Fry

While you were in the store, I sat in the car, taking advantage of the air conditioning, radio, and lack of people. From my comfortable chair, I watched two crows fighting over what appeared to be an old french fry.

Then the fry hopped, or more accurately flopped, as I discerned it was a semi-live grasshopper. The crows seemed to take turns pecking at it until it made its way under a car. I held my breath and watched the black birds moving towards the doomed insect.

You returned then and saved me from the end of that familiar narrative.

Look

The sunny aide says the leaves are changing. The tree in me has been dead a thousand whiles, but I don’t tell them I’m not interested. Just roll back to my room where the window looks out at where the mailbox and dumpster sit, cold like relatives on the other side of the state too cheap for phone calls, too absent-minded for letters.

TV is still on. SVU still, but different-same episode.

Now and then a curious squirrel comes tapping at the window, and I tell him the good nuts are down the hall. Otherwise, there is nothing to see.

Michael Neal Morris’ most recent books are Based on Imaginary Events, Release and Haiku, Etc.  He is a regular contributor to the blog Two Cents On and posts almost daily to This Blue Monk. He lives with his family just outside the Dallas area and teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Dallas College.

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