Glitter on Glue

Plush carpets and the outsides of windows showed trees with thousands of branches, the snow on them like someone sprinkled glitter on glue. Brightness and it was alright that the purple plum trees had now closed down, their September bounty produced, picked, and eaten. A large balcony above, iron gates below and two cherry trees were planted by the fence, one sweet and one sour. Down in ravines always something was barking, fighting, or otherwise sounding in some way. In the summers when the rains came, the small stream overgrew itself and flooded the hills, bringing down the odd tree, say a newly planted Evergreen, or else carrying Garter snakes up from where they were trying to be quiet and wait in the wait that is their ordinary wait, that is their solitary wait, that is their instinctive and prayerful and prey- full wait. Music played and glasses chimed. Sometimes a man would put wine on his fingers and circle his fingers, one or two or even three of them around the top of a wine glass and it would make a strange whistling sound. At other times two men would make a drink and light something and then there would be fire on top of the glasses or cups. Laughter, lighting, and the way of things. The women talked about people, about local events, while the others, their counterparts with the fire and whistling sounds, argued about the greater world and were more externally oriented. Couches and floors were there, and stucco walls sturdy waited beyond bookshelves and strange collections of things. There was a wood chiselled carving of King Tut, a deceased dog’s identification tags, an arrow and bow that a visitor had brought from somewhere in Europe, and a collection of books by Ernest Hemingway with hard blue covers that nobody ever read. In the night, there were no lights outside really but there was one motion detector. Everything grew quiet and even the traditional howls or fights from animals in the ravine sometimes calmed or else were muted as if quarantined by some invisible barrier that said, “This is the night, and it now to be vast and quiet, calm and easy for a while, so that the snow owl can peer out from somewhere or the squirrel can run without fear now.” The wind picked up the snow-glitter, and carried it away to somewhere invisible in the slight beyond. But some snow still stayed on the branches. And the thousands of sticks waited there in the dark, patiently, for the bright hours to show themselves.

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Brian Michael Barbeito writes impressionistic vignettes, flash fiction, short stories, prose poetry, experimental novels, book and film reviews. His work has appeared at Glossolalia, Subtle Fiction, Mudjob, Six Sentences, Thinking Ten, American Chronicle, Our Echo, Ezine Authors, Author Nation, A Million Stores, Crimson Highway, Paragraph Planet, Useless-Knowledge Magazine, Exclusive Conclave of Delights Magazine, and Lunatics Folly. He resides in Ontario, Canada.