Literary Lunes Magazine: November 2011 Issue

“Bike Man”

  By Brandon Lee Webb

  Bike man,

  His strange,

  haunted-almost-drunk,

  glazed & red eyed look,

  Kids in tow - oblivious to all except the proud ice cream reward they devour.

  Teapot cozy wooly heads with denim & oversized lensed camera over shoulder.

  Then nothing,

  Just hiss, crash & 'Wahhh! Come on Betsy" in the distance,

  As the breeze dances with my free page.

  Trio of people, lady with keys,

  Windlessly jangling,

  Curious glances in my direction.

  Kids on scooters collide,

  No tears,

  Biggest kid leads the way,

  Then more hiss, crash and the breeze asks my hair

  "Shall we?"

  The horizon seems so far,

  A ship,

  A hulk of a ship in the distance,

  Unaware of my interest,

  As my eyes fall on its twin,

  Further back still.

  "We gotta walk back don't forget"

  A grandpa advises newly mobile scooter-granddaughter.

  The years straining on his ruddy map of a face.

  Then I stand,

  My day has to be given back to my work,

  So I join the fleshy tide,

  All the way back to my car.

  Zeigarnik Effect

  By Richard Luftig

  I hate loose ends. Always have. You might say I’m compulsive about closure. I’m sure my wife would agree with you.

  In some ways, disliking things left undone can be good. I’m not a guy to leave the lawn half mowed nor can I stand to have paperwork pile up at the office. I answer my emails the day I get them. I pay my bills the day they come. My inbox is empty, and my credit is pristine.

  But this need for closure might cost me my marriage.

  It was bothering me for weeks, a sense of dread, of unfinished business. I knew what it was but I didn’t dare tell Sarah. We’ve been married fifteen years. I’m turning thirty-nine in September. Sarah is two years younger than me. We have two daughters, one in middle school, the other going into fourth grade. I’m a corporate lawyer, Sarah is a school guidance counselor and we live outside Atlanta. We’re happy, comfortable, well- adjusted. That is, when my neurosis about loose ends doesn’t make her crazy.

  We met at the University of Georgia when we were undergraduates. I was a junior and. Sarah was finishing up her freshmen year. Already, I looked like the lawyer I was going to become; tall, angular with eyeglasses from poor eyesight inherited from my mother and exacerbated by reading the small type of legal texts, and with the full brown hair that, if my father was any indication, I would begin to shed like tufts in a windstorm within a decade.

  Sarah was beautiful, perhaps not the homecoming queen type of beauty, but lovely to me. Soft, tanned skin that she had to protect from freckling or burning in the hot southern sun, and long, brunette hair she wore in a pony tail which stuck out the back of the U of G baseball cap that she wore everywhere.

  We didn’t really have all that much in common; she was a bit of a party girl and I liked to get my work done on time and have things in order. Maybe, what she found desirable in me was that I made her pay attention to details, her syllabus, the due dates for papers, seeing her advisor to stay on track. I know that her mother gave her a hard time about dating a guy going into his senior year when she was barely a sophomore. But Sarah stuck to her guns. We married five years later, a week after I passed the bar exam.

  Flash forward fifteen years and I’m about to risk everything simply because I can’t leave things well enough alone, can’t let sleeping dogs lie. Any cliché you have might work just as well.