Wayne Cresser
Esther
She has this knack for extrapolation. She might say something innocent-sounding, non-threatening, like, “We eat there sometimes,” and you forget and say, “Yeah, you like that place?”‘
And before you know it, she’s off, circumlocuting her universe. You’re with her, going everywhere, hearing everything: when her kids go to bed and the stories they want to hear, why her husband won’t get a vasectomy, where the freshest fruit is to be had in the tri-state area. The mind reels. You imagine this thing going on forever…
“We looked at a Hyundai but Jonathan really wants a Volvo.”
Italian food, E.M. Forster, mutual funds, gambling casinos in Connecticut, and suddenly she doesn’t see you there, trapped in a sand castle at the edge of the shore while great tides of talk break over you, dragging wet and sandy pieces of you out into an inky vastness, where you will be swallowed up and forgotten like the songs tiny fishies sing at the bottom of the sea.
About the writer:
Wayne Cresser lives on an island in Narragansett Bay with his wife and dog. His work has appeared in seven print anthologies, most recently Spank the Carp 2018, online at Gravel, Shark Reef Literary Magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters and Story, and in such print journals as The Ocean State Review and SLAB. Most recently he has been a Finalist, Flash Fiction Category, at The Newport Review (2012), and a Finalist, Fiction at Jerry Jazz Musician (2017).
Image: A Journey Inside a Big Fish by Eugene Ivanov (1966-). No medium specified. No size specified. 2004. By free license.
