SHOSHAUNA SHY: The Letter Arrives

Flash Fiction by Shoshauna Shy

THE LETTER ARRIVES

Hand-printed in pencil. Not a sharpened pencil, but the lead faint as if rubbed half away. All your words barely fill one page of blue-lined canary yellow paper, four creases folded three times. I unfold what you folded, study each preposition; each noun attached to it; each transitive verb. Count how often the pronoun you appears, a pronoun that usually signifies second person, but here it is something else. With both thumbs I touch the word I , just a single vowel, but bigger than the whole planet. Tally how many syllables separate each  you  from I;  how many consonants stack up between them. Your signature, your name floats there alone making a sound like a tongue drum reverberating my spine. It is unanchored to anything else–not a  Sincerely  or an  Always or even a  Best,  that nondescript sign-off people use as a buffer between what they feel, and what they pretend they don’t.

Panicked, I skim through it all again. Are there any helping verbs like  could  or  will  or  might?

How many of those did my birth mother use?

Are any in the future tense?

500 RUMMY

When I finally manage to locate my birth mother, it’s in a suburb of Dallas. I keep the one Polaroid snapshot she lets me take of her in my wallet: a full-on head shot, red hair wavy upon slim shoulders, blue eyes looking directly into my camera with a mischievous joy. She gives me an earlier photo of herself to keep with it, one from her late teens.

At that time, her crowd hitchhiked to various outdoor rock festivals, campgrounds, and farmyard bonfires. She grew her hair down to her hips, wore hand-patched blue jeans, read Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac. Her Presbyterian parents, wanting her buttoned into a marriage with the boy next-door, had watched her fly out from under their roof and completely off their radar. Years went by between her collect calls.

Locating my birth father in Philadelphia proves harder. She had never told Keith Greyson she’d gotten pregnant before checking herself into the Florence Crittendon Home for Unwed Mothers in Denver. Once I learned about that, I pictured him scouring Rocky Mountain homesteads to find her, doing hairpin curves in a beat-up Chevy pickup, chin jutting with the righteous conviction they belonged together. He just didn’t locate her in time to rescue me, I figured.

I am sitting in Keith’s kitchen when I show him my mother’s current day photo. His brow furrows in consternation.

“What’d you say her name was?”

My tongue tastes metallic. I tell him. I grab the other photo from my wallet, the teenage one, and hand that to him, too.

“Pretty girl, alright. But don’t ring a bell.”

“Boulder, Colorado, Neil Young concert? 1970?”

 “Jeeze,” he strokes his graying beard. “Had a lot of one-nighters back in the day. And not in my most lucid state neither,” he breaks out laughing, but not with embarrassment. With pride.

Gently, I take the photos from him. My hand is shaking. I don’t see any kinship between his features and mine, although my hair is the same shiny black. Is that enough to go on?

“Ever hear that song ‘Love the One You’re With’?” Keith asks with a grin.

I tuck the photos back into my wallet. I don’t listen to a word he’s saying.

There’s a lone cloud drifting in the sky beside me as I drive back across the state. That my mother gave me up in Denver rather than return to her hometown meant she kept my existence a secret from her parents. Explains why no one’s ever tried to find me.

And if he’s telling the truth, my father was a one-night stand. Just maybe not hers because he honestly has no clue. And my mother? She never counted on my success at finding her; never wanted me to know my conception was this casual a mishap. And maybe what’s most true is she doesn’t know who my father is. She simply picked Keith Greyson out of an assortment of probabilities from a certain week of her summer. Like playing the Jack of Hearts after you get dealt a handful of cards. It’s not the best of the deck. Just enough to get you out of the game.      

MY BIRTH MOTHER THINKS OF ME WHEN

the girl next door turns five, and all her party guests arrive dressed like garden fairies, ballet dancers and princesses

her phone rings several days in a row, and Caller ID says “Restricted” and no one speaks when she answers

she dates a divorcé who never invites her to his apartment when his daughters come for the weekend

she miscarries that one and that one and that one

her first husband leaves because he doesn’t want to die before becoming a father

her second ex is the one her sons say they rather spend the summer with “because he’s more fun”

her first son is gay, and her second son marries a woman who doesn’t like her one iota

she moves alone to Gulf Shores, and rereads the letter I sent two decades before that she never acknowledged

it is the 5th^th of June–for 1,440 excruciating minutes

Author of five collections of poetry, Shoshauna Shy was one of the ten finalists for the 2021 Fish Flash Fiction Prize. She earned a Notable Story distinction in Brilliant Flash Fiction’s 2022 contest then was shortlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Award anthology in 2023. As a Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction award nominee, she was also shortlisted for the Flash Fiction Contest 2023 Awards conducted by South Shore Review.

Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.