by Roppotucha Greenberg
Pamela, my daughter, doesn’t come because she isn’t into graves lately (or Wordsworth or her maths homework), which is a shame. It’s been a year and I’ve grown a nice kitchenette beside the headstone. You know the way it is. At first, you seep. You squelch through the dark, straining at every molecule in your path. You’re so slow the dandelion seeds are mocking you. It’s dark, but they’re right behind the nearest clod of earth: hard, alive, busy growing. You crawl upwards, and you’re less than the puffs of gas you use for transport, less than the particles that giggle in tiny galaxies. Once you reach the surface, you know everything: how to stay quiet, how to stir translucent tea in an invisible cup, and how to grow non-places around you.
I have a kitchenette, and I’ve had to get a couple of rooms. When that daughter of mine finally shows up, she can pick those two up. They’re hard work. I have the big one washing clothes. She’s stubborn and dissipates all the time.
‘But why’, she says as she rattles the washboard. ‘why, why?’
I don’t know. It happened. One moment I was walking home and next I was seeping like gas.
‘Why, why.’
‘That’s good. Keep scrubbing, and never mind your why.’
I did have trouble focusing. They said: ‘ground yourself, count ten things around you’, and I did: two magpies for joy, two shoes on the wire, three glass shards on the ground, one truck… Maybe I was too present. Or maybe it’s nothing, not a dose of dying at all but a touch of lostness, a drop of a snake-skin. The real me might still be out there counting.
I have the little one studying in the front-room. What she doesn’t know, she looks up and copies out neatly. That dictionary, it’s bigger than her, and the words are tricky: radiance, antiferromagnetism, splendour. But I have to keep them busy or they turn into grey light, and then what will she say.
I didn’t name them because they’re both Pamela, escapees from the big day. There’s more arriving every week, but not full-size: stick insect girls with messy hair and claws for hands, brittle little soulkins, cast-offs of untrained grief, good only for chopping ephemerous salad. I’ve crafted big canvas bags; they’d fit in nice and snug; she could even take them all in one go.
She’s too busy being sad that’s what it is. Or perhaps she never noticed the old snake-skin. I’m here ghosting, and she is still squabbling. Or else, she got tired of all the runaways, shook them all off, and changed away.
If she came, I’d say ‘Take it easy. Nothing stops. It’s just more work.’ That’d cure her grief. Or else, I’ll teach her to mourn, show her the young ones in the back room. That’ll set her straight, keep her safe from changing.
I’ve taken up smoking. It’s not like the real thing, more like vaping or herbal cigarettes, but I need some me-time. I find little jobs for those two, sneak behind the headstone, and light up. The sky’s turning, pulling at me, and I nearly slip into the clouds. In spring, they are piled high above the pools of light. And I must grab on to the earth or I’ll fall head-first into the blue, through the icy mirrors, past all the startled birds.
Roppotucha Greenberg is the author of a flash and micro-fiction collection Zglevians on the Move (TwistiT Press, 2019) and two silly-but-wise doodle books for humans, Creatures Give Advice (2019) and Creatures Give Advice Again and it’s warmer now (2019).
Links to her published stories can be found here: https://roppotucha.blogspot.com/p/short-stories.html
Her many rejections can be found on this tree: https://roppotucha.blogspot.com/p/rejection-tree.html
(And for more Roppotucha, check out her Elephants Never Fret, or our review of Creatures Give Advice. – Elephants Never)