Two Flash Fictions

by Melissa Benton Barker

 Gia Oris

The Closing

My real estate agent, Dana, liked to act the mother hen, as if she were trying to soften the fact that my personal tragedy was her sale.

“Eat something, Vee,” she said. “You don’t want to go through all those documents on an empty stomach.” She pulled a granola bar out of her shoulder bag and held it out to me. She probably wouldn’t have called it a granola bar. It was the fancy kind, the kind they display by the cash register in the health food store. I took it from her, just to be polite. I thought I might put it in my cupboard, or maybe later I’d leave it in the big basket at the front of the grocery store, the one where they collect donations for the food pantry. I had no intention of eating it.

Dana watched me slide the granola bar into the breast pocket of the oversized button down I wore to keep the dust off during the moving process.

“At least make sure you get a good breakfast tomorrow.” She patted me lightly on the forearm. “How about this. I’ll pick up some bagels on the way to the closing if I have time.”

Like most people, Dana couldn’t stand to see a woman like me lose weight. Skinny to begin with. That’s what they say. Now she’s just a bag of bones.

We stood in the driveway of my rental cottage. My new abode was painted lime green, shaded by a walnut tree that spat golf-ball sized nuts on the roof, and sometimes on my windshield right before I pulled out of the driveway. Crack! Suddenly a lightning bolt stretched across the safety glass.

They say cracking is preferable to shattering, but I’d like to shake glass out of my hair. That way everyone would see the sparkle of my trouble. At the heart of it, I suppose that’s why I stopped eating. Withering myself away might be my last chance at visibility.

“It’s great you moved in right across the street from your old place,” said Dana. “So convenient.”

“I didn’t even have to hire movers.” I bared my teeth at her in a manner that I hoped resembled a skeleton more than a smile. I didn’t tell her I had so little left, the whole process had taken less than a day. It didn’t take much to set me up. Bare cupboards and a medical-grade scale. (In another life, I was a nurse. Would you believe it?)

The walnut tree spat a nut at Dana. It rolled away from her feet and lodged in the grass and she jumped a little at first, then laughed.

Dana’s husband Fred, a retired junior high school social studies teacher, stood at the end of the driveway. Dana was training him in real estate so they could be in business together.

My husband, or ex I should say, had gone hand in hand with the house. Apparently, I had no right to one without the other. That’s just the way the numbers worked out.

In other words: I never should have quit my job. Early retirement was not in the books for me. My ex had taken off for Quintana Roo.

In other words: I’d been screwed.

Dana squeezed her binder to her chest, brimming with all the paperwork she’d gone over with me in preparation for the next morning.

It’s incredible how much you can lose by signing your name.

Fred nodded in the background, a mute giant. He was so tall he blocked the view.

But I knew they were there. They—the new owners. They came by almost every day, circled the lawn, even though we hadn’t sat down together, made the final sale. We were under contract, so I guess, according to them, it didn’t matter that what was mine was not yet theirs. Those two were dreaming, planning, scheming. A young woman, a young man, and their brand-new baby, just a worm in her arms.

They had no idea I’d moved in right across the street.

Dana rushed me for a hug, almost knocked me over, stood so close I could see right into her scalp, the blue-gray shadow where she made her part.

“We’ll see you tomorrow morning, dear,” she said. “Things have really worked out for you. Everything will be just fine.” Then she wobbled down the driveway in her little black pumps. Fred bent and opened the door for her, and, with Dana in the driver’s seat, they made their get-away. The branches of the walnut tree hung low, as if weighted by a hundred knobby globes they would eventually lob down on us. Through the leaves, I saw the woman across the street in what was still, by law, my garden. She knelt, her limp hair held away from her face in a thin ponytail, the baby tied to her chest. One hand she pressed against the soil for balance, in the other she held a spade. I knew she was planting bulbs. I knew she was thinking of spring, daffodils, those shaggy suns bursting up to cast off winter. She was already living for a time when a cold that wasn’t even a nip in the breeze would be over but: “Sweetheart,” I whispered, “there’s a freeze coming. You have no idea how hard the cold holds on.”

I took the so-called granola bar out of my pocket, and held onto it like a gun, pointed it at the woman in my garden, then at the tail lights of Dana’s car.

I had slipped into a clean place, beyond hunger. Soon I’d be able to slip through the walls and the floorboards of the house across the street, the house I would always call my own.

Everyone hates it when a woman like me loses weight. I say better for you I’m a bag of bones. I’ll clack when I approach. You’ll hear me coming from a mile away. You’d better heed me like a warning.

Charm

A stepmother isn’t a real mother. It makes Celie so angry when people say this, she’d like to howl at the moon.

No, that’s wrong. She imagines the boy correcting her. Howling at the moon, he would say, is a form of pack communication, calling out to the others, an announcement or a warning.

Oh come on, Celie hurls a thought at the boy, who is upstairs, in his bedroom. Wouldn’t howling at the moon be like railing against it, or at the very least, wouldn’t it be a lonely gesture?

No, the boy would say. Just because you, personally, find a sound to be lonely doesn’t mean it’s actually a lonely sound. Plus, you are angry, not lonely. You mean something like: shake your fist at the moon.

Maybe I’m angry AND lonely, Celie thinks. She’s already standing outside, stupidly barefoot, even though it’s the time of year when the temperature drops below sixty after the sun goes down. The moon is full tonight, bald-faced, placid, and thoroughly unimpressed when she shakes her fist at it. Still, it feels good to stand outside and shake one fist, then two, then to jump on the concrete path that leads to their front door, knowing she’s a little bit too wild right now for her current audience, a cul-de-sac of prim looking, identical houses, most with their porch lights left on all night, little electric moons wasting energy because no one cares more about global warming than burglar warning. The soles of Celie’s feet are raw from jumping and she finds the almost-rhyme of that last thought satisfying, so she’s able to quit this outburst and move back inside. She might repeat the rhyme to the boy in the morning.

Despite the fact that he’s recently grown taller than her and has taken on the faintest shadow of a mustache, they still like to be puny together.

Celie stands in the kitchen with the lights turned off and fills a glass with tap water.

It’s almost midnight, and the boy’s father hasn’t called, hasn’t texted, hasn’t come home. That’s five nights since the beginning of the month and the month’s not even half over. She’s been counting. The boy doesn’t know. He’s thirteen and a half, an adolescent in every way except he still gets sleepy so early, trudging up the stairs at eight-thirty, maybe nine if she plies him with ice-cream. They sit together silently at the kitchen barstools, the boy yawning into his spoon. Then he goes to bed, and he’s not one of those kids sneaking his phone under the covers, Celie knows, because she checks on him—just like a mother—she knows the way his eyelids turn translucent, almost blue, when he dreams.

Tell me, Celie howls to herself, thinking about the boy’s eyelids, tell me that’s not a mother.

Like any stepmother worth her salt, Celie keeps a witchy charm. Hers sits in a small lacquer box by the kitchen sink, right out in the open, where most people would mistake it for an old bar of soap, melted and creviced and worn. On nights like this, it’s a comfort to know the charm is still there, innocuous, waiting. She knows she needs to bide her time, that this situation could still turn around—maybe—without tapping into charms and incantations. She knows how the magic spools out, how a woman can never be quite sure when she’s about to run out. She’s a believer in patience, in careful choices, in conservation.

She falls back on the sofa, and the sofa crinkles underneath her, covered with some kind of cheap faux-leather. Celie had wanted to invest in something nicer, something that would last the length of a marriage, or a lifetime, or at least a childhood, but it seems, even then, the boy’s father had known better. He’d said he didn’t want to waste fancy furniture on a toddler, that they’d invest once the boy was grown, but the boy was long past the stage of jumping on furniture and unpredictable vomiting and the couch had split open in places and the stuffing spilled out, and still there was no talk of replacing it, and she realizes that his rationale had nothing to do with wear-and-tear and everything to do with cutting his losses.

Upstairs she hears the faucet run, then the boy’s feet padding back from the bathroom. She squeezes her eyes shut but she’s run completely dry.

Next time. If he stays away a sixth night, she’ll use it. She’ll hold that charm, all worn from the ages and complicated in her palm. She knows it works because she’s used it before.

She’s more than a mother. She wields the forces of the universe, conjures love and last out of sheer will. This boy is counting on her, and there’s nothing now left but Celie and her charm, shaking her fist and howling at the moon and going double or nothing in the space between loneliness and love.

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Melissa Benton Barker’s recent writing can be found in Lammergeier, New Flash Fiction Review, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.