Magic Chair
Francine Witte We spent the morning like always, staring at the magic chair. It was a wooden chair, all splintery and bare. We thought it should be sanded or painted, but Mother said no. She told us how her mother and mother’s mother had passed it down. To fix it would be like rubbing our ancestors away. One time, my little brother sat on it, only to be slapped aside by Mother. That’s Great-Grandmother X you are smothering, she said, or Cousin Lavinia from the Civil War. So, instead we learned to sit in a semi-circle on the hard, uncarpeted floor. A carpet would steal the chair’s splendor, Mother had warned. We didn’t know what splendor that was, or why the chair was magic. In fact, the truth of it was, the one time my father sat on it, he was stumble-drunk and on his way out the door to dead-crash the car. And my brother, the one who sat on it that time, caught an awful fever that the doctors didn’t understand, and they apologized to Mother at the funeral. One other time, in the quiet of just-before dawn, I woke up and saw Mother waving a match at the magic chair. She held the match in several ways, skating the air above it and then drawing circles right around the legs. She didn’t know I saw her. How I watched until her fingers nearly burned. |
|
About the Author:
Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks, two flash fiction chapbooks, and the full-length poetry collections Café Crazy (Kelsay Books) and the forthcoming The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) Her play, Love is a Bad Neighborhood, was produced in NYC this past December. She lives in NYC.
Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks, two flash fiction chapbooks, and the full-length poetry collections Café Crazy (Kelsay Books) and the forthcoming The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) Her play, Love is a Bad Neighborhood, was produced in NYC this past December. She lives in NYC.