Today he confronts the drawing, a faded stick figure of his child with bandaged head. Tiny elves hammer at her with fists. He runs trembling fingers across yellowed paper, corners curled, and turns to trim the bonsai, snapping off one piece at a time to the rhythm of jazz fusion. The juniper mimics a Thai dancer, one arm bent east, the other west.
After lunch, he graffities his walls with keep it simple slogans as the cat rips the burlap shades, exposing a view of a hundred motor homes, a lake and dumpster.
That evening, under leafless oak branches that reach for heaven and hell, he drinks coffee from a chipped mug, wraps his gnarly fingers around its warm smoothness and watches a slice of moon ripple over the lake. His hand clenches. The cracking mug makes him jump and he hurls the fractured parts against a tree. The cat yowls out of the way.
That night, he snips the fifty- year old juniper again, one new bud here, one new bud there, a stick snaps, a branch pops and a twisted tree- to- be dwarfs again.
Kaye Linden
www.kayelinden.com
Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short Stories