She is prone to bouts of hysteria.
She smokes on her front porch, eyes fixed on the drawling, dipping sun,
kicking at clumps of her wisterias.
She is getting hysterical. She is waiting for a miracle.
It finally arrives. She signs for it, waves off the deliveryman who offers to help bring it inside.
“Never mind,” she mutters to herself, to her future self, lugs it in, box and all, across the threshold,
old cigarette tossed forgotten by the road.
She unpacks it, checks for cracks, dusts it off, brushes down the Styrofoam packs.
“Hmm,” she hums, thumbs brushing across her forearms. Her fingers drum against the table.
Finally, she sets it on her mantle. She tilts her head left and right –
Maybe it’s the light. Maybe it’s the angle.
It’s the furniture, she decides. It doesn’t match, it clashes terribly. There’s really nothing she can do about it, there isn’t anything to be done.
She picks it up once again, looks it over, sighing deeply. She never keeps her receipts, never really returns anything, but with this – she’ll admit that she’s sincerely disappointed.
And she’s disjointed, she wants a Camel. She is certain the enamel of her two front teeth has started chipping, and then suddenly her miracle is slipping, tipping down out of her hands,
and there’s no way she can stop it
dropping down onto her tile, cracking out in violent pinwheels
smashing cleanly into a pile of useless shards on hard ceramic
and she can feel the teardrops starting; she doesn’t think that she can stand it –
because her miracle was precious;
because she thinks she would have kept it.
