[437 words]
Museum Security Camera #7
Every night at 3AM she dusts the empty frames of stolen paintings. Black gloves, gray uniform, ID badge catching moonlight: Angela M., Maintenance. She thinks we can’t see her press her palm against the blank spaces, waltz with invisible partners in the modern wing. For six years she’s worked the graveyard shift, carrying on conversations with absent art. Tonight she slow-dances with the ghost of Rothko’s Orange and Blue, her shadow cutting shapes across marble floors. In the break room, her file says she used to be a painter before the tremors started. Through my lens, I watch her trace brushstrokes that aren’t there, conducting symphonies only she can hear. At dawn, she clocks out, leaves no trace except fingerprints on empty frames, a map of longing in dust.
The Chandelier Maker’s Daughter
The crystals speak their own language—rainbows splintering across workshop walls, light becoming sound becoming memory. Dad says each piece remembers the sand it came from, whispers stories of heat and transformation. I sleep beneath his latest creation, dream in fractured light. When we hang them in strangers’ homes, he tells me to listen: the crystals sing differently in each space, mapping memories that haven’t happened yet. After the accident, I find his last unfinished piece, its shadows spelling words across my palms. At night, its half-strung beauty speaks in his voice, teaching me new words for grief.
Time Zones
My sister lives three hours ahead but texts me yesterday’s weather. “It rained here,” she writes at nine my time, midnight her time, tomorrow her memory. We exist in a constant state of temporal jet lag, sharing sunsets across area codes. “Are you in my future or am I in your past?” she asks. Neither of us knows anymore. When mom died, the hospital called her first, so she knew three hours before I did. For those three hours, we lived in different universes: one where mom was gone, one where she still breathed. Sometimes I think we’re still there, stranded on opposite sides of that moment.
The Glass Eater
They come to watch her bite wine glasses into delicate crescents, swallow light bulbs like moons. Tuesday nights at the underground circus, she transforms Edison’s dreams into dinner. The audience doesn’t see her morning ritual: gargling with sand, practicing on paper-thin porcelain. They don’t know about the x-rays on her kitchen wall—constellations of tiny shards mapping her inner sky. Every performance ends the same: her bow filled with starlight, her smile sharp enough to cut shadows. At home, she drinks only from plastic cups, afraid of accidentally consuming ordinary miracles.
Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after years of keeping Hollywood’s agents and lawyers in perfect order. Armed with a Psychology degree that finally proved useful when creating complex characters and an MBA/CPA that helps her track plot points with spreadsheet precision, she ventured into the haunted halls of Goddard College’s MFA program. Her work which has appeared or will appear in several literary journals and magazines confirms that words are more reliable than numbers, though occasionally harder to balance.
