Outside the museum’s cool walls, the midday pavement broils; lanyard-swinging workers eddy near food trucks for burritos and sandwiches; my forgotten bag lunch rides the route to and from the commuter lot; my husband leaves messages I’ll delete un-played when I return, empty-stomached, to my desk: What’s this $10 admission charge on the Mastercard? Why aren’t you answering? Where the hell are you? But for the next twenty minutes, I get to stand in marble quietude, gazing at the purple-red mass of a two-thousand-year-old porphyry bathtub, imagining how good it would feel to strip down and steep for hours in volcanically-hot water. To have a life in which happiness, however small the price, wouldn’t always be too expensive.
Author's Note:
I've made self care a high priority since my separation and divorce. Almost every day, I do at least one thing to recharge myself emotionally and/or physically. This might be a phone call or visit to a close friend, a walk in the park, a trip to the gym, or a Bikram yoga class.
Francesca Leader is a writer and artist originally from Western Montana. She was named the winner of the Southeast Review’s 2023 World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest, runner-up in CutBank’s 2020 Big Sky, Small Prose Contest, and has been nominated for various other awards. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.
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