Audio: Child Whom I Have Loved

Child Whom I Have Loved (MediaFire download)
by Stephanie Morris
Read by the author

Duration: 6:05
File Size: 7 MB

Summary: A woman finds herself trapped between the memory of her niece in childhood and the stark reality of the woman her niece has become.

I've recently been reading about the art of the flash fic: short-short stories that fit a beginning, middle, end, and Falcon Punch into 1000 words or less. The prospect of squeezing stories into such a confined space struck me, initially, as terrifying - I like my legroom. But legroom has its costs - I can ramble on for pages and never reach the end. Clearly, if I ever expect to publish my work, nonexistent endings are an issue I must address.

I had an opportunity to write a flash fic for a contest a few days ago. I chose an aspiring short story that had floundered into incoherence somewhere around page twenty and took a scythe to it. I cut, slashed, and hacked my way down to its heart and emerged, hours later, covered in verbiage and triumphant. I had pared 6,000 + words down to a little less than 1500 - and yet, this was not enough. On day two, I reevaluated my approach and took my scythe to the story again.

The final draft was 997 words long. Triumph! I submitted and won third place. The whole thing was a much needed boost to my ego, :)

The full text of "Child Whom I Have Loved" can be read below the cut.

Child Whom I Have Loved

by Stephanie Morris

It’s raining when we reach the airport. There’s a woman in tailored slacks watching my friend Paul’s weathered pickup from beneath her umbrella.

“That her?” Paul asks.

I say, “Oh my sweet Jesus.”

Paul grunts, “That girl’s gotten tall.”

My first thought is that I don’t know my niece Felicity anymore. She isn’t a girl. She’s over six feet in her pumps and she smells like cinnamon, grown-up. She stoops to hug me and says, “Hello, Aunt Winnie,” in a smooth, heavy voice. She’s all made up of slender muscle and faintly-perfumed clothes; the strength of her embrace feels strange.

She fends off Paul’s hug with a handshake. When he says, “Welcome home, girl!” she retorts, “I live in D.C., Mr. Gilbert.”

She has to squeeze into the truck between us with her knees spread around the stick shift and her travel bag in her lap. Her umbrella drips rainwater onto my dress. She shuts her eyes on the drive back home, says she’s gotten so used to driving these days that riding makes her nauseous. I want to hug her.

But I can’t reconcile the woman beside me with the impish smile and chubby face of the little girl I’d been expecting. The cinnamon scent of her skin is drowning out my little Felicity, who smelled of rosemary and spring grass, who combed my hair as I told her stories.

--

She used to say, “Tell me about when you and Daddy ran into that cottonmouth in the drainage ditch.”

Paul’s truck lumbers past the Collins Family Farm. The stink of rotting peaches, the sight of that listing fence, with its chicken wire bent shapeless by neglect and its backdrop of an orchard run to seed, makes me think of how Mama used to take my brother Sterling and me peach picking when we were small. It was always hot enough to turn the well water sweet, hot enough to make me and Sterling and the seven Collins kids gasp in rivers of our own sweat as we dashed barefoot through the orchard, our baskets rubbing bruises into our forearms.

I say to her now, chuckling, “You remember that story bout the cottonmouth?”

“Mmhmm.” Her face twists. “You said one of the kids beat it to death.”

“Sure did. The eldest Collins boy. He was—”

“Sick.” She shudders. “I don’t know who could do that to an animal, that’s just cruel.”

We’re past the farm now, back among the woods and their sunken shadows, their ghosts.

The oldest Collins boy was a hero, once.

--

And she also used to say, “I want peppermints like the ones you and Daddy used to eat.”

Her daddy—Sterling—never ate the peppermints our daddy would buy us from the gas station, though. He preferred the orange slices, crystallized in white sugar, heaped up in a paper bag. But I loved the peppermints. They filled my mouth with spice and flame and I’d suck each stick until my tongue was scarlet and my lips were sticky. I remember looking at myself in Mama’s compact, once, not quite ready to wipe the stain off my mouth, thinking the red smear made me look grown-up. Beautiful.

I have a bag of peppermints in my purse. They’re too sweet these days. They just taste like sugar but that’s because I’m getting older and nothing tastes like it did. I remember the spice and flame and the memory makes up for the sugar flavor just fine. I offer her a stick now. She says, “No thanks.”

I think, she’s getting old too.

--

It’s the weed-choked remains of the Church of Jesus Christ the Saviour that tells me we’re nearly home. They’ve built a new church across the street, with a big parking lot and a separate building for the Sunday school. But it’s that blistered shell that holds my gaze. It’s been there so long that I don’t remember anything of the building it used to be. Just the way it burned, one night during a drought.

The old church roof is caved in. Summer’s crawled in and spills out through the broken windows: tongues of ivy, stunted trees strangled in the shade. There’s a graveyard. I strain in search of a row of seven white crosses. The crosses are where they buried the Collins’ kids after they all died in a car crash on their way for Christmas shopping. The oldest boy was eighteen, back from his first year of college. He’d been driving. I’d been in love with him, I think, the way he used to smile as slyly as sin and wear his hat crooked and had once whistled when he saw me walking down the road, skirt knotted at my hip and legs bare in the sunshine. How grown-up I’d felt, as I’d tugged the knot out of my skirt and turned, blushing, from his grin, his wink, how beautiful.

“We’re gonna have a real nice service this Sunday,” Paul tells Felicity. “You’ll be able to say hello to everyone, catch up. Folks miss you and your Daddy round here.”

Felicity snorts. “I don’t think anyone’ll remember me down here,” is all she says.

And again I want to put my arms around her shoulders, to tell her, “Rest your head on my shoulder, child. Lay down—I’ll tell you stories.” They’re all caught in my mouth, these stories—cottonmouths in drainage ditches, candy made of spice and flame, Andrew Collins whistling at my legs. Jesus Christ the Saviour burning up. I can’t get these stories out.

We used to sit on my porch when she was small. She’d comb and oil my hair and say, “Tell me about when you and Daddy were little.” I need her to ask me that again. Because I’m grown-up and only my memories are beautiful these days.

I am riding down into the roots of my memory, roots that have gone sour with silence. My mouth aches with not speaking.