The End of the Girl
- Sep 17, 2021
- 2 min read
by Marie Hoy-Kenny
As usual, Chloe saw it before me. The shimmery white helium balloon caught on one of the oak tree branches, its tangled ribbon stopping its struggle to get away. Chloe hoisted me up to unravel it and it popped on the rosebush as I pulled it down. “Fuck Jill, you always ruin everything,” Chloe said. A square of pink paper fluttered out of the balloon’s belly like a consolation prize and she gripped it between her thin fingers.
She held it close to her face and tilted it away from me so I couldn’t read it. My fingers tingled as I imagined slapping the pretty right off her face, leaving it red-raw. After she got bored of keeping the message a secret, she finally let me see. It read, 2005–2020. Ruth, we miss you already.
“Only 15? What do you think happened to her?”I asked but Chloe was already cutting a square from a Cornflakes box, writing the alphabet on it, choosing the pointiest stone from beside the pond.
“Let’s find out,” she said, and I recognized her art project as a makeshift Ouija board.
She insisted that we wait until the sun set, and I watched it cast pinks, oranges, and purples across the sky with a sense of dread, knowing that when the colors faded to black, I’d be playing with death. The June bugs buzzed around our heads like relentless voices that refused to shut up. When it became dark, Chloe told me to sit cross-legged, placing the cardboard on the grass between us. She placed my two pointer fingers on the stone and rested hers against mine.
“Ask now,” she demanded, so I did, because Chloe’s a hard person to say no to.
“Ruth, how did you die?” I whispered and below our fingers the stone shifted along the line of letters to rest on S. “You’re fucking moving it, Jill,” Chloe said, her eyes accusing slits.
“No, you are.” I drew my lower lip between my teeth and shook my head.
Chloe huffed and pulled her fingers off. The stone moved from S to T-R-A-N-G-L-E-D and the only sound was our quickening breath.
“Ask her who I’ll marry,” Chloe insisted as if this was an appropriate second question. But the stone only shifted to spell out the word S-T-R-A-N-G-L-E-D again and again until I pulled my fingers away and folded them in my lap like useless cinders.
At night I lay awake in my top bunk, Chloe snoring beneath me, thinking of cotton candy, the carousel at the fair, Momma’s bedtime stories, kittens, peonies, lucky pennies. Anything but what it meant that Chloe might not marry, might meet the same sick fate, thinking not of my fingers tingling, thinking not of hands gripping necks, squeezing tighter and tighter until there’s no more air.
Marie Hoy-Kenny is a writer who just moved to a rural town in Ontario, Canada, where she lives with her guitar-playing husband, two creative children, and mischievous bichon poodle. Her work has been published in Cease, Cows, Ilanot Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue as well as other publications. One of her flash fiction stories was nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology.
