Daily Flash Fiction Stories
By Ian Artis
“I’m sorry about Alissa,” Mitchell said, sitting on the corner of my bed. I noticed his frame—gentle, but strong, like a linebacker who knits—made the fitted sheet in the corner pop up, but I was too sick to fix a pet peeve. I was too sick to anything. Listless in this heat, listless from this pain, in this old house with no air conditioning. [Read more…] about Tenderness Upon Palpation
In the house, on the wooden coffee table marked with circles from wet beer cans, Cate saw the little pipe Travis used for what he called “shake,” the bits and pieces fallen from pot buds in his Ziploc bag. Shake and bake. Travis thought that was the funniest.
The baby was blue on the floor.
She started what she could remember from a CPR class.
Before I take their guilt money, my parents meekly mention rehab again. It should be a four letter word, and I sing “no, no, no,” amused with myself, and slam the door on my way out. Not that they got the reference. My ride is almost here, and my fingers and forearms are numb, giddy with anticipation. I won’t be back for days. My steps quicken to meet them, and I’m already ashamed, as if I have anything left that my parents don’t know. As if anything could be worse. The good thing, and the problem, I guess, is that I’m no longer scared to die. It’s all been done before.
To Grimm and Grimm—for the women they claimed
Once, a baby came into the world early and insistently, tearing his mother as he went. He would not let himself cook for the recommended eighth and ninth months, but he grew still once Trudy’s feet were crammed into cold, metal stirrups, and then would not be pushed from her body. The doctors cut him from her while John held her hand, murmuring promises husbands only think to make when they are afraid they will never get the chance to keep them.
She lost too much blood.
The baby wasn’t crying.
Doctors wheeled her from delivery to surgery past her husband. Before awareness left her veins and her eyes rolled back into her head, Trudy heard John’s voice crack in a plea to God: “Save her, take anything, anything but her.”
~
She remembered another pregnancy, the first swell of her body. The wane. Holding a bundle of new, wriggling limbs and breathing her name like a prayer: Marlene. She remembered, later, a white coat spelling out SIDS. Then there were John’s arms and his murmur that they would try again; there would be other children for the newly painted crib.
~
She woke from her anesthetic sleep. She lay in the hospital bed for three days before they brought in the baby. John placed him in her arms, and Trudy screamed, “He’s burning me!” She sobbed at welts that the doctors wouldn’t see while nurses rushed the baby boy to another fluorescent lit corner of the hospital.
Trudy slept for another three days. And then a new doctor sat by her bed and ripped a piece of paper from his pad, pushing it into her hands before leaving with the click of his pen. Magic words. She didn’t mention the welts again, but she ran her fingers over them when John wasn’t looking.
~
Seven days after Trudy and the baby came home, John packed a briefcase and went back to work in the city near their house.
There was an old juniper tree growing beneath the baby’s window. Trudy spent her sharp days curled against its bark, listening to the baby wail. Every hour, a bird hidden in the branches above would sing sweetly as it swooped down and pecked at her ear. She hid her bottle of gin and small bottle of white pills in the tree’s roots and used its twisted trunk to steady herself to stand. She went into the house that did not feel like hers anymore, climbed strange stairs, walked into the room of the boy they kept saying was her son. Her pine-wrecked breath seldom rising above a whisper, she sang:
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird won’t sing…
Mothers do this. Mothers sing. Mothers comfort. Trudy was called Mother again. So she sang. She comforted. And the heat from the crib streaked her arms in red that her husband wouldn’t see. And, leaving the boy stewing in his shit, or with his maw gaping for milk she would not give, she went back outside. She crawled under the juniper and poured gin down her throat, over her arms. And she planted white pills in her body like seeds.
The welts knew the bird’s tune. The welts knew every step to its dance.
John came home every night twenty-eight minutes after the ninth song. He hugged his wife and felt her cringe where he brushed her arms. He changed the baby. He fed him formula. He asked after Trudy’s day. She wanted to tell him that nothing was wrong, but her mouth would not bend to the lie. So she said nothing. And he said she would try again tomorrow.
Late, with John’s warm body curled around hers and his skin covering the welts on her arms, Trudy dreamed of pecking song birds, gin-soaked sweaters, tear-watered baby clothes. The dream was always called Bad Mother.
Dreams are unsolved things, like ghosts—unfinished intuitions staring us down in the dark, stalking our steps to the bathroom. Trudy was sure she had read that somewhere.
~
One day John was late. The boy wailed and the bird tweeted. The pills were spent. The gin was gone. The boy’s screaming filled the whole house. And the bird was his scream, and the doorways were his scream, and the berries clinging to the juniper tree were his scream, and even Trudy was his scream. Her body was on fire, the welts moving to the sound of the baby’s voice like crescendos to a conductor’s relentless wrist.
The woman on fire snatched the baby from his crib and pitched him into the bathtub. And she climbed in after him and held him down, stomping out the embers that had singed away at her since the boy first filled her arms. She heard his screams from under the water.
When the boy was silent and still, she pulled him to her breast. He was cool. Something in her veins was singing—the bird, the gin not yet released, the juniper itself—something, to the tune of the lullaby she sang him.
The song knew the Bad Mother dream. The song wrote it. Are songs like ghosts too?
Trudy went where she always went after she calmed him.
Under the roots, Trudy began to dig. She placed the shell of her son into the earth and watered it with her tears and the bathwater that still clung to her clothes. And because she had never heard of a child growing from underneath the roots of a juniper, and because birds did not sing in people’s veins, and because the gin was gone, she hung herself from a branch, and watered the seed of her son with blood from the wound the rope cut into her neck, for good measure.
Like I washed up on a beach. The sand in my hair was like termites on my driftwood-soft head. Waterlogged and unreal. If you burnt me, I would become smoke like the Northern Lights, green and cosmic.
By Marie Lathers
The latest family crisis started right in the middle of “My Favorite Martian,” and not even during a commercial.
I was watching in the living room, plopped down in the lime green beanbag, wearing my Mets cap. It had been a good day and was only getting better.
