All False Starts
That the dog didn’t bark was the first sign.
Who acts like that, who, tell me who acts like that at a parent’s wedding?
He was a Texas Holdem player and I’m Five Card Draw.
His saxophone rode the piano, drums, and bass like a surfer on giant waves at Nazare.
That the dog just up and disappeared was the real sign.
In the end it didn’t surprise me.
I had the information, journals, DNA results, photographs, but I didn’t know which child to leave it to.
That there even was a dog is part of the dispute.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
The motel was where we remembered it, high above the dunes, bleached clapboard, splintery deck, but it didn’t help that we remembered it differently.
“You’re wearing that,” he said.
A full moon, high winds churning up the wild horses, the dog barking in the night, who would have been able to stop what happened.
You get the picture.
If first sentences are gifts from the gods, elusive second sentences are the devil’s retribution. But even false starts have to end.
PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ekphrastic Review, Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, Fractured Lit, Harper’s, JMWW, Smokelong Quarterly, Three Penny Review, and Vestal Review among others, and in the anthologies Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and recently in Flash Fiction America, BestMicrofiction of 2023, and Best Short Stories 2023. Painter’s stories have received three Pushcart Prizes and have been staged by Word Theatre in LA, London, and NYC.
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