Snow Queen Serotonin
Mary Buchanan is a writer living in Mississippi. Her work is heavily influenced by mental health and magic. Her writing appears in Hobart, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Razor, Psychopomp, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others.
It’s December, you’re 11, and you have something called the Norwalk Virus, which you got from someone in your ballet class, who got it from her parents, who got it from a cruise they took in November for some reason. You’re backstage waiting to go on as one of the intermediate level chorus dancers. There is blue glitter in all four corners of your eyes and backstage is eerie, submarine, lit like laser tag. This is your favorite costume—you’re mesmerized by the silver slippers and your gauzy tutu. You got to try on the Snow Queen’s tiara during dress rehearsal days before. Balancing it on your head gave you a similar clarity to the one you got after several minutes of hydration from the ER’s IV drip.
You see your friend opposite you in the wings. She’s given herself the job of giving you the cue. You trust her implicitly to know when to go onstage because she makes it her business to know. There she goes, pulling her go-now-you-idiot face, urgency lit eyes, as you lope onto stage, slip, and fall against another body before thumping to the rubbery floor. The collision knocks the tiara off the queen’s head. Panic, grabbing for it, mashing it back on her head, but even over the orchestra you hear her stunned animal inhale. She tugs it off—blood on the cloudy costume gemstones and a sharp savage dent in the metal band. She is crying; you can’t help but think: oh! to be seen only briefly under the blue glow of lights! like this, next to the wounded queen! Onstage, both of you, licked with glitter, and the paper snow that falls falls in long, certain curtains. There is a sureness to this make-believe you’re quickly growing dependent on.
The High School Reunion
Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Florida Review, Wigleaf, Pinch, The Cincinnati Review, The Forge, Passages North, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove or at williammusgrove.com.
Mickey holds up his wallet. He points at a photo of a boy riding a tricycle. The picture’s tucked in a plastic sleeve next to an AmEx card, and I can’t help but think he’s flexing his credit score. “Can you believe I have a kid?” he says, slurring, the words spraying out of his mouth as if his tongue were a Slip ‘N Slide. Mickey’s name tag reads Michael, but he’ll always be the same prick who puked on my shoes during a house party senior year.
He flips his wallet around and looks at the picture. His eyes get misty like he can’t believe it either. Not in a bad way. It’s more of a how-did-I-get-so-lucky way. After graduation, Mickey traveled the country in a van, used to blabber on and on about the “nomadic lifestyle.”
Now, the doofus seems content starting a family and working as an accountant, and I’m jealous he gets to have two existences when I don’t even have one.
The Class of 2015 Time Capsule, my target, sits on the edge of our high-top. I bump it with my elbow and send it dinging across the sawdust-covered floor of the bar. I almost skipped coming tonight. Didn’t want a reminder of how my life’s sucked since high school, that I ended up cleaning parks for the city. Basically, I pick up crushed beer cans and scrub graffiti off public bathrooms. Then on the reunion’s Facebook invite, I saw that they’d be opening the time capsule and formulated a plan.
“I got it,” I say.
I pick up the time capsule. Trying to match Mickey’s body language, I draw imaginary lines connecting our shoulders. It’s a trick I read about online that’s supposed to make you appear more trustworthy. Mickey glances at our classmates throughout the bar, mingling and laughing as if they can’t believe they grew up in this Podunk town. Then he shrugs and wanders off, brandishing his wallet like a cop flashing their badge.
I hide the time capsule under my blazer and head to the bar’s back patio. Who was I in high school? An extra in a play. I moved around onstage. I mouthed all my lines. No one could hear me, not even myself. I got stuck like that, a caterpillar that spins a cocoon only to emerge still a caterpillar. I open the time capsule, which resembles a funeral urn. Inside are letters written by our former selves. The letters detail who we hoped we’d become. I find mine and fish it out. It’s full of generic placeholders, stuff I thought others wanted to see: go to college, major in business management, earn lots of money. I flunked out of college. I get paid $13 an hour. I wanted to want the right things. The problem: I haven’t figured out what the right things are.
From my pocket, I grab the letter I wrote earlier this afternoon. The letter compares quaking aspen leaves to shimmering sequins, compares the sea to velvet. Cheesy, I know. The letter also states that I’ve always wanted to work in nature, that I don’t need money or things to be happy. Later, they’ll pull it from the time capsule and read it aloud, proving I went on to be my best self.
Why do I care what some jerks from a decade ago think? I don’t think I do. If I did, I would have stayed home, would have avoided the possible embarrassment. What I care about is getting to be a butterfly, even if it’s not real, even if it’s just for a night.
“What’re you doing?”
It’s Mickey. Despite being hammered, he’s nimble enough to snatch the time capsule and letter from my hands. “You were going to put this in, weren’t you?” he says, skimming the letter.
He stares at me, waiting for an answer. I look away. While brainstorming a response, I notice for the first time the stripes of moonlight shining under the patio’s floorboards, notice how it’s the perfect July temperature. I notice the humidity on my cheek like a wet kiss. It takes a bit before I remember he’s standing there. When I do, I notice again how his name tag reads Michael, not Mickey. And I take in the heavy summer air.
Chair Lift
Emma Johnson Tarp is a writer from Virginia. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Every Day Fiction, Rejection Letters, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and Right Hand Pointing. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two cats.
The chairs hang suspended from the cable like ornaments on a tree. Suspend is a lovelier word than hang, you decide, even if they mean the same thing. Even if there’s little lovely about these chairs: blue paint chipped, pocked with peeling stickers and gum gone black from years of melt and mud and freeze. Sorry skeletal frames, twisting in the wind.
At fancier resorts, the lift chairs aren’t chairs at all but gondolas. They are cushioned and warm, enclosed by bubbled windows that partition you from the howling elements. As a kid, you couldn’t stand the distance; you’d pressed your mouth to the glass and make your own weather.
Here, there’s no need. The metal cradle hoists you into the heart of gray clouds and your ears swell with their silence, your bones ache with deep cold. You want this, this intimacy with the wild. You want to belong to it, to be consumed by it. You pound your mittened fist into the side of your quad the way your brother taught you, to get the blood flowing.
“It’s been a hard winter,” he’d answered last year, when you had dared ask how he was.
You had inquired at your mom’s prompting. “He looks up to you,” she’d insisted, her voice threadbare. “He’ll talk to you.” You hadn’t understood that. He is older than you and clearly you are the one who always looked up to him, trailing after him onto the tennis courts, to the same university, to a sanitized career in the lab.
It had used up all your cold courage to ask and all of his to answer so you let his response hang there between you until he started to whistle the way he does, through his teeth. It was something you could never imitate. You’d closed your eyes and listened as he made music with the mountain.
It is colder now without him next to you. The fog is dense and flat, static teases the corner of your vision. You can hardly distinguish your own skis dangling from your feet. A gnarled shape materializes in the fore view as the chair lurches up a steep incline. It’s that poor tree, rimed with Mardi Gras beads and wilted bras. They’re strung up like condemned pirates at port, rattling a warning. Or is it a lament? Each year you hope they’ll be gone, dropped off like rotten fruit or plucked clean by snow patrol. And yet each year they remain, clinging stubbornly to the wet black branches. Artificial and imperishable, they’ll hang there forever, you know. Long after the rest of us are gone. You’re almost glad he’s not with you to endure it. Almost.
You tuck your chin into your neck and inhale the wet of your own breath condensed in your fleece gaiter. Vapor to liquid, spirit to water. One small alchemy of the natural world that, for a moment, lifts you from your chafing grief into subtle, dizzy wonder. You glance down as the chair floats you over the blue ice cliff and your breath sticks in your throat like that one compulsive thought: will you follow him down, the way you follow him everywhere?
It’s only when the chair crests the peak and deposits you gently into the downy snow that you exhale. “Where are we going?” you whisper to nobody, angling your skis toward the woods.
“We’re going crazy,” is the answer, wind whistling in your ears. “You coming or what?”
Monsoon
A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Vestal Review, DIAGRAM, Hobart, Lost Balloon, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Wigleaf Top 50. He's currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
Mama in the lake, praying. Knee-deep, she’s wading her newborn along the moonlit surface of the water, her head crowned with twigs and bird bones. The baby looks as confused and genderless in her hands as those oysters the pastor has been carving open for the ceremony. Now, he’s busy pouring saltwater on the baby’s forehead from the lip of an oyster shell to baptize her amid bawls and tears. The train of Mama’s wedding gown disturbs a butterfly nest on her way out of the water, the ship of my half-sister’s infantile body sailing beside her. Three generations of monarchs get trapped within the layers of her tulle in the same way three generations of women got married on this land and have never left. The frames and furniture inside the house have grown old with them, with me, those bones of a family ingrained into each wall and have since become a part of the concrete. All her life, my half-sister, too, will probably try and wash this blood off her milky skin, feasted on by mosquitoes and blessed with motherly prayers. As Mama and her boyfriend hold hands in the canopy of a weeping willow to say their vows, gypsy moths start buzzing in the mason jars lined along the makeshift altar to mark the beginning of something I cannot place. Watching them smile and negotiate words with each other, my heart becomes a sponge, infinitely growing larger as I soak in all the rain and fire.
Sacred Rock
Kleopatra Olympiou is a writer from Cyprus. Her writing has appeared in HAD, Maudlin House, FlashFlood Journal, and Electric Literature. She lives in London.
My son, Panos, is having open heart surgery in London, where he now lives, and I’m climbing up the sacred rock of the Acropolis.
I make my way around the Parthenon, barely looking at it, and stand by the Greek flag.
There are crowds, always, people taking photos of each other or of themselves. The only eyes on me are the regal green eyes of a cat.
I check my watch. Three more hours before there’ll be any news. Then the phone rings: my daughter, Irini, who’s flown to London from the Netherlands to be at the hospital.
I think the worst, but there’s no news. She’s just checking in on me.
“I’m at the Acropolis, actually,” I say. I don’t say that this morning, pacing back and forth in the kitchen, I saw that photo of them on the fridge, toddlers in big coats in front of the Parthenon, new and piercing and unfamiliar like it hadn’t been there for years, and just set off.
“For fuck’s sake, mom,” she says. “Panos is having surgery and you’re playing tourist?”
I take it. I’ve said worse. I’ve criticized and accused and pressured and questioned and opined and eventually been repelled. There is too much between us. “Please call me when there’s news.”
The cat blinks at me. Doesn’t take her eyes off me. It’s hot and crowded around the temple, but looking out toward Piraeus and the Aegean sea, I sense a pluck of chords, an inner drum beat. A power pulsing with something to say.
The cat stretches, tickles me with the tip of her tail, then steps toward the Erechtheion.
The rope preventing us from approaching the marbles is nothing to her. She leaps between the Caryatids, vanishing among the stones.
I look at the six girls, so effortlessly bearing the temple’s weight. I think of the five originals, united in the museum. Of their sixth sister, hostage in Britain. Of my kids, away from me. This country, drained of its children. All our mistakes and unspoken loves and small-mindedness and misery. Of Panos, opened up and vulnerable and completely in someone else’s hands.
I wait for the cat to emerge, but it never does. Like it was never even there.
Our Last Winter
Janice Leadingham is a Portland, Oregon based writer and tarot-reader originally from somewhere near Dollywood, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Reckon Review, HAD, the Northwest Review, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, and Best Small Fictions 2024. She is @thehagsoup everywhere and hagsoup.com.
The psychic on the corner of Hawthorne and 27 th closed without us ever having gone in. A few times we thought about it, came close. Lights bordered the sign shaped like a hand, long fingers and lined palm, in the window facing Hawthorne—the carnival hues ran sequentially red, yellow, blue warming our cheekbones, and we were happy for it to be a choice. But we chose to keep walking, to the ramen shop, Tim Tom’s for a beer, the record store if he just got paid. And then, the sign was gone, replaced with brown butcher paper tacked to the glass with masking tape. I thought maybe a bookstore, he hoped for a new psychic, her predecessor’s enemy, only this one would read tealeaves and have an accountant, and we could become regulars.
But it was a video game store, thick plastic cases lined the shelves, the kind we put our lips up to in childhood to blow the dust from its ridges. The sign for it was simple and ugly and hung from the window that looked at 27th, which was wrong. Wrong in the way of the couple that moved into the house on Stark Street after us and how they put the Christmas tree in the dining room window instead of the bay window, and just the same, there were no glowing lights where we stood in the cold, and our breath fogged the glass until it all blurred and so we walked away.
Descendants
Billie Chang is a Chinese-American writer from Los Angeles. You can find her prose work in Same Faces Collective, Surely Mag, The Racket Journal, and others.
When Yeye died, his body became a skeleton tree, the branches naked and still, like the hollowed carcass of a meatless fish. Years ago, during the war, he lost his left-most molar from rot and poisoned stress, the enamel cracking straight and still, as though a butter knife had sliced the white in two. When he made it, in America, he had a dental implant installed, made of pure diamond and worth $41 million. Before the dirt blanketed the casket, Arthur pried the jaw open and massaged the tooth from the gum. He was the one who drew the shortest straw, a system we devised while huddled in the corner of the funeral service, and besides, it all worked out fine. No one caught Arthur, who was the smallest of us and had the softest hands. Wearing masks shaped like monkeys, elephants, lions, gorillas, we crushed the diamond into soft dust, then did the same to our Adderall. The mixture was named Filthy Rich Fuel and at the end of the night, when Yeye was finally six feet under, was in such high demand that our animal faces left the venue stained, powdered white at the nose.
Between bites of garlic-steamed fish, our Aunties and mothers wept over Yeye’s will, asking Where did it all go? The medicine shops and chain of restaurants. The high-rise apartment and the house with the balcony. What they didn’t know was that their children, sitting prim and proper around the lazy Susan, were nostril-full of diamond money, and in a few years time, would attend Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Northwestern. The trick was writing weary personal statements, capitalizing off generational Hardship. We put such pressure on these stories that the word grew from h to H.
Day-to-day, we drank pulp-free juice and harped over the pH of the heated swimming pool. We took turns seeing who could hold their breath the longest, who could sweat the most, and by the end, everyone had forgotten how to say Thank You in their mother’s tongue. The only Chinese was in the blood or, maybe, it emerged slowly, head-first, when one of us felt adventurous, and topped white rice with sesame.
The eve before the lunar new year, Rebecca becomes the first to change her face. She chooses the elephant and moves to New York, where the skinny boys post her to their Instagrams and stretch their fingers over her trunk. Belinda follows suit, except monkeys have better dexterity, she argues, which will help her new party trick of holding two cigarettes at once – one in the palm and one in the foot. Kevin is allergic to fur so he becomes a big fat snake and swallows his mother whole. Eventually, Dr. Krudup gives us a family discount and we all become victims of plastic erasure. Everyone begins anew; even little Arthur, who gives up his softness for Brillo-pad spikes.
Later, when we are old and ourselves, it is nighttime and everyone lies asleep, scattered across the country. Snoring must be genetic; the sound travels from one Huang to the next, rising up into the sky and gathering speed over Texas, carrying itself past sirens and buildings, states and borders, skin and blood. Under its crescendo, in the staticky darkness, covered with the filth/grime of his Descendants’ spit, Yeye wakes.
He pounds a fist against the coffin door. The sound rings out, hollow. A knuckle to watermelon.
In the Middle of the World, Mama is a Spirit
Esther Fox is a queer Chicana writer and visual artist studying English at Truman State University. She writes to re-open conversations with spirits and the graves of her lived experiences, drawing from loss, liminal identity, and the magical. Esther’s work is featured in Windfall, Quirk, and Rejected Lit Magazine.
She shows me the scar and lifts the hem of her collared shirt, the bronzed navel of her stomach, like the outside of a kiwi, reminds me of a planet. She points to the crescent scar under the swell of her body. Here is where they cut you out of me. Ma closes her fist and places it in my hands. And you were this size, like a hummingbird.
The boys at my school call me Hyena Girl. They roll up the sleeves of my shirt, pluck at the hair on my arms, and call it my fur. Sometimes, in the shower, I’d scrape off the fuzz with Ma’s razor until the drain clogged, until I noticed the birthmarks stippled across my body and called it the Milky Way. Ma would hide her arms from the boys when she was younger so they’d stop cornering her by the chain link wrapped around the playground as if gnashing their teeth in her face would scare the gold from her skin. Make her so white she’d disappear.
Our house is where the coyotes cry. La Luna! La Luna! Like children wailing, they erupt from the trees, the moon making their shadows stammer tears. Once, those coyotes were warriors in Nahuatl, dancing animals with human hands and feet, following the drum song of stars. They look at his fur and call him creator, the singing trickster, baying for La Luna! until the soil returns him to clay.
The tears never reach inside our home. Ma cleans it away with lemon and lavender but lets the guitar on the stereo weep into her muscles and womb. She holds it there where she can’t hold anything else other than spirits. That’s why she tells me I’m made of Abuelita all over, from the cleft of my chin to the shape of my mouth. I’m young in these rooms where she used to point at my eyes and call me “mama.”
The moon and the sun used to be in love in a language I can’t speak. The moon used to hide inside a deer carcass and a cloud of dragonflies. The moon used to be a woman glowing blue onto lost travelers. The window is supposed to be closed at night so the dead can’t find you, but I keep it open to let its light in, to have these bright things as a witness.
“Your blood is dirty,” a boy whispers into my hair at the back of our church while the priest blesses the air with smoke. My arms are bare and smooth this time. The stories say that our blood used to feed the sun so it wouldn’t disappear—a gift. Gold. I turn my head over my shoulder, and his face is scrunched and twisted pink. I want to make my mouth unkind, like a coyote, to close my jaw around his head and crunch.
To be a daughter is to be unburied. If I were uncovered from the earth, my bones unbraided from soil, would the archeologists look at my fossils in limestone and call me a beast, could they tell that my blood is mixed with salt and dirt, impure and animal. Would I be made of clay, called a creator, or hidden away like the woman inside the night as if the world around us was only ever meant to be a carcass.
“Mama, I cry for the moon too,” I confess while sitting in her bed. Her fingers brushed through the knots in my hair sprayed with strawberry detangler. The shopping infomercials chatter in blue light. The night is quiet. She doesn’t respond to me, and rarely she does when I replay our memories of mother and daughter. Sometimes, I believe we’re ghosts. This time, I crawl back inside her until she is heavy with me. The day Abuelita died was the same day I was born. Our wombs, house, ofrenda, where souls overlap on Earth and take the body so they can sing where the music can’t reach and can’t be cleaned.
I don’t know how to sew loose buttons, hem a stray thread, to wash and smack clothes against rock, to work until my hands purple. Ma only taught me to read and never shave against the grain. I don’t know Abuelita’s suffering or the rivers where the daughters floated away in woven baskets. All I know is the story of the moon and the trickster and that I’m a Hyena Girl.
“Can you hear them?” Abuelita asks me. I’m young in this room. The trains shake the house.
The photographs on the walls shudder. She hums in her mother tongue, and this time, I imagine us as the coyotes I used to fear, her tawny muzzle pressed into my hair, our bodies folded into each other the way Ma’s hands do in church. Soon, I will inherit her. Soon, I will be heavy. A gift. Her eyes. Mama’s mama.
Once, we hid under long sleeves so they wouldn’t scare the gold away from us. In the back of churches and classrooms, they called us filthy, pointed at the spirits inside us, and said we were empty. Ma still fills my bath with dried rose and minced herbs, our hands still pray. One day, I’ll crush their bones into cascarilla and write stories with their remains—these words are how Ma will sing when she crawls back to the altar inside me.
Yes, Abuelita, I can hear them.
I think of my mother’s fist in my hands and imagine a wet organ, where my pulse was the sound of the earth breathing.
We used to be the size of hummingbirds.
The Universal Language
Ben Watson is a third-year MFA fiction candidate at McNeese State University who served as the managing editor for the McNeese Review. His short fiction has appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Wilderness House, Glass Mountain, and Shards literary magazines.
The first time I heard it was on my wedding night.
Leslie and I were intertwined on a hotel bed so soft it felt substanceless. The place was dim, maroon blackout curtains letting slivers of the white streetlights sneak in through the windows. It was hot and muggy, the wall unit blasting a swampy scent throughout our room with only a touch of coolness.
Leslie pulled herself forward, her skin dragging against mine like rubber. We were good little Christians, so this was the first time I’d ever seen more of her than her smile.
Leslie’s head was next to mine, and she cupped my face in her hands. Her eyes were bright, her expression similar to the first time she’d asked me on a date. A sort of excitement that the nerves inflamed.
Leslie leaned forward. Her lips moved. Her breath tickled my chin. But what came out of her was utterly incomprehensible. Like human white noise. She looked at me expectantly, but I hadn’t parsed a single word. I blinked, and Leslie did it again. Talked in this inexplicably senseless way.
For a few moments, we just looked at each other. Her pulse slapped my fingertips, the heat of her sticky in the thick air. Her odor melded into the room’s earthy scent. I realized she would wait forever for my response to a question I had no idea how to understand.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I told her. My voice seemed too normal to exist in that moment, too centered where everything else felt so light and so heavy. Leslie hesitated, then moved her lips again, the same unintelligible mush escaping her.
She rubbed her hand along my back as she spoke, as if tickling my spine would awaken me to whatever she was trying to express. But seeing my utter lack of comprehension, she lowered her arm and patted me on the shoulder.
“I guess that’s alright,” she said. She pressed herself tight to me, but the excitement in her eyes was gone. I waited, feeling like there was more to be said. Feeling like I needed to somehow make up for a failure of mine that I couldn’t even begin to understand. But before I could make myself say anything, she gripped my hand, and with the same tone she’d use to ask me to take out the garbage, she said, “Well, are we done here?”
Luggage
Victoria Melekian writes poetry, short fiction and, on occasion, a novella-in-flash. Her work has appeared in print and online and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives with her husband in Carlsbad, California where the weather is almost always perfect. For more, visit her website https://victoriamelekian.com
Always a medium-sized suitcase, red, with rollers, common enough she can claim it a mistake if caught, but Leah’s never been stopped. She’s done it before, walked out of the airport with stolen luggage. No one knows, and it’s just something to do on Sunday afternoons when the lonely presses in on her.
The first was full of old lady clothes she gave to the Salvation Army—a nightgown, lavender-scented white blouses, and some bobby pins. Another had kids’ shirts and jeans and a doll dressed like a cowboy that scared her so she tossed him in the apartment dumpster. Suitcase three: a tennis racket and lots of athletic wear and dirty underpants. This one, the fourth, holds wrapped Christmas gifts for Tiffany and Christopher from Grandma with a tag inside: “Helen Jordan, care of Anna Emerson, 159 Gleason Street, LA, California, 213 240-1247.”
She opts for a late-night drive by, plans to set the suitcase on the porch and run to her car, but a dog barks and lights flash on and Leah trips over a garden hose. A woman opens the door—Helen, it turns out—and she’s nice and she’s grateful and she insists on helping Leah limp inside to check on her bleeding knee which she dabs with hydrogen peroxide before bandaging it with the supplies in a first-aid kit Tiffany fetches from the bathroom. There’s Tiffany and Christopher, their mother Anna, who sets out cookies and makes cocoa, and of course, Grandma Helen—all here in the kitchen, the fantasy family Leah’s dreamed of most of her thirty-five years.
Leah sips her hot chocolate and imagines moving in with Anna when Helen returns home, helping with cooking and laundry and walking the kids to school, having her own place at the table. She pictures Christmas a year from now, a small party in the living room, Anna telling guests “And that’s how it started, a lost suitcase,” smiling, putting an arm around Leah, “and now we can’t imagine life without her.”
Leah waves good-bye, Anna and Helen, Tiffany and Christopher standing in the doorway like people in a snow globe, red and green sparkly Christmas tree lights blinking behind them. Three blocks away, Leah tosses Helen’s wallet out the car window. At home, she counts the cash—seventy-one dollars she tucks in a drawer underneath her nice blue sweater, the one she wears on first dates and job interviews, the one she’ll wear if Anna invites her to lunch.
The Blood Between Us
Nan Wigington lives in a retirement community and volunteers at a nearby cemetery. Her flash fiction has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Splonk, and Molotov Cocktail.
I’m stuck here – my mother in the kitchen on the phone, the white curlicue of the rotary’s cord swaying above the spaghetti sauce she’s stirring. “Very close veins,” I think she says, and a five-year-old me wraps herself around her mother’s left calf, pokes a plump index finger between the buried blood traffic, the growing map of bulging turnpikes and throughways. My mother steps out of the loop, her heel grazing my chin and nose when she does.
“Go away,” she whispers.
I have the word right by the time I’m nine, can spell it, explain it. Mom’s an aid at an old sailor’s home, so I pick up the language. My vocabulary includes decubitus, sepsis, pneumonia. I imagine her all day lifting and lowering, pushing and pulling, rolling and feeding, wiping. Her patients, old sailors with tooth pick legs and balloon bellies, never say thank you.
She holds their big man hands, anyway, comes home exhausted, and cannot say hello. It’s the same routine – shoes off, hose off, bad leg up, TV on.
“Get me a beer,” she tells me. She drinks until it all really aches – the job, her choices, the leg. She says it’s a curse. I’m the curse.
“You were a big baby,” she says, “You did this. Carrying you nearly killed me.”
And there it is, the glue, the cement holding her to me, me to the past. I am always the little girl wanting blessings and forgiveness for a sin I didn’t commit from a god that never loved me.
Penance was impossible. Nothing softened or impressed her. I grew thin, got good grades, went to college. She said so what. I studied medicine. She asked why.
I grew wings, but couldn’t fly.
The nursing home calls. Mother is angry again. Can’t I visit? I say I’ll be there, but I know I won’t. Let her rage, I think. Let someone else hold her bird hand.
I fear I’ve developed my own venous insufficiencies. All day on my feet and my leg starts to cramp. Sometimes home from work, I pop a beer, take off my shoes, put my leg up. I think I see a bloated vein and trace it down the length of my calf. It doesn’t hurt much. Not yet.
Chain of Culpability
Matt Kendrick is a writer, editor and teacher based in the East Midlands, UK. His work has been featured in various journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Cheap Pop, Craft Literary, Fractured Lit, Ghost Parachute, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Website: www.mattkendrick.co.uk | Twitter: @MkenWrites