The Palimpsest Review - Volume 10

Palimpsest onLine!'s Professional Writers at Work

Return to Palimpsest onLine!
 

Sarah Etter: “Concaves”

Marissa Molina: "The Day I Wasn’t There"

Andrew Timberlake-Newell: "Smokie"

Anthony Kocur: "To the Edge"

David Kim: "Young and Perverted"

Ryan Morini: "B – Movie Enthusiast"

Joe Giachero: "Whatever Came First"

Meghan Elliott: "Sound"

Veronika L Daddona: "Driver" and "Lamentia"

Ronell Smith: "The 1988 Holiday Barbie"

Charles Howells: "Bandwagon Patriots"

Andrew Noll: "Ten Feet Behind J.F.K."

Sarah E. Smith: "Autumn Skies"

Daniel Debiec: "A Morning in Missoula" and "into the rain"

Ryan Melling: "Hand in Hand"

Andraleen Zelonis: "Let’s Play"

Kevin Cope: "House Guest"

Becky Liscusky: "I Like Dogs and Frogs" and "You know the pan’s hot"

Amber Shinskie: "Scent of a Cherry Cigar"

Zachary Bricker: "Bedtime Story"

 

The Palimpsest Review and Palimpsest onLine! are publications of The Pennsylvania State University. The words and ideas contained within their pages are the property of their authors and cannot be used for any purposes without the authors' specific written consent.

Veronika L Daddona – Delaware

   Driver

Saturday evening, a quarter to five
My heart lost its mind when you first arrived
The sun drips down like heavy blinds
And your face is acutely, shadowy lined

The bruised asphalt sweats and sprawls and fades
I’ve lost myself inside of you for a couple of days
Ravenous tresses made in the image of heaven’s sake
What a potentially perfect painting you’d make

What a good passenger I am, all calm and serene
The amethyst world outside your Camaro is all a dream
Monochromatic your eyes always seem
Colorful yet colorless like dramatic moonbeams

Concentrating hard on the dark lashes that frame
Your eyes digesting the road like starving flames
Spanish complexion cradled in the fast lane
My love for you is sloshing all around in my veins

(Kind of like a glass that’s too full of water…)
 

There was as certain slant of afternoon sunlight that wound itself through and upon Sunita’s hair. Her church bell chime laughter was echoing along the shore. The blue Mediterranean glittered and twinkled, blinking its lashes of light flirtatiously with the sky above. Before Sunita, I would have minded not devouring this scene just by myself.
    “V!”
   Her voice racked the dishes in the cabinets of my brain. Her brown skin was being defied by the sunshine. There were others, scattered somewhere down the beach, lying out and tanning, looking like pieces of driftwood in the distance, seashells somebody might want to collect. Not me.
    We gathered our things and crossed the promenade. It was Siesta time and the whole world seemed to be asleep. Sunita and I plucked violet orchids and set them in our sea-salted manes. The damp tresses of our hair coiled and framed our faces like seaweeds. We dropped dimes into the fruit vendor’s canister while his straw hat shaded his resting eyelids from the unforgiving Spanish sun. Walking away, we sunk our teeth into the veins of juicy mangoes. The only sounds on the planet were the slapping of our sandals against the cobblestone, the breeze that whispered in our ears, and the occasional silvery sound of our spritely laughter. 
    “Girl,” she addressed me in her hip-hop sticky molasses voice, “How you feelin?”
    How strange her accent sounded in this place! I remembered the days when I was always sick and how Sunita always asked me how I was feeling. When we came to Spain, an embryo of well-being had been conceived and I could finally reply that I was okay, peachy-keen. But now the tables had turned and I was wondering how my childhood friend was doing.
    “I’m okay,” I replied with a motherly half-smile. I raised my brows “And you?”
    Her smile was so genuine you could hang it on a charm bracelet. For a second, the fingers of calm brushed my cheek  delicately.
    “I’m fiiiiiiine,” she dragged out her i. The vowel slithered from her tongue and evaporated into the clean air. The answer, unlike her smile, did not sit well in the chambers of my heart.
    Arm and arm, we walked on. Sunita leaned on me as she moved. The weight she had over me did not affect me. I couldn’t have said the same before.
    “You still write those stories and those songs, V?” she asked, changing the subject. I appreciated that.
    “Yeah.”
    “You know God gave you a real talent. And you know God doesn’t just hand out talents for no reason.”
    “Yeah. I know,” I sighed as I made a note of the sun smearing in the sky.
    “You’re one of those people who reminds the rest of us that there is so much beauty in this world. Me, I got to try and see it. But you, you just link, and you notice so much more than what’s there to the rest of us. Maybe one day, when I’m gone, you can immortalize me in one of those crazy stories you write.”
    I laughed but a fear frosted my nerves. I didn’t like the when-I’m-gone part of what she had just said. She looked at me through the inky-eyeliner-smudged corners of her dark brown, Disney doe eyes. We kept walking and I remained silent. I was quiet, but, to my dear friend, my face was full of noise. I wanted to spare her the sound of my nauseous, fiberglass heart beating furiously and desperately as it prayed for a way to cure her and make everything all better again, as it got black and tangled with the ropes of sadness, as it mingled with sad Empathy brand laundry detergent, as it got lost in the rushing water that thundered over the cliffs in my soul, as the crimson shards of its broken self made me tiptoe around in the darkness of my own mind, making my head so dizzy and unfocused that I just wanted to staple the damn thing onto my shirt sleeve.