Stories

Pink

© Sande Boritz Berger

I am a girl just awakening in my new canopy bed on Sunday morning. I lay listening as the March wind whistles around the air-conditioner my father decided to install in the window behind my headboard. When doing this, he had no idea that he’d blocked all chances for me to spy on Philip Birnberg ─ the quiet boy, next door, for whom I carried a curious fascination. No matter how often I waved to him over the years, Philip never once waved back. Instead, he would peer outside his window as if he were looking into a vacant lot. I was a tree to Philip Birnberg, nothing more. read story...

611

© Sande Boritz Berger

I awaken to the aroma of lavender and the intrusion of squeaky wheels.
Wedged beside my hospital bed, there’s a clear plastic bubble that resembles a miniature tub. The chatty nurse from Trinidad, the one with wooden beads woven through rows of skinny braids, blows her signature spicy breeze across my face.
“Well, morning, missy. Will you be wishing to see your little boy?”
She asks the question rhythmically, like a native song, and it takes me second to remember where I am and that her question is meant for me. A sudden gripping pain shoots through my groin and reminds me. This is the moment I had feared− the perilous truth− the crisp evidence of how I’d lived the last few years of my single life: carefree, frivolous, without a plan.read story...

Plastic Shoes

© Sande Boritz Berger

Bennett Kane died watching reruns of I Love Lucy the episode with Lucy and Ethel on the assembly line, popping chocolates, their cheeks puffed like chipmunks.

Miriam was standing in the kitchen when she heard her husband’s loud cackling cut off in the middle before it wound down to its usual soft sighing. She’d been drying a dessert plate, was about to place it in the cabinet, when it slipped from her hands and shattered over the freshly mopped tiles. As she lifted the last splinter, the need to pry took hold of her, ushering her frail body towards the den—a pine paneled room where Bennett lay stretched across a flowered sofa. read story...

My Sin

© Sande Boritz Berger

Sonny is sprawled across the scratchy beige wool carpeting in the dark hallway. Stretching until she is completely flat and her muscles taut, she peers through the gap beneath the bathroom door. She’s relieved to see her mother’s large feet, actually one foot, planted in front of the toilet bowl just inches from the shell pink bathtub. That foot magically disappears as the other one slides across the tile and takes its place. Sonny closes her eyes and presses her nose into the sliver of space as if it were a window, cracked open, promising a gulp of fresh air. She breathes, deeply, inhaling the pungent odor of polish. Nail polish. Looking under the door again, she counts her mother’s toes. Her mother has painted them a brilliant shade of coral the exact color of the Flamingo perched on the front lawn, the set of unbreakable breakfast dishes, and the plastic tulips sitting in gray water on the dinette table. ...read more

Stupid Cupid

On the night of Franny Tucker’s sweet sixteen party, held in the Tucker’s newly finished basement, Myrna Tucker, Franny’s mother, who had insisted on the 60’s Rock and Roll theme, got shot. Luckily, the shot was not fatal; actually, it didn’t even come from a gun. Mr. Tucker would never keep a gun in the same house with Franny’s crazy, younger brother Marty. “That, for sure, would be asking for trouble,” he’d said to my father, a few days after the party, while they weeded the daffodil beds separating our backyards. ...read more

To Begin Again

There was once a little girl and a little boy who knew each other but not well. They stood at the same bus stop, went to the same school, and sat side by side in their fourth grade class. The little boy was strong for his age, not tall, but stocky. He had huge hands and he was always pulling the sleeves of his sweatshirt down as it crept up to his elbows. His sandy hair fell into straight bangs even though his mother attempted each morning to plaster them down with hair lotion. The boy had a husky voice that made him seem tough to all the kids. ...read more