Category: flash creative nonfiction

Odore di Neve | Jacqueline Goyette

The drive is different in the middle of January. In the mornings on my way to work — on my  way to Loreto — I can’t even make out the mountains in the distance, where they would usually  sit behind the city of Macerata. The drive is hazy here, and it feels  like I’m driving through a dream. When I drive into the valley, the hill towns come into view through the fog, and I can see them: Recanati with its churches and castle walls, Potenza Picena like a tiny cluster of towers. Montelupone drawn in slate blue, a charcoal sketch of a city tipsy on the hill. There are times I want to stop and memorize it all, but I can’t. There’s no time. I drive on. I drive right through the haze and up the next hill, all the way to Loreto. 

January is the hardest month to go back to work. I always find winters to be strange here, nothing like they are back home. None of that snow that falls in cartwheels and somersaults, winter is competing for your attention, drawing you in. Here one month fades into the next and when the new year starts, it drags its feet, making you want to stay cozy and cuddled up in the heat of the house with a kitten curled beside you. I’ve learned to savor the drives, readying myself for the busy blur of teaching and rush of students walking through the crowded halls. The drives are easy, slow. Back home, in the streets of Indianapolis, I would already be shoveling snow, dreading the icy stretch from Audubon to Emerson Avenue. But here, there is none of that yet. Not in December, not now. I drive home in the sun-blazed start of sunset, watching the hills catch the glint of golden light. The rain as it begins to fall. The pine trees that carry their backlit silhouettes like ostrich feathers, and once again I remember where I am.

On Thursday, the drive changes. The sky looks like it has caught fire, and rain streaks down from clouds in the distance in sheets of silver light. Antonello once told me you can recognise the rainfall from here, you can see the clouds as they hug the horizon, rising like smoke from the fields. We’ve done that before: stood in honey brick piazzas in the small towns — his hand in mine, dry stones all around, as we counted the rain clouds that were heading our way, their countless thunderstorms. In Indiana we were warned to watch for tornadoes but here there is no need to: the storms are right there, announcing their arrival with battle horns. You could stand guard on a hillside and see the entire country sneak up on you, watch it invade the hills and set up camp in the Adriatic Sea. There is no hiding here. It is all spread out, field after field, a tapestry of painted land. Sometimes I miss the way the fields back home stretch for miles without me knowing. Feeling left in the middle of it — small and unknown — oblivious to where things really are. 

I dreamt of home last night. Of Indiana roads — the network of them and their grids, the sturdy reliability of street signs and highways and traffic lights. I dreamt I was shopping with a friend I hadn’t seen in years, and we were picking out bracelets, lip glosses, boxes of Mike and Ike’s and Sour Patch Kids. We were storming through the aisles at Osco. My dreams are rooted in this childhood that lures me in with nostalgia, with boxes of candy, with friends that are long gone. No one tells you how easy it is to lose people. They say it is hard to make friends, but they don’t warn you about the skill it takes to not let go. They don’t warn that you’ll get older, that you’ll lose faces and names, entire cities will be gone, the roads and where they lead. They don’t tell you how lonely it gets. How many postcards you will never send. How fragile the night can be.

There is a lamplight that flickers at the end of the day. It is near the grocery store where I’ve stopped to pick up things  — red peppers for dinner, scamorza cheese. I am ten minutes from Macerata, home is just around the bend. Here the neon orange letters of the grocery store sign are crisper than the sunset, and they feel bright and cheerful against the blueish night sky, a strange mix, an unintended overlap — a day beginning just as it is starting to end. The clouds crease like a collar around the nape of the night, and I see what is left of a thread of lightning tumbling through, erupting into pale fireworks in the heart of the cloud. I think for a second of what a colleague said to me today as we were leaving work: c’e odore di neve. You can smell snow in the air. There is a chill here now, and I wonder if that’s what she meant — that the snow will be here soon. As if we might know what is coming just by the chill, just by the scent in the air — standing on the hill and sniffing out the rest of the year like a prophecy, long before it has even arrived. 

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Grandfathered | Haley Larson

I. Impulse

The bananas began to brown. I worried fruit flies were next. Worried that even in the kitchen fruit bowl, an unseen order presided over sickness, a body could divorce its health simply from stillness and air. 

Thought of trickery in the body, how oranges sour in the mouth after sugar, how to eat the tartest things first to stomach the sweetening build.

Some paper towel held the morning coffee’s remnants. Seeking comfort, I composed a list on it: how dying begins. Thought, in browns, by souring, sweetening, softening bodies, in blackening. Swirled into the fibers, the grounds dimly dyed it. The ways evenings bring darkness: sharpening edges of trees, closing my eyes, resting my outsides so my insides can unstill, can regenerate, can seek out damage. 

Potentially, these are the first steps to spoiling. 

Even kept chilled, kept in a sealed bag, skins limp. Insides turn mealy. To rot from the inside is to sweeten with age. Death publicizes himself as colors biting through skin. In blemished body flesh. In respiration. And mine, always accelerating.

Bodies build nice homes for worms and bugs and idiopathic diseases. 

Bodies become less alive outside, become livelier inside, the more they breed disorder. Involuntary tremors, quakes, guided by dying cells, take orders from souring neuronal lives. 

Bodies can house unbidden voices. Bodies can house organs and music. Breaths. Souls and systems. And Lewy bodies house Parkinson’s disease. 

II. Diffusion

Grandfather’s body housed such life and small bodies, spoke things he hadn’t asked of it, moved and uttered its own music. Thumbs drummed against recliner fabric, fingers trilled the lowering murmurs of a slowly emptying water glass. The foot missing two toes gamboled in the air, plied an absent land, a muscled announcement of something still firing.

He’d stashed his scrap iron treasure amid wild ditch weed marijuana, alongside more intentionally greened wheat. He’d affixed mechanisms to vehicles, sprayers to mowers, welded useless gadgets into solutions. He’d made more practical tools for growing and cultivating. He had puzzled. 

The treasure fields emptied the day the farm sold. His hands had drooped, half-covered in coverall pockets, and he wholly removed from the bidders when they let the tractor go for something less than what it took to let the tractor go. The auctioneer’s cadence hurried the severing. 

Such small acreages left.

The plastic toy farmhouse sprawling across his living room floor; this is where we’d sat and scooted sheep across the brown shag carpet and built pigsties suitable for ages three and up. Like standing in the middle of his scrap iron pile: gadgets and possibilities. And always a dinner call—always a time to put it all away. 

The fix-it man unfixed and the dog-eared farmer began to fold. He sunk in. His structure bowed. Bent, lumbering, his shoulders disclosing a weight not in the body, some vacant statements he might not speak. He might not speak.

Upon my asking if he knew me, No, I don’t believe I do. This quiet kind of anxiety.

Moved from his home to a home, his music allayed, his mealtime taps and quavers, his typical dinner accompaniment in the key of weighted utensils. The dulled walls and blankets softened the ruckus, held him in bed with a guardrail, a perfunctory arm shouldering a body against midnight tremors. 

His mattress tracked the body’s stillness. It sank like aged skin, wilting, collapsed in patches of spongy rind, the way, if touched, a thumbprint might remain, a lasting and dying form. His shape remained when a body didn’t, the impression preserved in something like a home, how shape can suggest what lived where. What didn’t.

My mother wrote to me after each visit, wrote the most when he couldn’t remember.

We pulled into the nursing home, he asked why . . . He was completely puzzled. Maybe it’s good that he doesn’t remember where he lives.

He asked for expired homes, for his wife. Skin longed for other skin. 

. . . couldn’t figure out where Mom was . . . thought maybe she might be fed up with him. 

Fabrications made a more comfortable home than the body. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. Reassurance manifested in the body’s slackening, relaxed into the home it once outlined. Said she’s probably talking to someone, that they had been together for over 62 years and that was too long for her to get fed up with him now. 

This expiring song.

III. Excitement

Still, I tell the eyes: close. I tell the heart: slower. I cannot ask the body of its quaking. 

I worry. I worry I am a home, a family share. I am an anxious lack of neural inhibitors, and I am coursing panic waves. I contain nerves. I am nervous, so I can feel still. And unstill.

I am my hands’ shaking. 

I am a body’s singing.

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Selfishly, I Planted Flowers | Rachel Sussman

I planted flowers whose delicate blooms and soft fragrances remind me of you, but what I really miss is your razor-sharp tongue and tart humor. But I can’t grow that, even if you are closer to dirt than to flesh and blood now. Just ash and bones. How is that possible? Even just weeks before you died, your words crackled with life, your texts zinged across miles and miles of land and sea to ping my phone with a jolt of humor and snark. But your body was ebbing, ebbing then, breaking down, and was I selfish to say that you not being dead was still my favorite thing? 

What I mumbled like an incantation (or a rant) to the flower bulbs as I planted them this fall—hands numb from the cold soil, body aching with repetitive labor, mind grateful for the expression of its grief—is that we don’t talk enough about how friendships are, in some sense, the greatest love stories of our lives. There is no altar at which we pledge our undying affection, just a collection of hours and days spent together, our feet tucked underneath us on couches as we tell and retell the stories that make us whole. Or sitting, legs stretched out like an offering to the whining mosquitoes, for hours after dinner on still-humid summer nights, opening our hearts to share all the things we secretly hate. (You can share what you love with almost anyone, but for your scorn, you need a trusted friend.) And I’m grateful to girlhood for the skill of being able to wile away an entire weekend doing nothing but sitting and talking—the light outside shifting gradually, the drinks in our hands changing, the people around us coming and going, while we remain fixed in our spots, cataloging the entirety of our lives, analyzing, considering, meditating. But, without any rite of passage, the years just go by—weekends spent together greedily soaking up as much of each other as we could, months or years spent apart, meaning to call or write, but always in each other’s thoughts—more or less uncounted until somehow they span decades.

Without realizing it, our friendship grew roots so deep and far-ranging that, by the time the call came that you were dead, you were interwoven through every aspect of my life—like a delicate, complex nervous system, ready to activate with the slightest brush. Everywhere I turn I find you again, your memory still filled with so much life and energy that I am almost ashamed.  I wish I could grow you again in my backyard. Reconjure you somehow to recapture another lifetime of conversations, even though I know that’s a selfish wish, too. Your body suffered long and hard, and who am I to wish it anything but rest? 

After you died, people were quick to tell me the things you were like to me—an older sister, a mentor—but I recoiled at them all because friendship was always more than enough. Now I wish I had captured every word we said, every inflection in your voice, every gesture of your hands, every expression of your face. Instead, I’m left with fragmented memories. (I worry I’ve already forgotten too much. I worry I was never good enough to remember.) I remember you standing in your yard, pulling weeds in your pajamas, the morning sun catching off your coke-bottle glasses, which you swore you let almost no one you see wear. I remember the first time you hugged me, surprisingly strong for such a slight body, and isn’t that so you? Surprisingly strong and fierce for just one person. I remember your admonition that I shouldn’t question your habit of keeping chocolate in your bedside table because You never know when you’re going to need some. And it’s true. We should always keep our comforts close at hand. I remember you teaching me to hide terrible children’s books down the back of the couch. Most of all, I remember sitting by your side, your face almost lost in the dark, both of us beyond tired, but not yet ready to say goodnight, your laughter and the sound of your voice, keen and luminous, filling the night. 

I told myself when the flowers come this spring—pushing up from a dormant wait in dark, cold earth, leaves unfurling—I will tell them about you. Into their translucent petals, their delicate heaps of pollen, and their thin stamens, all of which belie their fortitude and strength, I will whisper your name and your stories. And they, in turn, will pass it onto the bees, the rain, the dirt, the seeds, the birds, the clouds, the squirrels, the roots, until there is no corner of nature where your name and life will not be whispered or shouted or burbled or sung—although people may not know to listen for it. 

Now, though, the flowers are finally beginning to show above the soil, like small green spikes of promise. Now the birds are gathering, practicing scales, building, arguing in the tree outside my window. Now there is an insistent hope for spring. 

And I do not want it. I feel a frantic scrabbling in my chest to push it all back down. Not yet, flowers. No more, birds. Wait. Stay dormant. Because when they blossom and pollinate and sing, you will still be gone. And, selfishly, greedily, furiously, I am not ready. 

It doesn’t matter what I say. The hyacinth I planted bloomed today. Little purple flowers that opened like trumpets without any warning. I stopped and stared. I stopped and thought of you, of you, of you. I stopped and wept. I knelt beside the plant in the still frigid dirt and whispered your name. 

Selfishly, I Planted Flowers by Rachel Sussman was selected as the winner of the 2023 HoneyBee Prize in Nonfiction by Hugh Reilly. Here’s what Mr. Reilly had to say about the piece:

“Selfishly I Planted Flowers,” is a lyrical exploration of lifelong friendship. Insightful commentary like, “You can share what you love with anyone, but for scorn you need a trusted friend,” stopped me in my tracks and made me read the line again and savor its power and truth. I thought of my own best friend and what it would be like to lose him. Authentic anecdotes like pulling weeds in your pajamas, help this story ring true. The careful word choice, the judicial use of repetition, and the consistent and memorable metaphor of a flower garden resonate and make this story unforgettable. The final paragraph reminds us that there is a finish, an end to all things, and an inevitable new beginning. Sorrow and hope intertwined.

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Mutation of a Body | Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter

Control taken too far will batter your body. Your slender frame will mutate, bones jutting out beneath loose material. 

Control will be important to you. It will drive you, consume you. Control will be your burden.

You will walk into rooms, jeans barely staying above the hips, concave contours of chest and stomach prominent through tops. And mouths will drop open, eyes wide. You’re sure they are fascinated, jealous of your control.

I’m not so sure.

As chunks of hair fall from your scalp, and your face sinks in, and your body begins to eat its own muscle, leaving dangling flesh, you will be self-righteous with your control.

At twenty-two, your control will drop you, sending you into a coma, shutting down your body. You will wake to warm towels shrouding your face, machines beeping and blipping, family lining the room, and neon light piercing your eyes.

You will spend almost two months in the hospital. most of it remaining a foggy memory.

Eventually, your eyesight will grow dim, the pictures before you faded, no longer crisp and clear. Facial features become a soft haze in your cloudy vision. Your control will find you on your knees, carpet scratching, tears rolling down as the world whittles down to four senses.

Your control will leave you breathless.

The last time you see sunlight, you will be in bed, staring out the window. Dust moats will swirl in the Sunbeams and catch on silver threads in your lilac comforter.

The last time you read a print book, it will be some romance novel; a well-intentioned gift from your parents. Head turned eyes straining, each letter will appear and slide in-and-out of view, like a fish swimming in-and-out of focus.

The last time you see color, your hand will graze along racks of clothes hanging in your closet, colors arranged by shade. A textile rainbow.

The last time you see yourself, you will stand in front of the hall mirror, so close, your breath fogs it. The image an Impressionist rendering. Blonde hair, tanned skin, long limbs will drift off into a haze, your outline softening at the edges, pale and opaque.

The last time you write by hand, it will be in a blue notebook, pen posed between fingers, scribbling invisible words across the page.

Your control will give you the last visual memories you will ever have.

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The Reason You’re Wrong About Wearing Shoes in the House | Mathew Serback

I kept my Jordan’s strapped tight until my ankles were black and blue from the double knot in the laces. Those shoes were the only thing that helped me escape the parabola of poverty I carried with me throughout the house when we had no heat in the winter.

I was ready to get jumped for my Jump Man.

Oh, my – soulless shoes, worn through the middle, decayed like other idols I couldn’t abandon. It was only when I was in those Jordan’s that people paid attention to me.

What a bright future he’s going to have.

I didn’t exist beyond a pair of shoes, which my parents thought were a lifeboat that might get them out of the blocks and blocks of abandoned brick buildings, strip clubs, and dollar stores. I never lost the sense of irony that my Nike Airs took me to the clouds, but they’re also the reason I came back to Earth.

They laugh now when I tell them the banks around here have changed their names so many times I feel like the money is ashamed to be associated with us.

I wonder if they laugh when they see a kid in a pair of those Nike’s circling the park, hoping to make it to the court in time to yell, “I got next.”

I don’t laugh.

I hope. And I hope they do too.

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