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Kacy Fallon is a proud mom, military wife, writer, and educator. Her work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Euphony, 50-Word Stories, Ghost Town, and Boston Poetry Magazine, among others. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Kacy is an adjunct professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, MA, where she previously served as the Director of the Writing Center. She currently lives in Kennebunk, Maine with her husband and three children.

Kacy Fallon

Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin

All my childhood, I felt like I was staring out my two-story window, watching life unfold, daydreaming for hours, wishing the reality was as good as my dreams. From my two-story window, I was watching as we, my mom and me, tripped down the front slope, walking our golden cocker spaniel puppy, and I was holding the leash with one hand, and my other hand was in my mom’s. And from this window, I was listening to the older kids, the cooler kids, the ones across the street, throwing yet another house party. From my window, I am climbing down the tall tree that scratched at my windowpane, and I’m hoping to emerge somewhere new when my feet leave the bark and touch land. This is the window where I imagined kissing my best friend’s boyfriend at the curb as his truck sputtered, keys in the ignition. At this window, I dreamed of my friend Matt wrestling me down our snow-packed front walk: his warm fingers, our warm breaths, the snowflakes in the lamplight, ice under us when we went down, together. Staring out my two-story window, I remember calling down to my three best friends, one prettier than the next, “Wait for me! I’m coming,” and we were walking to Frostie Freeze in the shortest shorts we could find; it was our first summer wearing makeup. From this window, I see so clearly how my fiancé and I fought with a cheap tent in the front lawn, trying to set it up before our first camping trip, and the diamond keeps distracting me, keeps catching the sun so brilliantly, and my mother is looking on, smoking a cigarette on the driveway, smiling, but the soil is too soft from the late afternoon rain so the peg slips, and we’re falling, laughing, then we’re kissing on top of the collapsed tent like nothing else ever happened in this spot, but I’m watching from my two-story window, and I know better, because I was there but here too, looking down at all these memories, touching my lips to feel my smile, but my happiness was damp with the knowledge that these moments will pass, that innocence always fades, that life just goes on and on, and it goes too fast.

— Kacy Fallon

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