Spill

by Nancy Connors

Daniel Sinoca

And on the third night, the younger sister spilled her milk again, and their father slammed his hand on the table and said, “Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?” and the mother scrambled to mop it up, and the older sister leaped to help, and the younger sister began to weep, and their father yelled out, “Sit down!”, and the mother and older sister sat, and silently they watched the milk flow over the tablecloth, and their father ate, staring at his food, his knife and fork scraping against the plate again and again. Still the milk spilled from the glass, spilling and spilling until it began dripping into their laps and saturating the carpet.

The older sister watched as it slowly, slowly slipped around the furniture and began climbing the stairs and then the walls, turning them white, turning everything white, and she saw that it wasn’t cow’s milk or goat, but something different, something sweeter that she remembered from a long time ago, before memory even, and she breathed in the smell of it and was comforted, and she saw that her sister was comforted too, and had stopped crying, and the milk kept on, now creeping along the ceiling, and the mother sat and smiled, too, at the memory, as milk flowed from the electrical sockets and flowed from the kitchen faucet, as it sloshed in their shoes and pooled in the dinner plates. And it wasn’t a blinding white, but an animal white, thick, with an animal smell, and the older sister recognized that smell, and it belonged to her mother, a secret smell that her father didn’t know, and now a drop of milk fell from the overhead light and hit their father on the forehead like some blessing, but he brushed it away, furious, and threw his plate on the floor, and it didn’t shatter but only splashed in the milk. That made the older girl laugh, and then the younger girl, too, and the father grabbed the two girls by their thin arms and herded them to the basement stairs and slammed the door, slammed them into the basement where the spiders lived, but they had been punished like this before, and they weren’t afraid, and the milk followed them down the stairs, and it filled and then overflowed the washing machine, and the older one turned on the lights and chased away the spiders, and they watched as the milk ran down their arms and legs, and soaked their hair and their socks, and they — who so often argued and even pinched each other — now covered each other’s faces with milk that had turned thick, like cream or honey, and that made them laugh, too, and they called each other ghost, and then they climbed the stairs, and the door was unlocked, and they walked out into the newly white world. Their father was gone, chased from the house by milk, and though they knew he’d be back — he always came back — their mother was there, and she sat on the sofa and called her girls to her, and they sat together and watched the milk as it ebbed and flowed around them.

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Nancy Connors has had work published in failbetter, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Stone Coast Review, Burningword and others. She’s the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize. She teaches at the Writers Studio in New York City and lives in the Hudson Valley.