It’s a bleak rainy night, and the husband is very late getting home.  The wife has been reading a book all day about the ways people have died while visiting Yellowstone Park.  (Stupidity, nature.)  Naturally, she has wondered, since her husband is so late, whether he might have gotten in a horrific accident himself.  So that when he walks in the door, perfectly fine, and she is no longer a widow, she is slightly disappointed.

(A few summers ago I wrote one short-short story a day for a month for newsworks.org, the online news source for WHYY in Philadelphia. Here are four of them…)

1.
Sunday afternoons are the worst, when all those imagined families draw closer in their orbits on solid maple chairs over roast beef served on the good china. On your bulletin board; a faded yellow boutonniere from a dance. I remember the girl, heartbreaking in her youthful beauty. Do you?
2.
A brief kiss by two lovers on the street, given hurriedly. Even the moonlight doesn’t make them linger. Times like this I feel loss the most, when I see others so careless with love. When I see the moon tonight, knowing tomorrow it will be less.
3.
How will I live knowing that darks will be washed with whites, and eggs will sit past their expiration date because no one is making cookies. It’s these things I think of, not loss of love. Maybe I could write it all down for him before I leave.

4.“And there was my husband, standing under the very tree called the widow-maker when the thirty-pound pod dropped squarely on his head, killing him instantly.” The story was tragic, however, in Mavis’s re-telling became slightly tinged with a wry humor.