HONORABLE MENTION
The 2019 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY TARA LYNN MASIH
Lucy lives by a tidal marsh. From an early age, she was warned not to go near the curving banks of the salt creeks. Gators and water moccasins to kill you. Knife edges of oyster beds to make you bleed.
But then Lucy’s mother died of the diabetes. Her skin changed all on its own. From inside out, the danger came.
So Lucy no longer fears the outside marsh creatures. She rows around the shallow creeks in fall, pulling oysters off their mounds, culling them and knocking off the spat with a dull hunting knife. She places the larger ones with deep cups on grainy ice in her red cooler. They will be dinner.
This past summer, there was green growing on the gray beds. Her father called it sea lettuce. “Not a good sign,” he said, before he left to go shrimping in the rough ocean. Her mother’s skin and teeth had turned yellow. She wonders if this green, mossy skin on the beds is like the diabetes and will kill their dinner.
But the hot summer sun erases the sea lettuce. It slowly browns, then disappears. The beds are gray again.
It’s while she is cutting an oyster free, hacking at its base, that she sees the spiral moving toward her. She pulls back into the wooden boat as the black moccasin approaches, its deadly diamond head above water. Her father would call it a swamp lion. It doesn’t pass. It stops a foot away from the boat. She knows that snakes can’t jump, so she is more curious than scared. It opens its cotton-white mouth. And speaks. In her mother’s voice.
“I finally found you, Lucy.”
Lucy jumps. “Is that really you, Mama?”
“Do you miss me, little Lucy?”
“Yes, Mama, every day.”
“Take that oyster to your father tonight. Tell him I love him and am in the sea.” Then the snake spirals away.
Shaken and dazed, Lucy follows these orders. But when she tells her father, who is dripping Tabasco on the oyster, he snorts and tells her not to lie to him, and gulps the writhing shellfish whole.
“He doesn’t believe you, or me,” she tells her mama the next day, as the boat bobs in the current.
“Tell him I heard him talking about that woman down the street, Martha, while he was shrimping the other day.”
When Lucy repeats this over shrimp gumbo, he stops eating. Rice kernels sit on the edges of his lips, clinging like white maggots.
“I’m going with you tomorrow,” he says.
But the next day, as they row around the creeks and the smooth cordgrass, startling white herons from their ground spots and kingfishers from their pine perches, and even when they stop to float, the snake doesn’t come.
Lucy lies in bed at night, wondering how her mother could be speaking from the mouth of something that can bite and kill. She loved her mama, who was so gentle. Lucy plans to net it, next time, and bring it home with her and put it in a fish tank. Not “it”—Mama. Put Mama in a tank. After his goldfish died, Billy next door left one on his porch, empty. She sees its dirt-glazed glass walls every day when she goes by. She could clean it up and put Mama’s favorite things in it—her glass beads, her toe ring, her cigarette lighter with the fake opal in it, her tiny silver cross.
The net doesn’t work. Mama hisses and dives below.
Lucy learns that, to keep her mother, she will have to let her go.
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Tara Lynn Masih is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and The Chalk Circle (both ForeWord Books of the Year). She is author of Where the Dog Star Never Glows, and Founding Series Editor of The Best Small Fictions. Her flash has been anthologized in Brevity & Echo, Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose, Nothing Short of 100, and W.W. Norton’s New Micro. Her flash was featured in Fiction Writer’s Review for National Short Story Month and received Wigleaf Top 50 recognition. My Real Name Is Hanna, her first novel, won a Skipping Stones Honor Award, and AITL Media selected her for their Inspirational Women in Literature Award in 2019. www.TaraMasih.com
