Simply Not a Disaster
- Dec 9, 2022
- 3 min read
by Elizabeth Horner Turner
I am still here, the crash just a feathery echo now, and my shadow darts about when it should be dabbing my wounds and helping me up. I wish I could get this letter to you, darling, dearie, sweeth-pea o’ my heart, because then I could continue to torment you as one does in the shoulder-tapping, neck-kissing way of those with our type of relationship. The type we bought after agonizing together at Home Depot. You wanted the motherload of ornate cabinetry and me, I wanted the bowl sink, the sink with hammered, metally depth to catch our water like wooden buckets did for old-timey hand pumps; I was so enamored with Little House on the Prairie. So we got both. Both! They raised their eyebrows at the relationship checkout stand, but our plastic cards had enough numbers and we looked ready. We were ready.
But this crash really tosses in a wrench, doesn’t it? If my shadow would just wipe away this bloody pool collecting, maybe push aside some of the wreckage that has me trapped, I could mail you this letter. At least I have the healing process to look forward to — I hope it’ll be a quiet, clean place with antiseptic-smelling people knocking knees and taking pulses. Big windows and airy light puffing through curtains. Perfectly smooth enamel water pitchers, starched, linen sheets. There’ll be a woman in the bed next to me, and I will capture her final story and you and I will spend the rest of our lives telling it so everyone will know that she was a fighter… I look a little wan now, but I’m not washed out quite yet.
I’m over near a tree, a big live oak, and it’s been long enough since the crash that birds and squirrels have started creeping back. One sat on my chest, its head cocked with that look birds get that either means “I’m hungry” or “I’ll listen.” I took a gamble and asked the bird nicely to find you. Staring hard into her little brain, I sent the best message I could. I thought our address over and over; I thought about love and about help and that it was all worth it; we were always all worth it.
I have to hope that she’s left to find you, perhaps to start peck-typing my message in mini-Morse Code on bits of bark, and then she’ll tuck those scrolls into her bird carrier leg brace and fly to you with her own soundtrack. When she arrives, I know you’ll read the note thoughtfully, strew some bird seed for her as a thank you, but she’ll have to be off. You’ll even chew each bark bit to absorb my every word and come find me because that’s the kind of person you are: a searcher.
When you find me, open my belly. This letter will be there, nestled among organs and bone. If someone gets my liver, darling, make sure you get this letter. It is for you.
— Your honeling, your heartbait, your dessert-in-the-wait.
Elizabeth Horner Turner’s work has been published in journals including Cutbank, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, Lost Balloon, and Pumpernickel House. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50 in 2021. Her chapbook, The Tales of Flaxie Char, was published through dancing girl press. She lives in San Francisco and can be found online: @lhornert
