The airport is also a train depot. I wander back and forth between the terminals, hearing languages. I see my parents riding in a golf cart, but they’re going the opposite direction.
*
I can’t find the oregano. My daughter is at the computer, reading out loud. “We are few and they are many, they will devour us,” she says.
*
The nurse says they will take some fluid from my mother’s spine. She’s careless with the wheelchair, knocking over a vase at the end of the hall.
*
We fiddle for hours, turning knobs, working gears. It’s like a jet. I brought a jello mold with shredded carrot. I top mine with whipped cream. “Cheater,” you say, taking some.
*
My husband arrives with gifts from Asia. One is a tee shirt with two cartoon soldiers, both resembling Mr. Magoo. They’re running with rifles. Underneath, it says “Indonesia.”
*
Our home feels outsized, bloated. We walk the rooms, bewildered by high ceilings and Louis XIV furniture. Looking out the window gives me vertigo. An old man waves from the garden path
*
“Is it five o’clock yet?” I ask. You lick cream from your finger and hold it up. One more game.
*
The manager of the Starbucks asks me to describe myself using only one word. I take a sip of coffee. “Dark,” I tell her. She writes in her notebook. She says she’ll get back to me.
*
My brother phones to wish me a Happy Birthday. He likes his new job, but it’s all arrivals and departures. “Lila is doing a report,” I tell him. “Chief Joseph.” He talks about the day our parents finally brought me home from the hospital. He uses the word grim.
*
In my dreams, my father walks into a church wearing a red carnation in his lapel. I hold forth from the pulpit. My mother raises broken hands, imploring me to stop.
*
I find the oregano, but it has lost its scent. My daughter leans closer to the screen. “I’m tired of fighting. My heart is sick and sad.”
*
We’re invited to have drinks with the neighbors on their deck, but it’s misty. We sit at the kitchen table under a bulb, our faces in the fog curling over the blue Adirondack chairs.
Kathy Fish teaches flash fiction for the Mile High MFA program at Regis University in
Denver. She has published four collections of short fiction: a chapbook in the Rose Metal
Press collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (2008); Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011); Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012); and Rift, co-authored with Robert Vaughan (Unknown Press, 2015). Her story, “A Room with Many Small Beds” was chosen by Stuart Dybek for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press). She blogs at http://www.kathy-fish.com/.
Lost Balloon 