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Author's Chapter Notes:

Toby Improv!fic, 5 prompts, 2 hours, no beta.  Originally posted on LJ.  Prompts listed at the end of the story. 

 

She tells him one morning in late fall, when he’s putting on his coat and getting ready to take Sasha to pre-school.  He pauses and looks at her, and she’s serious; arms crossed, mouth set in a firm line.  He just nods.

 

Walking Sasha in, her small hand eclipsed by his, he thinks someone must be burning leaves nearby; suddenly every breath makes his lungs ache.  They reach the door and her small fingers slip out of his reach, and he says good-bye as she pushes something into his pocket.

 

He gets to work and closes his fingers around it, a maple leaf she must have picked up along the sidewalk.  He stares at his computer screen all day, the orange leaf on his desk the only way he knows that he’s still there.

 

He doesn’t know where or how she wants him to go, only away, so he spends the night in his car, curling in the backseat like he’s waiting for something to blow over, for the calm after the storm.  The next morning she moves out, back to her parents, taking Sasha with her.

 

*

 

He has a new routine: work, home, calling Sasha, staring at nothing until he can start over again.  He realizes one night that all he has left in his fridge are condiments; all that’s left in the cupboard is a dusty can of peaches.

 

He flips through the phone book and randomly chooses, calling a travel agency.  Some guy named Steve answers and asks him where he wants to go.  He tells him he wants to go somewhere, anywhere.  He tells him that he wants to forget.

 

There’s a pause on the line, then Steve recommends Amsterdam.  He books a ticket with no return flight in mind. 

 

*

He’s been there two days and its slightly exhilarating, walking different streets and not caring when he can’t understand what’s being said around him, to him.  At least here he has an excuse. 

 

Stepping out in front of the train station, he stops and listens to a boy, this kid, play a small guitar with a tin bucket at his feet.  Fumbling in his pockets for change, he hears a hollow clang as he drops his offering for redemption, proof that he’s a good guy to someone.  The glint of the coins in the bottom of the bucket twist something inside him, and all he can think about is a baby food jar full of pennies.

 

*
A year before, Sasha somehow managed to swallow a handful of change, causing panic and a rushed visit to the hospital.  She just giggled, amazed at her x-ray, how someone could take a picture that was inside.

 

Collecting the change days later, they cleaned them off, four shiny pennies.  His wife put them in an empty baby food jar, painting the lid closed pink; leftover paint from before Sasha was born, when she could still laugh and he woke up with pink smeared down his arm. 

 

He told Sasha they were her lucky pennies.  And they were there to remind her that lucky pennies don’t need to be eaten.  She just asked to have her inside picture taken again.

 

*
He stares at the change in the bottom of the bucket, and wants to turn, go back to his hotel and write a letter, anything, and not bother to wait; he’ll fly back home and she’ll somehow know, be there with their suitcases already unpacked.

 

The boy is looking up at him expectedly now, and he tosses in another handful of coins before finding the nearest hash bar.  Pot always makes him cry, anyway.

 

*
He stumbles back home late one night; broke from the cab ride and inhaling the layer of dust that’s settled over everything during the past month.  Focusing on the box of mail on his table left by his neighbor, he pulls out a letter in handwriting that’s his but not; he must have sent it anyway.  Return to Sender is scrawled across the front. 

 

He doesn’t bother to open it and read what he’s been feeling for the past month in a haze.  He tosses it in the trash, along with his suitcase filled with things that smell like forget. 

 

Reset button.  He’s ready for a new routine now.


5 Prompts:

> four shiny pennies
> a can of peaches
> an orange maple leaf
> a tin bucket
> a handwritten letter



Bennie is the author of 28 other stories.
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