Special Delivery
by Sylvia Claire Onorato
She was in the middle of putting an ancient Greek curse tablet to music when he plopped a pot of basil, muddy and dripping wet, onto the lowest octave of the baby grand.
Practically a baby himself, he chortled at her look of horror. But before she had time to reprimand, she heard the storm that must have been howling for at least an hour. Focused on her work, trusting her sister to watch him, she turned inward for the first time in forever. And paid.
The back door was open. Wind had strewn last year’s leaves throughout the whole kitchen and into the dining room. Every pot in the garden had been brought inside, warmed with a blanket or a toy. Somehow he had known to put the small red Zectron ball below the unripe, green tomatoes. Her old Raggedy Ann was half submerged in impatiens. All around the new celery stalks were Bananagram letters.
For less than a moment her training took over. She looked at the scattered letters and searched for meaning. What sort of curse…? No, this was the exact opposite. The little hero of an epic with an untranslated ending had saved the harvest – the first of many great deeds.
Sylvia Claire Onorato is a creative writer and scholar. She graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University with a major in English, then earned a PhD from Princeton University, where she wrote a dissertation on American prose poetry of the early 1900s. To promote the study of this delightful intergenre genre, she founded Melange: A Journal of Prose Poetry and the Arts while at Princeton. She can be reached through LinkedIn or Facebook.