1.
Leda Red
A Collection of Microfiction by Tess Littledale

2.
Dedicated to my great aunt Leda Papazian
A light at every family gathering, be scushy wherever you are now

3.
During this Independent Project I discovered my niche in the writing world. It started out as a
creative fiction study but after the death of my great aunt Leda, I found that what I really love
writing are character studies of my beloved friends and family. Exploring their routines and
discovering where they are comfortable is a much more interesting subject matter to me than
what I originally set out to do. I want to thank my aunt Leda, my mother and father, Glenn and
Lyssa, and my advisor through this course, Professor Valerie Rohy for helping me discover this.

4.
Table of Contents
Dinner’s at Six… 5
Breakfast… 6
Leda Red… 8
Kindergarten Kiss… 11
Mother… 13

5. Dinner's at six
she croaked, giving him a smile that all but hid the nerves. The recipient of this information
mustered all of his four feet and eleven inches to return the smile without much thought to hiding
his weariness. They stood in an uncluttered kitchen smelling pleasantly of peaches with no
discernible source. Through the window above an old but efficient sink, he watched a Blue Jay
win a battle with an earthworm. He imagined himself as the earthworm, plucked from the womb.
Plucked from his meager playground by his mother who was forty percent sober forty percent of
the time. Plucked from his room when forty percent became zero and finally deposited into the
nest of the Blue Jay, right here, in Mrs. Jenkins’ kitchen not as prey but as a victim of an
uprooted life.
She stood wondering if he expected her to dismiss him and after wondering for a moment
too long, she asked if he played checkers. They read the rules and together began jumping each
other and making their way across the board at the table where the game had clearly been set out
for the occasion.
“King me”, he said after a few minutes, with more than a touch of triumph. She smiled,
the nerves subsided to a dull ache, rising and falling with each breath.
After three rounds the boy went back up the stairs turning right then past the door with a
broken handle and through the second door on the left side of the hall just like she showed him.
Downstairs she listened to the footsteps, restless, and finally, the creaking of bedsprings as he sat
in contemplation in wait for six o clock. The game of checkers rooted in her mind as a first
memory and rather than take a deep breath, she held it in as if the memory would disappear if she
let it go.

6.
Breakfast
Wilbur thought to himself one day that perhaps he should learn to drive a car. This
occurred to him as he left his house one morning forty five minutes after his customary departure
due to some mishaps that had nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Driving a car was more
of a metaphor than a realistic goal, or at least an expression of his frustration.
7:45am: Wilbur fills his first waking breath and begins to stretch out the night’s kinks.
8:02am: His breakfast posed the first threat to his morning ritual. He slept in and like
anyone normal he needed to rush if he was to make his departure on time. Wilbur does not rush.
Everything takes exactly as long as it takes. So he stood there looking at his breakfast and would
have let out a sigh had he been any less wound up. It wasn’t what he wanted, but then again it
never is. Eating had never emerged as more than a necessary means to survival and the thought
of enjoying a meal ran akin to a sailor regarding the ocean as a privilege. So Wilbur went along,
slowly and deliberately, not savoring but grimacing through every bite, eating a breakfast that ate
up the time until the next meal.
8:17am: Wilbur required no grooming. He looked like himself every day and he had no
reason to improve upon that and this morning was no different. His home, however, was a
different story. The hoarding was a simultaneous source of necessity and anxiety and the lady
knew this. She knew she wasn’t to touch anything that appeared in a pile of five or more items.
Wilbur doesn’t trust her. In fact, he is afraid of her. He watches her run the vacuum cleaner in the
calculated manner of one who has spent years perfecting a balance between physical ease and

7. efficiency. She came early. Wilbur watched her until she walked out of the front door leaving a
marginally cleaner home behind her.
8:30am: Forty five minutes after his habitual departure, Wilbur pushed his wet nose
through the flap at the bottom of the back door and began a day in the life of a dog in his own
backyard.

8.
Leda Red
She sits in a kitchen in Astoria, Queens inside an apartment small enough for New York
City and watches Rachael Ray while spooning Wonton soup from a plastic container. The yellow
of the kitchen walls clashes with her faded pink bathrobe and bright red hair. Her curls are so
perfectly in the shape of ten drugstore curlers that they give the impression that her day was
meant for more than takeout and a tv show. The channel switches to ​The Home Shopping
Network when Rachael completes her 30­minute meatloaf. This is the tv version of her
excursions to Macy’s back when her legs could carry her there. Now she sits and pulls out a
credit card and calls the toll free number and adds to her collection of unworn gold jewelry and
blouses in varying shades of red. The apartment itself is a monument to her shopping crusades.
There are pathways through the stacks of papers and binders and unopened boxes of either
nothing or nothing that has ever been used. There is mail at the bottom of some of the stacks that
hasn’t concerned her for fifty years. One could learn quite a lot about the history of American
advertising culture by simply sorting through her mail. Some of it could probably even be sold to
a vintage collector, if you could ever extract it from where it had been sitting.
She has lived in this apartment for eighty years, first growing up and now growing old. It
is difficult to imagine that the kitchen in which she sits was once filled with the loud, food

9. obsessed family of her childhood. Now the apartment itself seems as serene as its sole occupant.
The superintendent of the building has only just made the list of select people who are allowed to
come in. This is only because the toilet stopped flushing and she couldn’t fix it herself. She is a
watcher, and watchers often live solitary lives. Her eyes appear glazed as she sits perfectly still
as if she is lost in thought. She isn’t. She is listening. Her role of caretaker in the family she
fulfilled with passivity yet the intensity of an eagle in case an argument should arise. She isn’t
unhappy about being a watcher but had someone managed to wiggle their way into an intimate
role in her life, she wouldn’t have complained. As of now she sits in her kitchen switching the
network from shopping to cooking and she waits for her family to call her.
This is a story about my great aunt. She was the absolute most optimistic person I have
ever met and even at age 80 she had the reddest hair of anyone in New York. She never referred
to it as hair dye but only as Lady Clairol which for a long time registered in my mind as the lady
who set and dyed my great aunt’s hair. She wore gold and told me not more than once that there
was a certain age where a girl must choose her metal and stick with it for the rest of her life. This
isn’t true. I have sources in the fashion world who have relayed to me that it is no longer
considered fashion suicide to mix your metals.
She was never quiet. Even when she said nothing there was sound. Somehow her gaze
was intent on being as audible as the conversations she’d been watching. Not in a stern way
although there were occasions when I would suddenly hear “don’t run in the house!” Or if I had
been yelling at mom or dad I would likely get a sharp look and an “easy now.” Her family
became her classroom and she came out of retirement every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Her

10. kindergarten days were behind her but just barely, the stories of teacherhood were never left out
for long when talking to Leda Papazian.
I should talk about her favorite farewell. “Be a scush” roughly translates either as
“be careful and smart and make good decisions and spend your money wisely and take care of
yourself and eat good food and save some for me” or “Psst Tessy, bring me a cheese or spinach
Bereg and don’t tell my doctor.” She was not a “scush.” She fought hard not to be a “scush.”
Through the last year, I was mad at her until I realized what we were really asking her to do
when we asked her to move into assisted living. For an emerging adult nearly fresh out of college
it is hard for me to grasp what independence means. The concept is terrifying to me rather than
cherished which it was for her. We asked her to give up the strongest pillar of her life and it took
me a long time to understand why it was so hard. Her body and mind were on different timelines,
and we asked them to sync up. They finally did.

11.
Kindergarten Kiss
Her daughter has voluntarily strolled up to a boy on the playground who is busy stomping
ants into the sidewalk. A small but growing grin stretches across his cheeks like Macintosh
apples all the way up to his child eyes. His Sketchers light up as he stomps and slowly,
deliberately, smears ant guts in a curved line, painting his own Mona Lisa. She has reached him
now. She takes her little finger and waggles it under his chin. He looks up. His grin shrinks and
his mouth forms a small O. His response to her halfhearted scolding, as it has been for the past
three days, is to purse his lips and lean in for a kindergarten kiss. Her daughter’s face twists in
feigned disgust but not five seconds later she takes hold of his hand and they begin to stomp and
smear in perfect harmony. This is their third date.
Although her own admittedly haphazard dating life has never included an activity so
macabre, her daughter’s relationship with her new friend has a simplistic intensity that she

12. envies. Occasionally they will stop their painting, turn toward each other and briefly smush their
lips together like a cuckoo clock on the hour.
Their third date comes to a close when she looks up from CandyCrush to see that it has
occurred to the children that ant guts might be the right thing to feed to each other. In the car on
the way home, her daughter stays quiet in the backseat. She is no doubt feeling the sudden and
desperate loneliness that her mother felt as a teenager when her parents picked her up from
Timothy O’Haren’s house. They pull gingerly into their driveway, silent and contemplative and
walk slowly into a suburban house with a second mortgage. They head to the bathroom and
taking a thin piece of floss, she works at removing the various ant appendages from otherwise
white teeth and she looks up to see her daughter’s dreamy smile, still stuck on her kindergarten
kiss

13.
Mother
Her day starts in the kitchen where she makes her coffee and some enhanced version of a
healthy ten grain cereal from Bob’s Red Mill. Taking her breakfast into her office, she sits at her
computer which holds her career in its external hardrive. The office itself is so crammed with
books and files and various apparatuses that she looks like part of the scenery. If one were to
walk into this room, they would expect to see her sitting there with her head bent toward the
computer. Microsoft Word causes formatting trouble as usual but she won’t change it to
something more appropriate for the documents of a historic preservationist. Her dogs accompany
her into the adjacent room where they take up a position on the couch with optimal sun exposure.
They all exist in separate spaces, she doesn’t bother them, they don’t bother each other. If she

14. happens to get up for any number of reasons, they are right there with her, following with their
collar tags announcing their presence. It is a quiet day, a woman with her two dogs. A mother
whose children are eager to come back and visit but don’t live here anymore. Her desk chair has
been carefully chosen and perfected to her liking. Pillows have been added to support her back
and bottom. The office is equipped with devices to ensure maximum comfort so that her legs
don’t fall asleep or her wrists don’t get sore from clacking away at her keyboard.
The town of Putney owes many successes and none of its failures to her. She is a civil
servant and an avid volunteer who works on town projects and deals with the surprising racism
of a quaint Vermont town. Days spent sitting at her computer either give her a great sense of
accomplishment or a bitter frustration. These resonate either as dancing in the kitchen to The
Talking Heads or swearing at a dull knife as it nearly misses her finger and lands on an oozing
tomato. Her stress is brought on by a committed sense of procrastination. She abandons a
difficult grant proposal or a particularly uncooperative document to volunteer and head a
renovation project for a non­profit organization or to rebuild The Putney General Store. She has
never committed an act of procrastination that has not in some way helped someone or more
often, an entire community.
Her day ends in the kitchen, her creative haven. A place where food is the only accepted
currency. The place where after searching in her numerous cookbooks, she settles on
improvisation and produces something worth a five star review just because she can. A mother, a
volunteer, a dancer, a singer, a yeller, a wife, a chef, takes her two dogs and a crossword puzzle
up to bed and turns off the light.