clearance sewing patterns. Then, some night long after said daughter has quit on fashioning a pleather vest, he will spy the house while concealed by that electromagnetic garden shed long acquainted with rain and breeze.
Tom Sokolowski completed his MFA at the University of Central Florida and is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University. His fiction is featured or forthcoming in The Barcelona Review, Shenandoah, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere.