*
It’s winter and the ceiling fan, not in use, has become a big asterisk above my bed, a qualification to my life. I wonder what it’s telling me. Is it a “yes, but,” or is it more of a “by the way”? Does it mean this terrible, lonely year is a mere blip, a statistical aberration, or is it marking me in general as a freakish anomaly? I wish I could ask someone, but the first person I think of asking is several hundred miles away, lying alone in his bed, looking up at his ceiling, which is a big blank space. He doesn’t mind that, I guess.
I go downstairs, an attempt to see below, but I find only more empty rooms. There’s no small-print explanation. There’s no sign anyone has ever been here but me. Ominous despite its form (flower, snowflake, star), an asterisk forces you off the preset path of your narrative and into something you weren’t expecting. You don’t have to follow an asterisk, but most everyone does, seeking the hidden meaning. I trudge back upstairs, lie down, look up, wonder if it isn’t an asterisk about me but about God. Maybe it’s saying “yes, He moved mountains, but He was on steroids that year” or “results may not be typical,” so I shouldn’t expect miracles, not even a little one, though it would make all the difference right now. One sentence, a really short one, wouldn’t even need a verb: Me, too.
Of course, an asterisk about God or life wouldn’t actually correspond to an explanation, would it. You’d just be teased, left wondering what that was all about, maybe nothing more than an unusually clean and symmetrical Rorschach test. I stare at it every night, these long winter nights, and wish for summer’s heat again so I can turn on the fan, the asterisk gone into blur like the past, keeping God in his unpunctuated heaven and me in a breezy, unqualified life.
_____________________________
Letitia L. Moffitt was born and raised in Hawaii. Her work—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—has been published in literary journals including PANK, HTMLGiant, Black Warrior Review, Aux Arc Review, Jabberwock Review, Coe Review, The MacGuffin, and Dos Passos Review. Her recently completed short story collection has been a finalist for prizes from Livingston Press and Black Lawrence Press, and she is currently working on a novel. She received a doctoral degree in English and creative writing from Binghamton University in New York, and she currently teaches creative writing as an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University. Read her online serial novella, Redwood, at redwoodnovel.blogspot.com and follow her blog atelectronwoman.blogspot.com.
