UNLEASHED - a Valentine's Anthology

The Swing

Debra Goelz writing as Brittanie Charmintine

Distracted by her husband's chewing, Madeline barely tastes her own fried chicken dinner. He smacks when he chews, and the little muscle at the connection from his jawbone to his skull flutters in a vaguely reptilian way. It is just the two of them sitting at the table. But sometimes being with Troy is lonelier than being alone.

They eat on the back deck, the planks, which have been warmed by the summer heat, smell like broken trees disintegrating into the forest floor. Madeline's dad built the deck forty years ago, and it showed every bit of its age.

Speckles wags his tail and waits at Troy's feet like a refugee, keeping vigil for the inevitable food drop.

Using his own fork, Troy scoops another helping of mashed potatoes from the pot, which sits on the table on a hand-woven mat made by their youngest daughter, Jenny, when she was five. Now Jenny and all her siblings are grown and gone. But Madeline is still here, living with Troy and Speckles and a plethora of children's crafts gathering dust in shadowed corners.

"I used a different kind of oil for the chicken," Madeline says when she thinks the silence has gotten too loud. "It's canola."

"Yeah," says Troy. "It's good, Mad."

"Thanks," she says.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

"It's crunchier," he says.

"I noticed," Madeline cannot help saying back.

Troy picks up his corn and begins eating down the individual rows like a lawnmower at a golf course. Madeleine purses her lips. He eats corn with great precision even though the rest of his eating is chaos. His lips glisten with butter. Madeline daubs her own lips with the thin white paper napkin.

She exhales and tries to come up with another topic of conversation. Perhaps she could tell him about the O'Malley's divorce. But he never really liked the O'Malley's. Maybe she should tell him about Jenny. Talking about the kids always seemed to fill suppertime conversation, but Jenny had specifically asked her not to tell Dad yet. "You know how he gets," she said.

"Weather's nice," Madeline says. That had to be safe.

"The plants are dying," he observes.

Madeline looks out at the garden. The calla lilies are limp and dry; the long grasses look like they would be good tumbleweed material. But there is a drought, and they aren't supposed to water. The trees are still green. And past the meadow, in the glade, is the old swing, hanging from the highest branch of the hundred-year-old oak. The swing creaks vaguely in the breeze.

As is always the case, the swing reminds her of her first encounter with Troy.

That day, a lifetime ago, the sun filtered through the trees in rapturous filaments of light—the way the path to heaven is often depicted in movies. The birds zipped through the branches of the oak trees building nests. Maddie wore an old robin's egg blue silk dress of her mother's she'd found in the attic years before. At the time, she thought it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, though it fit her like a parachute.

She wore no shoes because she loved the tickly feel of the feathery grass and the loamy soil beneath her feet. The air smelled like summer and freedom. Her parents had gone to church and would be gone for at least another hour, leaving twelve-year-old Maddie to pretend in the garden, though everyone knew she was too old for such activities.

She should've been listening to records or gossiping with friends on the phone, but the place she liked best was her imagination, because it never disappointed her. Still, she knew enough to keep her hobby a secret. If anyone found out, she'd be the laughingstock of the entire middle school.