Prompt: Up in the trees

We walked in the park yesterday and sat down on the berm separating the street from the playground and the rest of the green. It was so hot. My brother and I plunked ourselves on the grass and I examined the fallen leaves while he and I caught up on so much we never got to talk about. The shade from the sycamores was sublime. It was well over 100 degrees and under the canopy the earth was cool to the touch. I don't now how long we were there. The air was so still, the passage of time seemed slowed down. Everything seemed slower. Except the movement I noticed among the foliage, up there, in one of the trees. It was too big to be a squirrel and the wrong color for a cat. And then, it barked.

"It's his babysitter," a woman said as she sauntered towards us.

I guess she meant the tree. I looked at my brother, his eyes fixed on the dog that had emerged a little from his camouflaged perch.

Prompt: You had it coming

Whenever someone says, "you had it coming", it means you got what you deserved, just deserts, all that. I'd venture to guess the speaker would be feeling a bit smug. You might even witness a little nod of satisfaction to punctuate their verdict.

I don't remember ever consciously saying that kind of thing out loud. Maybe I've thought it. I try not to. It's so...punitive. I want to believe I can move past these terminal stops, find a juncture, not just "it" and its predictable arrival. I'd like to think that when "it" gets here it will bring with it some new possibilities.

Prompt: Memories from the Edge of the Universe

It has been determined that we are more non-matter than we are matter, that the space between our own particles, possibly at the atomic level, makes up more of us than the solid particles themselves if they were to be compacted into a solid mass, if that were even possible. And, on top of that, we have been told that we are 75% water. So, at best, only a quarter of who we think we are is "us".

Our very "us-ness", my "me-ness", your "you-ness" seems almost vaporous, like humidity. We are like tiny infinite universes, microcosmos. We are not there, yet we are everywhere, nothing and everything, simultaneously.

Yet, I can see where my arm ends at the fingertips and his dark lashes curl against the crisp white pillow case.

Now I have to ask, have you ever looked at a painting, really looked closely? When you have a moment, study one more than you might otherwise have done previously. Look at a Vermeer, Girl with Pearl Earring, for instance. There are no lines separating the cloth she wears at the nape of her neck from the air surrounding her, her lips from her skin. Look closely, you'll see how "she" dissolves into her space. Her "she-ness" is like a magic trick.

We also, in our own way, dissolve into the worlds in which we live. Little bits of us float off and mingle with the very air we breathe. Dust mites, as I write this, are devouring the invisible specks you left behind unknowingly at the library, where you sat and contemplated a magazine.

Memories, fragments, histories blur the edges of our very own selves. At the minutest level we mingle and collide and have no knowledge of these tiny interactions, these infinitesimal romances, wars, novels written, dreams destroyed. You and I, we are making memories at the edge of a universe we have yet to discover.