Baggage

My grandfather’s wife left him at the Boston airport in a whiteout, saying, “He likes to watch the planes.” She didn’t like it when he put the cheese from lunch away in her lingerie drawer, though that’s the way with memory sometimes. Things have to go somewhere, but where?

When the skies cleared, a baggage handler put him on a plane. Now he asks us, would we buy him a car, a little roustabout so he can get home to see the folks? He spreads his hands. “I’ve always kept my skirts clean.”

He says, “I’m good for the loan.”









Susan Morehouse is a professor of creative writing at Alfred University in rural western New York, where she also directs the Creative Writing Institute for Young Writers in the summer. She has published her short prose in New Ohio Review, New South, and Beloit Fiction Journal among others.