Sarah Freligh

Drive

I used to drive by his house about ten times a day hoping for a glimpse of him doing—I don’t know—anything. Sometimes I drove my mother’s station wagon, beige and anonymous.  Or I rode shotgun in Kate’s Beetle, crouched down in the front seat while she reported to me: Nothing. Wait: Maybe that’s him out back, shooting baskets.

I used to drive by his house because I loved him. Andy, Andy, Andy, his name was a song I sang to soothe myself to sleep. After he scored the winning basket at state semifinals, I inked Andy all over my hand, framed each name in a heart.

I used to drive past the corner where the accident happened on my way out of town. Piles of dried flowers and candle stubs marked the spot where a semi had plowed through a red light and hit the car Andy was riding in with three other guys. They were the lucky ones. Only Andy lived.

Sometimes I dream I’m driving when someone else really is. My mother, who is blind. Or Kate, who says Look, no hands. In dreams it’s me in a wheelchair, withered legs hidden under a blanket. It’s Andy who is whole, alabaster statue under the gym’s white lights. His legs are tensed, ready. He gestures to the men in front of him, a cop directing traffic, and only then does he start his drive down the length of the floor.

CP

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sort of Gone and A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, winner of the Editor's Choice Award from Accents Publishing. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the New York Council on the Arts.

Sarah Freligh

Here is Your Fairytale

When she asks me again what I’m hiding from her in my briefcase, I look away and out the window. Mr. Adams is cutting his grass again, the third night this week. He’s a shadow in dusk, nothing but the mower’s buzz and moan, a trailing off as he stops to turn a row, the way an argument dies when it’s not kindled with words.

“I made tiramisu,” she says. She folds her napkin into eighths, snuggles it against her plate. Makes a little cell of her fingers, imprisoning a triangle of air, the way she does when she’s dying to say something but doesn’t. She knows that once started, she’ll never quit.

“How do you think he does that?” I gesture toward the window.

She barely turns her head. “Smoke and mow at the same time?”

Those straight rows, I say. No scraggle between them, not a blade. I wonder whether there are lessons, maybe at Lowe’s or someplace: Lawn Mowing 101. I imagine my lawn as a destination: people driving up from downstate just to look at my lawn, my beautiful, neat rows. I will dress in tweeds and carry a stick to point out the finer points of lawn mowing.

She will love me enough again to trust me.

Here is the fairy tale: There was an elevator and on the elevator was a woman who took a bullet-shaped lipstick from her handbag and applied a red mouth over her rose pink one. The elevator bucked and bumped, and her hand never wavered. By the time we reached the lobby I was in love, or so I thought.

Here is the ending of the fairy tale: I kept the Kleenex she discarded. Nights when she’s asleep, I take it out and admire the nearly perfect oval of a red, red mouth.

I keep the Kleenex in my briefcase, under lock and key.

[editor's favorite, 2013]

CP

Sarah Freligh is the author of A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, the winner of the Editor's Choice Award from Accents Publishing, and Sort of Gone, a book of poems. Her work has been featured in Brevity, The Sun, Barn Owl Review and Rattle. Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a poetry grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006, and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1997.