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Weekly Contest #342
Four in the morning and I was there in the dark. Sleep had left a while back already and it wasn't coming back, that much I knew. There was this smell in the room. The formaldehyde and the soap and the skin and then underneath all of it, like it was hiding, something sweet. Vanilla. Her shampoo. The one she bought at Walmart in the yellow bottle and always left uncapped on the rim of the bathtub.Faye.She was downstairs. In the oak casket I'd picked out myself, cream lining, bronze handles. I hadn't let anyone else do it. I'd washed her. Comb...
My mother held the Book. She held it against her belly the way she never held any of us. Both hands on it. Her thumb crushed against the edge so the pages wouldn't move. They'd made room for her on the front seat. They'd wedged rags so it wouldn't knock around in the turns. The Book traveled well. It traveled better than us.Father's pickup was loaded. Crates, tools rolled in rags, bags of laundry tied shut. A sheet over everything. The vehicle sank on its axles. It drove slow. We were in the back. Piled in. Knees in ribs. Elbows in soft bell...
My mother was bleeding from her eyes.Two straight lines. They ran down without seeking the nose or the mouth. Slow. The blood took its time.She lay on her plank, the one at the back, the one that creaked. Someone had put a blanket over her belly. I don't know who.The barrack stank. Forty women. Twenty planks. Two to a plank. At night they coughed, chattered their teeth, moaned low so as not to bring the guards back.No one looked at her.We had learned. A gaze catches. What catches becomes a debt. And debt, here, was paid in grams of corn.The ...
Weekly Contest #341
Father, I hope you're holding up. That the cold ain't eaten your spine too bad. It's cold here too but it ain't the same kind. Not the kind you fix by stuffing rags under the door or nailing plastic over the windows. Something else came in after the fire and it stayed. It sat down in the house like it lived here. Like it always lived here. Donna says it makes sense. But nothing in any of this ever made sense and I stopped trying to make it. You keep doing what you did before. You get up in the morning. You heat water on the burner. You fold...
Latex has a taste. If you don't know it, it's because you've never put it in your mouth.I did. Eight times an hour. Ten. Fifteen. The rubber tip between your lips, you blow, you swell it, you twist. By the third balloon your lower lip splits. By the fifth it bleeds. You swallow without thinking. Rubber and blood. The taste of a coin heated against the gum. You keep going.The kid across from you is waiting for his dog.You twist. You knot. The balloon squeals under your fingers. A high, strangled sound. Your fingertips go white. The shape appe...
Do I know you?She didn't scream.I hadn't planned for that.In my head she screamed. She always screamed. The scream was the starting gun. The shot fired. Six hours. I'd been in her closet for six hours.Do I know you?Three words. She stood in the doorframe of her bedroom. One hand on the light switch. The other clutching a rolled-up towel. Her hair was dripping. Water ran along her temples and down her neck. It smelled like coconut. Sweet. Clean. Too close.I knew what that smell was. Three weeks earlier she'd filmed an unboxing of the shampoo....
Shannon had never trusted a white man. Not once. It wasn't an opinion. It was the body. The body had known since Scott Street. Since the landlord who came up on the first of the month with his eyes that counted before they looked. Eyes that saw the rent before they saw the woman and the lateness before they saw the child. Shannon had learned white faces that way. The tics. The lips. The nostrils. The way a neck stiffens when a white man steps into an elevator where there's a Black man.That morning, the guard in front of his cell had a differ...
Greg was not a man who went back over the past. He'd sworn it to himself. Since prison, he had learned to live off-center.He had held.And then, one morning, it no longer held.An ordinary morning. No anniversary, no date, no sign. Just the ordinary: the bathroom, the mirror, the toothbrush.It had started in the mouth.An acid taste.On the ceramic of the sink, the night guard waited: a piece of pale plastic, molded to his teeth, to the exact shape of what his jaw clenched at night without knowing. A smile that had been ripped from him and set t...
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