Lens Cleaner

He'd watched Joyce's right hand resting, wrist up on her knee, for the entire ride home that day. She'd pinched the bridge of her aquamarine bifocals between her thumb and index finger as if escorting a specimen to a laboratory. When she'd walked into their bedroom, she pulled a supple lens cloth from her bedside table and swabbed it smoothly across the left lens capturing a sample of the coarse grit of their son's ashes. When she was done, she'd placed the cloth into a tiny plastic zip-pouch, and tucked it away. On her way out of the room, she'd dropped the glasses into her pink plastic wastebasket with a hollow plunk that neither startled nor soothed either of them. Today, the loose ends of her illness, their life together sufficiently cauterized, Omar rescued the sealed up lens cloth from it's place in her nightstand drawer, and moved it to his side of the bed.

Ventura Highway in the Sunshine

Jonah touched down in the middle of the southbound lane, tallons clicking against the asphalt as he paced slightly east then west, dismayed by the flock of crows feasting on the tender, dew-kissed fawn. His breath quickened to a soft huff as he struggled to figure how to squeeze in among their sharp, eager beaks and join them in ripping strands of moist pink flesh. A bold male scuttled up and pecked once at Jonah's creamy underbelly, leaving a streak of the deer's blood on the fluffy down and startling Jonah who grabbed a wingful of air and pumped against it, lifting himself high enough to kick the crow away. His tallon plunged through the silky black feathers, through the brittle shell of the crow's skull and caught in the squishy gel of his brain. Jonah began to kick frantically trying to shake the crow loose, but came away with bits of bone and syrupy blood coating his craggy skin and collecting granules of sand from the road as he backed away, sending the feasting flock into the air while the shattered crow spilled onto the road and scavenger flies set to work on the leaking blood. Jonah stepped forward, gently shaking the sticky grit from his claw and sunk his beak into the fawn's cooling belly and tore a satisfying chunk of delicate meat away.