Rebecca Fishow
Short Fiction
Where’d you find that?” I asked my daughter.
When I came home from work she was sitting at the dining room table studying the journal I’d written during my first pregnancy and kept hidden in a dresser drawer. I managed my feet out of my work flats, paid the babysitter, and sat beside my girl. I’d always planned to wait until she was older to tell her, until, perhaps, a teenager about to head to college. I didn’t want to talk about it now, when she was only eight.
“I never want you to feel like a consolation prize,” I said. I slid the book from my daughter’s hands and led her to the couch. “He was only a month or so old. He didn’t have a body, like ours. Or a smile, or a temperament, or likes and dislikes. His arms and legs were only itty bitty buds. He was not a son, not really. He wasn’t even named.”
She listened and I tried to remember what exactly I had written. I hoped I abandoned the journal before the worst had happened. I hoped I didn’t write about the blood in my underwear, dark, and only traces at first before it got much thicker, or the panicked call to the doctor. He’d said I could go to the emergency room if I wanted, but it would only be for peace of mind. I hoped I didn’t write about the way I just put on a pad instead, and put myself to bed.
I did not tell her, now, what the near-son did have: a heartbeat that stopped two weeks before my body could let him go. A color picked out for his room. I kept the funeral to myself, too, and the memorial rock out in the yard.
“A month later, I became pregnant with you. I called you my little miracle.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
She stood and ran off to play.
After I tucked her in, I imagined she might never forgive me for lying. I never pretended that Santa Claus or the easter bunny was real to avoid that kind of betrayal. I thought of the answers I might give if she started asking questions about death or birth. She recently developed a penchant for scaring her little classmates, so I worried, too, about the stories she might tell at school. Would I get a call from her teacher because the other kids were terrified that an undead boy with no face and no fingers might be floating through the halls? But, after she didn’t bring up her almost-brother for a week I relaxed. Perhaps her child’s mind couldn’t make the leap from a belly tadpole to the beginnings of a boy. Maybe she had already forgotten, my girl who was still so young every day meant something new.
Then, one night, she tiptoed into my room after I’d gone to bed.
“Mommy,” she said, “I met him.”
I was groggy. I said, “Met who?”
A boy came to our backyard in a dream. He climbed all the way up the treehouse tree, like a playful little squirrel. He had blond hair, she said, and when he smiled, his freckles stretched like a night sky full of stars across his face. Then he jumped all the way from the top of the tree to the grass and started to play with his toys.
“You were there too, Mommy,” she said. “You were sitting in your lawn chair, reading, and stopping to smile, sometimes, at him. Was it supposed to be like that?”
I kissed her on the forehead. “It’s supposed to be like this.”
I came home from work the next day to find my daughter talking to someone in the treehouse. But when I climbed the ladder and peeked through the little door, she was standing by herself. She touched her hand flat to the top of her head, then slid her body out from under it. She hovered her other hand in the air.
“Miles is shorter than me,” she said. “Girls grow faster than boys.”
“Who’s Miles?”
“My brother. My brother Miles.”
In the bathtub, she assured me Miles was there. She scrubbed his back with a washcloth and covered his eyes when she poured water on his hair. Before school, she began insisting I pack two sandwiches, two juices, two cookies. On the weekends, she worked on “The Miles Book” out of folded construction paper. She filled each page with a Miles fun fact. He was left-handed. He had broken an arm jumping from a swing. His favorite animal was the tardigrade. His favorite way to travel, a hot air balloon.
My therapist encouraged me not to worry. Children process difficult information in different ways. An imaginary friend was perfectly fine. I don’t know why I could not tell him that as my daughter played with Miles, my near-son was a cluster of cells unraveling in my brain, a perpetual letting of blood and flesh. I don’t know why I could not tell him I was lowering his body into the ground, on repeat.
“Read us a story,” she said.
So I read.
“Buy that shirt for Miles.”
I bought.
“Kiss Miles goodnight, too!”
I puckered my lips and kissed the air she promised was his forehead.
For a week, I couldn’t get comfortable in bed or fall asleep. When I couldn’t stand the tossing and turning anymore, the staring at the wall, I got myself out of bed. I turned on a little lamp in the kitchen, searched the refrigerator, and sat in the dark dipping my fingers into a peanut butter jar, and licking them one by one. I put my feet up on a chair. I listened to appliances buzz.
Freckles bright as stars across his face. Blond hair and a scar on his arm, from a playground fall. Bright green eyes. Short, yes. A tiny boy. He didn’t look much like my daughter, but yes they were certainly siblings. Who has been cooking your meals, all this time? Who has been brushing your teeth?
He walked from the doorframe and stood close to me. He reached and touched my hair. He held his hands around my head and guided my ear to his chest.
Miles. Miles. Miles, it pulsed.
“Feel,” he said.
I did.
Rebecca Fishow is a writer, educator, and visual artist. Her book of short stories, The Trouble With Language, won the Trnsfr Books 2019 Holland Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of two chapbooks, The Opposite of Entropy (Proper Tales Press, 2018) and How to Love a Black Hole (Conium Press, forthcoming Oct. 2024). She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD at the UIC Program for Writers.
Photo Credit: Anastasia Noelle Pirri is a Connecticut-based photographer, writer, and traveler. When she is not spending most of her time with her cat, she can be found enjoying the beauty nature has to offer.
L'Esprit Literary Review 