Tommy Dean
Undiagnosed Harmony
After the storm, the boy stood in the circle of broken tree limbs. The water dripped onto his neck and back, slowly soaking his shirt. The wind had disappeared; the sky purpled with promise.
Inside, the mother counts out her cash, checks her phone battery, and rocks her luggage. The wind, an unknown enemy, had ruined her plans to leave. She wavered on writing the boy a letter. Excuses in ink felt like names chiseled on gravestones. If she said nothing, and disappeared like smoke, wouldn’t that leave the boy with nothing to remember but her scent, her touch on his forehead?
In the driveway, the father sits in his Rav4, hysteric in his silence, the low thrum of NPR as constant as the tick of the vehicle's engine. A gathering of sounds to root him in this place. He saw the wife’s suitcase in the coat closet last week. He was returning a jacket after a quick run through the nature preserve. He wondered why she didn’t leave while he was out. Running, pushing his body to the brink of collapse cleansed his mind, made him more driven, possibly a better husband, but the suitcase disagreed.
Sirens assert their violence, rocketing the air, claiming tragedy through the neighborhoods, forcing everyone to stop and contemplate the tick, tick of their selfish thoughts and whims, desires secreted away.
The boy and the man enter the house from opposite doors, their feet slick against the hardwood floors that haven’t been waxed in months, their faces stricken as they both reach for the handle of the suitcase. The wife, they believe, in their harmony of action, has been rescued.
The mother’s walk down the stairs is accompanied by the notes of sirens slipping toward and then past their neighborhood. She can see their shapes in the mirror that hangs at the stair landing. The boy a toll she’ll have to pay, the father a good but distracted man, with impatient shoulders. Apologies or lies shuffling like a deck of cards as she meets them in the foyer.
The red lights awash on the rain-streaked foyer windows. Wife, husband, son peer through the windows, heads stacked by height. Tragedy, a blacking out of their own desires, erased by the spark of fear that has them all reaching out, finding fingers, the gentle touch of reaching into the past and framing it in an uncertain future.
The sizzle of garlic and shallots, the wafting comfort of onion, and the gentle roar of the stove hood taking it all away. The metro engine of her heart is beating somewhere in the bowels of an ancient tunnel in a city that could care less about her trifling feelings, but still, it waits to greet her, to swallow her in only the way a beast can. And yet, she plates their food, the steaming chicken golden in the half-light doming the dining room table, cleared of the daily detritus by her husband, her son, eyes wide, his screen put away for once, these men of hers offering their own adventure of escape. She sits in her usual chair, ignoring for one more night the calcification in her bones, these roots dragging her closer to the ground, and further away from the beast of her dreams.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
