Aaron Restivo
Bio
Person in New York who writes sometimes
Stories (4/0)
Fruits of the Unknown
Beneath the warmth of the setting sun, holding the hose just above the rich soil at the pear tree’s foot, she wipes the water falling from her face. The jasmine has already begun to bloom, and its scent fills the air around her. She has placed a single flower in her raven braid that stretches down her back. Six months have passed since the crash. Dutifully, she has adopted caring responsibility for the pear tree, a job which has only since become hers. The buds bursting from the leaves will soon bear fruit the color of cobblestone streets, and she must do something with them lest they go to waste. The tree, which stands at the center of our garden in a small plot behind our home, reminds her of me. I, who planted the tree when we bought our first house together, this house which became our home, tended to it, pruned it, watered it, and picked its fruit for us to eat. I strained its juices for us to drink in the heat of summer and baked them into almond tarts for dessert we shared with our neighbors. Standing beside it now, she wonders whether trees grow where I am.
By Aaron Restivo3 years ago in Fiction
Heavy Furniture
“It’s the 31st…we on for tonight?” With a swooping sound effect, my text was sent. It’s a quarter till five. There aren’t many customers left in the shop. A lone man sits in the back hunched over his laptop, and a handsome couple chats flirtatiously near the window. Their plates and mugs sit empty save for foam and crumbs.
By Aaron Restivo3 years ago in Fiction
Things Bloom and Die
The train whips left and right through the window as strange heads bob in sync to its music. The people in the car ahead of him seem like a world away. They are in some ways. The air filling their lungs he does not share - a different atmosphere completely. He does not hear the Biggie song playing from a man’s phone at maximum speaker volume nor the tapping foot of his neighbor. He cannot know that the man playing the song does indeed own headphones which lie around his neck. He would have smiled to witness this gift of 90s American avant-garde to his fellow riders. Perhaps he would have thought to himself, good music needs no permission. But he is not on that train. He is on this one, which by the looks of it, is the same as that one. Except that it’s actually a world away. The world inside those doors, which lives and breathes only from Barclay’s Avenue Station until 36 Street Station in this exact moment in time, is not his world. He knows this because no one is playing Biggie. No one is playing any music. Instead, the grumbled hum of metal tires against the track performs an encore, again. He also knows this (that the world of the car ahead of him is not his world) because the three shades of orange and singular yellow of the seats in that parallel universe glow differently than those in his. Although their colors surely came from the same batch of pigment, the light streaming in from the world outside hits them in different shapes and intensities than they hit the seats around him, the red-orange under him. The car ahead looks brighter, deeper, more full of color. They are not the same colors as the colors of his world. Not exactly.
By Aaron Restivo3 years ago in Fiction