NERF vs Captain Hook and Peter Pan

NERF gun vs Captain Hook and Peter Pan
February 20, 2020

The Xbox broke, 
twenty-year-old tube TV flickered.
Playing ensued. 

Miguel 15, William 9.

Stumped

Carole, I am so positively stumped without you... found your copy of Journeys in Wonderland, maybe transition(s) in it... hints? Is third person, easily changed to first. But alternative realities? I am so stuck!


WORKING COPY. Possibe closing to chapter one, ot not. 

Reflecting on that day, what also remained with me was Carolee’s full-heartedness, her kindness. It was my kid sister who ignored the splatter, timidly tippy-toed toward Mom, the glide of her feet inaudible. It was she, the youngest, who'd tugged at Mom’s bathrobe and wrapped her arms around her waist. Not me, Leslie, chickenshit, nearly wetting myself. Myrna had cleared out early on. It was the last born, seven-year-old Carolee who stepped up. 

As I said, my knowing, having already lived that timeline didn’t interfere with its happening.  And if it had turned out another way, who could say where Carolee and I would have ended up?  Our sisterhood wasn’t cut short then. Not that I had reason to think it might have although the stream of distancing might have been mangled somehow. Or I’d remember differently. However in all honesty, how could anyone forget something like that?  Still, you had to consider especially in light of Carolee’s proclivity, and her penchant for ventriloquism, throwing her voice like a time-space slingshot that would call out from faraway places. 

That day remained our secret, because Carolee made it so. Her reach then and in future years evidenced by her whimsy, the way she’d expand mythologies, explore the hidden power of inanimate things, extend them, make them malleable, turn them inside out. And suddenly — whoosh — a new beginning appeared bright and alluring renewed by a fresh perspective, her words transmuting the order of the universe. 

And now, in this present, both Carolee and her prequel, Sophie, no longer with me, I am hearing Carolee’s revelry from a yonder, feeling her prodding: her insistence: quit-ya-belly-aching, get a moving girl, you’ve a job at hand.  You must complete the story we began but could not finish together. 

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