Pokrass: 'Fluff'

Fluff
Meg Pokrass

Carousel
He took me to a carousel because it was my birthday. Told me to get on the horse, any one of them, and to ride bravely. To wave goodbye while spinning, he said. I shook inside my new Keds, walking toward one that looked gentle.

"I'm light," I said, hopping up on its back.

When the carousel started to move, I saw my father walking away. Not waving. Not turning around. He was showing me the way out. Doing what a father was put on Earth to do.

Violet
My mother's name is Violet Orchid Daffodil Smith. The truth is that she weighs as much as two mothers, and she could die soon. Looking and smelling like a flower hasn't made things very easy, she says.

This is true. I traipse behind her like her seed. I watch her watering the plants in the garden, the way she bends down to see what she's really doing, and the whole garden nearly topples. I tell her to be careful, but I'm too troublesome. She's stopped listening to a piece of lint like me.

Jitters
I'm fifteen and a boy is coming over. He gives me the jitters. He looks like a human frog, all buggy eyed and bubble-cheeked. I'm not sure why I want to touch him.

On the way to school, he walks beside me, careful not to interrupt my gait. I let him kiss me on the mouth. He lives near the racetrack and he waits for me like a shadow. I can sing sometimes, I tell him. We kiss each other's faces, but the melody comes later, behind the cafeteria.

I'm brave enough to show him my damaged foot because he asks me to during the quiet part. I slip the shoe off and he grabs the sock and he stands there staring at the damage.

Espresso
Forty years old and espresso is what I live for. I wake up and drive to the coffee shop, stand in line like a junkie. I shrink when anyone says hello, pull up my hood. I'm just a middle-aged juvenile delinquent, I tell myself, grinning inside my soul, amusing myself. A person who can ruin lives just by being funny.

My husband and I were a comedy team, until he stopped laughing. He was my sidekick, I was his spirit house.

Corset
I read a story of a child who followed her father into the Siberian wilds and two weeks later, with her arms cut to shreds, someone found her alive. Picked her up. The person interviewed described her as a miracle, "light as fluff, hardly there."

I set down and take off my shoes.

I remember standing in the snow one night, waiting for my mother to wake up. I became a snow angel. Stood in the snow until the neighborhood dogs gave me away.

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Meg Pokrass' latest book is THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME, a collection of flash fiction. SPINNING TO MARS! —a Blue-Light-Book-Award-winning collection of microfiction—is coming out later this year. She lives in the U.K..

Read her postcard.