Lucinda Age 5 and Her Mother’s Great Friend, Bob O’Conner
by Lucinda Kempe
The Butaca saw the world explode leaving it the last chair sitting. It sat in a garden empty of people and pets with not another kind of fur or skin-covered creature around. Just dust and rocks and exposed tree roots twisted grotesquely. If the Butaca could have it would have liked to say it was sorry for this present state of disarray, but the Butaca didn’t have language. It had a sling-back spine and flat arms of Cuban mahogany and had been made two hundred years ago by a Creole cabinetmaker in New Orleans, who loved his work so much he brought it home to his family instead of selling it in his store on Bourbon Street. He sat in it at night with his wife in her chair and the children on the floor at their feet in a small but tidy and beloved parlor of a small beloved house, a shotgun, in an uptown neighborhood where the neighbors had greeted each other on their stoops in a regularly reoccurring ritual of civility.
Lucinda Kempe’s work has been published or is forthcoming in New Flash Fiction Review, Centaur, The Disappointed Housewife, Unbroken Journal, New South Journal, Southampton Review, and the Summerset Review. An excerpt from her memoir was short listed for the Fish Memoir Prize in April 2021. She lives on Long Island where she exorcises with words.
