It’s an old chair. A well-used chair. In the dining room, it seated its share of guests and heard a quota of secrets, while providing measured comfort. The chair occupied the nursery for decades, a cushy seat for the nursemaid when she wasn’t walking the floor with a colicky infant.

That was you.

After the nursery became a study, the chair had a grand refurbishing in burgundy velvet. It sat under a bright lamp, digesting scholarly papers while your father snored. Trapped in the attic, there’s a mouse nesting in its seat.

Recover it. For the baby’s room. It’s yours.

Published online in The Dribble Drabble Review, Second Issue October 2020

My grandfather hijacks every conversation. Maybe World War II was the biggest thing that happened to him. The last time I wanted to borrow money, he told me that when he was nineteen his ship sunk in the Mediterranean. The water was red with blood. Many people were killed. I always thought that he exaggerated, but now I’ve read about that battle. I’m nineteen and I think, maybe if I’d been there, I’d have to keep telling that story about people I’d saved. Swimming, hypothermia, explosions, smoke. Video games, but real. Survivor’s guilt on steroids. Maybe he’s always had P.T.S.D.