Page 74 - WTP VOl. X #6

Spiraling (continued from preceding page)
“Your invitation. To the baby shower. The christening will be next. Thanks for reminding me, by the way. I’m so focused on getting this baby out of me that I might have forgotten all about it.”
Maggie takes the envelope and hurries to the nurse’s station, sees the box wrapped with shiny red paper. She pulls on the tape, ripping the paper with haste. Inside, she finds the salmon-colored hat. The one from the 1930s. Also, a note: Lovely Maggie, I wanted to give you something, even if it isn’t a fraction of what you’ve given me. Take good care of it. And of you. Remember what I said. Keep living. Forever grateful, Mary Gallagher. She stands at the nurse’s station, and fingers the felt of the hat.
~
When Maggie arrives home, she can almost hear the quiet, the only sound in her house the hum of the refrigerator. Maybe she’ll get a cat, or even a fish tank. Something to come home to. She drops her keys on the table, pours herself a glass of water, and thinks about calling Sam. Through the blinds, the sky grows darker. Maybe tomorrow, she decides.
In the small studio off the kitchen, she turns on the light, places a classical CD in the player. Maggie stands in front of the fresh, white canvas. Outside her window, a pink sun streaks across the sky, sinking slowly behind the clouds. She purses her lips to blow dust from her brushes, uncaps her paints, and begins.
She blends the brushes with color, mixes and swirls shades and hues. She loses herself in the motion of cre- ating something real, her urgency thick and palpable. As she works, her mind passes over snapshots of Pete maneuvering a path in the sky, but there is no time to dwell. She doesn’t try to figure out whether she’ll see Mrs. Gallagher again. She doesn’t attempt to decipher whether she and Sam will reconcile, or even be friends. Instead, she spends these moments fully immersed in the motion of brush meeting canvas, filling in the face of the elderly woman, her eyes tender, her cigar smoke like clouds, her body turned toward the blue green sea.
Troisi holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The University of Maine’s Stonecoast. The Angle of Flickering Light won First Place for the 2021 Royal Dragonfly Book Award for Memoir, received a 2021 Silver Medal for the Readers’ Favorite Awards, and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Paris Book Festival Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies, including The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Fugue, and Under the Sun. Her pieces have been finalists in multiple contests, includ- ing the 2020 Iron Horse Literary Review Trifecta Award in Fiction, American Literary Review’s Nonfiction Contest, 2018, and the 2018 New Letters Publication Award in Fiction. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020.
Darker Side
oil on canvas
16'' x 22 1/2''
By Maddie Hinrichs
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