My.Third.Eye Photography

The Housecleaner

She came to clean their house, and often stood in the dusty sunlight speaking to the boy of ordinary things she had seen and done, things that had been, she said, stuffed too full of people.

There were turnings in her story: what she had seen in a doorway, how she had stared with pleasure at a swipe of blue sky, and how, later, she had resisted the impulse to lean into a certain man.

She had never experienced the murmurings of love, or the accompanying gusts of grief.

He left home at eighteen, the lips of his loneliness trembling, and while he was away at college he missed her more than he did any of his family or friends.

Without him to talk to, she began to see her face in every passing wall, and fell into the habit of dreaming her way backward and forward through time, which seemed to her, now, a combination of cream and stone.

Margaret Takes Another Walk

Margaret lived in a one-room studio apartment. Every day after work she came home and did predictable things. Hung up her red jacket. Turned the thermostat to sixty-eight degrees. Opened the refrigerator and stared at the bag of eczema'd baby carrots.

On weekends she took long walks, during which she clung to a small new camera that was rapidly becoming her antidote to life's wide array of disappointments — run-ins with her own perfectionism, the steadily ongoing demise of precious illusions.

One day, surrounded by a few beautiful hours and an unexpected burst of rain, she went out again. This walk led to a revelatory street corner. All thoughts and words rushed out the soles of her feet and into the euphoric river of gutter water, and she perceived every step forward as a step into the Great Unknown, and for the first time in a long time, she was not afraid.

As the sun came out from behind charcoal clouds, she continued on with her walk until she found a surprisingly erotic tree trunk. Then she went home.