Cooked Cookies 5

Conclusion

My early stories were often populated with characters sharing the same defiant world filled with imperfect love and unresolved loss.

Those “… large and startling figures …” writer Flannery O’Connor spoke of, I drew so many in gigantic ways.

I also drew on my own life.

These days, not so much. Micro fiction has a way of cutting to the chase.

The characters though, I craft quieter.

Thank you for the close serialized read of “Cooked Cookies”.

May the Fourth be with you.

Photo by Anya Chernik on Unsplash

***

The story made headlines for months, the first murder on the island astonishing in its own right and yet, incredibly committed by high school students. The crime forever destroyed the atmosphere of absolute safety in a paradise where youngsters once shelled at dawn. The newspapers, both island and mainland, warned of the toxicity of angel’s trumpet with its stunning dramatic blooms, the botanical equivalent of a flashing skull and crossbones while the school board demanded the drug curriculum be reviewed and revised, particularly in the area of local poisonous plants. Some discussion was bandied about requiring a resident pass or a payment of a toll to cross the causeway onto the island, but all the protests, declarations and community outrage didn’t bring Luke back, anymore than witnessing his killers plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. The broken family left the island and moved to the tiny seacoast of New Hampshire, where beaches stretched long into the cold Atlantic and shelling proved somber, all shades of black like their grief.

Lulu and Mina nap in webbed sand chairs beneath the beach umbrella, calling it quits on saving cooked cookies. Both wear visors and sport noses coated thick with sunscreen, their individual tubes stuck in the sand beside their bedazzled flip flops. The sun shifts to bathe their lily-white legs in tropical heat and with a swirl of the canopy, Sadie casts them both back into shade. Her sisters continued to live in the northeast after the death of their mother, followed by their father a year and a half later. As friends and relatives gathered at his home after the service, Sadie escaped away to his study, where his cashmere sweater still hung across the back of his leather chair. On his desk stood the photograph of Mina and the junonia. Off to her side stood Luke.

“Dad received the print not long after we moved,” said Lulu from the doorway. “Luke was cropped from the photo that ran in the paper. The editors felt the family should have the original, considering what happened.” She joined Sadie and picked up the photograph of Mina’s big day. “Mom couldn’t bring herself to look at it and for some reason, Mina hated the picture as well, so Dad filed it away, until a few months before he died.”

“I don’t remember him being with Mina,” was all Sadie could say, tracing her finger over the eagle embroidered on the Apollo 11 Mission patch sewn to her father’s sweater.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about Luke,” Lulu said, crossing to the window where a glimpse of the ocean on a sunny day brought thoughts of island life. “Sadie, I caught him sneaking out to the beach the morning he died.” She had woken to find Luke rummaging deep through the dresser drawers and before she could say a word or wake her sister, he found Mina’s junonia and stuffed it inside the leather pouch made at summer camp. Holding a finger to his lips, he whispered wish me luck, Lulu and slipped into the darkness and out of their lives. “I could’ve stopped him,” Lulu said. “Instead, I rolled over and went back to sleep, thinking I’d tell Mina in the morning, but I didn’t. I never told anyone.” She placed her forehead against the glass and closed her eyes. “You should take the photograph home, Sadie. Dad would want you to have it.”

The sun sets wide and purple and orange on the island, a burnished sky parallel with the ocean. Sadie will wake her sisters in awhile and together they will watch the light dissolve into magenta. She looks out to the horizon where years ago she tossed the stolen junonia into the center of Luke’s scattered ashes, a promise to her brother she would search for him always among the sand dollars. She remembers her mother wore the Vera scarf that day, knotted tight against her throat, as stoic as Jackie in her pink suit. The shell litter pricks Sadie’s feet and she strolls back to the deep sand of the dunes. The royal terns have taken residence in the tidal pool and she walks their way, scanning the beach for conch and cockles and whatever else the island has cast aside on this day.

#

Photo by Yana Hurska on Unsplash

“To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

-Flannery O’Connor

Read:

Cooked Cookies 1 here.

Cooked Cookies 2 here.

Cooked Cookies 3 here.

Cooked Cookies 4 here.