Taking her seat, she watched as grandma did the same. She kept watching as the old woman used the squeeze-bottle of honey to draw a line around the inside of one of the orange slices, along the white pith beneath the rind. Then she pushed the cardboard tube from the paper towels into the honey.
And when the chatter goes silent, when the signal is too weak, too far away, or the remote team is dealing with situations too sensitive to be broadcast to unsecure receivers, she has nights like this, where sleep comes only in snatches and the face of the clock seems to mock her, melting into the darkness like wax from a flickering candle.
If I looked back at my mother, at her hands gripping the steering wheel, would I see the remnants of energy crackling around her fingers? Would I see her eyes glowing slightly green in the not-yet-morning light?
I haven’t abandoned this site… by Melissa Bartell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.