Offset Melodies

A lyric hybrid story

Photo by me

Offset Melodies

Each morning stretches hot and indifferent. The girl works in the vegetable garden among the runner bean plants, twining the pliant tendrils around bean poles. The newly born plants that emerged from dry brown seeds are flexible and soft in her hands. The heart-shaped leaves hum as she works, hum heart-shaped songs or songs that shape hearts. All the girl knows about hearts is that hers is still and dry as a stone vessel waiting to be filled.

*

Once, the girl’s heart was alive with curiosity, flowers, and freedom, embraced by never-ending story-time, twilight sing-a-longs, and hands that always gave. It becomes harder to remember the soaring joy of her once-filled heart, to believe it will ever be filled again.

*

Each morning blooms of bejeweled red ruffles wave at the girl-in-waiting, at her poor dry heart-in-waiting. The flowers whisper words that mingle with the humming heart-shaped leaves, whisper waiting is good practice for fulfilling. The girl rubs her thumbs over the sun soaked leaves, feels hundreds of vibrating hearts humming together. Deeper still, she feels a mother-thrumming from the furrowed earth that birthed the bean plants, that birthed every plant since the Big Bang.

*

Mothers are made, not born. They are a want-to-be, not a given.

*

Each morning she watches as the bean pods flourish, she rub rub rubs them between her fingers and thumb, feels their growing fullness, tends the twining vines. How they whisper and hum in her hands...

You’re the only one our hearts beat for

*

Flutter……. goes her heart.

---

One morning I awoke from a dream with the words “offset melodies” in my head. I didn’t remember the dream so I have no idea how those words were connected to it. But I knew, somehow, the words needed a story. The story began as a traditional narrative but it didn’t want to be traditional no matter how I tried to make it conform. Once I let the heart go where it wanted, the words flowed. Offset Melodies is nonfiction at its core but told “slant” as Emily Dickinson suggests in Poem 1263. I don’t think I’ve written anything like it before or since and I may never again.

Offset Melodies, the story, was published in Louisiana Literature in 2022 and is included in my debut chapbook of the same title. Many thanks to Editor Jack Bedell for accepting and supporting this piece and to ELJ Editions for accepting and supporting my chapbook.

Offset Melodies is included in a volume of five chapbooks titled Grieving Hope and can be found in paper back and ebook at ELJ Editions and the other usual places online.