Meg Pokrass
Your Family, From Afar
When seen from afar, your big sister resembles the stars of all the movies your mother loves to watch on TMC. Ma says she looks like Natalie Wood, an actress who died from falling off a yacht, drunk.
“Natalie Wood couldn’t sing, and neither can your sister,” she says.
But your sister plays her guitar and sings very well. You love the sound of her voice and the look of her hair, but mostly, she hides behind her locked door so nobody can hear her.
“My acting's good. But I can’t sing. And I'm not thin enough. These deficits are going to be a serious disadvantage.”
This is what she said the day before she left for Hollywood to become famous. You rescue what remains of her hair from the shower drain and collect her it like bits of blown bird’s nest.
___
It’s a year later, you are laying in a deck chair near the pool at your sister’s apartment complex. You all live here in California now because you've left your father in the dust. “The Born-again Christians in LA are insane,” she reports.
She explains it like this: “They knock on my door and shove me their flyers about Jesus Christ. They could be serial killers.”
You think about how skinny she is, how easy your sister would be to pick up and carry away.
In the pool, your brother is dog-paddling, squealing like he's never lived on land.
Your sister is sipping a wine cooler and looking like a skinny movie-star but with her bones popping out, too thin.
___
Ma, who seems to have revived from her life with your father, is sometimes smiling. You develop California skills from long days at the beach— green-blue water and the silhouettes of seals. Your skin becomes brown as roast chicken.
Your new favorite hobby is sneaking into hotel pools illegally with your brother. Saying confidently, Our family’s staying on the top floor.
And you love the tiny brown birds that gather in your yard. You try to catch them with your butterfly net. You’ve never caught one, which Ma says is a damn good thing, because birds don't like to be trapped.
___
When the call comes in that your father has died in a car crash, you imagine yourself jumping on a trampoline, thinking about how it might feel to fly into outer space like a small brown bird.
You hear her say, Oh dear God, thank you for letting us know. Then she puts her arm around you, explains it while holding you tight, and you stop jumping up and down in your mind.
“Later we can check and see if there’s any hummingbird liquid left in that bird feeder,” she says, but she stays there with you, waiting for your brother to come home from the beach.
___
Life becomes a parade of stories about the terrible decisions your father had made in his life on earth. For example, he had gone after younger women—Ma would be home sweeping the kitchen floor and he'd come in looking like he just won at Russian roulette.
“He was always getting away with it,” she said. "Just like you kids, swimming in those hotel pools.”
For most of your childhood, you imagine your father slumped over his steering wheel, daylight squinting through his t-shirt. One day you’ll meet him again in a different world perhaps, and ask him about it— about this accident, and others.
Meg Pokrass is an award-winning writer of flash fiction, prose poetry, and hybrid work. She is the founder of New Flash Fiction Review and co-founder of the Best Microfiction series. Her generative workshops and prompts are acclaimed for their ability to spark creativity and open new doors. Meg’s new full-length collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories has been acquired by Dzanc Books, and will be published in late 2024.
