THREE FLASH MEMOIRS ABOUT THE ACT OF OBSERVATION

 Lookers

 “Your ma has eyes in the back of her head.”  She’d laugh and laugh as I looked and looked.

Before he was my father he ate carrots to pass the eye test to go to war. He met my mother-to-be on a double date with her foul-mouthed cousin with whom she lived. Later he’d wait for her to get home from dates with other boys, sitting on her porch and chatting with her aunt and uncle. She was an orphan, skinny then, but with those killer breasts (which would eventually kill her). He was a catch, the son of a judge, track champ, movie star handsome.

I hovered behind them; nascent, watching, rooting: desperate to inherit his looks, her insight; desire strong enough to get me born: a random mixed breed, compromised, derivative, half-blinded.

She saw me: then, later, always, dragging my fingers across the back of her scalp, under her hair, imagining I could almost see them, wondering how I could possibly keep overlooking anything so important.

.

The Last Wave

 I always had to watch my husband swim. More than just watching, I tried to become him as he swam, parallel to the beach, his pale limbs sweeping through the blue ocean's froth-dotted waves. If I focused hard enough he'd swim back to me and everything would be all right; I could at least summon a lifeguard before it was too late. It was meditation or the opposite; he was my lotus. I can't remember the moment I faltered; no doubt there were many such, but one was definitive, or perhaps merely cumulative, the last wave.

Something Else 

Her muse caresses her awake, urging to abandon her formal plan, her notes, her slides. She feels the sweet trembling in her limbs, pictures her performance as a flowing river, defining the landscape.

Arrives, beams at the moderator, steps on the stage. Glances down to see her bare leg sticking out from her short pink chenille robe, ends in slightly hairy-chested toes.

Curious.

Draws a breath, weak and shaky, powering through.

The stage does not consume her.

She becomes a curiosity, large as the auditorium, larger, Curiosity Itself, infinite, a floating cloud.

Not as she had hoped, before or later, or ever; something else entirely. But, nonetheless, something.

A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers, Julie Benesh is working on a novel and a collection of micro-memoirs. She is recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and her writing has appeared in the anthology Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Tin House Magazine (print), Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Gulf Stream, Cleaver, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and other places. Originally from Iowa, Julie now lives in Chicago.