Cheryl Pappas
1. THE DISPATCHFound
A slip of paper telling me I will surely die. I find one, then many, everywhere: on church benches, bus stop platforms, at the supermarket customer service window. They are written in a hand I don’t recognize. I stuff them in my purse and ignore them like receipts. I’ve been going on with my life, adding pure sugar to my coffee, waiting in doctor’s offices, kissing the top of my son’s head after soccer. I’ve told no one. But tonight, with the kids in bed and my husband in the dark living room watching a crime show, I unpack my pocketbook filled with the paper slips onto the bed. I lay them out. They look different when you put them all together like that. Like a puzzle that’s clear to anyone who’s paying attention. Then I wonder if is this some kind of sick joke? Because I have no intention of dying. I have lifetime memberships, loads of books I have yet to read, and I don’t even know the names of all the flowers. I don’t care what the slips say. Whoever did this made them all neat and square, like a box. Official.
I didn’t get the slips when I was younger. My life was open. I didn’t get them until my mother was gone.
She certainly didn’t get the slips. Because she bought little trinkets at the Christmas Tree Shop every November, even though she’d already had a closetful. Closetsful. I’m sure, wherever she is, outside of that small ceremonial box underground, she is looking in the heavenly aisles of some new department store chain selling home goods and holiday figurines.
It is possible that she did get the slips and didn’t tell me. She would do that. She did get quieter near the end. As I was pulling out of her driveway on a quick visit, she held her wave a little longer than usual. In the rearview mirror, I thought I saw her smile.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYCoffee in a mug made by Melissa Ostrom
Stacks of ignored mail
Printed-out poems of praise (Walt Whitman, Thomas Lux, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Wislava Szymborska, Ellen Bass)
Phone
The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language (Encyclopedic Edition), 1987, 1447 pages
A figurine of Saint Christopher that used to be my mother’s. The saint and baby have no head, so it’s in a resealable sandwich bag. The saint’s head is a recent injury.
3. BIOGRAPHYCheryl Pappas is an American writer living outside Boston. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, Hayden's Ferry Review, Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, HAD, and elsewhere. She is the author of the flash fiction collection, The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press (2021).