Category: flash nonfiction

You’re supposed to be 43 now, maybe 44?, and you’re either the guy on Instagram with the photos of handguns and old cars and tattoos (HOLD FAST and DON’T TREAD ON ME) and the surgery scar from the terrible car accident, and I can’t really tell because I think those eyes are the eyes I remember, maybe?, but you’ve grown a beard and you live in a different state, and you haven’t posted anything in the last three years, and I don’t know if you’re dead or not,
OR
you found God and volunteered your time for Him, and you work at a warehouse one state over from where we grew up, and, two years ago, you wanted a different job, so that’s why you made the LinkedIn page, but there’s not a single photo of you online—your profile mentions you were in the Army, which you were, though it doesn’t give your years of service—but I hope this is you instead and
that you’re doing well,
NOT
like how it was when you were 19, and it was Halloween, and your girlfriend told us you were on leave over the weekend, staying at the Days Inn and not at your mom’s place, and it smelled like old smoke in the room, but there we were, just the five of us on the king-sized bed and the cloth armchair and the questionable floor, and your girlfriend was dressed as a harlequin for the party she went to earlier— none of the rest of us were in costume—but, holy shit!, you’d shaved your head and grown taller, and you had abs and pecs and sunken eyes now, and there was a seriousness to you, maybe something to do with why you had to go and live with your dad in the middle of high school,
AND
there were empty Rolling Rocks on the floor, like the green bottles we stole from your mom’s fridge when we were 13 and she’d gone to bed, and do you remember how we stayed up late watching Tales from the Darkside on VHS after trick-or-treating? In the movie, Debbie Harry played the witch that was going to eat the little boy she chained up in her pantry, and he wound up saving his own life Scheherazade-style by reciting stories to her about a mummy and an evil cat and a family of gargoyles, and sometimes these are the fictions we have to say out loud because not saying them is worse.

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Barrett Bowlin is the author of the story collection Ghosts Caught on Film (Bridge Eight). His essays and short fiction appear in places like TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, Salt Hill, The Fiddlehead, and Bayou. He lives and teaches and rides trains in Massachusetts.

It’s the taste of your diet bars, chocolate but also rebellion, that she sneaks by twos and threes from the kitchen cabinet, unwrapping and swallowing them, unchewed; it’s the comment after a big meal about how you’re “never going to eat again”; it’s your worry that her two-year-old is too fat and suggesting that she maybe take her to the doctor to have her checked out; it’s the way that you say, about other women: “she’s so tall,” “she’s so striking,” “she’s so slender”; it’s the way you talk about yourself and your “too wide” hips; it’s the way you never want to give her “a complex” but the whole out-loud worry itself gives has the same effect of giving her “a complex”; it’s you noting that her friend is “so tall, thin, and beautiful’ that “maybe you shouldn’t go out with her when trying to meet men”; it’s the way you respond―or don’t respond―when a male relative says she “used to be so cute and then she…” and then he mimes a body blowing up like a balloon to indicate that she got bigger; it’s the way she is not supposed to get bigger.

It’s the way that a boy in her 3rd-grade class mouths “You should lose…” and then holds up the words “10 lbs,” cut from a magazine cover; it’s the way that a boy in her 8th-grade class writes in her yearbook: “Fatness is a pig; a pig is fatness, but you’re just a cool duder;” it’s the way you circle the areas of her body that are the most problematic, with a black sharpie in front of the mirror; it’s the taste of peanut butter and butter sandwiches, the slickness of the fat on her tongue, the feeling of partially-masticated bread, so soft against the roof of her mouth, like a cloud, like cotton candy, like cotton balls, like a comforter, like comfort; it’s her friends wondering aloud why they crave such soft things when they are binge-ing―bread, cupcakes, twinkies, Hostess pies―not celery, not carrots; it’s the taste of chocolate covered raisins from the Costco-sized container that her college roommate’s parents send, how she can’t eat just a handful, but instead handful after guilty handful, and still she never feels like it’s enough; there’s never a moment where she says to herself I’ve had enough; it’s the way she thinks that if her body looks a certain way, then she’ll be happy; if she fits into a certain size, then she’ll be happy; if she look in the mirror and likes what she sees, she’ll be happy; it’s the way she never sees you look in the mirror and like what you see; it’s the way that you are never happy.

It’s the way she sculpts her life’s goal from the silence of those smoked-filled car rides during family trips, oh please please make me only smart enough to be happy; it’s the way you wonder how she could still be a child in her mid-20s, like she was supposed to just grow up on her own without any sunlight, any effort like she’s a weed; it’s the way she doesn’t even need much, could have lived on little; it’s the way there is no abuse, not even neglect in the traditional sense, just no care for her emotions, since how could you have cared about her emotions if you never cared about your own?; It’s the way she snuffs them out with cereal, with peanut butter sandwiches, with diet bar after diet bar; it’s the way she wants to be good, be erased so she will not feel so much, be so much; it’s the way she takes her revenge or protects herself, like in the fantasy she has where everyone’s hands all over her; it’s the way she understands, how can she possibly miss it, that her body isn’t hers, it is a public service announcement that―like advertisements showing women in parts, an arm, a leg, a belly button, an exposed neck, a collection of parts, lying supine―communicates that the best possible thing she can be is dead.

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Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s most recent work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Autofocus Lit, Pithead Chapel, Memoir Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times. Her creative nonfiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA in Theatre from UC San Diego and attended the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023. You can find her on Twitter @loriyeg

1. Late Bloomers

They spend a few years in high school together before they notice each other. In their final year, she hears from gossip-Lucy that he likes her. “Do you like him?” Lucy asks, her voice, syrupy-smooth. She stands in the kitchen, staccato breath, the phone cord wrapped around her fingers, tips turning red.

He composes a piano piece and names if after her, performs it when they finish eating the chicken he roasts, Greek lemon potatoes, honey-sweet baclava for dessert. They lose their virginity in a suburb of Vancouver the night of the piano performance, after he woos her with his music and poetry. She doesn’t remember much about the act itself, only that they keep the lights off. They are still in bed when his parents show up early, high beams spilling through the slats in his basement room blinds. He rushes her out the front door, just as his parents enter through the back. A slight cramping in her low belly, she listens to the swooshing of her heartbeat meeting her eardrums, until she is home. Only then does she discover the small dot of blood in her underwear. Her body is hollow, as if she lost something.

After time spent apart traveling, writing fat tear-stained letters, they meet up in his grandfather’s village on Naxos. Slow days are spent swimming in the Aegean, sipping ouzo, snuggling on a moped through windy, sleepy streets. She leans against a short rock wall, the expanse of the blue-green sea behind her, posing in her white t-shirt and purple paisley shorts, her brown curls piled high in a messy bun. It’s here he tells her he loves her over and over again until her insides kink and coil and she asks him to stop. Years later, when she thinks back to the gradual demise of the relationship, she returns to this point, presses play and rewind like a mixtape.

2. Fake

I’m at my mother’s house sitting on the couch, book in hand, sipping strong coffee and breaking off squares of dark chocolate while my six-year-old watches Laurel and Hardy in the next room. I read parenting books, ones that tell me not to let the baby cry it out or punish with time outs. I’m guilty of doing both these things plus so many more procreator faux pas that I’ve lost count, and I wonder which of my wrongdoings my son will choose to talk about with his future therapist. “This book says you can’t show a child too much love,” I say. My mother glances up from her newspaper, reading glasses balanced on the tip of her nose. “What a load of shit,” she says, waving her hand across her face.

When I ask my mother about the three words, her face puckers, like she’s eaten something sour, and she tells me she doesn’t like the expression. “It’s so overused and sounds fake. If you say it too much, it loses its meaning. Besides my parents never told me. We didn’t say that in Czech. I just knew.”

The next day I speak to my mother on the phone. “I love you,” she says as we say goodbye. I wait a beat, maybe two. Then we both erupt into laughter. “I thought I’d try it out,” she says, catching her breath.

3. Hard to Get

Six months into the relationship with your future husband you accidentally blurt it out during sex. A long pause fills the room before he says it back. Instead of believing his words you feel anxious that you have become one of those women who traps men into saying things they don’t mean. And you flash back to your childhood room lying on your bed with your piano phone, about to dial a number, when your mother barges in and tells you not to chase boys. “Let them come to you,” she says. “Don’t be so easy. Guys like it better when you play hard to get.”

You don’t talk about it for a couple of days but when you can’t stand it anymore, you ask him if he really loves you and he grins, teases you about the way it slipped out, and all you can feel is relief.

4. Foghorn

You play a game with your son where you hold him on your lap and press your mouth to his ear and say I love you and hold the ou sound like a song or a foghorn and he laughs and squirms and pushes your face away, but really he wants you to say it again and again, so you do.

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Claire Sicherman is the author of “Imprint: A Memoir of Trauma in the Third Generation” (Caitlin Press, 2017). Her work is featured in the anthology Don’t Ask: What Families Hide (Demeter Press, 2023), Grain Magazine, Isele Magazine, Hippocampus, The Rumpus, the anthology Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food (Anvil Press, 2017), and elsewhere. Claire is a teacher, speaker, and mentor, supporting writers in bringing the stories they hold in their bodies out onto the page. Find her at https://www.clairesicherman.com/

Breathing through your nose is supposed to rejuvenate the body and maybe even straighten crooked teeth. I read this in a book, the kind my wife would have scoffed at. I see my dentist twice a year, not including return visits to fix cavities, which means I’ve gone for ten check-ups since my wife died. Every other visit, so about five times so far, the hygienist asks me how long it’s been since she passed. I don’t blame her for not remembering. She must see a thousand mouths between my visits. We don’t measure absence in the same way.

Who gets cavities in their fifties? It’s all the chocolate cookies. I eat two every evening with Greek vanilla yogurt and blackberries whose seeds get stuck in my teeth. The routine is comforting, but all the sweetness might be eating away at my fillings. I’ve read that soft food weakens the gums. I need my wife’s couscous, to bite into the spicy merguez that took my breath away.

When I broke a tooth just before Christmas, there was no pain but I could feel an empty space. My dentist had already left for Hannukah so I got another one from the same office. He spoke with a French accent more pronounced than my wife’s. She was nomadic, hard to pin down, her voice a shakshuka of Tunisia, France, Israel and Quebec.

Unlike my regular dentist, the temporary one played music over the PA. As he drilled into my tooth, he sang along to Cheek to Cheek through his mask. It was a temporary fix, he told me, until my regular dentist could see me. It might last or it might break. I wonder if he ever saw my wife. I hope not. Her illness made it difficult for her to brush and floss, and the meds gave her dry mouth. She needed permanent solutions.

The temporary dentist saw signs that I grind my teeth at night. Maybe my jaw has been rebelling against the tape on my lips. Perhaps I should breathe through my mouth after all, exhale the toxins, the scraps of half-remembered songs, the undigested emptiness.

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Based in Montreal, Mark Foss is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories. His CNF has also appeared in Star 82 Review, Hobart, JMWW, and elsewhere. He is the co-editor of The Book of Judith (New Village Press, 2022), an homage to the life of poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students. Visit him at http://www.markfoss.ca.

Time to bond, time to connect, time for her to be / the lifeblood of this young life.
Time to / be removed from everything adult she requires / and feel, as she says, Like
a cow dispensing milk / all damn day. Time to need the boy to sleep / a little longer, to
not demand colostrum’s liquid gold. / Time to worry over alternating breasts and
avoiding mastitis. / Time to feel like the only person who can keep this boy alive. /
Time to sleep in spurts and then, in turn, time to turn / grouchy or grumpy or testy,
maybe crabby or peevish / if the day’s been kind, snappy or ill-tempered or
cantankerous if not. / Time for the man to be jealous of the child who drifts / off
mid-suck while still he’s stuck in a chair / or on the couch, wondering if that gift of
sleep can come to him too. / Time for sleep to be all they think of, / daydream about,
obsess over. Time to question / if it’s worth it because formula can be mixed by a man
too. / Time that’s supposed to be enjoyed and, sometimes, / it is, but not as much or
as often as she had hoped. / These feedings how days have come to be measured. /
Nights too. Time to know this will last / only a short while. Soon this boy will push
away, / will reject all that’s been given him, and then / everything after will be about
closing the distance between them.

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Michael Levan has work in recent or forthcoming issues of Laurel Review, The Rupture, Waccamaw, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Arts & Letters. He is an Associate Professor of English and edits and writes reviews for American Microreviews and Interviews. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife and their three children.

Burning coals glow red atop the golden plate. The friendly café owner props the Hookah next to us by the planters of mauve and red lilies. My mom nods her thank you. I whisper mine. You say, “Merci,” and with it, watch my parents beam in your sweet attempt to speak Farsi. Our Turkish host chimes in, “Teşekkür.”

We flew across the ocean and over the seas, you and I, to meet my parents somewhere in between. I wanted you to experience a place akin to where I grew up—a city cloaked in honking horns and exhaust smoke, where drivers color outside the lines, and dark brown eyes are framed with deep wrinkles of smiles.

Winding the cobblestone paths to the Galata Tower, we wander in and out of shops tucked into ancient walls. We practice our negotiation tactics with the amiable shopkeepers; we resist buying a large rug with hues that mimic the mood of the Blue Mosque watching over the Old City and its red-tiled rooftops. In the bazaar, you linger near the fragrant heaps of herbs and spice. I am drawn to the kaleidoscope of shawls and scarves. My fingertips run along the gleaming threads of silk. On a shelf next to the amber bracelets and opal rings, an orange tabby is soundly asleep. Ceiling fans lift the heat from our cheeks, the delicate fabrics dance. Blue and gold, sage and silver shimmer with the slightest breeze.

We find our way to the water. Near the bridges across the Bosporus, we settle in at a café hidden in a narrow alley, where old Maple trees shelter the travelers and the local passersby. Between the Black and Marmara Seas, Europe, and Asia, the four of us gather. We smoke Hookah, drink from thin-waisted teacups, and savor little Turkish Delights. My mom cuts into the flaky layers of Baklava, and I long for that hint of bitterness that almond paste leaves behind. “Iranian Baklava is different…it’s concentrated and intense, better , I think,” I say. You disagree, but I can trace a faint smile in the depth of your blue eyes. My dad laughs, and you roll the dice. The rug-covered cushions feel intimate, rough, just right against my bare legs.
Bubbles form in the base, loud at first, but soon they fade into the clinking of teacups. The sound of the checkers hitting the edges of the wood brings back memories long forgotten: the times my grandfather used to challenge my dad to a game of backgammon with a bit of bantering on the side.

Hagia Sophia, with all its charm, awaits us somewhere beyond this street. I sip on the hot tea with a perfect note of cardamom and think, perhaps tomorrow. Today, I want to be in-between.

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Naz Knudsen is an Iranian American writer and filmmaker. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Mayday Magazine, and she has a flash piece forthcoming in an anthology by Alternating Current Press. Previously, her translations have been published in Farsi. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches storytelling and film editing. You can find her on Twitter, @nazbk.

It spits and heaves from the bus downtown. You’ll notice men looking at your mother strangely and feel scared, so you’ll focus on the Velcro on your scuffed-up dinosaur shoes. When you go by Rural Cemetery, there will be a three-decker that your great grandmother lives in. You’ll announce the importance of this location to everyone on the bus. In another couple years you’ll find out that she walked the same route the bus takes before school every morning to deliver her family’s daily piece work when she wasn’t much older than you.

It fills the street behind you from an ancient panel truck, somehow still in one piece. The seats and frame will creak and bounce while you’re delivering nuts to the city’s dive bars with your father. He’ll get dirty wads of cash and you’ll get a few bags of pistachios, maybe even some red ones. In one bar, there will be an old-timer, a friend of your grandfather’s—the one who killed one of his kids and brutalized the others. You’ll sit at the bar and stare at pickled eggs floating through vinegar that hasn’t been clear during your lifetime while your dad jokes about how he could take his dad now that they’re both older and the old man at the bar will just laugh and shake his head. You’ll wonder why anyone would care about this but one day you’ll understand.

It fills your lungs because somebody thought it was a good idea to put an enclosed train platform next to the opening of an expressway tunnel. You’ll wait here bloodied to get the last train home from punk shows when you’re 15. Or you’ll be 19, fiddling with a discman, sad about a girl, reading a book that you don’t like all that much but has the right affectation, and you’ll already be nostalgic more often than you should be. You’ll be waiting to go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas or maybe even Easter if it’s before your grandmother is too frail to pick up a ham or cut through a turnip.

It sputters from tuk-tuks outside an after-hours club. It’ll be five or six in the morning, and you’ll have been at this for days now. You’ll think that you’re probably ready to go home, but you might just end up in a flophouse downtown again. You’ll be looking around too much because a man that was wearing an all-white suit kept grabbing your friend and she kept telling him to fuck off, and you were high so you threw a drink at him and fucked up his white clothes which caused a scene and so you swiped through the converging bodies to get a few hits in. So now you’ll be outside coming down and nervously fidgeting with a cigarette you won’t be sure about lighting and drivers will descend on you with promises to take you to places where you can keep whatever this is, because it’s clearly not a party anymore, going.

It hovers low like fog, casting a gray-brown filter over everything, even the waves lapping at the posts barely holding the dock above the water. You’ll walk past the boats to the end and wonder what it would feel like if the pylons broke and the dock just floated out into the ocean with you on it, untethered and sinking. You’ll have woken up in a broken-down old bathroom stall, your clothes wet with something that hopefully came from you and coarse with sand. You’ll have stumbled out, bought a beer, and sipped at it while taking in the first light of day under a banana tree. Then you’ll have stripped off your clothes until you stood naked and alone on the beach, walking into cerulean surf set ablaze.

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Brenden Layte (he/him) is an editor of educational materials, a linguist, and a writer. His work has previously appeared in places like Entropy, Ellipsis Zine, Pithead Chapel, and the Forge Literary Magazine. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his girlfriend and a cat that was described as “terrifying” the last time he went to the vet. He tweets at @b_layted.

I was waiting to cross the street when I heard humans barking. I turned, and a convertible Mustang full of young men howled with laughter. One screamed, “Only a dog would look if they heard barking, you fucking ugly dog!”

I didn’t say anything.

The barking got bigger, faster, the terriers transformed into Great Danes. Two men half-stood in their seats, spit spewing with every bark. The light changed and the Mustang sped off, shrieks of “ugly dog” and “fucking dog” drifting back on the wind.

That wasn’t the first time a stranger called me ugly. It wasn’t even the hundredth time. The first time I was five. A blonde girl examined me, her impeccable nose almost touching my cheek. She said, “What’s wrong with your face? You’re so ugly.”

I was born in 1972 with a cleft palate. Put your finger right under your nose. Trace down to your lip, following the line of your philtrum. I was born without a philtrum. I was born without that connection, and the split, the cleft, ran right through the roof of my mouth.

I was born looking like a little kid drew a cat’s mouth on a human face. And the surgeons did their best, but it was still 1972. I have a scarred upper lip and a smushed-in nose. In North America, surgery’s improved so much that I never see a young person who looks like me. But every once in awhile I’ll see a stranger my age, with the same scar, the same nose. And I always feel this hot flush of joy, have to stop myself from running to them, to hugging them tight, to shouting, “Hello! We look the same! We’re from the same place!”

After the Mustang sped away I wondered why that moment, a drop in an ocean of nasty moments, was such a gut punch. Perhaps it was the calculated script. A car full of young men who had figured out the perfect way to get women to “admit” to being ugly, and when their plan worked their rapture was grotesque.

I wonder what would have happened if I’d shouted too. “Driver guy, you have brown hair!” or “Baseball hat guy, your dad was never kind!” or “Hey you in the backseat, you put sedatives in Solo cups at frat parties!”

I wonder what would have happened if I’d turned into a harpy and flown at them. Majestic wings breaking arms, razor talons drawing blood, beak pecking out eyes. Their gleeful barks turning to screams.

But instead I leaned on the telephone pole, dizzy with rage. I waited another light cycle before crossing the street.

As I got older, I discovered that being beautiful was no better. One friend told me about being the only person on the subway car when a drunk man got on. He sat next to her, he asked her out. She said no. She said no, but she was very nice, because it was a long way between stops, and it was 1 AM, and she was afraid. The man kept telling her how beautiful she was, while she weighed which would put her in more danger: staying on the empty subway car, or exiting and being followed. What saved her in the end was how drunk the guy was. She got off, was able to run up the stairs much faster than he could, and lost herself in a big crowd of people heading home from the bars. They’re angry when I’m ugly and dogcall. They’re angry when she’s beautiful and catcall. The game is rigged and all I’m trying to do is, you know, walk to the fucking library.

In 1991, I met my husband Todd on the internet. The baby internet, the internet that was just words on a screen. No images. No video. He told me he loved me before he knew what I looked like. He fell in love with my words, and I fell in love with his.

Many years later, I was walking with Todd and our son down the street in Montreal. We were laughing, all three of us, and a young man slowly passing us in a car shouted something. His Quebecois accent was thick, and I called, “Sorry, what? I couldn’t hear you,” and then kicked myself for being so foolish as to ask.

The man called again, “What a beautiful family! You are a beautiful family!” and we all laughed with delight. But that’s not the best thing a stranger ever said to me.

I’d just finished telling a story on stage in which I said everything I wish someone had said to me when I was a teenager. When I was waking up every day and chanting, “You ugly fuck, you should die,” in the mirror.

There are a lot of words in that story, but they all mean the same thing: you are worthwhile.

My husband was waiting as I packed up my props, and a seventeen-year-old girl came walking up to me. She whispered, “Hi. Um, I just wanted to say thank you. For the things that you said in your story.”

I told her how much her words meant to me. I asked if I could give her a hug, and we hugged for a long time, and I didn’t know how to say it but I hoped she understood that what I wanted to tell her was this: I was you, once. And someday, you’re going to be me.

After she left, I burst into tears. I cried on the sidewalk and on the subway and on the bus. I cried and cried. I cried so hard that two women sitting on the bus glared at my poor innocent husband, which made me giggle and then sob even harder.

I turned to the window, taking deep breaths. For a moment I saw the ghost of a Mustang convertible before it fell away into the darkness.

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Sage Tyrtle’s work is available or upcoming in X-R-A-Y, The Offing, and Apex among others. She’s told stories on stages all over the world and her words have been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS. She runs a free online writing group open to everyone. Twitter: @sagetyrtle

Ravenous at midnight, I shuffle to the fridge, crack the shell of a hardboiled egg, peel it over the trash. I bite into half, take a crust of bread, leave the rest.

Some evenings, I make eggs for dinner–they’re easy and require little thought. Mornings, I wipe my pan, pour new oil, and turn on the fire until it click-click-clicks.

Stacked against the wall are cookbooks I used when I was with Matt. He made pork chops with glazed string beans, roast chicken with rosemary. On his second visit, he arrived with a bouquet of tulips and a carton of eggs.

A new photo on his Facebook page shows a spry, sparkling blond atop Mount Taurus, where we had once climbed. Did he hold her hips as they kissed, before they picnicked on the cliffs above the Hudson?

I hike with a friend and her husband who love to cook. They try to decide whose soup was better the other weekend–his pumpkin or her squash. The nutmeg in yours was so good, she says. But the cardamom in yours, he says, his hand brushing against hers, added even more warmth. 

I get up to crack eggs into a cup. The oil warms in the pan.

On the last hike we’d taken, we walked in silence as our boots crunched over rocks. Matt didn’t know what to say about my mother’s declining health, her cancer that had spread into her bones.

She’d sat hunched in her bedroom as I sliced her a peach.

The eggs bubble and pop as I look for something to add, something more than just salt.  I see a wedge of Brie. I toss in pieces and see them shimmer, lift the trembling mass onto a plate.

My mother had once sat perched with spoon to my infant mouth.

I add pomegranate seeds. Truffle oil. Dried dill. Sea salt.

I lifted the peach to her lips.

“Mom,” she called to me, mashing the fruit on her tongue.

I take my plate to the table, raise my fork. The seeds burst in my teeth and are sweet against the Brie’s salt. I break the yolk with my mouth and taste its rich silk.

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Elizabeth Koster’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Teeth, Hobart, and The New York Times “Modern Love” column. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and has taught creative writing in public schools, nonprofits, and a program for incarcerated women on Rikers Island.

The cousins have been taking turns in the backseats of different cars as we zig our way across the States; the parents switch us up so siblings won’t fight and drive them up the wall. There are gummy bears in this uncle’s car. My cousin eats them by first biting off every tiny appendage, one at a time; ear, ear, arm, arm, leg, leg. Body. Chew. She’s the eldest, and she doles them out at the same pace in which she eats them, and I sit with the aftertaste of each one for a while before I get another, watching the scenery whip by.

It’s 1990. When someone has to pee or gets hungry, a message is written in big letters on a piece of paper and gets held up in a window. The driver pulls up beside each car long enough for the passengers to read the message, then takes the lead, everyone following behind them to the next gas station or to pull off on the shoulder. We’re in a constant state of picnic; trunks are popped open and out come blankets, coolers full of food. The moms take the kids to pee in the trees while the dads have a beer and look at maps.

“M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I.” Another aunt is in the front seat of this car, and so now we all know how to spell Mississippi. My little brother repeats it over and over again, and he’s only five years old, so everyone thinks it’s so great, but enough already, we get it. There was an oversight, and we’ve ended up in the same vehicle. There’s a cousin buffer between us, listening to a Walkman.

“Holy cow,” my aunt says, every time we pass fields of cattle. I feel like my giggles are expected, and I pray for no more cows.

“How do you get from Canada to Las Vegas?” Everyone keeps asking my brother, every day.

“You just follow the yellow line on the road,” he explains, earnest.

 

My dad’s brother is driving this car. Things get tense in the front seat.

“Look at him,” my uncle says, angry. “What is he doing?” He has a voice that sits comfortably in anger, but I can tell something is really wrong. I crane my neck around the headrest, trying to see through the windshield. My family’s car is ahead of us, my dad at the wheel. I’m not sure about the rules of driving, but I see my dad has pulled into the next lane. He’s driving so fast, right towards the oncoming traffic. “That son-of-a-bitch is going to get everyone killed!” I feel heat prickle through me. Grown-ups can’t get mad like that, not at other grown-ups. My dad swings the car back into the right lane and my uncle swears with relief. My aunt is fiddling with the radar detector. I stare out the window, turned to hide my face, hot with shame. I refuse to speak.

When we make the next stop I run to my parents, and now I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to. My tears won’t stop. He almost got them all killed, and words were yelled, like yelled about him, and he was a son-of-a-bitch, and what did that make me?

 

Everyone is getting out of the car, but I keep my eyes closed.

“She’s going to miss it. She should see this.”

“Let her sleep,” my mother’s voice decides over the sounds of belt buckles clicking, chunking door handles, excited children stretching legs. I can feel eyes on me, expectant, but I’m good at pretending. I’m thrilled by how good I am at pretending. My cousins slide out, bouncing the seat, but I don’t move an inch. I’m a daughter-of-a-son-of-a-bitch, doing what I want. The doors close and the voices are muted by glass and steel. Our fleet has pulled over to see something beautiful; they’re gathering for a family photo that I’ll be missing from, smiles stretching like the Nevada desert. I stay still, listen to myself breathe.

---

 

 

Nadia Staikos (she/her) lives in Toronto with her two children. Her work has previously appeared in perhappened, (mac)ro(mic), Fudoki, and elsewhere. She is prose editor at Chestnut Review, and is currently working on her first novel. Find her on Twitter @NadiaStaikos.