Thank you to Editor Mark Antony Rossi for publishing my short fiction today in Ariel Chart. 

https://www.arielchart.com/2022/05/selective-visions.html

Selective Visions

  

 A white picket fence, built-in front of a clipped, deep green lawn. A garden planted before a small veranda. Small is a limiting word, she means cozy.  Cozy enough for two to cuddle within, and enjoy each other’s company. A perfect home, except for the too loud ticking of the grandfather clock and that thump the shutter makes.  When it hits, it sounds like a car door closing.   

Wasn’t it Henry David Thoreau who said to go confidently in the direction of your dream?  She thinks she’s done that.  She sees a parade of celebrations coming: a wedding, large family holiday gatherings, great festive events.  The only thing to mar those events is the ever-increasingly loud tick of the clock, a more aggressively sounding strike of the shutter.  It sounds like something strongly ominous in the distance.

She looks forward to the long romantic walks around the block hand in hand and arm in arm.  All the neighbors smile and wave as the couple passes.  She sees that everyone knows them to be good people, and a pair completely in love. The neighbors will say this amongst themselves in the most wistful of ways. That ticking is becoming deafening.  And, that shutter, blown by the winds, sounding like a huge door slamming shut.