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Shipwrecked By Jacqueline Philyaw Hoskins
Mary Charlotte hated that her house was such a mess, especially her bedroom. To say the bedroom was “cluttered” was too polite. It was filled from wall to wall with everything she had taken out of her suitcase from her last trip, and the trip before that, and the one before that. The floor was covered in shoes, books, gifts she had received, gifts she had bought and never gifted, suitcases of varying sizes and shapes. The bed was piled high with clean laundry, dirty laundry, unread mail, toiletries, magazines…how could she be a 40-year-old woman living in the space of a teenaged boy? Was she doomed, a derelict ship anchored to the bottom of her barnacled bedroom? She could never be a minimalist, and she truly didn’t aspire to that life. She wanted to keep the things that meant the most to her: the vase she bought in Jordan, rugs from Istanbul, handmade pottery by bold artists on Greek islands, the exquisite wooden settee carved with angels’ faces…of course! Not a minimalist, but an exquisitist! With newfound resolve, she called the Salvation Army, then went to the garage to retrieve the box collection she had never been able to part with. She filled them to the brim with all the extraneous bits of her life, everything she did not find exquisite. All day and into the night, she filled the boxes. Early the next morning, she stacked them high on her front porch. As she waited for the truck to arrive, she walked through her now barren home. She had gone far beyond the bedroom, hadn’t she? How had that happened? So much was gone, had she inadvertently included some of her exquisite treasures in those boxes? There was no other way to explain… What had she done? She heard the roar of a truck engine and raced down to the front door, but it was too late. Mary Charlotte crawled into her now-empty bed, falling into a tear-stained sleep. She awoke to the mid-afternoon sun shimmering on her bedspread, cascading onto the hardwood floors. She looked around the room and breathed deeply, in and out. In and out. Her ship had surfaced.
Jacqueline Philyaw Hoskins is a writer from Sterling, Virginia, near Washington, DC. She enjoys writing short and flash fiction as well as personal essays, hybrid forms and novel-length fiction. Her work also appears in Ariel Chart.
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