Move Over by Lydia Weaver
It was the typo in a blurb on the jacket that made me buy the book, the book I’d avoided for years. It sat on a table in the Strand, a bit tattered, a bit stained, with that typo…
It was the typo in a blurb on the jacket that made me buy the book, the book I’d avoided for years. It sat on a table in the Strand, a bit tattered, a bit stained, with that typo…
i. Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were…
I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. Every takeoff is the same, but I am always on alert for the one that will be different. In Bosnia or Boston. Panama or Palm Springs. On short…
Two(opens in new tab) thousand, four hundred, twenty-nine texts. Over the course of 625 days, I exchange 2,429 texts with my boss, Will. For the first 149 days, 88 percent of our texts are work-related. Like the twenty texts…
I’m just sitting down to write when my mother descends out of a Winston-blue cloud, nosy-necked, squinting. Her head glints with bobby pins, skinned-tight and sectioned, mapped out like a city block, an argument for redlining, a gerrymander, aspirational,…
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
i. Candies gush across the ground. They clot and pool. Where the pale floorboards converge against the wall, they glitter in a long stream of plastic-wrapped sweets, the sort you’d see on a receptionist’s desk. Red, yellow, green, swirled…
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice…
The concept of what is or what is not a weed is not precisely defined because it has both biological and sociological elements. Biologically, weeds are plants having the ability to colonize, inhabit and thrive in continually disturbed habitats,…
My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was…
In the play Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire, a character describes grief by saying, “It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around—like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is ‘Oh right. That.’”
That line has always stuck with me. I dog-eared the page in college and still refer to it sometimes. I think the bruise in “My Mother the Nectarine” is like that brick. Mostly you’re okay, but it still hurts sometimes.
This story came out of a time in my writing when I was asking myself, “What is a story?” I found that flash fiction was a perfect vessel for that exploration. The simplicity of the form allows for a huge range in the content.
Alan Ginsberg once said, “The only real measure of a haiku is, upon hearing one, your mind experiences a small sensation of space.” “My Mother the Nectarine” is, of course, not a haiku, but it comes out of that tradition of simplicity and space.
The simplicity is obvious: the whole story relies entirely on one metaphor to tell the tale of two lives, grief, family trauma, aging, and the way these things manifest in our bodies. It is so compact that the title became a necessary part of the story, adding the texture, color, and fragility of the nectarine.
The experience of space may be less obvious, but I hope the reader finds it in this line: “Just don’t press too hard on the tender brown spot. It still hurts sometimes.” Those two sentences hold everything that the bruise means and they reveal a secondary story—that of the relationship between the narrator and the person they are addressing. It’s a small thing that I offer, but it means a lot to me and I hope it can mean something to others.
MEGAN HAEUSER is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara and has recently relocated from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, and she has had a play featured in the Fertile Ground Festival of New Works in Portland, Oregon. The writing she is most proud of is a series of short stories for her niece and nephews about a band of cousins with superpowers.