Unhinged

 

 Gingerly, she checked her jaw, sliding it left, then right.

She told herself every time to act scared, lower her head, but she never did. Her tilted up chin was just too tempting a target for his anger.

It was a miracle that she still had all her teeth.

Over time, her jaws started popping, becoming more loose with every blow.

One night it finally happened, and she smiled to herself.

He never saw the blow from behind coming, and the sledgehammer made a satisfying sound- like smashing a frozen watermelon.

Her jaws unhinged like a snake, and he disappeared.

Cabin

 

The faded little cabin perched on the shores of a peaceful lake. Even the road to the cabin was peaceful; the honey-colored sand of central Wisconsin.

It was surrounded by planted pine forests, where nothing grew under the trees, and the fallen needles were deep and soft, muffling all noise save the whistling wind through the pine branches high above.  

An old rowboat swayed next to the wooden pier, waiting for children and old men and their fishing poles.

Summer smelled of lake water, earthworms, and hot pine sap, and sounded like a creaky hand pump, surly chipmunks, and crickets.

 

House

 

She’d spent hundreds of hours inside the grand old house as a child, and now it was for sale.  She asked the realtor why it’d been on the market almost yearly since the owner died and the realtor laughed nervously and said everyone who tried to live there swore it was haunted.

“I’ll take it” she told the realtor, before even walking through it.

The realtor asked if she was sure, and she smiled and said, “Yes. It’s OK. I know the ghost.”

Slowly, the house was restored to its original façade and décor.

And they lived happily ever after.

Sand

The desert stretched behind them as far as they could see. They’d been walking through it for ages, waiting and hoping for the sight of just one tree, maybe a shrub, something that wasn’t dry and dead.

There had to be something better beyond the desert, but they’d run out of desert now, and this didn’t seem to be much of an improvement.

Sand.

They were sick to death of sand in their shoes.

Standing silently, they stared out at the ocean.

Beach sand and desert sand were the same damn sand.

The sharks swam lazily in the undrinkable water.  

Spider

 

The spider waved its front legs like it was waving down a taxi.

Its human noticed and peered into the habitat.

“How in the world did that get in there?” the human asked. The spider kept waving its front legs in alarm.

It wasn’t a velvet ant, but it looked similar. Whatever it was, it could have absolutely attacked and eaten the spider.

Carefully, the human removed the offending insect and released it outside.

“You’ve had a hard morning! Here’s a cricket.” The human dropped a cricket into the spider’s lair and walked away, not noticing the cricket’s frantic waving.

 

Feral Cat

 

The feral cat darted in and out, skirting the edge of her peripheral vision. She knew it was there, but she’d never acknowledge it. Let the tiny tiger think it was being stealthy.

Life was hard enough when you weigh six pounds.

She’d seen it skitter out to grab a mouthful of dog food and race back into the forest, watching for the dogs who would be happy to chase it down and kill it.

Born wild to a wild mother, it would always balance on that razor’s edge that separated wild and domestic things, neither one nor the other.  

Lava

 

The floor was lava!

He didn’t know what that was, exactly, but his siblings were panicking, so he leapt up onto a chair and stared at the floor.

The floor looked like it always did, so after a minute, he tentatively got off of the chair, to the shrieks of his brothers.

“How stupid,” he thought as he went into the kitchen to see if his mom had any snacks.

There was obviously no such thing as lava.

Sixty years later, his children placed a memorial where he and his house had sat, before being engulfed by the volcano’s eruption.