A stolen afternoon

The creased bedspread undergird your sleep, a sleep I do not want to disturb and have the magical spell and magical run that I have had with my writing, halt like it has arrived at an unexpected dead end. 

But you wake up and open those black eyes that I love so much. I realise my luck has thinned as I cajole sleep to curl into you. I cram in the last keystrokes, allow the sulci and gyri of my cerebellum to form thoughts as clear as possible and click the right buttons before I shut my work for the day and tend to you like I tend to the hidden desires in my heart.

Flash Fiction

A piece of flash fiction that I wrote is up at https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/ekphrastic-writing-responses-maria-izquierdo. Thanks for reading! 

Efforts at home schooling

Krishna is now two and a half years old and at home, thanks to the pandemic. Much as I try to slot the days into neat little compartments of learning, art and outdoor activities (which has reduced to a bare minimum), I have not been able to. For, the mind of a two year old is as playful as the flitting butterfly that refuses to get bogged down by the rigors of discipline. 

I try to cram in as many activities as possible for him, into the lone hour that I get, before leaving to office. Ten minutes of which, gets spent in cajoling him to arrive at the table to read. I finally abandon my futile attempts and get him to sit on the soft duvet, a bowl of raisins in one hand and his favourite water bottle in another. He uses both of them as distractions to suit his whims, once every two minutes when he finds the process of listening, tedious. I carry on like this for the next fifty minutes in the solace of the knowledge that we are 'making incremental progress towards a meaningful goal', a la Earl Nightingale. 

And then I hand him over to my mother to carry off from where I leave and proceed to office till I return in the evening, hoping to read to him but never actually getting my exhausted self to do it.

One of these days, hopefully, things will change. And hopefully the process of learning will get to be more fun for both of us, actually all three of us - my mother and me, as educators and my son, as a diligent learner.