WINNER, Winter 2023
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY MAUREEN McELY
Motherhood is driving past a cemetery, with your kids in the back, as farm animal sounds blare from the speakers and your daughter becomes unexpectedly enamored with headstones and full of questions, like why are they called that, and what’s in the ground underneath? She’s six, so she knows about death, but she doesn’t know where the bodies go after. She also doesn’t know death is inevitable; she thinks it only happens when something goes wrong, like when cars crash or hearts stop. She has no idea that all hearts stop eventually—that I will die, that she will die. Is this when I tell her, with my three year old yelling in the background for me to moo like a cow and baa like a sheep?
I repeat each requested animal sound and hope the song changes before my daughter becomes too impatient with my silence. I need it to last. Before I became a mother, I didn’t understand how much energy it took to be the buffer between the world and someone new to it. To be the holy intermediary, she who simplifies the complex, softens the terrifying, explains the impossible to explain, all while wildly uncertain of myself and my wisdom, agonizing, second guessing, almost certain I’m doing it wrong. But there’s no time to press further on that bruise of a thought; I need to be a rooster. I cock-a-doodle-doo obediently along with the song, and as I do so, I become aware of the fact I’m being watched. My six-year-old is eying me carefully in the rearview mirror, her brow scrunching up in Deep Thought, her little face settling into a new expression she’s only mastered this year, one that says she knows something important is being concealed.
I look away. We’re at a red light now, still in view of the cemetery, which is large enough to be a subdivision of houses. My hands find my phone and I’m scanning my e-mail for test results from the doctor, I’m reacquainting myself with the map, I’m calculating the length of our journey and doing nap-time math. I’m weighing the pros and cons of buying a new car to replace my husband’s ancient Pontiac, which has broken down for the second time this month, or continuing on the path of repair Ship of Theseus style, swapping out each and every decrepit part, including those that increasingly sound made up: the inlet manifold, the serpentine belt. All of that wrestles for space in my brain with photos of rivers turning to dust, an ominous ultrasound looming, and my daughter asking again, insistently this time: Mom, Mom, what’s in the ground under headstones?
When I was as young as my daughter is now, I already knew too much about death—the real thing, the stories. A kid at school said ghosts could hitch a ride on your breath, so for years, an embarrassingly long time, really, I tried not to breathe when passing a graveyard. Now, as I struggle to formulate a non-horrifying answer about corpses rotting in the dirt, as my toddler begs tearfully for the barnyard song to repeat, as I calculate and re-calculate the numbers in my bank account, trying to will a different amount into existence, I breathe deeply, almost theatrically. I would pay a ghost to hitchhike, extra if they could take the wheel for a while, entertain the kids, finish conversations I don’t want to have, let me think for the length of a single heartbeat.
The light turns green and, with a flutter, a spectral mass appears in the passenger seat, in the shape of an old, transparent woman missing a significant chunk of her midsection. She says nothing to me; she simply gets to work. She sings along with my son, as a pig, as a goat. She holds the wheel steady, long enough for me to close my eyes and feel the weight pressing on my spine to lighten, shift. She tells my daughter the truth about death: that it comes for us all, that we rest in the earth, that, in dying, we experience the spectacular collapse of the barrier between us and the world. When I reopen my eyes, the graveyard retreats in the rearview mirror, then vanishes. The woman next to me offers a gauzy smile and pats my hand—or tries to—as she flickers out of sight.
“You know, one day, you’ll miss this.”
Maureen McEly is a writer of short fiction, short humor, and screenplays. Her writing can be found in the flash fiction anthology And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and 100 Word Story, where her piece “Unused Magic” was nominated for Best Microfiction. She was recently a Screenwriting Fellow in the RespectAbility Lab for disabled entertainment industry professionals, and she has been a semifinalist in the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship and the Slamdance Film Festival screenwriting competition. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she splits her time between writing, caring for her small children, and navigating life with a neuromuscular disease called myasthenia gravis.