--NICE JOB.  IT WORKED.

                             The Thing About Beautiful Things

 I am clinging. I am holding on. Or trying to.

I am holding every beautiful thing I have ever felt in the vase of my little boy hands.

There are four of them, four beautiful things in total, and each is so lovely and radiant that they hurt my eyes, and still I do not cry. I will not cry. I will never cry again.

         I turn one beautiful thing over and examine its backside and see it is beautiful even that way, even from behind, though it seems somehow contrived or counterfeit.

         I make the second beautiful thing shimmy its shoulders across a dance floor or grade school gym. I make it sing crisp and chirpy and then I chirp chirp chirp right back in my small, Helen Keller head.

         Number three and four beautiful things are far more than beautiful, but I am dumb and don’t know a word for more than beautiful, so I just remain sitting and staring as the screams/fists/flares/flames take down the hall, the ceiling rafters, my bedroom, the kitchen and the fridge where tomorrow I will be too scared to look for milk and will instead run to the big burping school bus already leaving without me.