Resolution Writing Challenge

Tangles at 11:59:59 - by Cate Blue

I held the phone to my ear, while she gazed at me through a glass divider of smudge and smear and fingerprint. Her eyes had long since lost their luster, yet still … they remained intelligent.

“Pick up,” I mouthed, smoothing a finger over the cold face of my watch.

Slowly, she grasped her end of the phone line and pressed it shakily against her cheek. “Hey, darlin’,” she whispered, the phone escalating the gruffness of her voice.

“New Year’s Eve,” I said. “The last one in this joint.” I skillfully forced back a sob as I stared at her face—at her hair, full of metaphorical tangles. Once the identical color of mine: dark-chocolate brown, flushed with an undertone of red—we always had been straddling the line of humiliation.

But now her hair was grayer, sprinkled with frail strings of pure white, contrasting with her orange jumpsuit.

And here I was, my gentle waves of hair bundled back into a knot behind my head. My childish frizz abolished.

“How long?” she asked.

“A minute.”

“You should be watching the drop,” she insisted, tracing the table on her side, likely imagining my hand under her fingertips.

“You know I had to come.”

“Resolutions?”

I nodded, picking up a stack of photos. Screenshots from an NYC Ball Drop webcast. I started flipping through them, turning the pictures toward her—my feeble attempt at a slideshow.

She went first. “I will get out of here.”

“I’ll unpack the boxes.”

A shot of the halfway point.

“I will learn to cook.”

At this, I choked out a laugh. “I’ll get a real job.”

Three-fourths down.

“And I’ll love you more. Nell, I promise, every day, more.”

11:59:59 PST.

I smiled at faded eyes.

“Happy New Year, Mama.”