Lost Balloon

The Moringa witch sits on her porch and calls to five-year-old Mira. Mira knows the woman is a witch because she is greenish, has no teeth and her tongue is red with paan. Her fingers, curled from arthritis, looked like pods from the moringa tree, long knobby pointy green things like string beans with big seeds inside them. Like they are green fingers only ten times larger. Drumsticks, they are called,  hard like sticks for playing the drum in a school band. Mira is scared, but she is with her aunt, who says, “She is just a bit mad.  She is lonely, let’s go talk to her. ”

The old woman gives Mira a chocolate and laughs. She brushes her drumstick finger on Mira’s soft cheeks. It leaves a red mark, but no one notices.

Mira moves to America. Drumsticks in America only grow on chickens, delicious with BBQ sauce or tandoori masala. Drumsticks to nurture and grow the children until they leave. Drumsticks to spice up a dying marriage.  And then one day, America discovers Indian drumsticks. And when America discovers something that is a miracle cure, think kale or turmeric, Americans are ashamed not to try it, so Mira gets a packet of seeds from Amazon.

The seeds grow drumsticks relentlessly. Mira picks them and cooks them and gives them to all her Indian friends. One of them pierces the bedroom window.  Luckily the insurance fixes it, but another one pierces the window within days. The insurance says to cut down the tree, and she does, but it grows back the next year and makes so many holes in their house that Mira goes around with duct tape as her husband points out new holes.

She calls Texas A and M, and those experts come to inspect, take some pods, and produce a research paper that touts moringa goodness but does not mention how to get rid of them.

Their house, her house, looks like a target for gun practice. Mira places her ears on the walls and can hear cannons and horses. Sometimes she thinks the war is inside her. Her husband, now retired, wants some time alone, takes their Winnebago, and leaves.

Mira is sixty-six when she wakes up one day to find a drumstick piercing her waist. She pulls it out and it creates a bruise. Mira wants to go to a doctor, but her husband says who goes to the doctor for a bruise? Her husband does not want to be blamed for the bruise, and Mira agrees even though he hardly lives with her. But drumsticks keep piercing her body, her sides, her arms, and even her cheeks. They are easy to pull out but create bruises that heal with a greenish shade. Her husband jokes about planting a turmeric tree beside the moringa and having a color fight.  Mira goes grocery shopping and to Walmart, no one comments about her greenness. When her children call, which they rarely do, she is cheerful. They don’t ask and she does not tell them that inside she is hollow and dry.

Mira sits alone on her porch during Halloween, calls to kids passing by, and dangles her drumstick fingers in front of them. The children ask if she is a real witch. Their parents comment on how inventive Mira’s costume is. Mira gives the children chocolate. And waits, and waits on her porch, for another Halloween, for the grim reaper, or whoever will give her any attention, until she becomes immobile, she becomes the tree and moringa drumsticks grow on her and everyone talks about the woman who became a tree.

---

Ani Banerjee is a retiring lawyer and an emerging writer from Houston, Texas, who was born and brought up in Kolkata, India. Her flash fiction has been published in Janus Literary, McQueen’s Quinterly, Grim and Griswold, Flash Flood, and other places.

I was delighted when the skin fit. It was cold when I found the roadside carcass on my
evening run, and after determining the blood had dried well enough, the guts dragged off by
some hungry beast eager to feast, I slipped the body over my own, punching my hands and feet
through the fur and into winter air.

I did not know what the creature was—coyote, raccoon, some swollen possum—just as I
no longer knew myself. I’d grown feral from years trying to survive as a woman, a wild
existence full of wound and want, body alert to predators, yet turning against itself as prey. I was
constantly hungry, hurting from the deprivation girls learn early on earns beauty, but when I
placed the new skin over my own, felt the warmth of fragrant fur, I stood straight for the first
time in years. I marched home with purpose, turning around to see my strong tracks etched in
ice.

Home was a compromise. An acquiescence. My boyfriend was the kind of mediocre man
so convinced of his greatness the world simply went along with him, never questioning his
likability or looks, which were unimpressive but the best I thought I deserved. The house was
always freezing, because I disappeared to please his need to feel virile despite the fact that most
days he waged imaginary wars on screen, bragging about virtual victories in real life.
That night I wore my new skin to bed. It rested between us like a shroud, but for the first
time in a long time I was warm enough to sleep.

The next morning he complained. This was not unusual—he did not like the groceries I
bought or how often I exercised to keep weight off, did not like if I neglected to shave or lotion
my skin until it shone like some strange taxidermy. Most days he forgot to wear deodorant or brush his teeth, smelled of onion and Mountain Dew, but he liked me doused in perfume that
smelled simultaneously of innocent baby powder and a desperate woman’s floral.

“What is that thing?” he asked when I returned from a morning run, though he did not
take his eyes from the computer screen. “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s new,” I offered, though the skin seemed ancient and wild.

“Well don’t wear it when we go out together,” he said before turning his attention to
strangers on the Internet. I promised, because we rarely went out, except for greasy pizza that I
never ate or when he played frisbee golf in the woods and I followed, looking deep into the trees
for paths to escape.

I loved my second skin, even if I did not love myself. Supple and thick, I could smooth it
until glossy. At night I rubbed my body, caressing myself with pleasure. When I was scared,
which was often, whenever my boyfriend raised his voice or his fist because his game did not
turn out the way he had hoped, or I did not put enough mayonnaise on his burger, or I forgot to
remind him to wash his own laundry, I hid inside my skin. It smelled of blood and musk, shit and
sweat, a pungent ferocity.

Soon I preferred this scent, preferred the feel of my growing body hair tangling with fur.
Each night I curled into the den of my skin, wildness cradling me all around, and dreamed of
meat and heat, the feel of my feet running through moss and mud, running as far away as I
wanted.

I began to crave what was rare. I ate large flanks, licked salted flesh from my fingertips,
sopped blood with bread to leave plates shining pure. Though I had lived a quiet life, now I
relished the sound of my stomach gurgling with the satisfaction of digestion.

“Will you be quiet?” asked my boyfriend over the sound of my stomach, of me flexing
my strengthening body, of me cracking bones to slurp out the sweet marrow. “I can’t concentrate
when you’re like this.”

I focused instead on feeding. I grew big and heavy, full of pleasure and prey, satisfied by
the skill with which I could identify a particular piece of meat in the butcher’s window or the
way I crept out of bed at night to howl at the moon while my boyfriend snored, the sheets sweaty
against his pale body.

“What is that smell?” he asked in the morning, pointing to the melting snow and mud,
viscera and bone in our bed. “What the hell is that?”

“I think a possum snuck in last night,” I said, wiping the blood around my mouth. “You
should be careful. I hear those things have rabies.”

It was snowing when he left. His technology cords coiled like serpents in his car’s
backseat. He left me the pots and pans because he did not cook. He left me the old couch,
sagging on one side from hours he sat pretending to hunt imaginary creatures.

He said he was afraid, which made me laugh and bare my teeth and claws full of flesh
and feces. He backed away slowly, shivering on the front porch.

I reminded him to take his coat, hurling it through the evening air like some dark bird of
prey. It landed like a body between us and he stared at me wide-eyed as I howled goodbye.
Inside I stripped my skin. Underneath my body hair was thick and coarse. I smelled of
sweat and blood. My feet were caked with mud from the many paths I’d forged. Muscle rippled
hard and capable.

I rested on the floor because he had taken the bed. It did not matter, I slept better on the
ground, curled around myself for protection. I lay there a long time, stroking my animal body,
smoothing myself until glossy, caressing myself with pleasure.

When I had my fill and the moon was high, I walked naked out the door to hunt.

---

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press), and three poetry chapbooks. She has a craft book on unlearning the ableist writing workshop and developing a disabled writing practice forthcoming with Sundress Publications, as well as a collection of flash nonfiction forthcoming with Harbor Editions. She is an associate professor at Bridgewater State University.

So last night I was imagining that I had lived my whole life and now it was over. I was saying goodbye for the last time to everyone I cared about, and then dying and being reunited with the people who died before me: my mother, my grandmother, my little brother. It was an exercise out of my inner child workbook, guidance for living in the now. Sometimes I have trouble living in the now. Tears were running down my cheeks, wetting the pillow, when Len came into the bedroom and said, “Hey, Peaches, you awake?” in his Come and Get It voice.

Let me tell you about Len. He always calls honey “teddy bear juice,” because what else would you call the stuff that comes out when you turn a plastic teddy bear upside down and squeeze it? I laughed about it the first couple of times, but after fifteen years of marriage, now I just ignore him. I almost cheated on him once with a man I met at the library who made me feel witty and brave and free.

He’s getting a little bald, and a little pudgy, and I can’t ride in his car for long because the smell of the cheeseburgers he thinks I don’t know about makes me queasy. Whenever I need some help around the house — a lightbulb I can’t reach or a heavy table moved, taking the kids to the doctor or calling the plumber or yelling at the plumber or paying the plumber — Len is out somewhere running some pointless errand. He almost cheated on me once with a woman at work who made him feel witty and brave and free.

But he doesn’t gamble, and he has a decent job, and he shaves every morning, even on the weekend, because he knows his beard gives me a rash.

And the kids still shout “Daddy’s home!” and run to him with big grins and open arms when he rolls his smelly old fast food clunker up the drive.

And his smile is still the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen.

So last night he came into the bedroom and said, “Hey, Peaches, you awake?” in his Come and Get It voice, but when he saw me crying he wrapped his arms around me and held me without saying a word. I told him about dying, and he smoothed my hair and tucked the quilt around me, got into bed with me and just held me. Someday one of us will have to bury the other one.

In the morning, while I’m brushing my teeth and imagining I’m not getting older, Len grins at me in the mirror, winks and says, “You owe me one. I come to bed all horny and you pretend to be dead.”

In the mirror the laugh lines around my eyes get just a bit deeper. “Talk to the butt,” I say. I flip the bottom of my robe up at him, dart out of reach, and go downstairs to make his coffee and toast with teddy bear juice.

---

 

Elissa Matthews was born, raised, and began work many years ago at the phone company in New Jersey. At some point she got fed up, launched on a journey of discovery, and explored a bit of the world. One frigid day in November, at 5 in the morning, climbing into cold water scuba gear looking for a dead body, she realized that maybe a 9 – 5, climate-controlled job in an office somewhere (even New Jersey) wasn’t as bad as it sounded. She has published one novel, Where the River Bends, and short stories and poetry in several journals and anthologies, including Red Rock Literary Review, Lilith, and Art Times. She was previously Editor-in-Chief of Goldfinch, A Literary Magazine.

 

The flesh had been the first to melt away. The fire licked up the hair, eyes, skin, fat, stomach, heart, lungs and so on, until only the hard bits of my body remained. My skull rested on one end of the tray. The rest of the bones had been gathered into a desiccated bouquet of ribs and shards. A couple of knobby vertebrates peeked out from the bed of gray ash.

My family leaned over the tray, heads bent in watch. But I hung back, adrift but cinched by a sudden urge to reach into the remains and grab what appeared to be the clavicle. It was a sturdy rod, long as a palm is wide, wide enough to hang a skeleton on. I had felt it traverse my body once, where unlike the other bones buried in layers of fat and muscle, the clavicle protrudes gently out of skin. I remember what it was like to run my fingers along the deep crevice that a pair of them would form under a fluttering, silk shirt.

***

Before my body burned, it lay in a dark, plush casket in the sandalwood-soaked air of the temple courtyard. I sensed moving bodies through my closed eyelids. The murmuring voices called my name, bearing joss sticks. Above the altar hung my portrait, flanked by sumptuous flower wreaths. In the photo, large pearls were clinging to long, wrinkled earlobes that looked like dried mushrooms. The left corner of my lips was drooping, like a dog’s limp tail. I was wearing an inscrutable expression, a crooked grimace, a coda, my body cut off right at the collarbone by the frame’s edge.

Rites done right became ordinary. Old friends, neighbors, former colleagues, children of those who were too sick themselves to come, distant relatives, not many left in my generation still living, then, two sons, three daughters, four grandchildren, husband, their names dissolving fast like broth pouring through a sieve. Where does it all go? Them, me, this place? As I chewed a slice of guava upon the altar, fragrant smoke curled around me, and I pondered this.

***

The reading of the bones began. In the windowless room at the funeral hall, the suited attendant talked like a game show host, sculpting the stale air with his hands as he spoke. An intact skull, he announced to my family, indicates good karma.

Now, look here, he said, pointing to the tawny edge of a knuckle bone. Streaks of yellow mean heavy medications towards the end of her life. Healthy bones would be white.

I was glad to see the clavicle was a pleasing hue of ivory. I wondered in earnest if it was still hot. It looked fairly solid, but a few hours of incineration could have melted the marrow so all that remained was a thin shell. The urge to grab it was growing. Right as I reached in, there was a flicker in the corner of the room. Then a quiet bark.

A little white dog had appeared out of nowhere; it looked exactly like the one that used to live with us back on HPL Road, before he disappeared one night. Even his whiskers crusted familiarly around his snout.

I drifted low to scratch its ears. The dog said, you don’t have to look.

Look at what? I asked.

They’re going to bang the bones to dust and stuff it in an urn.

I sighed.

It’s the clavicle that ties me here, I told the little dog. I just want touch it one last time to see if it will crumble away in my hand.

I understand, said the dog. I love bones too.

***

So the dog and I decided to go outside and catch a breath. Next to the funeral parlor was a grove. The ground was covered in twigs and acorns. I dug up a stick to toss for the dog who ran back and forth a few times before tiring out at my side.

We came to an ancient tree lying on its side. Gnarled roots twisted out of the earth. From afar, the wood had looked firm and sound, but up close, I saw that the trunk had hollowed out. Its emptied core was bursting with ears of fungus and insect nests. The bark had started to peel, and a soft pelt of lichen crept over the side of its wooden body. The little dog sniffed at the mulch.

In the distance, I heard a cracking noise like a big dead tree coming down, another felled giant meeting the forest floor. I hoped no one and no house was in its path.

But then I realized it was the sound of my oldest daughter’s voice. In her booming way, she was talking directly to the bones in the tray, saying, there’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s okay to go.

***

My family took the ancestral urn aboard the bus. The dog and I sat in the back. We left the skyscrapers and boulevards of the city, passing stalls with steaming vats of buns, rain-washed buildings, the bus depot on the outskirts of town. When we reached the mountaintop, my family buried my body bits in a shaded plot where over several years the ashes would seep into the soil and one day grow into flowers.

A gray mist was brewing in the atmosphere, and it clung to the branches and buds of the pink trees like silk cloth. The bus drove away. I realized I had been here before, at the bottom of a breath, in the invisible world stirring to form. By then, I was fast dissolving into the ground, air, sky. There were no names nor shapes anymore, only a last whispered sound of an urge breaking apart.

Take care of the clavicle, I said to the little white dog sitting by the plot, its tail wagging and tongue hanging out. Then, even that final urge loosened, and the little that remained of me, let go.

---

Yasmine Yu is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has been previously published in The Cincinnati Review miCRo.

The neighbor boys carried the piano out into the rain. They’d taken the French doors off their hinges and left them leaning against the house. We watched them set the piano in the grass as thunder rolled and the cluttered gutters spilled over the eaves.

“It looks like something is happening,” you said.

“We should put on our boots,” I said.

It was still afternoon but already dark. Storm clouds were heavy and low. I could smell the lotion you left open on the dresser.

“Eucalyptus,” I said.

“No,” you said dipping a finger and touching it to my neck. “Japanese Cypress.”

“We should dress,” I said.

“Or turn off the light,” you said.

We stayed at the window and watched the neighbor boys carry the doors back into their jambs. They were home from college. They held the doors as if they weighed nothing at all.

“I remember when you were young,” you said.

“I’m not old yet,” I said.

“Not old,” you said. “But I remember when you were young.”

You raised the window and we listened to the sound of the rain in the leaves. Water puddled on the floor. Lightning lit and the neighbor boys shut the French doors. A lamp was on their parent’s bedroom. The curtain half closed.

You fell asleep in that room once. On the couch at the foot of the bed. You called it a davenport. A term your father used, you said. We were at a dinner party a few days after Christmas. The neighbor boys were children then. You drank too much wine and smoked a joint with the doctor’s wife in the basement. I found you asleep an hour later on the davenport in their bedroom. You wear wearing a string of the wife’s pearls. There was a pile of coats on the bed.

“I remember waking up there,” you said. “You had taken off your shoes. I thought that was strange.”

“The doctor wanted to look at my feet,” I said. “I’d lost you. I was telling the story about the sewing needle I stepped on as a child. The doctor didn’t believe it was still in my foot. He knelt down in front of everyone and untied my laces. It was late in the evening.”

“After he’d played the piano,” you said.

“Yes. The song you taught him,” I said. “After I lost you.”

“I wasn’t lost,” you said. “I needed to rest.”

In the yard the piano sat quiet in the rain. You went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. When you came back you were wrapped in a towel and the storm had begun to calm.

“How long will they leave it out there?” you said. “How long until it’s ruined?”

“I’m waiting for them to carry the doctor out and leave him there beside it,” I said.

“His wife must be behind all this,” you said. “She told me once to pull all her roses when she died,” you said.

“You didn’t,” I said.

“No,” you said. “I sent over a casserole.”

I watched you dress. You dropped the towel on the floor beneath the window and mopped up the rain with your foot.

“I’m going over there,” you said.

“Don’t,” I said.

“He can’t see the yard from his bed,” you said.

I imagined those pearl you wore that night, years ago. Where they were now. I took the towel to the bathroom and hung it to dry. The mirror was still fogged. I could hear your footsteps down the stairs. The backdoor opened. The screen slapped shut. When I came to the window you were crossing the yard. You stopped and looked back. You were wearing a pair of my boots. I touched the glass with the palm of my hand. You waved.

What I never told you about that night after the doctor took off my shoes, was that he touched the sole of my foot where the skin had grown over the needle and said, “Your wife is a hell of a teacher.”

You turned and walked through the rain. The neighbor boys hadn’t brought out the piano bench so you stood and raised the fallboard. You began to play. The rain was quiet and I could hear the notes. I looked up at the doctor’s window. I waited for the curtains to close or the light to turn off. I recognized the song. I touched my neck where you’d left the scent of cypress. The neighbor boys opened the doors and stood watching you. Their father was somewhere in the house. The roses in the garden were still in bloom.

---

Andrew Siegrist is a graduate of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His debut collection of stories, We Imagined It Was Rain, was awarded the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and published by Hub City Press in 2021. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, trampset, Juked, the Mississippi Review, Baltimore Review, Arts & Letters, Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, South Carolina Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Nashville, Tennessee.

Mara arrived in January, as regal as a beech tree, and planted herself in the yellow house across the street. From my bedroom window, I watched her skip rope like she was training for a NASA mission. She was like that from the start: formidable. By the first week she had made friends with almost everybody but me.

I still wore corduroy skirts and tall socks embroidered with apples. I was picked last for kickball. I had straight Bs. “You have such promise,” my teachers said. All around me people were blossoming, but any flowers I could muster yielded only hard, sour fruit. “Crabapple,” my mother called me affectionately, instead of honey, and I hated how well it fit.

In February, our science teacher paired Mara and me for a project. She thought Mara would rub off on me. Make me braver, maybe, less prone to sputter in class. But every time Mara got another answer right, anger fermented in my chest. When she raised her hand, the skin on her forearm was so thin I could see the blood moving. I dismantled a paper clip beneath my desk and daydreamed about etching my initials onto her skin.

I ran hot in those days: my temperature, my temper. I sweated in T-shirts on days Mara wore thick wool sweaters. She shed fibers every time she moved. Her scratchy sleeves rubbed against my skin. When I scooted away from her, her gray eyes pooled. The next day, her smile was even wider. Her niceness was one more thing I coveted but couldn’t reach.

“You should walk to school with her,” Mom said. “She’s new. She could use a friend.”

“She has more friends than I do.”

Mom laughed and told me that was all the more reason to be nice to her. Still, I scuttled away when she approached me in the hall. I side-stepped her smiles.

But something was changing. The trees in front of our houses draped their arms around each others’ shoulders. In March, we learned about inosculation: what happened when different trees chafed against each other. Their bark wore thin. Their cells merged. The trees grew conjoined. “Husband and wife trees,” our teacher called them. Mara shifted beside me, and I felt flayed. “That’s what we should do our project about,” she whispered.

In April she started waiting in front of my house in the mornings, underneath the kissing, sighing trees. She walked beside me in silence. It’s OK, I told myself. We’re not friends. We’re something else. Neighbors. At the end of the week, she held out her hand, her face serious. “Friends?” she said. I took her hand.

We started studying together, stretched out in her bed or mine. She swapped the story of her parents’ divorce for the location of my brother’s weed stash. We smoked by my open window, giggling against each other’s shoulders. We collapsed in my bed, our arms indistinguishable. We dared each other to become a dolphin, a boat, a rocket, a centipede. We squeezed our eyes shut and contorted our bodies into new shapes. With my eyes closed and hers on me I could be anything. Steel, bark, honey.

From then on, we linked arms in the hallway and split our sentences so we could share them. We made a new kind of fruit: bristly, nutty apples. “We’re going to be this close forever,” I told her. I hadn’t been the kind of person who thought about forever before, but now I was. She rolled her eyes at me, and I rubbed my shoulder against hers. “I mean it,” I swore.

I meant it the day she painted GO on my exposed stomach with pasty blue paint before her sister’s swim meet, and my skin prickled even in the places she didn’t touch. I meant it when we started high school and I memorized the 63 steps between her locker and mine. I meant it right up until the day in 10th grade when we were tangled in her bed, tickling each other senseless, and the joke in her eyes softened. I started to feel light-headed, exuberant, afraid. Her lips against mine were tentative, as if she were the one who didn’t know what to do.

I flinched. She didn’t. I started dating boys. She shaved the left side of her head and brought a girl to prom. I applied for college out-of-state. She stayed and made our town change around her. I told myself I’d never had her certainty anyway.

Still, I tracked her life on Facebook. I marveled at the dizzying shapes of her new friends’ hair. I tried to squelch my jealousy, that old prickly anger at how easily she reached for what I lacked. I closed my laptop and splashed cold water on my face. In the mirror my hair was flat, my eyes sad. Turning away was a habit. It was the only thing I was better at than her.

Then I stopped. I closed my eyes and tried to believe that I could remake myself the way she’d once reshaped me. That I could be anything: a girl, a tree, a rocket, all at the same time. My fingertips prickled, and I tasted apple-crisp beechnuts on my tongue. I turned back to the mirror and searched my eyes for the first flicker of something new.

---

 

Pauline Holdsworth is a writer and public radio producer who grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Necessary Fiction, Pithead Chapel, JMWW, and elsewhere. Her work has been shortlisted for The Masters Review 2021 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50.