Just To Catch Up

"We made a break for it, do you remember?"

"Sure." Again with this. He sipped his coffee, stared out the window into the street, looking for something, anything interesting. "You wanted to live in the school basement. You thought the cafeteria lady worked all day, that she'd make us dinner and breakfast but wouldn't turn us in."

"She was nice."

"She was an adult."

"She was nicer than most adults."

Maisie was defending long-ago childhood logic, so he dropped it. "You know they tore it down, the elementary school, built a new one."

"I haven't been past there in years. It's out of the way," She shrugged. "Anyway, the kids go to Walker."

"They try running away yet?"

"I had them chipped." She said it like it was a perfectly normal thing to do. "The dog too, of course. But I don't think I'd go looking for that damn dog."

Three Line Thursday: "Wax"

We burn, each of us, for all of our lives,
Until, all our fuel exhausted, we can burn no more.
But sometimes, having burned, we leave behind a beautiful residue.

Semiotics

"Why is she turned away from the camera?"

"There's no camera, it's a painting."

"You know what I mean. Why is she… why can't we see her face? Why would he paint her like that?"

"Who knows? Maybe they were alienated. Maybe she loved the flowers more than him. Maybe the flowers are a symbol of something, maybe beauty, I don't know. Maybe she left him for a more beautiful man. And with the fallen petals he's saying that her new love will fade and die like their old love, like any living thing."

"Jesus, you're a real downer."

"Sorry."