I thought I would share the first short story I had published exactly a year ago. I still remember how excited I was to get an email saying that my work had been accepted. At that point, I’d had a few poems published, but never any prose. I was so excited! 2016 was a windfall for me–I’ve now had seven short stories, two pieces of creative nonfiction and three poems published.

Little did I know that I’d have so many more stories published in 2016! But this is the one that started the snowball effect. It was originally published in untethered 2.2. Click on the link to look at the wonderful art by  tyson john atkings in that issue. This publication opened other doors as well, as I have been reading submissions for the magazine since last summer (issue 3.1) and it’s given me a window into the world of literary magazines.

I shouldn’t keep you waiting though, just in case you hate it as much as my main character does! Here’s the story…

The Waiting

On this particular day, she is waiting for a phone call. Her suitor is already three minutes late in calling. She is certain he knows that she cannot bear tardiness. She is expecting him to ask her to go out with him tonight, so she has washed her hair and is trying to let it dry into unassuming ringlets rather than the frizz that quickly takes over when she fidgets too much before it has completely dried. She has also taken care in dressing for the occasion. There is not much she can do to occupy her time during the waiting that will not endanger her hair or the fragile linen capris and thin Indian chemise, so she perches demurely on the edge of her chaise, near the telephone.

In a typical situation, she ensures there will be little actual waiting time that passes idly. There are always projects on the go: renovations in winter, gardening in the summer, and, throughout the year, endless documents, piled high on her desk, to edit for work. In the single-car garage, there are items in various stages of disrepair. She never discards anything that could be salvaged, but organizes them according to how long they will take to fix. The quick fixes are near her tidy workbench and the most time-consuming or questionable repairs are nearest the garage door, which is in permanent disrepair, due to heaved concrete that has accordioned the door to its frame. She suspects the scraggly jack pine on the front lawn is the culprit.

She gently picks up her Book of Lists and absent-mindedly runs her fingers over the slightly raised print that sprawls across the pages. Caressing its tidy pages, arranged into neat columns of perfectly stacked words, is therapeutic. The fact that the tiny hand-written black letters could easily be mistaken for type is a point of pride. For the first stint of waiting, she remains calm by thumbing through the lists. Each list is a predecessor of the original and is split into three equally spaced columns. The first two columns itemize what she has yet to accomplish. The first column is entitled Home and Finances and the second, Personal. The third, and final, column reads WHAT MOTHER EXPECTS.

When the clock indicates that seven minutes have passed since he was to call, her nervous fretting begins. Her fingers start drumming the highly polished surface of the vintage 1920s mahogany table, passed down through her family, she sanded down and refinished last winter, in a time of utter panic—Billy Pasternack had asked her to accompany him on an all-inclusive trip to Puerto Vallarta. Although she had wanted to fly off with him, her mother strictly forbade leaving the city with a man who might have romantic designs without serious intentions. And so, broken-hearted, she ended things with poor Billy, who had intended to profess his true, undying love with a platinum three stone princess cut diamond ring in her exact size. It had taken him eighteen months to save for this ring.

Billy had never once been late, but always five minutes early.

But by the time she had realized her serious error, she was too steeped in pride to admit she had made a mistake. Her mother also insisted where romantic relationships were concerned, if you repeat chapters, the ending will never change.

Her suitor is now almost half an hour late. This will not do.

She needs to calm her nerves, so she turns quickly to the current list, prepared to recopy it onto the next page, but there are no blank pages left. She fetches a fresh journal from the stack in the hall closet. She chooses a red one— to fit her mood. She settles herself again, quickly uncaps a fine-tipped red Sharpie and begins circling items she has forgotten to carry over from previous versions of the list. She berates herself as she methodically rewrites corrected and updated columns of things not accomplished. The third column has been unchanged since it was first penned, all those years ago. Each time she copies this column to the next list, she does so diligently and as lovingly as the hand that had written the original. Its passages are memorized.

#24 Fall in love when you are ready, not when you are lonely.

#25 Good things come to those who wait. Be patient.

Once she has completed the list, she goes to the garage, returning with a stepladder. She places it below the square cover to the bungalow’s attic crawl space. She plunges the top half of her body through the cobwebs and places the full journal into the nearest of several boxes filled with journals of a similar nature piled high in the dark.

The original journal, a gift from her mother, ensconced by a premature deathbed on her sweet sixteenth birthday, containing only one column—the third of her current journal—is housed in a fireproof box in the bottom drawer of her bedroom bureau. It is her most treasured and most referenced resource, her mother’s guiding voice for all decisions.

The phone rings.

She scurries down the ladder and yanks the cord out of the wall.

Smiling to herself, she stretches and purrs like a ragdoll cat that has woken from an afternoon nap to find itself lying in the brightest ray of sun.

The rain has stopped. She is pleased to see that puddles have formed themselves in odd places in the yard. The pond she so methodically constructed has overflowed and some of the drowning yellow and orange daffodils will have to be rescued. She twists her hair up and knots it in place, tucks her white linen pants into a pair of galoshes, grabs the ladder and ventures out to fix the damage.

Her mother always said that only rain can wash everything anew.