There’s a thin line between flash fiction and poetry. This is a piece I wrote in one of Kathy Fish’s amazing Fast Flash workshops. If you ever have the opportunity to take one of her classes, do it. I firmly believe her workshop could pull amazing writing out of a rock, she is that good.
We’ll All Be Together Again
Our old dog, Fluffy, is in the driveway, though he’s been dead for years. He would sit at the top of the sloping road, waiting, Mom told us, for Brownie, who disappeared the year the white van cruised the neighborhood. “It was on the news,” Mom told us. “They picked up dogs for medical experiments.” She knows that’s what happened.
Fluffy is all white, but as he sits in the driveway, his eyes glow red.
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We order side salads and toasted ravioli. My daughter can’t get the words out fast enough. She tells me about the episode that broke her heart. “The demon ripped her here,” she says. She draws a line from her flat stomach to the place where her breasts will someday be. “She was dying and they kissed,” she said. “I waited so long.”
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My teeth crumble in my mouth to dust.
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After the skin’s peeled off, the butternut squash looks like cheese, orange and square. I am quiet with the knife.
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Every new apartment is better. A window seat. Ceilings that reach the sky. We are always searching for the next best place.
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Late afternoon, I glance up from the couch at the churchyard next door. A possum waddles in front of the steps and disappears into the overgrown weeds in our yard. The cat jumps from one window to the next, watching.
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It’s usually my mother I’m angry at, though sometimes it’s my husband instead. What is always the same is that I have never been so filled with rage. I wake up trembling. It is as if Pandora’s box has been opened in the night and it will never be shut again.
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We narrate our lives to each other in staccato bursts. “Meeting in Texas cancelled.” “Sam’s home sick from school.” “The deer ate all the tomatoes.” “I hate this part of my job.” “Someday we’ll all be together again.”
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I am single again. Dating. It goes well or it doesn’t. That’s not what matters. I am back to the place where I will always be alone. It aches warm beneath my skin, just above my heart. The sadness rains down from the ceiling. But in the midst of it all, some part of me knows I’ll wake up with a warm body beside me. I know deep down that the worst is over.
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The same day as the possum, I go out to water the garden. I find a turning tomato, sitting in the grass. The scene of the crime. Nibbled until it is almost unrecognizable. I leave it there and listen to the hiss of water from the hose. Later that night, it rains.
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