Flash Fiction Contest
Second Prize
Like Paper Snow
Nicole Louise Reid

This is where her body was when I was three and you were seven. This is where you stood and I stepped in the heat of the tiles by her mouth—her breath gone only seconds but gone.

This is where I kneeled to touch her lips. Do you remember the way I used to wake you, or say goodnight or say a thing at all? My fingers over a mouth, didn’t matter whose—the mailman, your best friend Lou, Mother. Her thin lips sweat-warm, brittle, I think, though I wouldn’t have known how to say a thing other than like paper snowflakes blown wide and worn at the snippings for the vent beneath pushing heat against January’s newness.

So you stood and I knelt and pressed one hand to Mother and came away feeling I might damage her with my want coming through so hard. Even so, I’d no idea the trace of blood cornering her lips, beginning to find the lost cheek, was for my squeezing at her, was for all the ways panic began there in me and breathes here still.

To know which morning is the dream—that yellow halting years ago or nearly every woken day since—I've come back to this small, white room of washing and waiting. Here, where the water was just right and she held Blueberries for Sal safely dry from her perch on the toilet, I could not be still and splashed until she promised we would keep a baby bear if we ever found one stray and wandering our hillside woods.

I don’t remember her fits. Those, I just don’t have in me. Not like you with her walking dreams, their tremors and aching. I think I’d still switch lots with you: those bits of her rotting brain for my such quiet sleep. I have to wonder I ever knew her at all.

Kitchen dinners standing, rockfish from Daddy’s cooler, her in ballet slippers showing you pirouettes and grand battements. These I have. But these I may as well have come across in her old album, their sepia and suspension—I’m nowhere in these, not even the painter dipping his brush, choosing and swirling the red of her dress. My first three years don’t exist. Just the warmth of the tile under her mouth. Just my toes tucked under her chin, my fingers to her impossible face. That you stood behind me but I know on that morning—you in your p.j.s, I in just undies and Daddy’s big shirt, my hand over your sleeping lips minutes before because I was restless, always, then, such a restless sleeper—that while you stood and I kneeled, while I touched her to wake and you were quiet, in the time her air took to drift across our toes, you stood behind me in the last peace and wore her face. Her rosy threads of vein crazing the rim of your nose, half her own mother’s chin tucked under Daddy’s careful jaw in you, her thin voice lodging high at the back of your throat.

So it is right I have so little, now, of this early sun and January falling around us like last breathing.

You, here, in her house eat standing in her kitchen. And when your own boy falls heavily to the sofa-bed that I may take our old room (only in safe visit) and splash my shower to the cold tiles, I sometimes forget that this is where her body was when I was three and you were seven and I woke you both pushing bruise to your lips.

 

Author’s Note

Nicole Louise Reid is the author of the novel In the Breeze of Passing Things (MacAdam/Cage, 2003). Her stories and poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, Black Warrior Review, Confrontation, turnrow, New Orleans Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Grain. She is the winner of the 2001 Willamette Award in Fiction, and has also won awards from the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Short Story Competition, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Society, and Glimmer Train. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana.