Hawk

Fresh from the warm nest of down and cotton she starts the day with a careful cup of coffee. It is wrapped in ritual, simple and spare. There is no affectation of elegance. The ritual is pragmatic purity.  In her tattered t-shirt she slips out onto the porch into the curved cradle of the long bench.  She trails her finger tips along the smooth worn wood and remembers the soft stroking of the sanding block that occupied her idle hours for days on end.  She sits with her legs tucked under her, nursing her coffee, watching the mist vanish. She looks at the calluses' on her fingertips, stroking them with her thumb, remembering.  She wonders if they would shine if she sanded them lightly like the wood beneath her. She lingers until she becomes a hawk and flies, swift and fierce, into the day. Her empty coffee cup sits on the broad planks near the place where her tattered t-shirt lays, abandoned in flight.

Tags: Hawk, Woman, Morning, Flash Fiction