Christa Allan

WALKING ON BROKEN GLASS

BY

CHRISTA ALLAN

PROLOGUE

If I had known children break on the inside and the cracks don’t surface until years later, I would have been more careful with my words.

If I had known some parents don’t live to watch grandchildren grow, I would have taken more pictures and been more careful with my words.

If I had known couples can be fragile and want what they are unprepared to give or unwilling to take, I would have been more careful with my words.

If I had known teaching lasts a lifetime, and students don’t speak of their tragic lives, I would have been more careful with my words.

If I had known my muscles and organs and bones and skin are not lifetime guarantees that when broken, snagged, unstitched or unseemly, can not be replaced, I would have been kinder to the shell that prevents my soul from leaking out.

If I had known I would live over half my life and have to look at photographs to remember my mother adjusting my birthday party hat so that my father could take the picture that sliced the moment out of time—if I had known, if I had known—I would have been more careful with my life.

Leah B.

Discharge Statement

4 August

CHAPTER ONE

Cruising the sparkling aisles of Catalano’s Supermarket, I lost my sanity buying frozen apple juice.

Okay, so maybe it started several aisles before the refrigerated cases. Somewhere between the canned vegetables and cleaning supplies. I needed to kill the taste of that soy milk in my iced vanilla latte. Darn friend Molly, the dairy Nazi. It was her fault I was standing there having to decide what to pour in my Starbucks cup. Amaretto? Kahlua? Vodka? And the winner was. . .Amaretto. Perfect for an afternoon grocery event.

Ramping up the coffee seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. I’d left the end of the school year faculty party and thought I’d be a considerate wife and, on the way home, pick up dinner for Carl. He was supposed to have met me at the party. Probably he had one too many meetings, which, since I’d probably had one too many beers made us just about even. Don’t know if we matched spin cycles in our brains, though. That was the point of the coffee. A rinse cycle, of sorts.

I’d just avoided a game of bumper carts with the oncoming traffic in the organic food aisle, when I remembered needing juice. On the way to the freezer section, I maneuvered a difficult curve around the quilted toilet tissue display. My coffee sloshed in the cup in tempo with my stomach. I braked too swiftly by the refrigerator case, and a wave of latte splotched my linen shorts and newly pedicured toes. Yick.

Rows of orange juice, apple juice was third case down. I reached in, like a one-armed robot, I selected and returned can after can of juice to the freezer case, perplexed by the dilemma of cost vs. quality. Okay, this one’s four cents an ounce cheaper than this one. But this one’s. . .

My face would have reflected my growing agitation, but it was almost paralyzed by the stale icy air swirling out of the freezer. I held the door open with one hand, tried to sip what’s left of my coffee with the other, and wondered how long it would take before full body paralysis set in. I stared at apple juice cans. They stared back. My body seemed to free a part of itself, and there I was or there we were. I watched me watch the cans. The rational me separated from the wing-nut me, who still pondered the perplexities of juice costs, said. “Let’s get her out of here before she topples head first into the freezer case and completely humiliates herself.”