Street Symphony by Rachel Wyatt

sunshine,” he replied.
    And her green and simple place was suddenly drenched with rain.
    “I just want to go home,” she said.
    “It could take days to get a flight.”
    “Please don’t tell my sisters that.”
    A shriek startled her and the shriek became a roar as other voices picked up the sound. A small ship had appeared to the south. Crackling sounds announced the captain. “When the ship arrives, we’ll have to ask you to wait till called. I have all your names. You won’t all be able –”
    Furious arguments began, and shouting. Agnes said, “Move towards the way out.”
    Belle said, “You mean the gangway.”
    “We’ll push our way through. We have to get on that ship.”
    Dawn murmured, “We don’t behave well in a crisis. It’s a goddamn me-first world, isn’t it? And I don’t like it.”
    The man in the hat touched her shoulder. “It’ll be a while yet.”
    “Is there a reason for this? Are we being told that our lives are ordinary and we could do better?”
    He looked at her as if he knew of all her escapist thoughts, her images of a different life, her imagined adultery. Then he said, “We need more adventures, that’s all. We’re not used to randomness. Our ‘ordered lives’ make us complacent. We should be dancing, singing. We’re too puritan. Look around. All these people are stressed out about something they can’t change. Why can’t they hear the music?”
    There was a shudder, a growling sound. The engines were running again. The passengers kept quiet, as if they could will the boat to move by collective effort, a great push forward. And then they cheered. The sea roiled in its wake as the ship moved on again towards Devon.
    So they would get back to Toronto. More waiting for another crowded train. Hours, maybe days, spent in an airport that would be just this side of hell. More fret. More standing around. But home, eventually.
    Dawn said to her sisters, “There’s still a way to go. Let’s get something to eat.”
    When they were sitting at a table in the restaurant, Belle said, “Do you think Dad knew it was illegal?”
    “I have a picture of that gendarme on my phone. ‘You cannot do that ‘ere’.”
    “If we’d only had the ashes in a yogurt container instead of that damn urn. I’ll never forgive you, Agnes, for shaking them out like that in a freaking parking lot.”
    “He’s in Brittany like he wanted, Belle. And he’s round the trees at the side, not on the cement. Nobody’s going to drive over him. Besides, he liked cars.”
    Dawn reached out and took their hands. “Come on,” she said. “Dad loved us. We loved him. That’s what counts.”
    “And he only wanted the best for us,” Belle said, sniffling.
    Agnes handed her a Kleenex and said, “It’s a pity he never really knew what that was.”
    “But perhaps he did,” Dawn said softly. “Perhaps he did.”
    And then, at last, they began to laugh.

Pandora’s Egg

    A single small red leaf caught in an air current danced up and down, spiralled and spun six feet off the ground, determined perhaps never to fall. At first Erin thought it was hanging on a thread, a leftover strand of spider silk, but then it dropped as the breeze moved on.
    “I’ll be back by five,” she said, and tried to tamp down that little imp of joy that leapt into her soul every time she was leaving the house to get away, even briefly, from him, from her husband. His face a child’s face, his body a man’s body. The previous Dan whom she’d married and loved was hidden from her now and might never return. The wise doctors said recovery would be a slow process. How slow? The damage of war, the menace, the killing, a deep wound; the words were reiterated as a kind of explanation.
    Her mother said Dan would emerge when he felt it was safe to do so, as if he were being self-indulgent and wanted to annoy them all. But she did drop by on Fridays after school to chat with him about the circumference of sparrows and robins and