Month: June 2022

The TSA line in Orlando snakes through mazed partitions, people tacking onto the back of the line in droves. That’s where we need to be, but Aubrey won’t abandon her Mickey Mouse balloon. On a bench in the atrium I suggest, ask, beg. But: No, Mama! Cheeks scarlet despite sunscreen globbed on hourly all three days we tromped around the most magical place on earth, Florida sun searing the near translucence she inherited from her father. Father I brought us here to learn how to live without after he made it clear he’s gone gone.

We’re dangerously close to missing our flight. I ask her for the balloon again, but she crosses her arms. I say, I’m gonna have to count to three. Her lip quivers. I don’t want to take anything from her, not right now. So I breathe and say, One more minute baby but then we gotta get on this plane and go home. She looks up at me, brown eyes wide and dark lashes slick with early tears, then pats my thigh three times slow. So she won’t see my face crumple, I hook my arm around her tiny shoulders and slide her across the bench, hold her against me. Her body feels so fragile, such a breakable little thing. I don’t want to go home either. Empty house, new life stretching unknown before us.

An older boy wails sharp and high into the huge bright space. Aubrey stares at him, then at the yellow smiley-face balloon above him drifting up up up until it bumps to a halt against the glass of the ceiling. She looks back at her own balloon, breathes slow three times like I’ve been teaching her. Between thumb and forefinger she pinches the silver ribbon looped loose around her wrist, slides it over her fist. She releases and watches Mickey float float float. Says: Byebye, Mickeyboy. Then, like nothing: Come on, Mama. Hurryhurry. Chin up, she marches forward. Does not wait for Mickey to nestle into an elbow of steel beams, third side of a grinning triangular huddle with Ariel and Elsa.

It’s becoming a pattern, apparently—my baby girl refusing to watch a man go. Angling away instead. Just like when he walked out, Aubrey slipping from the room before he could get out the front door. A coolness to her I’d not seen before. This time, again: Mama hurry. I follow her lead, fumbling our bags and boarding passes, daunted by my mystery child but not slipping into praise, not saying: So brave, babygirl.

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Annie Frazier lives in North Carolina and works as a freelance editor and Fiction faculty member for Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Appalachian Review, Paper Darts, Hypertrophic Literary, Longleaf Review, CHEAP POP, and elsewhere. Find her at anniefrazier.com and say hey on Twitter @anniefrazzr.

Yes, I went there—to her house. Couldn’t stop myself, having returned to the country, my country, after a decade.

She introduced me as an old family friend to her husband—a clean-shaven man in the traditional kurta-salwar, his sandaled feet flat on the floor as he sat back in the couch that looked too high for me. So, I chose a low, upholstered chair across the coffee table. She went inside, anklets ringing, bangles clinking, the pink dupatta trailing behind her. The husband and I talked.

He loved to hunt, he said, pointed to a reindeer head mounted on the wall behind him. Brown eyes gleaming, antlers and hair a little dusty. I told him about my poetry, the collection that came out last month. The reason I was here, after all these years—on a book tour.

“Poet?” he unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeve of his kurta. “Soft man, soft emotion…”

She returned with a wooden tray holding a flower-patterned teapot, matching cups and saucers, a plate of cream-filled biscuits, some fried bread. A little thick in the middle now, but her face was as innocent, as radiant, as in my mind and eyes, my days and dreams, my breaths and beats.

“Begum, have you read any of the man’s poems?” the husband asked her.

“Umm, yes…no,” she stuttered. “Did you start writing after…” she looked at me and in her eyes I saw them bobbing up and down, emerging and submerging—the lines, the pages of verses I wrote for her, for us.

A boy, about five or six, darted in from outside, bringing with him a whiff of roasted meat, probably from the kebab-shop I noticed across the street. He scooped up a biscuit from the china plate. Beautiful boy, just like her: same heart-shaped face, mocha-brown eyes, a straight-arrow nose.

“Ahmed, where are your manners?” she scolded the boy. He grinned and licked the orange-white cream in the biscuit with his tongue.

The husband said, “Son, come here, did you greet your uncle?”

“Uncle, who?” the boy asked.

“Mamu.”

A cough shot up my throat but I managed to gulp it down. He called me Mamu—mother’s brother. Never had I imagined being called that. Her eyes remained glued to the floor as if she were a shy new bride, her fingers pleating an unpleating the laced edge of her dupatta.

“Salaam, Mamu!” the boy snatched another biscuit from the tray and ran past the paisley-printed curtains covering the doorway.

“The thing about hunting is,” the husband sipped his chai noisily, “you’re not afraid of blood on your clothes, your hands.” He held his large hand in front of his face, examining it. “Once, I extracted a living heart from an animal’s chest. It throbbed in my palm for half a second before the dog pounced on it.”

A dog barked from somewhere deep inside the house which I assumed had many rooms opening up into a courtyard where the animal was tethered. The deep, threatening bark, echoed in the air until the man shouted, “Bahadur!” The dog stopped after a reluctant yelp, an acknowledgement of its master’s order.

“Something about freeing a heart…banished into a cage, pushing, beating restlessly against the ribs. Maybe, you can write a poem about it. Poets know hearts better than anyone else.”

“Uh, huh.”

“It was this one’s heart, Begum,” he addressed her and pointed to the deer-head on the wall. “The animal you said was the most beautiful creation of nature.”

He roared with laughter, “If my wife likes a face, I’d pin it here for her, forever. Pretty woman that she is. Don’t you agree, Poet Sahib?”

I fixed my gaze on the curtains and took quick sips of the tea to mask any expression my face may betray. My toe itched inside the Italian leather shoe.

He continued, “You married, Poet Sahib?”

“No.”

The word hung there, oscillating like a pendulum between the man and me, creating an impassable stupor. He pressed the cup and saucer into his lap, her hands clutched them so tight her knuckles turned white. The air grew unbreathable, thick, as if ready to precipitate. I reached over and placed my cup back in the tray to create some movement.

Thankfully, a savior arrived—the boy, rushing in through doorway, holding a cricket bat and a ball. “Abba, let’s play,” he said to his father.

“Yes, let me wear my shoes,” the husband rose, his head reaching the same height as the deer-head on the wall.

“I should leave,” I stood up, embarrassed for my small stature, and extended a hand towards him. He squeezed it hard in his bear-like paw and turned to her, “Begum, remind me to grease my guns. Sometimes, even when a man’s not hunting, the game is on.”

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Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Born to a middle-class family in India, she later migrated to the United States. Her work has appeared in Reflex Press, Flash Fiction Online, Kahini, and elsewhere. She has been highly commended in National Flash Microfiction Competition, shortlisted in SmokeLong Quarterly Micro Contest, shortlisted in Bath Flash Fiction Festival. She is currently an editor at Janus Literary and a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut flash fiction collection Morsels of Purple is available for purchase on Amazon and in local bookstores. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com. Reach her @PunyFingers.

It started with the paving stones, circles of concrete heavier than the children who bore them, bent-kneed and staggering, between our houses. Bits of garden paths and front walks disappeared, leaving wet worms wriggling on newly exposed circles of earth. We traced muddy footprints from negative space to positive, finding pavers arrayed in a crooked line, heading toward the trees. A narrow avenue into the woods behind our homes.

“We’re out of stones,” the children told us. “The fairies need more.” We nodded, helping their small bodies clamber into minivans and SUVs for a trip to the home improvement store. We wanted to encourage them. We grinned at each other across the aisles as our children selected supplies. Gravel. Small lanterns with batteries that didn’t need the sun. Boxes of scraps the store gave us for free—broken tiles, splintered shims, a few curled carpet remnants too irregular for closets or hallways.

Our children bent their heads together and conferred about requirements, whispering visions half-remembered after fitful nights in their personalized, Pottery Barn’d bedrooms. Dreams with common elements, as similar as palettes of vinyl siding and matched entry lanterns and low-profile evergreens beneath our double-glazed windows. They did not share specifics with us, and we ceded them privacy, indulging their independent plans.

A single cashier checked us out, cooing over the children instead of talking to them. “And what’s all this, then?”

“For the fairies,” said a small voice. It could have been any of them—not one of mine, I don’t think, but my phone had buzzed in my hand, reminding me of work, or perhaps the dentist, or maybe that I was overdue for a vitamin.

“How sweet,” said the cashier.

We exchanged rectangles of plastic for rectangles of stone and glass, and returned home.

What relief, a summer project for the children. Something nearby that required no attention from us, and absorbed theirs as soon as they arose—always earlier than we wished they would—rubbing their sleep-crusted eyes and murmuring about their need to go outside, attempting to exit the back door before we could even get them dressed. We hurried and set them loose in our backyards, returning to our e-mails and our appointments and our overdue bills, and if the children were a little too focused, a little too quiet, who would complain? One or two of us raised our heads periodically, like prairie dogs, peeking out of kitchen windows and screened porches to see the kids still there, bent solemnly over their tasks.

The path wended deeper beneath the boughs.

“What’s back there, anyway?” one of us chuckled over backyard beers one night, and another of us said “just an empty lot.” An undeveloped patch of nothing-yet. We saw one lantern burning above the first stone, but the woods were behind nightfall’s velvet curtain.

“We should call them in,” one of us would say, and the children would return, one of them a little taller, maybe, another with redder hair than some of us remembered. We tucked them into bed, watching spidery lashes close over eyes that seemed lighter than the mossy green of morning—perhaps more peridot, but didn’t some distant aunt have light eyes? Don’t LED bulbs brighten colors?

We kissed foreheads whose curves felt strange against our lips.

“Aren’t growth spurts weird?” one of us would ask another, getting into our adjacent cars in our adjacent driveways, late for work and daycare, and the response—right?!—was so curtly reassuring we would buckle at the knees. All of this was normal. The hair and the height, the awkward postures, the unfamiliar tones and phrases—thank you, Mommy, for the dinner, it was delicious—all normal. The bird skeleton, hollow bones arranged beneath a Hello Kitty pillow in a perfect facsimile of flight, missing only muscles and feathers, this was normal. Thank God.

Normal, too, that they were always hungry, but odd they had stopped saying so. Odd, too, that they weren’t hungry for our help. We found them nourishing themselves with seeds and berries in knotted baskets hidden under leaves. We tut-tutted about safety. Never, never without us checking first. Their apologies were so swift we let them stay outdoors, sure they’d learned our lesson. And if it seemed, at times, as if they were no longer eating, we volleyed new messages across the driveways.

“Have yours gotten super picky?” our voices quivering.

“Oh, my God, I thought it was just me!”

It was familiar, the dread. The quiet voice that tiptoed next to us, whispering that something wasn’t right. That voice sidled up to all of us. Its constant presence became a universal force that unified. We’ve all been there. The children you carry grow up to carry themselves. The days are long, the years are short.

But none of us could say how many days or years had passed. Phones and calendars and apps would tell us, and we would shake our heads. Impossible.

Cold nights would drive us from our beds, the unexpected chill reminding us of seasons and other forces beyond our control. We framed ourselves in darkened doorways, leaning against penciled lines we’d stopped adding to the soft wood, unable to keep up with the growth. Those pajamas fit last week, but now…?

We measured quickened heartbeats against the soft breathing of unfamiliar bodies.

We gazed through panes of glass, past hanging prisms and crayoned sketches of wings, our eyes alighting on that single lantern swaying beneath the border of overhanging branches. We wondered where the path was leading, other than away.

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Audrey Burges writes in Richmond, Virginia. Her debut novel The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone is forthcoming in 2023 from Berkley/PRH, and her work also appears or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Pithead Chapel, Cease, Cows, HAD, Into the Void, Slackjaw, The Belladonna, and other outlets. More of her writing is available at audreyburges.com, and you can follow her on Twitter: @audrey_burges.