Lux Undergraduate Creative Review
Easter Sunday by: Mikaela Miller
Easter Sunday in the Chattanooga Municipal airport; six-car pile-up on the Interstate. My flight to Omaha will be late. I wish I could hear music. I wish I could hear Neil Young. Hey, Hey welfare mothers; my mother is in the restroom. My father is in Atlanta. No one is at home.
The women’s championship of golf is on T.V., I don’t know which one. Should there be more than one championship? Better than everyone one day, bottom of the pile-up the next. Thirty-minute rain delay is in effect. My sister is playing solitaire next to me. I wish I were dry.
Fog rolls off the foothills and planes roll down the runway. Easter dinner with Girl Scout cookies; no baked ham and rolls today. I wish I couldn’t taste the Wrigley’s spearmint in my mouth.
There are mint-green waiting chairs in Gate 5, all gates for that matter. Stacks of old newspaper are foot-rests for security guards. He is eating lamb and mint jelly somewhere by now. I wish I could smell his hair.
Viewer discretion is advised for Sunday’s family feature. Grey light dulls the atrium. It’s 5:32 PM in Tennessee. Exxon spilled oil in the Arctic, not on the runway. I wish I could see home.
Home is where he is now, and I have been pulled away. No matter how fake the trees look or how much the terminal smells like rancid milk, he is all I think about, or avoid thinking about. Is that a plague?
Plagues and Passover, blood around the door frames and spilling up to my knees. Spending Easter in a place other than home is strange. My first time in Chattonooga; out of Nebraska, south of last year. A first time in one hand and the opposite flies out of the other hand; firsts are lasts and bitter and sweet. Girl Scout cookies are sweet but like the darkness and the frogs too much is a plague. Hardly anyone is in the airport, but those who are here carry on as if it is any other day. Situational factors for Sundays and holidays; I guess no rules apply.
Plopped down in the middle of rush hour and no traffic, airports stand still when no one calls on them. What was it that led me to Chattanooga? Trains, family, and Sundays of particular importance. Now I was in transit; did I want to go home to be home, or to see him? I won’t think about that now; golf is more interesting. But I see his glasses on every face.
In the month of April, things are green and new, full of water. We wore gowns and tuxedos on the 8th of April and then…
…Then there were shrouds and floods, and we were washed free of the brassy feelings and shiny desires. Beads of rain butterflied as they splashed into the ground. It was over, but the green tricked me out of the change. I neglected the transition from new to old and suddenly what I felt was gone.
Making connections. Connections and causes are separate, like ice and steam, like milk and cream. Causes are meant to blame, but connections work both ways, for sheep and storms alike. And there is no blame for pyramids and rain. Eve befell Adam, and snakes slither through the hooves of our feet.
I have ignored us I suppose. How much can be connected before the pyramids crumble and gardens of water die? One week before I broke Adam, fountains spilled "here we are." No place to go but here. Everyone is from somewhere, poured from golden cups. I remember being stranded there, noticing the use of harvest gold in the décor; ashtrays the color of wheat that has lived its last moments in the only field it will ever know. Things are like that. Things die when they are uprooted or cut. But the wheat doesn’t just disappear; it just can no longer be there. And I can no longer be here, at least not the part of me that has passed through him. Like the sand dunes around the pyramids; change what you will, but monuments remain. Right now swirls and blows; dry and fragmented.
Pieced together. What he and I have is pieced together. Pick up the puzzle and it falls apart; carry on with it and it will slide and dissociate. It slides grain by grain from the face of the clock; from the lines in our faces. It doesn’t slide far—just enough to leave us unrecognizable. Time runs out, and I have to smash the glass to keep it from happening again. Breaking apart was already happening. But why could I still hear him singing? Don’t think about this now; its Easter, it’s a holiday. Take a break. Break. Break, break; break…
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