Page 25 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #9

“I thought she’d fallen asleep watching TV,” he said.
At dinner tonight, she launched into a detailed de- scription of a fight that had broken out on the play- ground during recess. I maintained eye contact as I considered whether I should call the bald guy who was the only person that answered the online dating profile I posted a week ago.
My mouth was full of toothpaste foam; I couldn’t speak.
I didn’t know that my grandmother had also died of a stroke until my uncle mentioned it while we were eating chips and guacamole in my parents’ living room, after Mama’s funeral. He said it like it was an interesting coincidence and I smiled in an effort not to feel doomed.
Whenever there was a lull in Alice’s reporting, I said, “Mmmmhmm.”
Later, Frank showed up. Everyone else had left and my dad was upstairs, sleeping off the day. I was moving through the house with a trash bag, throw- ing out paper plates and napkins. Alice was collect- ing the plastic forks and spoons because her teach- er had just taught the class about recycling.
I jumped when she banged her spoon on the table. “Mom, you’re not even listening. This is the best part!”
When I answered the door, Frank looked surprised, like I was the one who’d shown up unannounced. We hadn’t seen each other in three years.
Peaches, who was sleeping under the table, let out a whimper and I rubbed her soft, loose belly with my socked foot.
“I thought you might need this,” he said, and of- fered me a paper bag.
Inside was a pint of Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip ice cream, which used to be my favorite flavor. Frank crouched down to Alice’s height and held out his arms, but she didn’t know him and ran out of the room.
Flanders’s short ction, ash stories, and creative non ction have ap- peared in online and print journals, including Wigleaf, Vestal Review, The Foundling Review, Pearl, and New Plains Review. In 2011, she won Vestal Review’s Ten Years in Flash Fiction contest. She has recently completed a memoir, The Only Way Around, about the years during which her oldest son was undergoing treatment for leukemia. Chapters from the memoir have appeared in literary magazines
such as The Healing Muse, and in the anthology Uncertain Promise, published in 2014 by Compass Flower Press.
I thought, Oh, please don’t let this be the best part.
But I said, “Okay, let me have it.”
Now, with Mama gone, I have to pay for after school care, which means I’m just barely covering ex- penses. Dad says we can move back in with him, but I was hoping that we were moving in another direction.
Alice doesn’t ask about her grandmother anymore and she’s adopted new grown-up goals. Instead of a horse, she wants to be a reporter. One of the kinder- garten dads is a journalist and visited the class on Career Day. Since then, Alice has been all fired up about “telling facts.”
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