The Story That Was

 This may be shocking to you, but writers are weird. Take me, for instance. I've dedicated an academic career and every logical hour when normal people sleep to putting words together and making fictional things happen. Oh, and I toot my own horn. Every time I've published something, I do it up big --- run my mouth about it and post here, there, and everywhere. 

Except for this one time. 

The past couple years have been doozies. I wrote a spooky flash piece in 2019 and it was picked up by Hot Flash Fiction. It ran, and for some reason, I didn't tell a soul or do anything with it. There were factors: kids, a long and exhausting job search, abject terror at the world disintegrating around us . . . who knows, but I happily tucked this feather into my cap and didn't make a fuss. Skip ahead to today –– I just found out this cool woman-led journal is suspending publication at the end of the year, so this is me documenting my story had a home, albeit briefly, in the digital pages of a literary magazine. 

This is the story of a story. This is the story's proof of life. I'm linking it here and pasting the text and bio below. 

By The Teeth

I go to Cortinas for the laying on of hands. And to ask her questions about ghosts and sex. It’s really just one ghost, and the sex is implied. Still, I have these questions.

Cortinas has me down on the blue gingham sheet this time and I am looking up at the water spot on the ceiling, breathing deep as I can, puffing up and then deflating my lungs to reach, to somehow dislodge this sorrow space in there. She taps the crown of my head with her index fingers and it feels like an egg cracking. She says it’s a sign of affection when someone dead appears in a dream. She asks if I’ve seen red birds. Every time you see a cardinal it’s the same thing, she says. Someone dead who loves you coming back to see you.

I am torn up, Cortinas, I say.

Cortinas’s face is next to my face and it is comforting. She has tapped on me for two years and she knows what I am torn up about. Not the divorce, not my children getting older, and not the mortgage. I started coming to Cortinas because I was haunted in dreams by the specter of a boy who loved me first. He had eye teeth like a wolf’s, and one hurt the last time I saw him alive. He favored it, sucked air through it when he came 500 miles on a bike to see me in my dark days. Before he headed up north to work. To make art. To get killed.

I can’t remember how long it’s been since the last dream, and I don’t know if you can call it a dream anymore, I tell her. The more I try to hear his voice and my voice and what we said, the hazier it is. That last time, I shouted my words out at him, but it was a vacuum, a too-loud television drowning me out.

Tell him next time he comes, Cortinas says. He’ll come. But he has not come in so long.

Pennies too, she says. Feathers. And seashells. If you find these in your path, it could be him. Have you found a seashell? Look for messages and answer back. Talk to him direct.

You, Cassius. She says to tell you when I was 17 and you were 15 and we walked through the mall, it was as much desire as it was terror I felt when I admired the big potted palms in the food court; and that was the first time you touched me. Someday I will buy you one, you said, about the palms. And my God, in those days I was scared of everything—in the food court by Sbarro and the Orange Julius, I was in trouble, and your words opened up a hot place in me that’s still there. The threat of nakedness and falling, feathered up through my legs and chest and it was only for a breath I allowed a set of your fingertips to light on my clavicle.

Cassius. This is why those first nights after they left so little of you, you came to me in a dream bookstore, a laundromat. And then at an outside café in Paris, I think, though neither of us has been. Oh, you were whole again. Not bested and beat for your fancy camera, not a file on a cop’s desk. You sat so near me I could smell your same hot food smell from your mom’s kitchen, so close like my skin, all your pretty teeth blazing. You favored the sharp front one again, sucked in air and flicked your tongue over it in a perfect movement, but I was dream-slow and nothing coordinated. I was too dumb to tuck into you and then I woke up alone sideways in my marriage bed.

Cortinas, is there a spell you can do in case he comes back? I need to tell him I wanted to follow him down the street that day when he rode off, sunburnt to deep cinnamon—cocky and smiling because he’d just kissed me for the first time in twenty years. He kissed me brazen in full sun, on my porch in front of my husband and the whole street. I stood there like the same dumb food court kid.

Tell it to him plain, what you want him to know, Cortinas says. Mind the seashells.

Cassius. If you come back, I will tell you that last day I meant to grab your face and put my mouth on your mouth and suck hard on your tooth, siphon the ache straight out your jaw bone and beg you to head south to your sister’s, to a dentist. Anywhere but Illinois.

We are three hours inland, and the odds of finding a seashell are not good, I know. I come across pennies, though, and the trees in back are grown up now and thick with birds. The red ones, the cardinals, pair up for life. You see one and there’s the other, one high and the other low. They fly into each other, frantic when their wings touch. But they hold tight to their feathers.

J.A. Caldwell holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her words have appeared in The Atlas Review, Flying South, Juke Joint, 1808, and Go Triad. She lives in Jamestown, North Carolina with daughters and a hound dog. She works by day as a marketing & development manager at a crusading Greensboro nonprofit organization. She writes by night.

“ground feather” by zackzen is licensed under CC BY 2.0  No changes were made.