Claudia Monpere
If I Write I’m Not Thinking of You, Old Man, Does that Mean I Am?
This avalanche slope glows with purple asters, trillium, pink mountain heather. How we’d scour the web for wildflower sightings each spring, think nothing of driving 6 or 7 hours to see blooming meadows, hills, deserts. These are smart flowers here at Glacier National Park. To survive in extreme wind and snow and intense ultraviolet light, their flowers are often shaped like a parabola to focus the sun’s warmth on their reproductive parts. Or drooping bells to capture heat radiating from the earth. But you know this, my love. I wish I hadn’t rolled my eyes when you spoke flowers. I wish I’d learned instead of simply being greedy for color. You said your biggest fear was me seeing the future you: dying neurons, shriveling hippocampus. You said we’d have to stop seeing each other: your daughter’s demand. That she couldn’t cope with the awfulness of your diagnosis, couldn’t be there to support you if I was in your life. That this was her mother’s job in spite of the divorce, that her mother longed to care for your shrinking brain, your vanishing memory. You said you were too old and sick to stand up to your daughter. You said I could make you happy by not thinking of you anymore. You were crying, so I nodded. I lied. You’re in every bloom, waterfall, mountain peak. In every shrinking glacier. Dear aid, dear nurse, dear anyone. Please read this aloud to him, then shred.
Marigold
Drip, drip. From the ceiling into the pail. Sara curses herself for not getting the roof repaired, the ceiling already discolored from last winter’s rain. Her dying mother’s words: “Take care of Marigold. Promise me. Cherish her.” When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, her mother didn’t worry about dying; she’d go to Heaven and be with her husband who—never without his toolbelt— was probably remodeling the clouds. She told this joke often: to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, adding, “It’s not the dying. What I can’t bear is the thought that Marigold will be neglected.” She named the 118-year-old house when she moved in, a new bride, charmed by the marigolds out front.
Sara empties the pail, returning it carefully to the floor. Dry rot around windowsills. Deteriorating knob and tube wiring. Plumbing problems. The fireplace, the only thing she loves about this house— unsafe. The chimney’s crumbling.
The house contains all her mother’s nurturing. She babied the red pine floors, oiling them regularly. She spotted wall and door smudges before they happened. Whenever Sara played indoors as a child, her mother lurked with a rag and spray bottle. In her last days of life, pain controlled by the hospice nurse, she rarely spoke. When she did, her labored voice rattled words like Mari and promise. Once the word love. Sara leaned in. Finally, after all these years. But no.
The rain stops. A roofer makes repairs. The furnace goes out again. Sara talks to the broken furnace, who she’s named Haley. Tells her she’s exhausted by promises. Tells her she wants to burn this house down. Tells her about those glorious thirty-two months when she had her own apartment, rooms her mother never entered. A job working with people who smiled. Before her father died. Before her mother’s heart disease worsened and she pressured Sara to quit her job and move back home. Before Sara shrank to a speck. Vanished.
Like the fireplace. She awakens one day and it’s gone, the wall empty. She feels the wall; maybe she’s in a dream and the fireplace is invisible. But the wall is smooth, as if the fireplace has never been there. Outside, she sees the chimney is gone. She takes one of her mother’s sleeping pills, returns to bed. Late afternoon she awakens, groggy. Heads upstairs for the bathroom. It’s vanished. She showers in the second bathroom and wonders what else has disappeared. Maybe the antique curio cabinet with the creepy bisque and porcelain dolls. But nothing else appears to be missing even though she examines every room, opening closets, drawers, cabinets.
A walk to test her sanity. Everything seems normal in the neighborhood, and she has a lovely conversation with her neighbor, Blake, whose cocker spaniel is at dog boot camp. She’s too embarrassed to ask Blake whether or not he can see her chimney. She goes to the bookstore and buys a level 4 Sudoku book, completing some of them easily in a café. Good brain, she says. Thank you. Back home, the entire second floor is gone. Google is no help. She goes to the basement. Perhaps Haley can talk now. But the furnace is silent while Sara tells her about parts of the house disappearing.
She can’t sleep. She roams the remaining rooms in the house, grateful she lives mostly on the first floor, searching for what is most important to her. What must not vanish. It turns out it’s only her old leather boots, the emerald earrings her dad gave her for her sixteenth birthday, a framed photo of him on a ladder waving, and a few novels and collections of poetry. And of course, her wallet, laptop, and phone. She places everything in a backpack next to her bed, dresses in several layers of clothing, and lies down. Maybe she should take the backpack to a hotel, spend the night, drive back to the house in the morning and see what’s left. But no. She’ll sleep here tonight. She shuts her eyes. Something glows inside her, like she’s swallowed stars.
Alphabet
My pet ghost apologizes that she’s not a very good ghost. She can’t do any tricks. She’s uncomfortable scaring people. She’s only a gray blob the size of a toddler, not like other ghosts who prism and shapeshift. I tell her she’s perfect. I tell my husband about her but he thinks the medication is making me hallucinate. He’s so earnest, leaning in, holding my hand, running his fingers through my hair.
My pet ghost is full of opinions. She’s furious when my friend Sharon finally visits. “Does that bitch think she can just waltz in here with a box of bakery goods and you won’t remember that she hasn’t been in touch for months?! And you were so nice to her!”
I shrug. “It’s too sad for her. She doesn’t know what to say.”
“You’re too nice,” she says. “You need to grow some balls.”
No one can make me laugh like my pet ghost.
One day she surprises me by shaping herself into some letters. She can do C, D, I, and O perfectly and she’s close to getting some other letters. My husband hears me clapping and thinks I'm watching tv, then shakes his head sadly when he sees nothing. He asks if I’m up for a short walk. I’d rather be with my pet ghost, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings and the sun on my face feels good as he pushes me in the wheelchair. He talks yet again about how he wishes we had a child. Back when we went out a lot, our friends were full of funny stories about potty training and sleep routines.
My pet ghost says I’m lucky because few people in hospice get a ghost.
By the time I can’t leave the hospital bed that has taken over our bedroom, my ghost can do the entire alphabet. She knows I’m impressed even though I spend most of my time sleeping. But I notice something—she’s shrinking. I try to ask if this is a new trick but it’s getting so hard for me to speak. But she understands and shakes her head. Over hours or maybe days – time is a mirage--she shrinks and shrinks, still doggedly practicing her letters. When she is the size of a pencil stub, she shapes herself slowly into seven letters: g-o-o-d-b-y-e. Then she wraps around my right pinkie, like a ring, and I feel the pulse of her warmth and I know that she is me and I am her and really, there’s no need for either of us to say good-bye.
Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Craft, Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Trampset, Atlas and Alice, New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. She was the winner of the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize by New Flash Fiction Review and was awarded 1st place in Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize 2024 by Uncharted Magazine. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize, and her story, “Solar Flare” appears in Best Small Fictions 2024.
