Horsebroken

by Meg Pokrass | Oct 14, 2024 | flash fiction

Handcuffs 

On the way to see our boy in the detention centre I was wearing invisible handcuffs. “Don’t try to make them like you this time,” my husband said. He was talking about the guards. The bus lurched and my lunch wanted to become free of its cage. A sense of humor was what I once loved about him, but now, any time I made a joke, it shocked him. The bus was our chapel. We grew silent because we didn’t want anyone else to hear us. There were other parents on the bus. Every time we wound up that road, we were on the way to see our son, who used to love staring at horses in the fields. 

Horse

When our son was younger, he wanted to be a horse. “I don’t want to be the kind that lives behind a wire fence,” he said. “I want to be the kind that knows where it belongs.” We didn’t know things then, and our hearts were broken every day we couldn’t afford what we wanted for him. It was the year my husband and I lost our jobs, and the neighbor’s car backed over my foot, and our son said he didn’t want to ride to school anymore without a horse. Every day, he wore a uniform, the same sweatshirt and hood. When teachers demanded to see his face, they said, that hood comes off, or you don’t come back tomorrow.

Uniform

My uniform was a pair of jeans and a David Bowie t-shirt my old best friend gave me before she stopped calling because I didn’t pick up the phone even though it would have done me some good. There was a secret chapel I handcuffed myself to at night, and I talked to the bones of my foot, and I asked the foot to please behave like a limb again. “It’s not like you’re always going to be broken in two,” I said, and then laughed at myself because what kind of mother talked to her foot in the dark?

Wire Fence

After they caged our son, my husband erected a real wire fence around the front yard as a way to ward off more unseen problems. “That’s a bit extreme,” I said, but now he seemed to believe in doing whatever it took to make things right. He bought a pair of handcuffs from a sex catalogue, and we tried them out one night, hoping to bring sex back into our lives and knowing that we couldn’t be overheard. “All I’m asking tonight is that you stop acting heartbroken,” he said. I tried to feel slippery and young for him but it wasn’t happening. Finally, he unlocked me, and we lay in bed naked, staring at the ceiling. “Let’s just stop worrying,” I said. “Us, worry?” he said because sometimes he had the old sense of humor back.

Chapel

They had our son in the detention centre because he broke into a riding equipment store, stolen a number of saddles and bridles, left his fingerprints everywhere, and when the police came out, he blew air out of his lips like an angry horse. On the bus, my husband and I talked about how this was a temporary condition that all of us had fallen into. “Like a curse after the car ran over my foot,” I said, and meant it. There was the small chapel at the detention center, but none of the parents were ever in it. We were trying to remember the type of horse our son liked best. “The type with the freckles on its back, I think,” I said.  We couldn’t remember the breed of this horse. The roads were wet, and the bus driver was trying to break the ice. “Slippery day, folks,” he said. 

Heart Broken

In the chapel, we sat there feeling heartbroken, and then suddenly, we both started to laugh. About time, I thought, but didn’t say. It was a tiny, damp outbuilding, with only six pews. “I doubt God is hanging around here much,” my husband giggled with wetness in the corners of his eyes. I imagined presenting our son with a spotted horse. How he would smile at me like the child he once was. He would ride into the future, and we would wave as if to say, we’ll miss you, but we know you’ll do great and come back happy. 

Slippery

The day he was released, we went home on the bus, my son’s suitcase next to us on its side. He was quiet as we rode past the farms, and he didn’t look out the window. “There are your horses,” I wanted to say as he stared at my extra-large shoe. I stared at his eyes as if they were caught there. “The walking is going a bit better,” I lied because I still used a cane. He no longer had on a hood and his bare head looked too tender without it. I said, “We have a surprise for you waiting at home.” This was true. We’d rescued a dog found in the field near our house. We thought it might help all of us, even if the road remained potholed. My son kissed me on the forehead as if I were his freckled horse, as if, for the first time, he felt he could talk to me about the accident. “Mom, I prayed for you in that stupid chapel,” he said, as if we had always been handcuffed to each other, but it felt good.

 Where I Come From . . .

by Sudha Balagopal | Oct 3, 2024 | flash fiction

the house had jasmine bushes that scented the backyard, veiling the odors from our rubbish bins. It’s where my sisters screeched with laughter every time I read the lines “Sing Mother Sing, Can Mother Sing, Mother Can Sing,” from The Radiant Reader because our Ma had the voice of a man, where, when Ma answered the phone, callers thought she was Pa who died years ago, and where Ma forced us to drink Ovaltine or Bournvita or Horlicks until we turned ten, eleven, thirteen and begged for tea―ginger forward, sugar heavy, milk-thick.

Where I come from, the house had decorative cracks snaking across the bedroom walls, one shaped like the map of Australia, one like the United States, one like Brazil, but none like our state, Maharashtra, or our country, India. It’s where my sisters and I giggle-whispered that someday we’ll travel to farflung places like New York, Canberra, and London as we huddled under our blankets and listened to distant, static-crackly radio stations—BBC, Voice of America, and Radio Australia―and where we attempted to imitate the different accents, mastering none, making a kachumber of the English language. 

Where I come from, the house had many nooks and crannies into which we folded ourselves when Ma chased us―with a broom―to make us complete our homework. It’s where we retreated to the downstairs storeroom, by the buckets and mops, to share secrets and heartbreaks, where Ma caught me one night, jumping out of the broken window dressed in a sequined salwar and high heels to attend a wedding with Rishi, dragged me into the kitchen, triple-slapped my cheek, left-right-left, and said, “He’s just playing with you!” and, where I stamped my foot in frustration and screamed, “Any mother is better than you.”

Where I come from, obedient girls like my older sisters married the men Ma picked, one went to Sydney the other San Francisco, while I provided fodder for nosey neighbors who likely gossip-chattered about me, anointing me as the “runaway girl” because I fled home after leaving a note by the storeroom window. From where Rishi and I took the night train to anonymous Mumbai to blend with the multitudes, where, after a couple of years, Rishi took off for Dubai with a secretary in his office while I scrimp-saved-scrimp-saved, raised my son alone, longing for Ma, for her Ovaltine/Bournvita/Horlicks, her manly voice, and I call my sister’s place in Sydney because Ma had moved there, because I wanted to apologize, only to have my sister tell me, “You’re too late.”        

Where I come from, there’s no Ma I can hug now, no Ma I can beg for tea―ginger forward, sugar-heavy, milk-thick―no Ma I can introduce to my son. It’s where there are no screeching sisters, no jasmine bushes, no smelly rubbish bins, no walls with maps of faraway countries, no nooks, no crannies, no storerooms, no mops, no buckets, no broken windows, where the neighborhood’s shiny-new road signs and imposing multi-storied apartment buildings stand tall like disdainful sentinels mocking the piece of land that was once our humble abode, and where I sit on the rubble, excavating, sorting and gathering memories, so I can tuck them inside my heart, carry them to the place I today call home.

Whirlwing Daughter

by Phoua Lee | Sep 30, 2024 | flash fiction

eggrolls should be rolled tight. they taste better that way & men like them like that too but Ntxawm is thinking about girls & one time one asked to hold hands during a school field trip. & one time at school is asked about what or who she masturbates to & at home is asked why no boys like her but all she can think about is tight eggrolls & their glass noodle insides, how they’re packed then thrown into bubbling oil. & girls, she’s thinking about girls. their insides. the thrust into the world that breaks them. there will be an alive girl & just one time Ntxawm will let the girl kiss her without overthinking it. it will happen at the hmong new year’s festival in the triangle shade of a papaya salad stall, a current of red goldfish staining their teeth. the static bubbles over & her skin tingles. all she thinks about is how another person can swallow you but still make you feel so whole. now she knows for sure but uncertainty still sits in her stomach like graveyards that can never really leave her. they will clasp hands and balloon through the crowded alleyway of booths, dip under hanging plushies & silver lock xauv & chip-toothed grannies humming over mugwort & dried bark. their ball toss will be magical because who says a ball toss must be between boys & girls. briefly she will weigh the peony-embroidered ball in her hand, and in the next, it’ll be eating air, rainbowing into girl’s hand. like passing words between tongues. she will return to mom just in time for the upcoming stage performance of a folk dance & mom will say, “i saw a girl who looks like you.” her heart will stutter but mom will continue, “but her ankles were slimmer & men wooed her with earrings” & Ntxawm will reach up to pinch her smooth earlobe. twenty girls parasol onstage, their pear blossom skirts beating back wolf whistles & “hot damn i can see under her skirt.” suddenly Ntxawm can feel her legs, how they stick to the wooden bench. suddenly twenty girls onstage metamorphose into forty legs & she can’t stop looking & guilt bubbles up thick and hot like wheatfields. the sky heartburns over & it’s time to go home. the moon is a wheel tonight & it is a watermill at the back of her throat, dredging bits and pieces unrecognizable but so much like laughter that she’s buoyant off it. she chases bb bullets with her teen cousin who disappeared after he was outed, afternoon light mosaic-ing his face into a lantern that eats the light then holds it. there he is, the kick of his heel. the tell of his elbow. there it is, the mountains, saddlebacked with wax flowers, the one he will soon noose & throw over his shoulder. where are you? where did you go? where & where, where—he goes riding with the wind, slicing through fish belly light. throws over his shoulder: “i know too & really we’re all just waiting for you to say it.” years later his body will float up cold. she wonders if it was the love that did him in, so full of it he sunk & if he’s floating now she hopes that means he got to take it with him. aunts & uncles will welcome him home one last time. he comes back the same way he left: eyes closed, only this time without tears. mom receives a midnight phone call, a distressed auntie blabbering: “i saw his ghost, standing under the bridge. i swear i saw it, his chest traffic-light red like a fiend.” that’s only half-true. on a corduroy night, in a house folded into the corners of small town america, Ntxawm receives a midnight phone call. his voice statics like electric rain: go chasing the wind. you have seen the newborn sun. she guesses that ghosts appear to you the way that you love them.

Cold At First

by Hannah Grieco | Sep 26, 2024 | flash fiction

After signing the divorce papers, I get in my car and drive the three hours to my sister’s house. I can smell the ocean from her driveway as soon as I open my door. “Yes, Jesus, thank you,” Beth says when I offer to take Nelly and Grandma to the beach. It’s freezing, even now in late April, and Beth laughs when I complain, tells me, “You’re just not used to it. That’s how the people and the water are in Maine – cold at first.” I grab Nelly’s coat and hat, picture moving here, something I’ve thought about ever since I held her in the hospital four years ago while Beth slept, cradled that tiny baby and knew I’d never have my own. At the beach, I follow Nelly to the water’s edge. She points at a huge boulder and begs to swim out there, not that she could swim in the forty-degree water, even with floaties on. Grandma begins to pick her way over the rocks. “Beth is usually too busy to bring us here,” she calls, but it isn’t a grievance, just something that is, like the wet mist turning her hair limp as she pats it, or the slow, careful way she has to navigate the rocky section before reaching the sand, knowing a slip might break her.

James is a thousand years ago now. “Good,” Beth said when I called her, crying, the night he left. So simple for her, like when she caught her husband sleeping around. “Fuck those fuckers,” she said that night, whispering it in my ear again today as she handed me a cup of coffee. I love her as much as I hate how she towers over me like a tidal wave. But maybe she could teach me. Maybe if I moved here, I’d swim in the ocean every morning. Maybe I’d learn to love the sharp bite of cold and find the patience to wait for the burning heat that comes next. Or maybe I’d just walk the wet sand every morning and accept that this is me, like grandma, who stayed married for fifty-seven years to a man who barely spoke. “He never hugged me, not once,” Mom told us at his funeral. Grandma joins me by the water, finally through the rocks and on to the soft smush at the tide’s edge. She takes off her shoes, digs her pale ghost toes in the sand. Nelly throws fistfuls of pebbles into the water, shouting, “Eat these, sea! Eat these!” and grandma smiles, reaches down to pick up a cracked shell. “Eat this, too!” she shouts and tosses it into a small wave at her feet. I squat, scoop wet clumps of sand and rocks and shells, throw them in, scattered splashes like tiny fish jumping. A shallow wave soaks my shins and butt before I can scoot back.
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“Eat this, too,” I whisper.

Originally published in Perhappened.