A Little More Than Kind
Flash Fiction
by Brian Lynch
I see my mother naked every other Tuesday now. It is the day my sister cannot be there to look after her, when she is not around to walk our terminally tumor-ridden mother up and down the stairs before feeding her brothy soups by the spoonful. It is a day for bathing, for thin washcloths, citrus-scented soaps, and the cable television playing on loud. I balance the small box set on the corner of the bathroom sink, wedge it beneath the vanity mirror, and keep the evening news running on repeat. Rapes, muggings, murders, the uglier the better. I find I need the distraction.
I ignore my mother then as my hands drag across where her old used-up breasts used to be. The skin is wrong there. It is loose and empty, without any weight behind it, and the water slips straight off her front, falls into the tub with several slopping splashes.
My mother twists herself around when I ask her to. She shows me her back, and I think of my sister and about the sort of schedule that could keep her so routinely occupied on Tuesday afternoons. I am thinking, Where would she even?, and with who, and I am beginning to wonder if the curve of her spine goes this same way, if the tracks of it make these same shadowed valleys, what that must feel like to hold from underneath.
I am thinking this way still when I see my sister next. I am looking at her in that same way, seeing how she reaches tip-toe-tall for a glass in the kitchen cabinet, watching her sweatshirt crawl up her stretched-out back and trying to piece it all together from there, the bends and bumps, the shape, the angle of the thing. I am really looking, studying her now, checking for discrepancies and where the skin disappears down to, and my sister says, What? What is it?
It’s not right, I say. I say, I can’t do it anymore. I won’t. I tell my sister that she can’t know what this is like, that I’m losing sleep over it, thinking bad thoughts. I say I’ve stopped having most meals now, started reading the obituaries.
It just happens like this, my sister says, and she tells me it is all of this natural, a part of life. It’s what families do, she says. Don’t you remember Dad with Grandma at the end, my sister says, and I tell her to bring me a drink of water. And fast, I say, because the truth is I remember very little of my father before he left us. I can’t put together his face, or see our first house from the inside, either. I can’t say which rooms went where, how the walls were covered, what the paint looked like in the early morning. I know that backyard, though. I know its green hose hooked up to the spigot behind the garage, its coiled-circle rubber and kinked-up stops, and my sister running through the foot-flattened grass with her swimsuit on, a younger sister then, a sister when our father was still in the picture and she was made of dark hair leaking down the length of her back and long-going legs that showed clean and raw and new in the white sun’s glare.
I know that summer’s heat, the slick of water slipping through my fingers. I know her shiver and splash and squeal.
I run the water too cold in the tub now. I tell my mother one more minute, tops. I say, That’s all. I say, You can handle those parts yourself. My mother wants something else on the TV. She is saying that all this bad in the world will turn us wrong. There is a layer of wet collecting on the screen, a beaded film, and I draw my thumb across the crawl line, smudging it clear. My mother is asking whatever happened to that Shannon of mine. She is wondering out loud about how long it has been since, if that was the last, if there isn’t some nice girl my age I could settle up with.
Grandchildren, she is saying. You and your sister, she says. You would play house with her and her dolls. You did doctor and telephone and all the rest. So many games you made up. So many kids you had you could’ve been rabbits, she says, and I see that there has been a multi-car pile-up on the eastbound Expressway, rush hour, six miles outside of Newark, New Jersey, an 18-wheeler toppled over, ambulances on scene, two lanes shut down, spilled oil, burnt metal, bloody body parts, and it is still not enough. I am thinking still, tracing those lines on a back like mine, and remembering times of Truth or Dare in the dark. I can hear her whispers now, feel her short breaths when she says she won’t, that it’s too far, not fair.
You have to, I told her. It’s the rules, I said. No one is going to know.
About the Author
Brian Lynch is a writer living in New York. He is a fan of Christine Schutt stories, The Killers’ music, and loser sports teams.
About the Artist
Kate Horsley’s illustrations are made from a combination of collage, ink and watercolour paintings and fabric. She has taught photography workshops for a number of years in the UK and France, specialising in alternative processes like wet cyanotype, wetplate collodion, gum bichromate and polaroid emulsion lifts. Kate’s main subject-matter is the natural world and she experiments with handmade botanical inks, prints on birch bark, hand-coloured images, and prints made from leaves, flowers and grasses. Visit Kate’s website here.