Short story writing and creative fiction, essays and non-fiction stories.

Nancy was telling Tom about her friends who recently adopted a baby from a Russian orphanage.

“The poor thing,” Nancy said over her dinner plate, “she’s been so neglected. If you play peek-a-boo with her she cries because she thinks you’ve gone away. Can you imagine? Those people put that baby in a crib and let her stare at the ceiling for 6 months. But Ginny and Brad are determined to help her developmentally. Obviously, she’s got some problems.”

Tom slowly chewed his salad. “How can you tell?” he said with a mouthful.

“How can I tell they are determined? Because they told me. You should see them. They are so in love with that child!”

“No. I mean, how can you tell she has problems? She’s Russian, right?”

“Yes she’s Russian. And it’s pretty obvious she has problems. Even the doctors said.”

Tom shook his head and wiped his mouth. “Nancy, I don’t know if you’ve ever met a Russian before, but they’re all developmentally disabled. They are easily the most remote, underhanded, inhospitable people I’ve ever been around. I hate to generalize about an entire ethnicity, but the kid’s probably just a typical Russian, that’s all.”

Nancy stared at him. Her fork was frozen in mid-air, halfway between her plate and her mouth. Finally, she said: “You hate to generalize.”

Tom kept eating and nodded. “Yep. Hate it.”

“You’re a sonofabitch,” she said.

“What? Why?”

“You can’t even be happy for them. It’s too much to ask, isn’t it? You’re too selfish and mean spirited.”

“Look, Nancy, I know what this is about . . .”

“No you don’t! You hate Russians – shut up! You hate children!”

“I don’t hate them. I just don’t want them.”

“Christ! I’m done with this relationship,” Nancy said, pushing away from the table.

“Good! Then I can stop hearing your pathetic stories about Brad and Ginny and their retarded daughter!”

She stormed out of the room, crying. Tom heard the bedroom door slam, and he leaned back in his chair.

The racket started again. This was how it went every time. Nancy was throwing stuff around the room and shrieking. He heard the lamp shatter against the wall.

Tom turned in his seat and yelled at the door:

“It’s not just Russians, Nancy! I also hate the Irish! You hear me? The fucking Irish, too!”

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“You could rip a piece of paper into a hundred thousand million pieces and you still would have no idea,” she told me on that lonely Autumn day when we both felt the first winter chill creep in.

“You could burn up all the grass and all the fields of Calvin Coolidge High School into smoldering ash, and you wouldn’t have a clue.”

We were lying in the biggest pile of leaves in the neighborhood, a pile we had raked ourselves (at her father’s gentle suggestion), lying head to head as she finally poured it all out.

“You could pick all the most beautiful flowers, wrench them from the comfort of their homes, and throw them off the highest cliff, watch them fall into the abyss to be forgotten, and you would never really know.”

She had just turned fifteen two weeks ago; I was still stuck behind at fourteen with months ahead of me. We had known each other for eight years, since we first poked fun at each other on the playgrounds of first grade, and here she was, telling it like it is.
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I guzzled the last beer from the mini-fridge, slammed the empty can on the bar, and crushed it with my sledge hammer.

Melissa hated my man-cave. It was no surprise that, when her father died, she announced we’d be converting my only place of escape into a suite for her mother. Separate from the house, the space over our two-car garage would be perfect: it was plumbed, had heat, A/C, satellite TV. It was perfect – for me. Melissa didn’t see it that way.

“My father loved that room and you know he wanted mom to live with us when he died.”

“He wouldn’t want her living in the man-cave!”

“Ugh. Your man-cave…there’s nowhere else.” That was the end of the argument.

To convert the space into an apartment meant adding two walls and razing the bar – my beautiful, perfectly designed, one-of-a-kind bar. Demolition was miserable. Waves of grief wracked me with every swing of the sledgehammer. I pleaded with God, with my deceased father-in-law, with any invisible power: please, take this burden from me!

Unknown to me until I’d opened it with the sledge, the wall on which I’d built the backsplash for the bar counter wasn’t structural – it floated six inches from the framing of the outside wall of the garage. The space was curious, but the door I exposed in the outside wall was just senseless. The doorknob had a Batman emblem etched into it. It turned easily. Swinging silently out onto the landing of a dark, narrow stairwell, the door seemed somehow more and less impossible.
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At the cold end of Spring, young shoots pierce the hearts of autumn flowers.

You’ll be sitting out in T-shirts by the end of the month, you say, and we all pretend not to believe you, telling each other how, surely, this winter has an Arctic tenacity that surpasses any previous years.

You have punctuated our time with your sayings. I could set the calendar by you, marking the seasons as surely as the virgin notes of “Once In Royal David’s City” mark the lighting of the candles on Christmas Eve.

It might be the last nice day of the year, you say, admonishing those who fester indoors on glorious days. In our climate, there’s always the chance that you’re right. You still recall the triumphant time you said it on the last day of December. One milestone year, the children didn’t laugh and clamour at this memory, but rolled their eyes up to the ceiling. You said wasn’t it great to see them growing up, but we knew that Great-Granddads’ joke had somehow become a way that they were leaving you behind.

Now you sit, left, wrapped in a blue throw that Steven and I bought to protect the sofa when the children were babies. Despite our planning, four childhoods almost over are told in stains on the sofa’s pale fabric, so badly chosen. Milk, vomit and blood are succeeded by ink, Ribena and the seeped bodily fluids of a hamster, mourned in state for an afternoon on an all too porous square of tissue. Adult stains as well: my red wine, your spilled medicine.

It’s an odd setup, but it worked for us, for years. Steven dead, you alive but struggling. Right and fitting, said those who wanted to avoid the burden of you. The same people who avoided the burden of me, years before, when you were the one taking me in.

The old make way for the young, you say, as I help you into your coat. It’s meant to comfort me, but neither of us believe in that one. We’ve both seen too much of the young making way for the old.

So many things happened the wrong way round. They shall not grow old… While we repeat our wordless phrases, meaning everything and nothing.

They arrive in a square car, daffodil yellow, with the hospice logo in green.

The days are on the turn, we all agree.

Spring forward, fall back, you say.

The children form a guard of honour at the door. They hand you your stick and hat as if girding you for battle, and you straighten visibly as you grasp them.

“If you’ll just turn round this way, Mr Hannon…”, says the nurse.

Like a tap, you smile. Righty tighty. Lefty Lucy.

Your hand guiding the back of my bike, at the warm end of Spring, a dappling spin of wheels past swathes of daffodils. Loosening your grip, as I grew steadier. Teaching me the difference between left and right.

Mandy Taggart is a new writer from the North Coast of Ireland

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She slept like a comma under the comforter; he slept like a corpse on top. She was open like sunflowers; he retreated like a shrinking one. They were both still young. She believed in language; he believed in numbers. Five years ago, language and numbers merged and became a unifying bridge.

When he was away on business, she still slept on her side. She couldn’t move into the space that was his even when it was empty. One night, she woke up on his side of the bed. Her dream had been all mixed up that night. She dreamt of a field of headless stems, and a lone sunflower with her husband’s face in the center, smiling.

When he returned home, she wanted to experiment. So they switched sides.

In the morning, she saw him sleeping like a corpse.

He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked.

“The same.”

“Did it feel different on my side?”

“No. Everything is the same.”

“Why don’t you try a different position?”

“I’ve been sleeping like this my whole life,” he said. “ Habits don’t change over night.”

“Is it comfortable to sleep flat on your back like a dead man?”

“My body likes to breathe and it’s not good for the spine to sleep in a curved position,” he replied.

She had nothing to say. All she could think was that she’d risk a curved spine any night over the sharp air that outlines a corpse.

Brittany Michelson’s short prose is published in Flashquake, Sleet Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Glossolalia, and other online journals. She lives in Los Angeles.

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