Nicole Monaghan

 

It Hits Me

He says he’s going to leave the drips of milk on his chin and laughs his four year old laugh, milk like clingy tears precarious above his good pants.  A memory of something I heard a grieving mother say on Oprah pokes me like a plastic sword in the back, unexpected.  She said she missed his dirty-little-boy smell, the odor of him when he came in after playing outside, a mix of dirt and sweat and residue from the day. She’d never smell it again, and she sobbed.  I’d gotten it somewhere inside me at twenty or twenty-one, childless then, but not in my gut the way I do right now.  I’m looking at the drips of milk on his chin, knowing they’ll be a part of his dirty-little-boy smell later, knowing I’ll sniff him into me ravenous.
    
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Nicole Monaghan recently received First Prize Honors at the 62nd Annual Philadelphia Writers' Conference for Flash Fiction, Literary Short Story, and Creative Nonfiction.  Her work appears or is forthcoming in PANK, DOGZPLOT, Literary Mama and several other fine journals.  She blogs regularly about flash at http://www.writenic.wordpress.com, where she keeps links to her publications.

Jeannette Angell

Forgetting

And now I’m remembering the words, hot and
angry, that preceded the acts, not important
in themselves but wrapping

around me like a vine that chokes
off the new growth of the tree beneath.
I wonder at how easy it is to forget, my mother

sitting miserable in her bedroom drinking
sherry and wishing she’d had a
different life, a better life and

I see you now frightened, the fear
swirling in the bruised landscape all around
us. And wonder if you’ll ever be able to do it, to forget

what happened or if you, too, will grow
miserable and find your solace
in playing the martyr, in a bottle of something so

refined one could be forgiven for thinking
 it’s not alcoholism at all. I believed her words, that
it was my fault, always my fault, so it’s not

surprising (I tell myself) that I found others
who would make me feel that way too. That is the
past, now, but bruised me like the land

all around us, so I find it extraordinary that
the mind allows people
to forget. Perhaps it’s for the best; perhaps

if I remembered I too would have the door closed and
the bottle out. I don’t know;
I know only that since I came to the end of the world
                                                              I have healed.

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Jeannette Angell is a novelist, playwright, and poet who lives and writes in an old sea captain's house in North Truro village, at the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. More information at www.JeannetteAngell.com.

Melody Feldman

 

Provocation

When we had sex, and it was sex not making love like in the movies he watched on the 22” in my living room, he kissed the areas of my body that no one else touches, the base of my throat, the curve of my clavicle, the arc of my hipbone, the jutting of my knee.


“What happened?” The doctor asks, pulling the skin from the wound.

I cut myself on a broken bottle.  I don’t tell her that I lay in the street after his car had rounded the corner praying that a truck would come and slice my torso in half.

The doctor writes a prescription.  “Take these, and come back in a week and we’ll remove the stitches.”

“Will it scar?” I ask.

“Yes.”    

“Good.”


At night I stand in the mirror, and I count the bones of my spine, from my scalp, to the end of the S curve on my back. I pray for a break, for a pain, for a snap, for a burn.  I lay my cheek against the cold stone of the floor, until sleep comes.


“What happened?” The doctor asks.  He has sea green eyes that smile gently.

The knife slipped when I was cutting tomatoes, I tell him.  I don’t tell him about the cool of the metal or about the thin red line that formed, the pain that seared through my abdomen.

This doctor reads my records and his eyes are darken.   “I’ll prescribe you some painkillers, but you were here just a few weeks ago.”

“I’m naturally clumsy.”

He hands me the prescription. “Be careful.  If you take too many you won’t be able to feel anything.”

“I don’t feel anything anyway.”


At night I drive to his house. I sit in my car, and imagine standing on his front porch, my fist pounding hard until he opens the door. But I don’t get out, and I drive off, the windows down, the cool air drawing goose bumps on my arms.


“What happened?” The doctor asks.
 
I fell down my stairs.   I don’t tell him how my feet gave out at the top, how I lay at the bottom until the postman called the ambulance.

This time there is an IV drip and I sleep through the night, and in the morning the doctor comes. “We can release you today.”  He pauses.  “You’ve been here three times in the past two months.”

I say nothing and the doctor says something about talking to someone and places a business card on the table.

A nurse comes to wheel me out, my neighbor parked in the garage, her car door open.  The nurse hands me the business card and the prescription.

My neighbor drives and I roll the window down, and drop the business card into the air, watching the paper fly behind us as we turn down the street towards my home.

I have to find a new Emergency Room.


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Melody Feldman received her MFA in Fiction from Fairleigh Dickinson University where she was the assistant editor of the Literary Review. Her short story, Pie, won the 2008 Fulton Prize for Fiction from The Adirondack Review. She has also had work published in 34th Parallel, Perceptions, Gloom Cupboard, and elsewhere.

S.C. Morgan

—Photo, WWII Dog Tags, courtesy Wikimedia

Dog Tags

My uncle, Elliot R. Corbett, was one of those who fell at the Battle of the Bulge, fought over an 80-mile stretch from Belgium to Luxembourg from Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945. It was the largest land battle involving American Forces in World War II. More than a million Allied troops fought in the battle; more than 19,000 troops were killed.

I never met my uncle Yottie, as my mother always referred to him, but I gather he was a charmer. I’ve seen pictures of a dark, curly-haired man grinning for the camera as he stands easily next his horse, reins in hand. He was a handsome and easy going man who loved the out of doors. I understand he had a girlfriend before he was drafted, or enlisted, but no one in my family seems to know what became of her after Yot’s death.

Apparently, he tried to join the 10th Mountain Division to fight alongside his brother, Alfred, but the Army refused his application.  According to my mother, he was sent without training of any kind. Like so many, he ended up as cannon fodder in the European theatre. Alfred came home. Yottie did not.

But the Battle of the Bulge happened five years before I was born, so all this may seem like old history, and it is, but yesterday my 92-year-old mother wrote to say that a woman contacted her several weeks ago, wanting to know if my mother was a relative of Elliot Corbett. Yes, she said, she was his sister. The woman said, the Army will contact you shortly. Four days later the Army called to say they were sending some articles for the family.

After Yot’s death my grandfather, with help from his political friends, established the Elliot R. Corbett Memorial State Park, located off US Highway 20, fourteen miles west of Sisters, Oregon. It is mountainous country and the park is only accessible by foot. I have hiked there among Ponderosa, sage and wetlands and felt a kinship with the uncle I never knew. It is a living testament to Yot’s love of nature.

This week, true to their word, a small package from the US Department of Defense arrived in McMinnville, Oregon. In it were some papers from my grandfather assuring the Army that his son should be buried in the Margraten cemetery in the Netherlands, some official forms, and documents.

And, Yottie’s dog tags. Sixty-five years after his death. His dog tags. Where have these things been all this time, and what do we do with them now?

I just finished reading a book by Craig Childs about artifacts and the conundrum of where they belong and to whom they should be entrusted. Childs’ view is that they are best left where they were found; it gives the land a sense of history. As he points out, an artifact can outlive you, your children, and your grandchildren, so once they are in your possession the responsibility is enormous.

My mother asked me what I thought she should do with the dog tags. I told her I didn’t know. But what I thought was, I want to hold them for a moment’s reflection and then fling them onto the field where he died.

That is where they belong.

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S.C. Morgan grew up in Oregon, where she learned not everything is black and white. Now she lives in the jungles of Costa Rica where shades of gray cover the full spectrum. She writes because she can't help herself. Sometimes she gets published. You can read more of her work at http://www.scmorgan.com/