“Ashes, Ashes,” a short story by alumna Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13), appears in the spring 2013 issue of The Gettysburg Review.
[The city] was burning with the slow implacable fires of human desperation.—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Her mother used to walk the subdivision in the cool early mornings of summer, before the heat and humidity descended and trapped everybody in air-conditioned exile. She stopped walking mornings because of Dave Fletcher and O.J. Simpson. Dave was a county police officer who lived across the street from the mother. His wife left him in April, driving away from their house in Three Creeks. The summer of O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial for murder, as her mother walked in and out of the neighborhood cul-de-sacs, she saw Dave Fletcher in his dark blue police uniform walking too. Dave didn’t walk on the sidewalks or even in the street. Dave walked between peoples’ houses, across their lawns, through the common ground. At first, her mother said, she thought he was patrolling the subdivision, looking out for his neighbors.
This much of the story seemed reasonable to the daughter. But you never knew. She didn’t live there anymore, and the mother was prone to exaggeration, depression, and a dependence on cleaning products and box blush wines. So was the daughter. About the same things and different things too. They talked on the phone almost every day and the daughter made the ten hour drive to visit her mother once a month or as often as she could. She had Fridays off and that was her driving day. She’d leave in the morning and get to her mother’s house in time for dinner. No matter what time it was when she got there, her mother would be looking out the dining room window. No matter how long she planned to stay, the first thing her mother always said was, “Our time is so short.”
