Emerge Literary Journal, Issue Four

empty nut.

“What are you going to do with those?” he asked. “Slip them in my cocoa?” She was never more beautiful than in that moment, covered in sweat and mud, without a speck of makeup, climbing back down to the creek to wash her hands in the icy water.

“Oh, no,” she teased. “I’d never put you down that easy.” Indeed she hadn’t. She had waited four solid years before orchestrating his death. *** “He is nothing to me,” she insisted on that final afternoon, standing in their driveway, grasping for his suitcase. Her voice emerged strained and naked against the heavy veil of his silence. How nothing could end everything he would never understand. He could still see their bodies pressed close, feel his veins bleed out when the stranger leaned into his wife’s kiss. There were times even now when he replayed the moment he’d caught them, and wondered if refusing her subsequent pleas to stay had been the right choice.

His fingers stroked the seeds as though in Braille they would speak something to him, give him an answer. They were still perfectly intact, trapped beneath a thin ribbon of Scotch tape, waiting to be freed.

He tore the strip from the back of the photograph, collected the tiny nuggets in his palm and left his house. Walking out into the Saturday afternoon sun, he went west, down his street and toward the center of town. A soft wind played around his neck and he lifted his hand to the air, releasing the Buckeye into the breeze.