The kitten-shaped egg timer on the corner of the mattress beeps and they switch positions. Now she is cradling him. His head rests on her slender left arm; her right arm she drapes around his waist ... [+]
Mary L. Tabor is the author of The Woman Who Never Cooked: Short Stories, (Re)Making Love: memoir, Who by Fire:novel. Her most recent works were published in Story Magazine and Catamaran. She also writes on the arts at FactsandArts.com. "School" is in Short Circuit #06, Short Édition's quarterly review.
Remember promise in giant red doors you saw while your knees shook at the edge of the playground with book bag and lunch pail, cold from the thermos of milk? The sound of the future in the creak of the bindings of black and white speckled notebooks? How hope smelled in the wood of sharp yellow pencils? Remember how long red margins ruled down the side of lined paper you titled "My Summer Vacation" and you learned at hard desks how to write in narrow white spaces of weather, and clothes, and long days at the beach— not of skies bursting color like peaches and plums or birds' feet on sand like