Flash Fiction Friday: Leave
Leave
By Shaylen Cornwall
It was after the streetlamps had popped to life, after my newly broken-in sled was stowed against the house behind Mom’s burlap-wrapped rose bushes. After the no school day, the meet me and Joe and Frank on Baker’s Hill day. After snowball fights and forts. Long after my nose grew too cold to sting any longer, my feet and hands had stopped tingling and felt heavy with the warmth that followed the wet cold.
It was when I stood on the shadowed porch outside our front door, snow clinging to my boots, my breath swirling in veils of white around my face. When my mittened hand slipped against the knob, I clenched the soaking wool between my teeth and freed my stiff pink fingers from the sodden glove. It was in that moment that I looked through the frosted glass of the front window and saw them dancing.
My mom and dad, dancing as though his leave wasn’t coming to an end. Dinner steamed and bubbled on the stove behind them and Mom, still wearing her apron, let Dad twirl her around the kitchen. The carrot she had been chopping waited on the counter for her return. The light from the kitchen warmed their silhouette, Dad’s broad back, Mom’s trim waist. Heat radiated from them and collected in droplets on the inside of the windowpane. The color in Mom’s cheeks matched the pink of my frozen fingers.
I watched them twirl and spin, Dad already dressed in his uniform, Mom’s shiny black high heels discarded in the middle of the floor. Dad looked to be counting the steps, his voice only a slight murmur through the glass, and every moment or two Mom threw back her head in laughter, a strand of dark hair slipping across her forehead. Their bouncing slowed, and their bodies pressed together, perfect like a jigsaw, as Dad’s arm wrapped all the way around her back. Mom’s feet curved like question marks against the floor as she rose on tiptoe and laid her head against his shoulder. They swayed, their movements nearly imperceptible as Mom’s eyes closed against his shoulder, her lips pink and smiling as Dad buried his face in her dark hair.
