Issue 68 May 2019 Flash Fiction Online May 2019

By the time they crossed the state line, Deb Burkett’s daughter, Linnea, had just about perfected her list of Things That Could Go Wrong in Wyoming. This was not to be confused with her list of Things That Could Go Wrong in North Dakota (car keys fallen down drop toilet, car died after crunching across gravel road) or Things That Could Go Wrong in Montana (rogue bison attack, car flown off switchback, tent chomped in half by bear hunting for the Jolly Rancher in Nathan’s coat pocket). When they spent the afternoon in Yellowstone, Linnea’s list suddenly got a lot longer. As eight-year-old Nathan clomped across the boardwalks, ten-year-old Linnea hung back, staring at the electric green rimming the bubbling pools of the hot springs.

“Linnea,” Deb said, holding up the camera, “how about a smile?”

Linnea shook her head slowly. She never took her eyes off the pools.

Deb wasn’t especially surprised. They’d covered five states in six days, and Deb already had an impressive photo series of Linnea Not Smiling. Linnea Not Smiling on the Minnesota prairie. Linnea Not Smiling in front of a giant cow statue. Linnea Not Smiling at Dairy Queen. And so on. Privately, Deb was beginning to wonder if this trip had been such a good idea. This was not a good thing to wonder when they had four days and three states left and only one driver, so she set it aside.

“Ah—that’s a no,” she said quickly. Nathan had tried to stand on the bottom rung of the fence. Linnea eyed her brother with nostril-flaring dismay.

“How you doing, kid?” Deb asked her.

“The fence could collapse,” Linnea said. “A hot geyser could shoot up really high. The boards under our feet could break and then our shoes would melt and we would die.”

“Well, aren’t you cheery today,” Deb said. Linnea pressed chapped lips together and stared at her with raised eyebrows. Deb got the distinct feeling her daughter thought she was hopelessly irresponsible. She softened her tone, realizing a change in strategy was needed. “It’s okay, sweetie. Those things aren’t going to happen.”

Linnea ignored her. She stood near the back of the boardwalk as if rooted, blocking traffic, hands stuffed in denim pockets, brown tendrils curled around her ears. Every part of her looked solid except her eyes, which were shallow and distracted as she stared ahead.

Several yards beyond the boardwalk, water bubbled thickly from a rust-stained slope. Steam billowed like cotton up the hillside, milky white obscuring the green. Deb wasn’t convinced Linnea could even see it.

“You can come a little closer. You might not get to see this again.”

“If I get too close, it’ll be the last thing I’ll ever see.”

“Lin!” Nathan said. “Would you stop?”

Which was exactly what Deb wanted to say as well. Her daughter seemed to have become afraid of everything overnight, and Deb was at a loss as to how to handle it. She’d tried comforting, she’d tried downplaying, she’d tried taking seriously and making light of. Most recently, she’d tried joking with Linnea, which had gotten her exactly nowhere. In every situation, Linnea surveyed her surroundings and immediately identified the dangers, and she lost no time in sharing them with everyone around her, describing the family’s impending doom with deadpan relentless calm. If she had to listen to her daughter’s grim prophecies for four more days, Deb felt liable to lose her mind.

As she stared at Linnea on the boardwalk, she couldn’t help wondering if he would be dealing with this any better. Not that it mattered, because he wasn’t here. And so what, Deb told herself, irritation curdling in her—it seemed to be her dominant emotion lately—so what if he’d brutally excused himself from the family six months before; they were still fine, the three of them; they were still the kind of family that took road trips; they were still the kind of family that—

“This whole boardwalk could fall apart,” Linnea announced, as if she were a contractor at a construction site.

“Honey!” Deb’s voice bit with frustration. “It’s not gonna fall apart.”

“Yeah, it will,” Linnea said. “Everything falls apart sometime.”

Deb opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. The geyser gurgled behind her, a warning, an otherworldly lament, and she felt a sudden stab of dismay. There was no Band-Aid, no platitude, no lullaby that could soothe a ten-year-old who understood that things fell apart.

She wasn’t equipped to deal with this—but there was Linnea with feet planted on the boardwalk, waiting for an answer. Deb was the parent. She had to find the right thing to say.

She moved closer to her daughter until they were standing side by side, arms almost touching. “I’m sorry,” Deb said. “You’re right. Things do fall apart.”

Nearby, Nathan blew raspberries in quick succession, as if imitating the sound of the mud pots.

“But not this boardwalk. Not today.”

Linnea’s eyes met Deb’s. Deb forced herself not to look away. There could be no making light of this, no hint of sarcasm or humor in her face. She’d pushed aside Linnea’s fear long enough, pretended not to know where it came from. It was time to be brave.

Linnea moved forward—one, two, three steps. She craned her neck to see the white drifting up the slope.

“Okay,” she whispered, and backed away.

It occurred to Deb that okay was a word that could mean many things. She didn’t know what it meant to Linnea. What she did know was that they made it into Idaho that evening and out of it the next day, and if Linnea made a list of Things That Could Go Wrong in Idaho, Deb never heard about it. She dared to hope that she might still get a picture of Linnea Smiling. She wouldn’t even need an entire photo series. As a starting point, just one picture would do.

Like the way her voice slides into my ear, my guardian angel with the slight, teen-sized body, with the freckles and dirty-blonde bangs and tender little hands, the pearl-white nails so even. That piping voice, waking me: “Carrie, you’ve got to get up.” The quiet, mature concern of that child-high voice slices smoothly into my heart, and my eyes pop open. I sit past all that blurriness as she repeats herself, hands on my arms to hold me steady: “Carrie, you’re dead.”

I can’t believe her, don’t believe her: I have these scarred palms, this phlegm-thick chest, this tight desire to grab her and hug her, my little Loralee, size of a twelve-year-old, yet my senior by three years. I’m more worried that she’s here now, with me—what can that mean, if I’m dead?

The loose weave of her beige, turtleneck sweater doesn’t look like a dead woman’s. The bruised look and lines about her eyes are graduate student sleeplessness—not mortality. The sleeves of her sweater creep halfway down her hands. I say, “Loralee, you’re supposed to be in New York.” My voice shakes like my hands as I touch her, pat her in all the right places. She’s solid, soft, the old scent of lavender mixed with books and guitar strings.

She’s real but she won’t answer me. She walks off into the misty sunlight of the kitchen, as upset as I am by the change. I struggle to get my feet under me, to buckle the big clasp of my leather belt, put on the black trousers and blazer that always made me feel strong, like a hit man. She comes back to help as I fumble with the buttons, my left hand soggy and useless as that of a stroke victim—or a day-old corpse. I begin to believe her for the vague way my tongue catches, for the dead patches, senseless bruises the size of quarters on my fingertips, arms, cheeks. The warmth of her fingertips, the cloud of her patient breath, help press the terror back.

But before long she’s walking out into the library, her outline fading, blurring in a nimbus of light. I take my time following, sick to think she’s insubstantial, wanting to prove it all wrong by touching the crowds that flow through the house like mourners at a wake, but even my brothers don’t notice when I try to talk to them. Everyone’s discussing my belongings, going through childhood toys and comic books. My fingers probe my scalp, seeking some break, a jagged crack like broken pottery: nothing. No memory of the night before or the night before that. Everything’s a blur before I woke to Loralee’s voice.

I run after her. She’s in the living room, sitting calmly against the wall, knees drawn up in frayed, faded denim. I slump beside her as if I haven’t a bone in my body. “I can’t be dead. I won’t be dead,” I moan, but she admonishes me: “You can’t keep holding onto the body. You’ve got to let go.”

Have you let go, my love, my Loralee? Is that why your reflection wavers so? Have you taken up this body again by will, merely to warn me? It must take so much concentration and energy to reassemble the flesh from that fuzzy ball of light I’ve seen hovering in your place as you pass between rooms.

Terror grips me as I place a finger to my lips, and it comes back smeared with lipstick that I never wear. I used to swear only an undertaker could get it on me.

My brothers walk past, bickering happily over sheets and draperies.

My own embalmed limbs repulse me. If I let go now, I might float away, never to be seen again. If I don’t, my spirit will burn out, expending the energy of eons just to hold the body’s form.

How can we be reunited now, only for me to relinquish the body that would allow me to touch her again? She’s stiff in my arms, but it’s the stiffness of protest, not death. “Carrie, you’ve got to get up! I can’t stay here with you. If you won’t listen to me, I’ve got to go!”

Go where? Back to some azalea-scented ether? What would become of her, of us? I want to hang onto this body. Surely her logic is faulty; we will only dissipate little by little. If we let go now, we’ll be lost forever without will: what good is immortality as mist, as will o’ the wisps? Frankenstein’s monster, I will bumble about in this borrowed flesh until she agrees to stay.

But she’s fading already, frowning and throwing off that body I loved so much, the little nose and freckles and that heavy, straight, dirty-blonde hair. The woman I adored. I want to hug her tight, squeeze in one more round of Mystery Date, the playing pieces transfigured with photos of her friends. Just one more morning in the duplex with the sagging floors and claw-footed tub and the long stairwell done avant-garde. One more night, calm in the center of the storm, the party roaring beyond the door while we sit on the edge of her little bed, listening to the Cocteau Twins, the Grateful Dead, the Psychedelic Furs. God, how it all comes back, one long rush. But she says sadly, a finger to my lips, “Carrie, this isn’t your life any longer!”

She pries my eyes open to cold white sheets, where I’m spread out like a corpse.

Empty.

Dead.

Alone.

Things not to forget: the way she loved me. The way I loved her. Her voice, whispering my name. That little, freckled smile.

Things to forget: this dead weight that has bowed my heart so long, chafed me till I’m numb. A stranger to myself.

Distantly, I hear her call: “Carrie?”

And I’m listening, listening, and finally following that golden chain with my heart alone.

Previously published as C. A. Gardner, in Whispering Spirits Ezine, 2005 Flash Fiction Contest Showcase, November 20, 2005; Fifth place, Whispering Spirits Ezine 2005 Flash Fiction Contest; as Lyn C. A. Gardner, in 31 Days of Halloween Horror: A Shadowfire Press LLC Anthology, Ed. Michael Barnette, Sept. 2010.

Carrie decides to steal the baby the first time she holds him, his soft, bare head nestled under her chin smelling of soap and sour milk. He is nearly two weeks old, small, still below birth weight and not growing well. Nutrition has ordered him special formula, but it hasn’t helped. She can tell he’s hungry by the way he turns his head side to side, searching. He cries, and Carrie feels a pang in her chest, a yearning that is nearly overwhelming.

“I could feed him,” Carrie offers.

His nurse, Allana, looks up from weighing a diaper. “No,” she says. “That’s okay. You have things to do.”

“Really, it’s fine,” Carrie tells her. “Everything’s under control for once. It’s a quiet day.”

“What would that be like, I wonder?” Allana muses. She is at least ten years older than Carrie and has worked at the hospital fifteen years.

“I’m not supposed to say that out loud. I wasn’t thinking,” Carrie apologizes.

“What? Quiet? That’s just a load of bunk. Besides, I don’t think it applies to social workers. Just nurses.”

“And doctors.”

“Sure,” Allana says grudgingly. “Them, too.”

Allana shakes a two-ounce bottle of high-calorie formula and twists it open with a small pop, then effortlessly fits a disposable nipple into place one-handed.

“Sit there,” she instructs. Carrie sits. “Now, just give me a second to score him.”

Allana tallies the evidence of the infant’s withdrawal, writes the total on her forearm in pen.

“He can eat,” Allana tells Carrie, “while I get his meds.”

Alone, Carrie presses her face to the infant’s skull and inhales. He is not completely bald. She skims the fuzz with her lips, breathes in again. There are animals that eat their young, Carrie thinks. For the first time, she understands it. She would consume him entirely, if she could, his fists, his bony legs. She would swallow him whole.

“What’s his name?” Carrie asks when Allana returns with a small syringe.

Allana shrugs. “He doesn’t have one. She hasn’t named him yet.”

Carrie looks at the infant in her arms. She decides to call him Finn, after the Finnegan Abstinence Score the doctors and nurses use to determine if they can safely wean his morphine dose. It’s better, she reasons, than having no name at all.

* * *

“I can’t stay tonight,” the boy’s mother says, leaning over the nurse’s station, dyed black hair brushing against the divider. “I have court early tomorrow.”

His nurse sighs. It is not Allana today, who wouldn’t have hesitated to say what she was really thinking, but one of the younger girls, just out of college. Kristin, maybe. Carrie looks at her badge, but it has flipped backward. She digs deep, trying to remember. Krystal, Krystal with a K.

“Okay. But we need you to stay at least one full night before he can be discharged. I know it seems like he’s been here forever, but you’re getting close. This is his off dose. If he does well today, we’ll stop the morphine tomorrow. Think about when you can stay over, so there’s no hold up getting home.”

Carrie watches the woman shuffle toward the elevator, the collar of her puffy coat already turned up against the cold.

“Did her pupils look big to you?” she asks hopefully.

Krystal shakes her head. “Not really. No.”

“What was that smell?”

“It wasn’t pot,” Krystal says with the air of someone who’s been invited to those sorts of parties more recently than Carrie. “Just cigarettes.”

Carries sighs. “I’ll call DCF to update them he’s almost ready. His mother’s been cleared to retain custody. They did their home visit last week.”

Krystal half-turns her chair to look at Carrie. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

Shrugging. “She’s not ready.”

The nurse cannot be more than twenty-two or -three, but she shakes her head sagely, swivels to her computer. “No one ever is.”

* * *

Carrie plans to take Finn the night his mother stays in the hospital, so it will be clear the woman is at least partly to blame. There are security cameras, of course, but Carrie knows how to avoid them, how to get on and off the floor without being seen or scanning her badge. The wards empty out after eight, when visiting hours end. Night shift staffing is sparse. And Finn’s room is in the quiet part of the hall. She can sneak in and out, Carrie is almost certain, if she times it right.

Just after his midnight vitals offers the best window. It’s possible no one will even realize he’s gone until four. The methadone has likely made Finn’s mother a heavy sleeper, and Carrie is not worried she will wake the woman. She’s far more concerned Finn will start crying when she slips him into her bag.

Carrie goes to Target and buys diapers, bottles, a tin of powdered formula. She is careful to pay cash.

* * *

The following day, the boy is named Albert, after his grandfather, who died in Iraq.

“It took a while for his dad to come around,” his mother tells Carrie. She unfolds a fresh diaper. “He was set on Stannis, from Game of Thrones. But we couldn’t have that, now, could we?”

She wipes Albert’s bum and kisses his bare belly with a casual familiarity that makes Carrie flinch.

“Does he look like his dad?” Carrie asks, her voice shaking. She already knows the answer.

The woman laughs. “It’s pretty freaky. But my dad, Albert, he’s in there, too.”

Carrie looks at the infant’s snub nose and pursed lips. There is an entire family history written on his face, but it does not belong to her and neither does he. She will donate the formula and diapers to the women’s shelter.

It takes some time for her to speak. “Home the day after tomorrow, right? Congratulations.”

“I’m not ready,” Finn’s mother confesses softly.

In his crib, Albert stirs, and Carrie steps backward through the door. “No one ever is.”

Once more before bedtime, my sweet. Snuggle up here in the rocking [item used for sitting], and I’ll tell you how it happened.

Now, where to begin? When we moved to this cabin in the woods? When Sadie and I decided to have a baby? Those are beginnings, too. No? All right, we’ll start the day we began weaning you, at six months old. I offered you apples and Sadie offered you mashed blueberries, but you wouldn’t open your mouth for anything, so for fun I held out our [word for domesticated feline] like he was a cucumber stick and said, well, do you want to eat a [word for domesticated feline]? And as soon as I said that, the word [domesticated feline] appeared on your tray like a shimmering cracker, and before we could move, you grabbed the word and gobbled it up with your two little teeth.

Well, we’d never seen anything like that before! At first we thought we’d imagined it, but when Sadie dug out our copy of The [word for domesticated feline] in the Hat, we saw the word wasn’t there anymore. It had been gnawed out of existence. When I tried to think of the word it felt like I had a stone in my mouth, weighing down my tongue.

The next day I took you to the [word for medical professional]. She prodded your stomach and said it didn’t seem swollen, so whatever we’d fed you was probably fine. That’s how [medical professionals] are—they’ve got fifteen minutes, the waiting room’s full, they aren’t really listening. So, I told her to choose a word and I’d feed it to you. (What a word to choose! For all that education, sometimes they’re not very smart.) After that she smartened up and ordered a battery of tests plus meetings with a linguist, a psychologist, and a nutritionist. When I asked what we should do in the meantime she told me to keep a close eye on your [word for disposable baby underwear]. Well, it turns out words break down just like any other organic matter.

Of course, none of the tests amounted to anything—just a bunch of baffled specialists. When the linguist fed you the Spanish word for [water that falls from the sky], it was gone in English; and in all the languages she tried, there was no word for [domesticated feline]. The psychiatrist had me sit on the sofa and breastfeed you while he asked me about the absence of a male role model in your life, as if that might be the reason you consume the very fabric of language itself. The nutritionist lectured us about a balanced diet and how to deal with picky eaters, then took off spooked when Sadie fed you [the word for orange root vegetable].

We swore we wouldn’t feed you any more words, then. We held out for a week. You just sat in your high [item used for sitting] and banged your spoon on the tray, shrieking. You’d gotten a taste for language, I guess. Finally, when we couldn’t stand it anymore, Sadie gave you [the word for cold-weather outerwear]. It held you for an hour before you were banging the spoon again, wanting more—greedy little thing! That night Sadie found me holding you, crying and breaking off a piece of the word for [liquid that flows from the eyes]. She was calm about it, Sadie was—told me we’d better accept that you’re a linguavore, it is what it is—and of course she was right.

Since then we’ve fed you when you’re hungry. Do you remember the picnic in the park where you giggled while eating [the word for the absence of light], like the letters were tickling your tongue? Or the time Sadie tried to have you eat the word “mooncalf?” You turned your nose up at that like a regular baby with brussels sprouts. Seems you like popular words, the ones that are always on our tongues. We’ll still have “apricity” even though we’ve lost [the word for the star at the centre of our solar system], and “gloaming” when, someday, you eat the word “night.”

After a few months, we decided to move out to this lonely place, where there aren’t many people to gossip about us at the local diner. You love the woods and the vegetable garden, and out here we’ll be able to watch you grow up without the world coming to find you. Sometimes we pop into the general store to buy flour and milk, and overhear the speculation: maybe they’re doomsday preppers? No, they’re conspiracy theorists, tinfoil hats… but there’s never a hint of the truth. They may wonder why conversation’s lagging at the table, dinner going cold as they wonder why they can’t ask someone to pass the [word for sodium-based seasoning], but they’ll never guess someone fed the word to a baby.

This morning you said your first word. We were in the garden, tending the [orange root vegetables], when you tottered up and looked at Sadie and me, and said [the word for a female parent] in your bright voice. Then you took the word, shimmering in front of you, and ate it. We know, now that you can feed yourself, that we’re on borrowed time. It won’t be long before I’ll run out of words to tell you your own story, before I go into the store and find the gossip’s dried up because the words for it are all gone. On that day, I’ll collect a basket of the remaining supplies from the shelf and come home to Sadie and you, my long-limbed child of few words—because so many of those you say, you’ll eat—and we’ll face the strange future together. But don’t think we have any regrets, my sweet. It was worth it all to have heard you say [the word for a female parent] that one time.