by Beth Thomas
I. Jump
Lenore has been jumping for upward of six months
now. Though she can’t quite put a finger on how it
began, she knows why it continued. She was, for
the first time in sixty-some-odd years, able to see
over things: people in line, fences. She was able to
feel things that she hadn’t felt in years: calf muscles
contracting, flexing; heavy breasts bouncing;
shoulder tendons tensing, releasing.
At first, people would see her walking, then jumping,
then smiling, and they would smile. It’s not
something most people see every day, a woman of
a certain age jumping and hopping across the quiet
village square.
Lenore started wearing bangles on her wrists and
jingle bells tied to her shoes so as to make music as
she jumped. The people laughed and waved when
they heard these melodies. Lenore herself felt even
lighter with the ringing of bells to lift her feet.
Most days she jumped down to the grocery, skipped
to the laundry, or hopped to the post office. The
sidewalks were sometimes full, sometimes deserted.
She passed people who nodded knowingly, and
those bewildered by her wild-eyed bounding,
jingling, chime-and-ringing.
"When did you start this jumping?" the florist asked,
while Lenore bunched together stems of gerbera
daisies, larkspur, leatherleaf fern.
She thought what he really wanted to know was
why, but he asked instead, when. This was a
question that deserved an answer.
Eyeing the oncidium orchid displayed behind the
counter, she said to the florist, in her head, “I was
so lonesome. I used to sprawl awake in the cool
grass listening for my dearest Ezra, feeling for his
words among the blades.”
She said, in her head, “I heard a lark in a nearby
tree and wondered if it was him. I wanted to follow
him through the sweet, sweet sky.”
Out loud, she said, “A few weeks ago, so June. It
was June.”
II. Stress
It is winter and the sky is white; it has no more
stories to tell. The sun goes down for hours, casting
long undulating shadows across all people and
things. Lenore is still jumping.
The folks she passes in town look away when she
leaps past, pretending not to see her. They try not
to see that her clothes are torn and her feet are
bare, that she limps, and that her eyes, once those
of an exultant child, are now those of something
dangerous. Now, the people turn away from the
dissonant racket of her tarnished bangles and
broken bells.
As she gathers her weekly bouquet, she glances
now and then at the canary yellow oncidium orchid,
its blooms spread along the stem like starched
petticoats hanging on a clothesline, placid and
perfect in its heavy terra cotta pot. She wonders
what the pot would sound like smashing against the
cold south wall of her house. She wonders what the
shards of terra cotta would taste like, would feel like
on her tongue, in her throat.
"Do your feet hurt?" the florist asks.
She realizes she is sitting, not standing. Not jumping.
She says, out loud, “Yes, always.”
She rises, pays for her small clutch of flowers, then
jumps home. After replacing the bouquet on her
dusty kitchen table, she finds a county phone book
underneath a pile of dirty clothes, then flips to the
page marked Physicians.
III. Fracture
Today, three towns away, Lenore sits in a bright
reception room for a half-hour trying to read a
National Geographic article about polar bears. The
reception desk displays a single yellow oncidium
orchid, which holds her attention for much longer.
"There are borderline stress fractures," the young
doctor says.
Lenore doesn’t know what that means so he goes
on to say that if she saw four doctors, two would
likely say they were fractures, while two would likely
not. She considers with great interest the idea of
visiting four doctors to test his theory, but decides
that because this doctor is young and handsome,
and because his reception desk displays a single
yellow oncidium orchid, and because she is running
out of time, she will stick with this diagnosis.
"Why do both of your feet have borderline stress
fractures?" he asks.
She says, in her head, “I searched the quiet
corners of our home, finding only a box of
mementos high up on a shelf in the closet. I knew
inside I would find photos and yellow petals long
since pressed between pages of a heavy book.
Having no ladder, I did something then I hadn’t
done since I-don’t-know-when.”
She says to him, in her head, “I jumped once,
timidly, my arm extended covering but half the
distance. I jumped again, higher, stronger, but still
short. I crouched and, harnessing all my strength,
jumped a third time, not only reaching my target but
bringing it down perfectly into my hands. Plop.”
She says to him, out loud, “Well, young man, I
suppose it is because I was happy once.” She
makes no mention of the jumping.
# # #
works as a technical writer in California. Her
fiction has recently appeared in Edgar
Literary Magazine and Gator Springs Gazette.
