Page 73 - WTP XII #3

“Yeah.”
The creak of sadness in Rachel’s voice brings Anita’s eyes back and she finds the amazon staring off into some middle distance, another tear bright on her cheek. Her hands remain deep in her pockets. Her boots rock back on their heels when she notices Anita’s watching, like some shy boy building courage.
“Sorry,” Rachel says, pushing an almost angered knuckle into the hollow under one eye, “Feels stupid to be crying in front of you. It’s just, I don’t know, things aren’t really real until they’re real, you know?” The last two words break off at a precipice where it’s impossible for a person to keep talking.
Anita, surprised and heartened and heartbroken by this rawness, is helpless to hold back her own tears. Slightly more quiet and soft about it, she stops trying and slides herself over to one side of the bench. It’s a silent, compact gesture that brings the biggest smile yet from this tall, athletic woman named Rachel. Her chin quivers when the corners of her mouth reach this new height.
The two women sit side by side on the bench. Anita takes a braver look at the group of four women down at the more populated end of the dog park. The one who peeked before peeks again and Anita raises a hand, holding it up in a wave that isn’t quite a wave, but is something.
When she pushes her hand back flat into the plasti- dipped grating, Rachel’s larger hand presses into it. Warm from her deep, down filled pocket. Anita tilts her hand enough for this friend of her wife’s to get their fingers around her fingers. Enough to squeeze back some.
Anita turns to look at Rachel without really looking, she sees Rachel’s other hand come up to catch a new tear. A gesture that tells Anita it’s ok to press them away. A quiet calmness comes with knowing the op- tion is there, ready for her when she’s ready for it.
Anita looks back out at the morning, blinking an- other tear past her eyelid. She lets this one fall and catch the cool air as Clara and Bruce race past them and back out into this small world of dogs and their people.
Baird is a writer born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, who is also a primarily self taught, multi-disciplinary artist. Over the past decade his foremost focus has been fiction. He is currently finalizing his first two novels. His work is featured in several online and print publica- tions, including Discretionary Love, Children, Churches and Daddies (CC&D) and Amarillo Bay literary magazine.
“It’s a look that dumps out the puzzle Anita
just brushed past. Now she has to look at it. It stabs at a part of her so viscerally that she leans back on the bench and places a hand over her middle.”
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