Lost Balloon

In the back of the car, you show me your chest, and I show you mine. We agree that they are both concave and too much alike. We are eight years old, and we are often left to our own in the stifling heat of the old Buick. We pretend to go on errands and stop at the grocery, garden, and liquor stores. We catch the seeds of popped dandelions, the heads remind us of our grandparents, and we wonder when they will pop, and if like generals and presidents, they will be paraded around town in hand-crafted caskets pulled by solemn horses. Until someone dies or calls us in for supper, we hold hands and point out the windows, calling each other darling and sugar, our feet pushing on the pedals, the other looking out the wide windshield, peeking through the dust, hoping for once the car would lurch forward and we’d be on our way, to someplace where we could do more than imagine.

I’m in the backseat, head stuck between the two front seats, watching you paint your toenails. The windows are up, the cranks barely working, so the smell of dust lies under the stiff scent of the polish. Somewhere in the air, you smell of strawberries and kiwi, and I lean closer, my chin resting on your shoulder. We only talk of possibilities now. No more imagined bank robberies or running away to the Everglades. You hide what you can from me in your clothes and talk of other boys, our classmates: their eyes, the curl of the hair on the back of their neck, or the way the sun highlights the muscles of their shoulders. Tell me about your crush, you say. Does she dance? Can she sing? Does she swim laps in the early morning while the rest of us sleep? I can’t answer. My ability to imagine anyone else is lost in the heat of the car. Your turn, you say, blowing on your toes and scrunching your nose. I hold out my hands, afraid to show you my feet. You can’t hide these, she says.

Graduation night, the hats have been thrown, the pictures were taken, and our parents have gone back to their gin and television, to ignoring each other, especially when one mother cries, and another father complains about the cost of tomorrow’s open house. Midnight, and I find you curled up in the backseat, head loose from the two beers you drank to be polite, the hiccups coming like irregular clashes of a cymbal. We hold our breath together, faces plumped like stretching balloons, until you pop, a pause, heightened until my mouth opens, and your tongue slides in, our lips meeting, teeth clashing, sparking until you pull away.

“Now that’s a way to get rid of hiccups,” you say, wiping away our spit.

I lean back in, but your hand is on my chest.

“Let’s just leave it there. Then we’ll always want more,” you say.

You give in first, leaving me in the dark, the windows fogging up, left alone with only the things I could imagine.

Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He is the Editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Laurel Review, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

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.

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.

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.

Dad and I pass a packet of liquorice Allsorts between us at the kitchen table. It’s drizzling outside. Flowers from the pōhutukawa tree cover the lawn in a carpet of scarlet. A nest falls from the tree. She’s left again, dad says quietly. I tug at the loose skin at the edge of my fingernail until a prick of blood beads. I wipe it on my corduroys.

I don’t tell dad that when I was poking around in mum’s make-up drawer, I found two business cards under her eye-shadow palette. One from a psychiatrist, with an appointment time, the other from Todd’s Car Dealership, a penned message on the back: ‘Call me.’ I don’t tell him about the letter I wrote. How I painted my lips with her orange lipstick, pressed them to the back of the envelope in a childish seal, how I placed the envelope in her underwear drawer where I knew she’d find it. That she never replied.

The next day, after school, dad hands me a shoebox. New sneakers, he smiles. I open the lid. Nestled in a bed of shredded newspaper is a duckling. Its downy feathers dreamy like fairy floss. We’ll build a hutch, he says. I skip behind him to the shed. My job is passing, which he says is an important job, passing him tin snips, hammer, saw, measuring-tape, U-nails, hinges, lengths of salvaged timber, wire.

Do you think the duckling will miss its mother? I ask.

He snips and bends the wire around the wooden frame, not if you look after it, he says.

Every morning, I collect aphids and worms and crickets before school. At night I place the duckling in a shoebox, put it next to me on my bed, read to it in words that are brittle and brassy in all the right places. I jot down quotes in my journal in spidery running-writing, like, ‘I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.’

Mum turns up again a few weeks later. She’s in the kitchen staring out the window at the hutch, hair hacked to her skull. She’s wiping her nose and eyes with the back of her hand. Her long blonde hair is heaped in a plastic bag on the bench. A pair of scissors next to it. I tell her about the duckling, how its little bill nibbles and tickles, how it snuggles in my lap.

After school, I find the duckling’s body limp on the straw. Dad strokes my hair, says that he’s sorry. He buries it in the vegetable garden, his eyes resolute but red-rimmed. After dinner, I creep with a torch and trowel to poke and dig amongst parsley and lettuce. My heart splinters when I unearth a yellow wing. I cradle the duckling as if its tiny heart is still beating. Mum is wilting in front of the news, eyelids fluttering.

In my bedroom, I settle the duckling on my best handkerchief, light thirteen candles, grip my magic wand and repeat, come back to life little duckling. I draw an infinity symbol in the air and the wind gusts and the candles flicker and crackle like tiny imploding stars. My breath catches as the duckling’s feathers ruffle, but when I pick it up, its head swings like a pendulum.

I tiptoe to the lounge, stand over mum. Hold my breath. I lay my hand in the centre of her chest where I know her heart is hiding. Her pulse is weak. I sweep the magic wand in an urgent flurry around her head. Come back to life, come back to life, I whisper. Her arms are crossed as if she’s laid out for burial. A yellow tatter is wedged under her fingernail.

In the garden, a ruru turns its head, cries more-pork as I lower the duckling into the grave, fill it in, pat it smooth. A dog barks at a shooting star. A gang of boys smash bottles on the road. I fling the magic wand over the back fence, hear it clatter on the neighbour’s roof.

I drift through the garden like a spectre in my white nightdress, plucking handfuls of mum’s hair from the plastic bag, tossing it to the wind, broadcasting it around towering tree ferns, the pōhutukawa, the tamarillo with its strange fruit hanging like eggs. Clouds scud across the black sky. Her hair falls like snow.

Belinda Rowe is an emerging short fiction writer and English teacher. Born in New Zealand she now lives in Western Australia. She has words published by Night Parrot Press, Flash Frontier, Gone Lawn, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and Ghost Parachute. She is a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow 2025.

“SPIKES is an acronym for presenting distressing information in an organized manner to patients and families.” – Clinical Journal of Oncology 

S- Setting

There is no guarantee of privacy since you share your house with four housemates, but you’ve done your best; the others are at work, it’s just you and your husband. You are his only significant other, which is maybe part of the problem, so there is no one else to invite to this meeting. Push your textbooks to the side of the table. Ask him to sit down. You’ve already sat where you can see the kitchen clock over his shoulder. Turn off your phone. If you haven’t established rapport by now, there’s no chance you ever will.

P-Perception of condition

Ask your husband what he knows about the state of your marriage. Listen to what he has to say and quietly assess his level of comprehension. Accept denial but do not confront at this stage. He will tell you that everyone has rough patches, but you will see the deadness behind his eyes.

I-Invitation to inform

Ask your husband if he would like to know more about how your marriage is going. Accept his right to not know; if he goes that route, offer to answer questions later if he wishes. When he becomes angry that you are offering to tell him about your marriage, unilaterally, as if you were the only person involved, do not get distracted. Stay on script. When he finally says, sure, Alice, why don’t you tell me, go ahead, I would love to know more about OUR marriage, take a moment to consider if there is any guidance about how to proceed in the face of sarcasm. Unfortunately, the data on how to break bad news is limited. Plunge forward.

K-Knowledge

Use language intelligible to your husband, with consideration to his education, sociocultural background, and current emotional state. He has not spent hours watching YouTube lectures on heteropatriarchy. Instead say you’re just going in different directions. Give information in small chunks. Check to see if he has understood what you said. Give the positives first: you’ve had a good run, and it’s not like you have the same friends so your support systems won’t have to pick sides. Give facts accurately about treatment options (none), prognosis (terminal), costs (actually not that bad, thankfully).

E-Explore emotions/sympathize

Identify the emotions expressed by your husband, i.e., sadness, anger. Then identify the source of the emotion. Give your husband time, then respond in a way that demonstrates that you have recognized a connection between the emotion and the source, i.e., I see that you are angry because I am leaving you.

S-Strategy/summary

You’ve glanced discreetly at the clock and you are on schedule. Close the interview. Ask whether he would like you to clarify anything else. The question why are you like this seems more like an expression of emotion than an actual request for information so you can ignore that. Offer an agenda for the next meeting, i.e., I will speak to you again when we have the paperwork from the lawyer. Remember: unhappiness is a normal response. Get up. Walk away.

Margaret Adams’s stories and essays have appeared in over two dozen publications, including The Threepenny Review, Best Small Fictions 2019, Joyland, and Pinch. She is a healthcare worker and a writer, and she currently lives in Vermont.