Ann Kathryn Kelly
Puff
She puffs and the flame, bending and swaying at the top of the solitary birthday candle at the end of her solitary birthday song, extinguishes. Short, slim, striped blue [and white] because the green-and-white she considered from the pack wouldn’t do, it had to be blue. The petite beacon of light that accentuates peaks and valleys across a saturated brown landscape all sugar and butter and cocoa and fond recollections is snuffed, twisting tendrils of white-gray rising from a charred wick. She breathes in. Always loved the smell of an extinguished flame. Ghosts of birthday celebrations, his | hers, swirl as smoke dissipates and she thinks about her jolly good fellow, the one nobody can deny, least of all his latest love. Her finger drags across pillowy peaks, cream collapsing as she lops off a mountain cap and brings it to her tongue. Chocolate, his favorite. Hers, too. She pulls the blue-and-white candle from the cupcake, leaving a rupture in its center, a hole bored into something sweet. She sniffs for lingering wick smoke, sniffs the edges of memory, unable to answer why she insists on celebrating him. Still.
Bio
Ann Kathryn Kelly lives and writes in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her essays have appeared in a number of literary journals. Find her at https://annkkelly.com/.
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