SNOW GLOBE
-An Excerpt-
Click Here For Audio
...“How could you?” she said, breath balling before her.
“What are you talking about?”
She looked away, to somewhere down the street, and squinted as if trying to see something that wasn’t there. Peter saw trees limbs sagging with snow. Icicles hung from the evergreens.
“Janice loves you,” she said.
Emil was peering through the frosty window next to the door. He’d cleared a circle to spy through. Peter looked down at the shovel and then behind himself at the walk. He looked at his hands. For the first time, he began to feel the cold.
“I know,” he said. “I love her too.”
He thought of their first date. They saw a wintertime movie about the upper class in nineteenth-century New York. Both of them were awkward and young, and when they exited the theater they were surprised by snow, large, downy flakes swirling in the street lights. He risked her hand so she wouldn’t slip on their way back to the car, and she accepted his hand and told him when she was a girl her father had given her a snow globe with a little house and a tree inside the plastic bubble. She said she was always careful when she shook the globe because of the people who were living in the home.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“You have to tell her.”
Emil’s round head was frozen in the window. Even though Peter was finally able to apologize to Robert Jenkins for hurting him, he was certain his son would now grow to hold him in quiet contempt. They wouldn’t fight, but Emil wouldn’t ask him to play catch or for help with his homework either. Later, he wouldn’t ask him to lunch. Perhaps he’d be too busy.
Jessie shimmied her hands up and down her arms. “You know?”
He did know. He and his wife hadn’t made love in a long time, and he saw her get to her hotel room in Lima, Peru, and the first thing she did was turn on all of the lights, then check the lock on the sliding glass door before going to the bathroom to carefully arrange her toiletries on the sink, closing her eyes when she found she’d forgotten her brush with the silver handle.
Peter shivered. “Thanks for watching Emil,” he said.
“Peter?”
Janice opened her eyes, ran her fingers through her hair, brushed her teeth, flossed, then took off her uniform and put on one of his old tee-shirts. She hadn’t felt like making love to her husband in over a year, and she took out a picture of him and her son and put the photograph on the bureau before getting into bed half a world away. She thought of them back home, in a snow globe. Snow might be falling, but a gentle hand shook the world.
To Read The Rest Of This Story,
Order now from:
Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble,
or the
Publisher