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.
    
CP

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.

Nicole Monaghan

New Age

I threw out the bent wand, the mangled pompoms, the sparkly belts. I tossed the beaded purse, like I was taking a free-throw shot, and it went in. I chucked the mesh skirt, its matching tunic, the transparent little shoes. I didn’t want them.

My sixteen-year-old daughter, still with the face she had at twelve was peeing again, pregnant. We’d get through it. She was smart, we had money. College would not be sacrificed. We were figuring out the logistics. My husband was grieving his little girl, but he would not turn his back on her. The boy was decent. They were not so stupid as to plan to marry yet, if ever.

She came out of the bathroom and rubbed her eyes. For one second, she was eight or nine again, a groggy girl about to hurry for the bus. But in a flash, she was thirty or forty, a woman with old wounds.

“Mom?”

“Morning, Sweetheart. How do you feel?”

I was tightening the drawstring neckline of the trash bag, satisfied to bring it outside.

“I think I had a miscarriage.”

CP

Nicole Monaghan loves words and finds inspiration everywhere. Her work has appeared in Foundling Review and is forthcoming in Long Story Short.