I Asked for Signs By Joe P. Squance

Adrian Scottow CC




I Asked for Signs

I asked for signs and found them everywhere. A ladybug on an apple core on a plate next to my sink. A single leaf falling from a tree and landing in a puddle in the street. The muted peal of a distant bell as I tied my shoes before a run. A memory of the smell of pipe smoke in my grandparents’ house when I was seven. The signs were everywhere all the time in all things, and I was grateful. 
        We scattered (some of) his ashes from a mountaintop in Colorado. (Kept pinches for ourselves to do with as we pleased.) The climb up was tough and long and made my lungs burn––part of the experience––but when we reached the summit the sky was blue and wide and stretched out before and around us like the sea above our heads. The wind blew. We took our handfuls and let them go. Afterwards, my palm and fingers were still dusted with ash and I didn’t know how to get it off so I just looked at it and let it be and by the time we got back to our cars it was all gone. Later, during beers, I asked him for signs. Let me know you’re still out there, I said, and a single drop of condensation slid down my glass and onto the tabletop, a little pure bubble of water that magnified the A in a name that had been carved into the wood.

A year later I went back to the mountain alone. The air was colder than it had been the first time, a sign. A patch of black trees from a wildfire. The rhythmic sound of the pavement beneath the tires of my rental car driving away from the airport, all signs. 
        It took much longer to climb up because I was older and slower, out of shape, and because the signs were all around me. Sap like rubber cement in the bark of the evergreens. A pebble in my boot. 
        At the top, I was alone. My fingertips tingled in the cold and my nose ran. The wind blew loudly across my ears and brought tears to my eyes that I didn’t bother to blink away. Sky like the sea. I could see the road I had driven in on scratched across the valley like a child’s scribble. A bird. A columbine. The feeling of fullness like water in my lungs. That’s enough, I said. I appreciate what you’ve done, but please. No more. Held it up and scattered it like ash.
        The wind died down. I closed my eyes and opened them and the world stretched out around me in total engulfing silence for miles, the shadows of clouds like patches on a memory quilt. A finger of wind moved my hair but just a little and then all was still and all I heard was the sound of my own breathing. The moment was incredible, overwhelming. I smiled in my loneliness and gratitude, ready for the long walk down.




Joe’s stories have appeared in the Best Microfiction Anthology, Citron Review, Entropy, Gone Lawn, Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y lit, and elsewhere. Though he taught for many years in the Department of English, he currently works in a non-teaching role at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He lives in Oxford with his wife, their daughter, and an Aussie Mix in red merle.

​