Flashback

I sit down in the office this morning, half awake, no coffee in my hand, no breakfast on my table. As I gaze out the window without really focusing, a small movement between the blinds draws my eye, flicking like a dandelion seed trapped in the screen catching light then shadow in the slant of sun streaming through the window.

Awakened and intrigued, I force my eyes to focus. The furry mote resolves into a flurry legs delicately lifting warp from weft as if weaving. A tiny, translucent spider spinning a tiny, translucent web in the cells between the screen. Her legs tap and stutter like a teletype desperately ticking out a message that none will ever read. Like my wife's fingers clicking her needles as a blanket emerges from the center of a skein to warm a friend's the newest arrival.

She spins the thinnest, transparent silk like the finest fiber-optics flashing in the sun. Remains of old strands cling to the window like discarded fiberglass, giving it an illusion of age, crafting it a personality that is scratched or cracked or ready to shatter from the pressure of the light. Like a life that has been fractured and painstakingly pieced back together, nearly seamless, without ever falling from its frame. The way I feel some mornings.

Now she waits as I do, her at the center of her web for breakfast to become ensnared, me for the day's central appointment that will tangle me in web of emotions from which I have only recently broken free. Predator and prey, we contemplate each other like black and white circling each other's tail as the sun rises through the trees.

As I finish, the sun glints off my wedding ring, dispelling the flash of melancholy I know will return later in the day as I prepare to face a future woven eight months before.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III