William Ogden Haynes is a poet and author of short fiction from Alabama who was born in Michigan. He has published several collections of poetry and many of his poems and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies.

Losses

At eighty, he lost his wife. Then, he realized that more 
friends and relatives died every year. When he was 
young, deaths were infrequent, predictable, and inevitable, 

as with aged parents and grandparents. But the losses 
began piling up, and each year as his Christmas card 
list grew smaller. The widowed spend their days alone, 

fading fast, like frescoes flaking in dampened rooms. 
The couples he and his wife socialized with stopped calling. 
His medical problems increased and appointments populated 

his calendar like a virus. He took more and more medications to fight the physical and cognitive deterioration. Then, he went to a nursing home, losing his house, car and all his

possessions. And there, he slipped and fell on the sun- splashed floor of the atrium, a broken hip punching his ticket to the beginning of the end. After that, he lost his mobility, 

independence, dignity, and finally, his life. At the end, he wondered why everything must go away. But this should not have been a surprise. Life had prepared him for losses from 

the beginning, if he had only paid attention. We come into this world with nothing and leave with nothing. After all, one of the first gestures taught to children is how to wave goodbye.

Dollar Store

Every week, the boy earned a two-dollar allowance. He 
saved his money for a month and one Saturday he 

decided to go shopping at the nearby Dollar Store. It 
was a new store where he imagined that every item cost 

a dollar. Otherwise, why would they name it the Dollar 
Store? So, he pedaled his bike dreaming of bargains. 

The store smelled like rubber pool toys mixed with the 
aroma of fresh popcorn. There was a bin where everything 

in it was a dollar, but they were of no interest. He walked 
down the aisle past plastic dinosaurs, games, kaleidoscopes, 

wooden paddle balls with elastic strings, plastic pinball 
machines, telescopes, and action figures. The actual cost 

of many items was difficult to interpret due to multiple 
mark-downs on the price tags. At the checkout lane, he 

put his two toys on the counter; a Superman action figure 
and a Slinky.  As the clerk put his purchases in a bag she 

said the total was seven dollars and fifty cents with tax. 
He reached into his pocket for the crumpled wad of eight 

one-dollar bills and put it on the counter. He exhaled a 
whispered, "Jesus," as he got two quarters in return. 

And that was the day he first learned the important 
lesson, that things are not always what they seem.

Uncle Ray’s Wristwatch

I drive by the old textile plant at sunrise. The factory’s 
final remaining windowpane catches the sunlight and 

winks at me as I pass by. My compulsive Uncle Ray 
spent his best years working there, until he contracted 

brown lung disease. I remember him lying in a hospital 
bed spinning his fist around in a circle to charge his 

gold, self-winding Bulova watch. He said, “When I’m 
in bed, I don’t move around enough to make it wind 

itself.” He was the type of guy that thought, if he 
bought a self-winding watch, he damn sure wouldn’t 

let it stop running, even if he had to use the last 
of his remaining energy to keep it going. Of course, 

the watch really wasn’t self-winding. It had a small 
weight inside that wound the watch in response 

to body movement. He would have been better 
off with an old stem-wound timepiece that he 

would have to wind only once a day. Or better 
yet, he could have bought a battery-operated 

watch that might still be ticking in a dresser drawer 
a year after he was dead. But Uncle Ray didn’t 

think about such things. He was too busy winding 
his watch and trying to catch his next breath. He 

finally ran out of time, and at the end, he was unable 
to twirl his wrist fast enough to gain another day.