Barbara Diggs
Big Girl
First, there was thumb. Like the rest of your fingers, a miracle, but better. Thumb was made for your mouth. Thumb never falls out of bed in the middle of the night or rolls under her bed where the monsters wait. Thumb could not get left behind on the number 62 bus or at McDonald’s. Thumb hides among your other fingers, and no one would ever know unless they were looking closely. Then they would see the wrinkles. Ugly, ugly, mama says. Big girls don’t suck their thumbs. But you love thumb anyway. Thumb is there when the storm comes. You can feel the change temperature, hear of slithery hiss of the wind growing, sometimes shaking windows, smashing plates. The storm is over when the front door bangs shut. One of them will always leave, sometimes both, but thumb will always stay.
Then there was spoon. You love the spoon the way you had loved thumb, but spoon was objectively beautiful. Elegant and smooth, a matted silver and elongated bowl. You don’t know where spoon came from. It just appeared in the drawer one day, quietly gleaming amidst the cheap clatter of the rest of the mismatched cutlery. Spoon was the real thing. Spoon was the princess who got bruised when sleeping on a pea under a mountain of featherbeds. Spoon was Zandra Jameson, whose thick-lashed doe eyes and delicate brown limbs had the boys pretending they weren’t scuffling to sit next to her in science class. You loved eating with spoon. Spoon made you feel elegant too as you shaved curls of caramel ice cream with it, lifted golden mounds of butterscotch pudding to your eager mouth. You should be eating soup with that damn spoon, mama mutters, poking the fleshy roll spilling over your jeans as she passes by. I don’t know how you can stand yourself. Mama was the one who got stranded after the last storm.
Then there was them. You do not love them, but you could pretend you did when they squeezed your heavy breasts, plunged fingers into your depths. You almost did when you took them into your mouth, and you heard them moaning above you as if you’d drawn a sword across their throats. You can forget so much in that moment. The looks people give you just for existing in your own body; the names people call you, even strangers on the street, even your mama, even them as they zip up and leave. You reach for spoon, replaying the groans in your head on repeat. Sometimes you imagine that spoon is a sword and drag it across your own throat.
Now there is ache. Heat in your calves or lungs. Scratches, when your bare legs scrape against a bramble. Occasionally, a bite or sting. Discomforts, but a cheap price for the trek. There is mountain air to drink like water. There are trees and vines and leaves; dirt and stony pebbles, misshapen or mud-covered, each is so perfect you could cry. There are people who offer an arm if you stumble, and when you offer your stout arm, they clutch it with gratitude. Thumb is on your hand; spoon in your backpack. Mama continues to yap far in the distance, but now you know you don’t have to listen. Still, sometimes the old sadness rolls in. Sometimes you feel like an empty pit. But at the top of the mountain there is rain, clouds, mist, or sunshine. A silky wind or a sharp one. When you reach the peak, you open your mouth and let whatever you find there fill you up. Everything in the world is so much bigger than you.
Where Your Knit Hat Went
The knit hat is gone. It’s not coming back, so please stop looking for it.
It’s not the navy-blue beanie the guy at the bus stop is wearing. His hat doesn’t have thin white stripes or a red double brim anyway, so it couldn’t be yours. And it’s not the shadow you spotted in the corner of the neighbor’s yard that made your heart jump. That’s a cat. A small dark one that actually doesn’t resemble a hat at all.
It’s not in your closets. Neither the one in the bedroom nor the one in the hall. So there’s no use searching behind the stack of board games you used to play, Scrabble, Stratego, Carcassonne; nor feeling around inside the black, dry-cracked rubber boots that you should have thrown away ages ago.
You know it’s not among your ski things, but that doesn’t stop you from rummaging through the pockets of the flashy red North Face jacket again and again. Eleven times now. It’s as if you think the hat could find its way home on its own. As if you think it isn’t really gone. As if you think the hat could send you spinning backward through time. To the life before ghost-blue brain scans whirled constantly, kaleidoscopically, behind your closed eyes. Before you had to learn words so toxic they swelled your tongue.
You’d be on the mountain again,
the sun in your face, poles planted in the snow,
him grinning as he tugs the hat low on his forehead,
tucks a stray curl under the brim,
then turns toward the white void below,
more alive than a flame.
But hats don’t do that.
You’re tired, so tired. If only someone would tell you where it went. If only someone would tell you why. You would drink the story like warm tea with honey. You would finally sleep through the night. You would believe it like a child.
If only someone would tell you that you left it in the back of a taxi. Maybe that night they sent you home to rest. (To wait.) You couldn’t find your keys, so you dumped everything out of your bag onto the back seat and scrabbled about in the darkness for a long time. Maybe the hat slid to the floor and faded into the rubber mat. Maybe you collected your keys, your tissues, your pills, your wallet, your phone, your breath, yourself, but somehow missed the hat.
That’s not so hard to believe, is it?
You would believe that the taxi driver’s eleven-year-old daughter found your hat the next day. She would like its heft, the tight weave of the knit. Her fingers would trace the stitching on the brim reading Zermatt. The look of the word would please her, the bold Z, the double ts.
You could believe that the girl would take the hat home, wash it by hand, place it tenderly in a drawer. She would later look up Zermatt on the school library computer; savor the crumpled witch’s hat of the Matterhorn and the sugar-dusted Swiss villages. Her eyes would sweep over the mountain where you and he once stood, and she would feel a pull she cannot explain. She will wonder whether black girls ski. You would want to tell her yes, baby girl, absolutely, we do.
You would sleep so well knowing that the girl will make it a mission to return the hat to the mountain, to the highest peak possible. That one day, she will turn her face to the sun, tuck her curls beneath the hat, then disappear into the void, the wind buoying her up like an angel, pulling diamond tears from her eyes.
It wouldn’t surprise you to know the hat will fly off her head somewhere along the way and become swallowed by the whiteness. Though she will side-step back up the slope with clownish clumsiness, it will never turn up again. But she won’t mind at all and neither would you.
You could believe all this, couldn’t you?
Go ahead. Believe this.
The hat is loved; the hat is happy.
It’s where it belongs.
Let it go.
Note: This piece was originally published with Lunate Fiction, 2019.
Barbara Diggs is an American in Paris whose flash fiction has been published or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Your Impossible Voice, Emerge Literary Journal, Fractured Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Disappointed Housewife, and FlashBack Fiction. Barbara’s stories have also won Highly Commended awards with The Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Awards and placed as finalist in competitions such as the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro (2023) and the Best of the Net (2023).
