Trampoline

Lynn Mundell

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They’re at Jimmy and Leila’s recommitment ceremony, jumping up and down like cartoon kangaroos on the kids’ backyard trampoline, and it’s just like it used to be, years ago, at her place, their moms hanging out the kitchen window, smoking cigs like twin dragons, yelling be careful for god sake, you’ll break something, them hopping on the canvas as firm and tough as a lunchbox apple, their bare feet furred with Marley the lab’s hair, the old dog sacked out, in the way like an open suitcase, fat and full, the summer sun patting their heads, them sometimes holding hands while they hopped like a pair about to say I do, and I do, too, and as they do the years vaulted past, her hope a window nearly closed, and yet, still, today her in a brand-new sundress and him in the cargo pants he’s always worn, like a human advent calendar, the pockets bulging with keys, loose change, a box of Tic Tacs, him jingling merrily while they keep rising higher, we’re really getting air now, he yells, their middle-aged bodies creaking like wood galleons, like life-sized Halloween super store skeletons, when he fumbles with his right thigh pocket and something small flashes in the sunlight, and her heart leaps, this is it, it’s Christmas in June, and they both try to stop jumping yet can’t quite, it takes a bit to slow down, they’re like balls on a tennis racket being lightly bounced when he says it’s a female halfling, and he uncurls his hand to show her the game figurine, and there’s no one to shout watch out, and the trampoline is just like a barren moonscape, how her steps across it are slow and exaggerated, and she’s having trouble breathing, where just moments ago she was getting so much air.

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Lynn Mundell is editor of Centaur and co-founder of 100 Word Story. Her writing has been published in Booth, Five Points, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, a W.W. Norton Anthology, and elsewhere. Her work in Tin House earned the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Lynn’s chapbook Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us was published by the University of South Carolina in 2022. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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