Regifting By Melissa Ostrom

Here’s a word for you. You know it? Good. Does it tease you back to Maria and that incident in Jimmy’s Pathfinder? Torment you with recollections of your mother’s nightgown, her flannelled lap? It would. It’s like that. Wait. Don’t toss it. Both verb and noun, it may come in handy. No, it’s not tricky. Smart. Whimsical. Paradoxical as cleave, untranslatable as trouble. I once used it as an adjective. It can help you. Last week, it dissolved the gum in my hair. See the new clearing behind the pasture? It urged the horses to browse brush — whole trees — straight to the ground. You would not believe how hungry it made them. I never would have conceived my son without it. Even now, it does strange things to me. Please. You’d better take it. I insist. No need to insure it. LOL. Instructions on maintenance? Just wash your hands afterward, and you might put your liquor on a higher shelf. It’s officially indestructible. Come on, now. Stop crying. Look. It likes you. I promise: it won’t ruin you, as long as you remember to exercise it. Take it out once a day. Study it wide-eyed. Adore it. Love it, like I did, like you’ve never seen anything so gorgeous. Make it feel like a miracle, an antidote. It very well may cure your quiet blundering.

© 2015 Melissa Ostrom

Melissa Ostrom lives in rural western New York with her husband and children. She serves as a public school curriculum consultant and teaches English at Genesee Community College. Her fiction has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Lunch Ticket, decomP, Thrice Fiction, Oblong, and elsewhere.

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