wildscape. literary journal

Snapshot
by Andrea Cavedo

        On the table are a few things. There is a pen, a bill that needs to be paid, a notebook, an empty grown-up cup, a child’s cup full of milk. A cassette deck, playing an audiobook. A container of teal playdoh, a nearly-empty box of graham crackers, a small plastic box filled with stretchy, plastic hair ties. Five woven placemats and one plastic placemat that maps the body’s systems (skeletal, nervous) in rich, cheerful colors. One laptop computer, its screen gone dark. One comb. It seems like a lot, listed in this way, but usually there is so much more.
 	The toddler is eating a snack, the third-grader is delivering a lecture about how to make a bracelet out of the hair ties, which she learned how to do at camp today and cannot wait to share. The mother is trying to simultaneously feed the toddler, attend to the third-grader’s instructions, un-hear the audiobook, and tamp down a ravening terror that if she hears one more sound she might cease to exist. Completely lose herself. Though that would be hard to do with the cat battering its little paws against her thighs under the table, as it is doing now. “Yes, I love it,” she says to the third-grader, rolling a too-tight bracelet onto her wrist.
 	With this lie (which is a kind of truth) she is also floating sort of out of her body and observing the scene here at the table: a young mother, that is, a mother of young children, a mother who is middle-aged, brown hair sparkling with grays, sitting with the third-grader on her lap, both of them facing the toddler so that the mother can comb tangles out of the little girl’s freshly shampooed hair and give the little boy pieces of graham cracker, and he is saying “gockoo, gockoo” (which means “thank you”) even though he’s pointing at the playdoh instead of the snack, and the girl is twisting more hair ties, her fingers like a loom, and the mother is drifting, seeing herself up against the ceiling, looking down at the figures below. These strangers, surrounded by their mess. Someone should take a picture of this. Someone should be here to see the summer-blond hair, the crazily tilting adult incisors next to the missing canines and the baby bicuspids, the pink plastic glasses frames, the damp spots on all of their t-shirts, warm and spreading like wounds, the way the sunset makes the stained glass in the window glow like a hundred hidden candles, the way her heart is glowing—absolutely ablaze with divine fire here in this nothing moment, these throwaway minutes in the late part of an endless summer day—pumping with the question: “How lucky, how lucky, how lucky is she?”
 	Someone should take a picture. But there is no camera on the table, no photographer. Just a pen, and a laptop. A grown-up cup with a few final drops hiding at the bottom. Crumbs, and a braid.

about the author // Andrea Cavedo