By Didi Wood
Tomorrow we’ll head north to Logan and then home, with our newest college T-shirts and the baguette from Bricco in the North End you’ll insist on stopping for, because we’re here, and I’ll dread how quiet the house will be, how we’ll be able to hear each tick of the clock counting down seconds minutes hours months so far away from both our boys.
But tonight I say I wish we’d brought backgammon and in the inn’s library find a set, incomplete, with quarters filling in for two missing pieces. It’s fine, we say, setting up the board, but just in case, I open a different box, checkers, and look, there’s one of them. I open another, Parcheesi, and you say No way and there’s the other.
Didi Wood’s stories appear or are forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. “Rattle & Rue,” originally published in Cotton Xenomorph, was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2019. The temporal structure of “Pieces” was inspired by Laura Gilpin’s poem “The Two-Headed Calf.” Find Didi at didiwood.com and on Twitter @DidiWood.
MoonPark Review 