Month: April 2025

A few miles up from the creek mouth, untouched by the ocean’s salty backwash, an expanse of farmland sprawled between two hills, hills that Samantha Kane liked to call mountains but Daddy said didn’t quite qualify. He claimed to know land. Nothing made him happier than perfectly flat dirt and perfectly straight rows. He said the smallest divot led to uneven watering, which led to unevenly ruined crops and an unevenly clothed family.

Swollen and hollowed land reminded Sam of the bulges and dips on bodies. And if humans and critters have them, why couldn’t the ground? Although, one time she did see a broken arm under the monkey bars, loosely attached to Mike’s body. That was unpleasant, and an oily pain heated her spine whenever she came across an animal carcass on her way out to the roadside chalkboard.

Sam agreed her mountains were hills only in the right light—only when the gaps between the trunk bases revealed patches of sky way down the horizon line. And when that happened, it was like digging in the creek mud and seeing the sediment layers, like pulling the cooked meat out of the fridge and playing with the separated fat. Of course, the trees didn’t drip to the earth like the stuff warmed by her hands. No, the trees stuck out of the hill like the peg people jammed into The Game of Life’s minivans.

Sam played Life on the well-splintered table during her summertime shifts at the farmstand. Occasionally, Tuckins (a sucker for the farm’s plums) ducked in for a spin. He played the red minivan. All the other colors were Sam’s.

“I don’t know about you, Tuckins, but one life doesn’t seem like enough.” She married in one, stayed single in another; but she always left the farm.

She liked that Tuckins didn’t spew platitudes about making the most of her real life. Tuckins simply smiled, said, “I know, kiddo,” spun the wheel, and watched it go round. Then he moved his red minivan piece, took the fake money from his wallet, paid his college tuition, took the real money from his wallet, paid for the plums, watched Sam take her turn, exchanged condolences about their dwindling fortunes, and went on his way.

It wasn’t strictly part of her farmstand duties, but Sam liked examining the book covers people donated. She searched for pretty fonts and snippets of bare skin. Reading more than three pages of grown-up books felt like splashing into the creek’s belly after heavy rains. The words funneled her head full of sand, and spinning the Life wheel between chores let out only a few granules at a time. Sam didn’t expect anyone to understand this. The creek did, though.

Lying there, greeting the millions of molecules sweeping by, Sam wondered if they wrestled for the middle of the stream the way people at school tunneled for the center of the lunch line. Did they know the outliers were likelier to be sloughed toward the back and left behind? The water trying to cut corners tripped on the rocks and lay pinned under the sun, waiting for evaporation to take them to their next form. Sam wanted to ask the dying molecules if they were bitter. But what if they weren’t and spent their last moments pondering an emotion they hadn’t yet experienced? So Sam stayed there as long as she could, waving to the perceived lucky ones and keeping her thoughts from the lonesome.

Soon she had to crawl into the water. There wasn’t even room in her word-filled head to feel guilty for interfering in the molecules’ fate, not when they weaseled into her ears, extracted the words, and washed them away. Would the words scatter and float up into the sky out of order? Did the ones carrying her thoughts travel slower? Would someone downriver catch them? Would they run ashore? Or would they make it to the ocean? Infused water was all the rage at school last year. Mineral-infused. Fruit-infused. Natural Flavor-infused. How many of these held more than expected? Had people upstream spilled in their knowledge or maybe the bug-killing juices Daddy bemoaned? How much had soaked into the ground? Into her skin?

Sam pulled her head out and listened to the last question dribble out of her ears. Was absorbing into a farm girl’s shirt an honorable end? The water trickling down her face seemed to say yes.

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Maggie Maize is a writer who enjoys spinning compost and whispering to her seedlings. She earned a BFA in writing from Savannah College of Art and Design and a Novel Writing Certificate from Stanford Continuing Studies. Her writing has appeared in Post Road Magazine, Funicular Magazine, and more.

I hear my mother’s voice as I open the kitchen cabinet to take down her favorite mug. If it could talk it might sound like her, with the high pitch of know-it-all confidence and a singsong lilt on words she wants to emphasize like Jeannine, coupons, and your father. The mug, of course, doesn’t talk and my mother is gone so all I’m left with is the Red M’n’M character smirking back at me from the curve of the cup, its black comma eyebrows arched in mockery. I’m back, just like she predicted.

I make coffee and eye the cars pulling up on the lawn. Locusts, all of them. My mom used to do it, too—scour the newspapers for sales and patrol neighborhoods at daybreak, coast onto the browning lawns of elderly couples cleaning out their garages. She’d often take me with her, teasing the mystery of discovery, as if someone’s discarded Rubik’s cube could unlock untold possibilities. She loved the thrill of giving new life to someone’s forgotten objects and preached the importance of a circular economy long before it became a corporate catchphrase. Why buy a new dress when you can get this muumuu for $2? I’ve got a McCall’s pattern that will make this look brand new! Never mind that the dusty pink nighty was worn by someone for half her married life.

Her frugality was later abandoned in favor of late-night flash sales on QVC after one too many drinks and sleepless nights after my father died. This, unfortunately, saddled me with a smattering of saucer-eyed porcelain dolls, souvenir teaspoons from 39 states, DVDs from Wal-Mart’s bargain bin, and celebrity-hawked cookware still in the manufacturer’s box.

It took me a week to dig through the debris she left. And much of what was hers, was surely someone else’s in a former life. When I finished sifting, I tacked signs up and down the town: Estate Sale. Yard Sale. Garage and Junk Sale. Things My Mom Left Behind Sale. Please Take this Shit Sale. Who Needs Two Salad Spinners? Sale.

The buzzing intensifies. When I’m ready, I prop open the screen door with an empty planter and invite the swarm inside.

Mmmm, smells like freshly brewed coffee, a woman says, nodding at the mug in my hand. I pour myself a cup. I don’t offer any.

A teenager pokes her head in the front door, cautious and skeptical. Mom’s not haunting this place, if that’s what you’re afraid of, I say. I take a sip and wink at Red. At least, I don’t think so.

It’s a lie, and I sense that the kid knows it as she wanders down the hallway that leads to my old room. My mother’s ghost everywhere. Evidence of her lives in the misaligned panels of wallpaper she pasted up at two in the morning. She’s in the chalky hole in the drywall behind my bedroom door. In the tile grout, in the dust dunes gathering on the fan blades, in every patchy spot of lawn where she tried and failed to grow.

And while the pores of her house are excavated by careless archaeologists, I poke around my mother’s hiding places for liquor. I know there’s a bottle around here somewhere and now’s about the time she’d replace cream and sugar for Jack.

How much for this? Someone asks. He’s a big guy with a bushy beard and a tattoo of Daffy Duck on his bicep. He might have been one of my mother’s boyfriends, but then again he might be no one. One of my grandma’s afghans is slung over his shoulder like a half-worn cape and he’s carrying a lamp under his arm. In his free hand is the mug.

That’s not for sale, I say too quickly. Warm panic inches up my throat and I really want the man to put the cup down. I’m afraid his grip will break it. I can even see Red’s face melt, his swooshed brows furrowing in fear. There’s coffee in it, I explain. It’s being used.

He looks down into the mug. No there isn’t.

Well, there will be.

Okay, he says slowly. How about all this then?

I wonder if I look crazed; I feel it. He shouldn’t have touched the mug and now his very presence inside my mother’s house makes me want to slam the doors and scream into a pillow.

Ten bucks.

That’s a steal. He hands me cash and lumbers off, looking back once. To me or the mug, I’m not certain.

By mid-afternoon the house is picked clean. When everyone’s left, I lock the door and turn on another pot of joe. As it brews, I sit on the kitchen counter and thump my heels into the cabinets like I did when I was a kid stirring a pot of easy mac while my mom smoked Winstons out the window.

I think of what I might tell her about today. She’d relish in knowing her home was a bargain bin Antiques Roadshow. A little tap-tap on her cigarette in the ashtray and she’d tip her head back to laugh at how someone tried to sneak off with the fuzzy blue toilet seat cover. There’d be a smile knowing I managed twenty dollars for her ancient washer. Held together on duct tape and dreams, baby. She’d scoff at the three offers on the house, all declined, and tell me I should have accepted. I would have given it away for nothing—maybe I should have—but I’m not ready yet.

I collected pennies on the dollar and watched midnight dance parties and screaming matches, movie marathons and family secrets filter out in the hands of strangers. They don’t even know that a layer of her now lives with them. In every item, a stratum of memory.

All I’ve got left of her is this stupid cartoon coffee cup and an empty house, and it still feels like it’s too much.

 

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Jacqueline Parker is a writer/editor based in Charlotte, NC. Her fiction often explores loss in its many forms, but occasionally she writes something funny. She’s an Associate Flash Editor at JMWW and you can find some of her work in Funicular, Flash Fiction Online, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and flash exploring the feminine wild. Read her work at www.jacqueline-parker.com or connect on social @onmytangent.