“Happy Birthday, Ma.”
The phone had rung ten times before she’d picked up. “Oh, hi. Hang on a sec…”
Cell on the counter, she cooed at Herman, “Ah, sweet boy… Do you want a widdle tweat?”
It wasn’t a second before she returned, or a minute. It was a lifetime.
Laura Levin lives in New York’s Hudson Valley where she teaches writing as an adjunct professor. She has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Beautiful. A big thing written small. Coulda, shoulda, woulda, but life got in the way.
So much said in so few words
Beautiful!
Thank you so much for these lovely comments, everyone. I really appreciate them!
I wonder whether you might be the Laura Levin I met at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. You were studying fiction, and I was a poet. My name was Mark Alsop; I go by Gwydion Suilebhan now, and I’m the Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. If this is indeed you, I hope you’re well.
Beautiful & devastating. Thank you for this.