Portraits of Heart

by Tara Wiley

The ancient attic stairs sagged and grieved with Grandma, whose sighs grew more audible with each steady step towards a roomful of memories. I cleared my throat anxiously as I followed her, ready to offer another escape, but she waggled her hand behind her to shush me.

“No, no, I may mutter and sputter, but this must be done, dear.” Her voice came firm from above. “And there will be good in it, I just know. Things to remember—“  sigh, step, “- things to put to rest,” – shove to the door, another sigh,  “-things to pass on. It must be done.”

A few cobwebs wrapped the tiny room, and in my fanciful mind, their presence added to the nostalgia of this occasion. But Grandma pragmatically dispersed them with another waggle of that strong hand and hustled over to the box closest to the eave’s window.

“We’ll start here, Hannah. You’ll enjoy these.” We spent the next hour immersing ourselves in the 1940s. Grandpa’s full Army dress uniform with all the brass still pinned in place was only partially attacked by moths. A certificate of commission. An old leather satchel Grandpa had used to transport documents, one of his many duties during the war. He had hated not going overseas, but the Army found plenty for him to do stateside. Grandma didn’t know many details. Back then, men didn’t share much about such things, she reminded me. Plus, they weren’t married at the time, only engaged, and that was long distance.

“It was a bad time to be a German in America,” Grandma reminisced. “I couldn’t help my name, my face, my parents. But Frank and I, we both did all we could to prove to ‘em all, we were on the right side. I left home, went to Omaha to be part of the female workforce. Oh, we needed workers back then! All the boys gone to war.

“Then there were the boys from over there, brought back and forced to work alongside us. POWs, they called ‘em, prisoners, but they didn’t look like prisoners to me. Dressed kinda sloppy, yes, indeed, but fed well, lived well, seemed to me…” I shifted my gaze from the contents of the box to Grandma’s face. She was far from me, sitting at a stool assembling who knows what with a gaggle of farmgirls on each side of her and a slew of foreign men across from her.  

Diamond Vows

by Jen Gregory

Certain things are private, strictly between a man and his wife. That is why when Gertrude Lawson unfolded the brittle paper, read it, gasped and marched away without so much as a word to her son Eddie he shrugged it off. He sat in the quiet little retirement home with its fuzzy carpets and faded yellows, lulled by the warmth, the ticking of the mantle clock. He heard shuffling in the next room and leaned his balding head back onto the nubby chenille throw he and his wife had bought his parents maybe seven years ago. It drove him mad the silence in this house, as if noise itself were sucked into another dimension, only enough vibration left over to sit at your ear and slowly whisper. The refrigerator is running. The neighbor is mowing his grass. Someone just flushed the toilet. It was as if the noises were more hearsay than something you actually heard.

Eddie was a bachelor as of late and he was possibly extra sensitive to the quiet because his own home had become somewhat the same except that he kept the TV on non-stop to avoid that reality as long as he could. Linda had only been gone four weeks. They were still talking but not about how to save their marriage as much as how to divvy it all up. The kids had been devastated. Dylan was irate and huffy while Thomas was brooding and siding with his mother. What did they know about love anyhow? Dylan was twenty and Thomas was a freshman in college. No. They didn’t know much at all. They knew nothing of the way a woman could drive you nuts. They didn’t know how quickly a man could cease to exist as a person to a woman.

Maybe five years into the marriage right after Dylan had been born he got an inkling that Linda wasn’t happy, that he should fix something but he got the picture the only thing Linda wanted fixed was his existence. He stayed at work, at the golf course, hunting, anywhere to not exist a little more in her eyes. He loved her though, hated how she seemed to hate him, but he loved her. She was sweet and good and easy on the eyes. Soft, smart and a good mother. Truth be told he would do whatever it took to get her back but just like twenty years before it’s hard to make someone happy who is only happy when you are not there. He’d like to know how to fix it, because church hadn’t done it, counseling hadn’t done it. In his mind nothing had worked, she just plain despised him.

Memorial Day prompt with a mystery

You are cleaning out your grandfather’s things from his war days and discover a strange, cryptic note. You take it to your grandmother and she gasps when she reads it. What happens next?