Fiction by Richard Gotti
Your oil paints and soiled rags, my unfinished story. Your newspapers in plastic sleeves, my underwear limp in the dryer. Your cats on the kitchen table nibbling the birthday tulips we forgot to bring. Your daughter at her father’s house crying to go with us. The new moon rises.
We drive east eating turkey sandwiches, the moon roof open to the March-chilled air and Etta James singing How Deep is the Ocean— the ocean we’re seeking this first weekend of spring. Then the Cape Cod Canal’s charcoal waters, white-veined from lights on the Sagamore Bridge. On Route Six four lanes dwindle to two. Dunes grow. Suddenly harbor lights glister beyond like blue stars scattering light in the invisible turbulence.
Richard Gotti’s short fiction has appeared in Chautauqua, Literature Today and The RavensPerch. A finalist in the Lost in Words international fiction contest, he co-authored the nonfiction book, Overcoming Regret. His plays have been performed in New York’s Hudson Valley and Finger Lakes.
