Short Fiction

selected by guest short fiction editor Jen McConnell, author of Welcome, Anybody

“Redundant” by Lillian Johnson

“Shell” by Jolene McIlwain

“Trauma” by Thomas Sokolowski

Jen McConnell is a fiction writer who dabbles in poetry. Welcome, Anybody is her debut collection of short stories. Her work has recently appeared or is upcoming in Sledgehammer Lit, Hindsight Magazine, The Louisville Review, Reflex Press, What Rough Beast and Vagabonds. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and awarded a grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Currently, she serves as Creative Nonfiction Editor and Co-Fiction Editor for The Bookends Review. A California native, she earned her MFA from Goddard College in Vermont and now toils by day as a corporate copywriter in the Midwest. See more at jenmcconnell.com

REDUNDANT: 

/rɪˈdʌnd(ə)nt/

Adjective

ONE

There is a very particular subset of panic that submerges a person when redundancy is unceremoniously plonked in their inbox. It’s the kind of panic that is astounded to see the rest of the world going about business as usual, as the person in question tries to nestle themselves neatly into a page of 12-pt. Times New Roman, single spaced. 

“Redundant” comes from a Latin word which means to surge upwards. Somewhere in the recesses of Amanda’s mind this useless factoid gently nudged the course of her synapses. Amanda was not an outspoken person, but when the mind fixates on an image as hers did, it simply can’t be ignored. It’s immediately recognizable as the thing that niggles its way into the dreamy and sacred space before sleep to jolt you awake. 

The image in question was, in Amanda’s mind at least, a cinematic resignation, a final fuck you so artistically passive-aggressive that to leave it unexecuted would have been her ultimate regret. 

TWO

The thing about Tony was that he was a douchebag. This was common knowledge. Tony would eat your wontons out of the fridge. He’d swap your keyboard with his slightly shitter one when he thought you weren’t looking. He’d sit backwards on his chair while he mansplained basic concepts multiple times, seemingly without pausing for breath. He was so efficient in his douchebaggery that it was almost to be admired. Incidentally, “douche” comes from a Latin word meaning “to lead.” People like Tony thrived at Stackswell & Co. 

There was, however, a small window into Tony’s humanity, and it came in the form of a beautiful orchid. Underneath Stackswell & Co.’s sadistic fluorescent lights, many had tried and failed to cultivate fresh, green things. With every thump of a plant pot into the wastebasket, Tony would smugly sit and nod. One deft snip of the scissors and it would be done, Amanda thought.

THREE

When Amanda got the email at 4:56 p.m. on a Friday that Stackswell & Co. was dropping her, she took her headphones off and sat for a while, cold, frozen, with that feeling of something surging upwards. One at a time her colleagues trickled out, wishing each other happy weekends, until the only sounds left were Amanda’s breath and the wheezing air con. 

Her stare was fixed somewhere in the middle distance as her left hand felt its way over the cold desk and into the handle of a drawer. Her fingers curled around the cold plastic handle of the scissors. Every breath pushed her upwards and across the office until she hovered over those brilliant yellow and purple petals. For a moment she contemplated the intricate patterns and felt an unexpected pang. The orchid wasn’t a douchebag. 

The moment melted when her gaze landed on a photo of Tony and his team leering at the camera on their last away day. There was the sound of snipping and then the muted sound of plant matter hitting the desktop. 

In swaggers Tony at 10:23 a.m. on Monday. He perches on a sales guy’s desk and they talk loudly about their weekends and how drunk they both got. If either of them were listening, then they'd realize this is not a conversation. It is two men impatiently waiting for their turn to talk loudly. 

When Tony gets to his desk and sees the shriveled purple and yellow lying there, he is quiet for a moment. He sees his reflection in the black computer screen, and it jumpstarts him back into his surroundings. 

Head down, Tony crosses the office and shoulders open the door to one of the toilets, where he stands silently for a moment. He watches himself in the mirror, astonished to see the beginnings of a tear forming in his right eye. He wipes it with his forefinger and stares at it, incredulous.

THREE

When Amanda got the email at 4:56 p.m. on a Friday that Stackswell & Co. was dropping her, she sat for a while, cold, frozen, with that feeling of something surging upwards. Standing over those brilliant yellow and purple petals, she contemplated the intricate patterns and felt an unexpected pang. The orchid wasn’t a douchebag. 

Her trance was broken by a rustle from the boardroom. Amanda stiffened and stumbled under a dizzying wave of adrenaline. Her face and hands burned. The idea of being caught red-handed in this petty, vindictive act played out in her mind. 

The door to the board room swung open, and there was Tony. His mouth opened to unleash a torrent of talking, but just as he reached the apex of his breath, Amanda found herself carried by some external force, a surge that sent the scissors in her hand through Tony’s polyester suit and into his torso. 

She turned and ran.

THREE

When Amanda got the email at 4:56 p.m. on a Friday that Stackswell & Co. was dropping her, she sat for a while, cold, frozen, with that feeling of something surging upwards. Standing over those brilliant yellow and purple petals, she felt an unexpected pang. The orchid wasn’t a douchebag. 

Her trance was broken by a rustle from the boardroom. Amanda stiffened and stumbled under a dizzying wave of adrenaline. Her hot hand enclosed the metal door handle and pulled it open. There was Tony. His mouth opened to unleash a torrent of loud talking. All that came was a sheepish whisper. Amanda scanned the room: Pringles, a sleeping bag, some clothes on a hanger hooked around one of the sagging blinds.

“Look, Amanda—listen, please just do me a solid here.”

In this moment it occurs to Amanda that perhaps she ought to laugh. Instead, she says, “I was going to cut your orchid.”

Tony’s eyes move from hers to the scissors and then back. “Oh. Well... Yes, sure,” he says.

“I won’t do it now,” says Amanda.

Tony nods. “Thank you.”

After a moment, Amanda waves the scissors at the Pringles, the sleeping bag, and the clothes, and asks, “Tony, why are you sleeping in the boardroom?” But the way she says it, it doesn’t sound quite like a question.

Tony laughs nervously, leans back onto the wall with the whiteboard and sinks to the floor. In doing so, he erases with his back half a mind map of Stackswell & Co.’s five core values.

He sits with his head in his hands, and Amanda notices the space where a wedding ring used to be. She places the scissors on the boardroom table and sits beside him underneath the fluorescent lights.

~ ~ ~

Lillian Johnson is an emerging writer and Literature graduate with a BA from the University of Exeter. Her story “Borderlands” was published in the Baltimore Review. She was born in Sydney and is based in London.

Shell

Tiller Shanty peered into the nest, sketching the markings in his journal, erasing, starting again. Spiral. A line bisecting it. There was no mistaking the “M.” “M" for his wife’s name, Mai. His pencil tip snapped. He struck it with his pen knife to find lead again.

Wind picked up, blowing ribboned cattail leaves sideways, lifting the bill of his hat. He tugged it down, wiped his eyes on the cuff of his shirt, continuing until what he sketched in his journal mirrored what he saw on the eggshell. He trudged out of the marsh, boots deep into the dropped reeds. Two pickups flew by him along the township road, throwing up dust he tried to veil from his eyes. He ached to lift his arm to wave, but he didn’t.

When he got home, he slipped into the garage, opened the hickory cabinet that held his notes. He ran a finger along pages of his own corn tassel readings, bark readings, even the tea leaves readings his grandmother’s hand had sketched for him when he was small. There was no crossover. Symbols on red-winged blackbird eggs had their own particular meanings. Still, he searched. He opened the largest notebook, one that held the intricate sketches for his decades reading nests. Mai had decorated it with a male blackbird in flight, had taken hours to get the red and yellow patches exact, the shimmering highlights on the wings. This book held eggshell readings they’d deciphered together as well as those from Mai’s memory of her grandfather’s words and notes. Feathers marked pages of symbols for illness, death, but he flipped past those, hoping there was another similar symbol that encoded an altogether different future. Under the bare bulb of the workbench, he scanned every page to find those he’d sketched at the marsh.

After nearly an hour studying the drawings, it became clear. He would lose Mai. How and when would she die? He could not tell.

Mai’s calls for their dog, Chạy, seeped in through the cracked window. He shoved the notebooks and sketching journal into the cabinet, leaned against the workbench, his heart hammering this new reality. She appeared in the doorway, listing the garden chores she’d planned for the day—transplanting lungwort and sedum, mulching beds, spraying down the weeds in their stone walks with her vinegar concoction. He took her hands, kissed her.

“Oh,” she added, “I forgot to tell you! Happy birthday! What would you like for breakfast?”

He couldn’t speak. He could only see the markings on that eggshell. He stared into her eyes, hoping that another symbol—one of long life—might call out to him from her deep brown irises.

She said, “Well, I’ll surprise you then.”

He followed her into the house, trying to ignore the echoing birdcalls jamming their wooded lot, breaking through the battens of their home.

* * *

Tiller stood at the bedroom window facing the twisting road that led to the cat-tailed marsh. It was his sixty-third birthday today, a full year since he read that eggshell. This morning’s sun dithered behind red and lavender clouds. Down in the yard, Mai wandered through their meticulous beds of perennials. Chạy sniffed every blade, leaf. Mai deadheaded blossoms, staked peonies. Tiller leaned his forehead against the windowpane, closed his eyes.

The screen door below banged. Kibble hit the bowl. Mai murmured something to Chạy. Tiller sat down on the edge of the bed to steady himself. He picked up her robe, holding it to his face, smelling her scent.

Mai’s voice broke through. “Are you ever coming down?” Again, he glanced out at the sky.

“On my way,” he yelled. It might rain. Storm. Or worse.

In the year since that awful reading, he’d searched the red-winged blackbird eggs in the marsh each morning during the nesting season demanding something might refute what he’d seen, that something might at least hint at how things might unfold, how he’d lose her. He studied them for the besom, the sickle, the anchor and waves, claw and chain, more bisected spirals. Would it be a stroke? Heart attack? And when would it happen? His readings had never been wrong, but sometimes he couldn’t get the time frame right. Mai was better at that.

Tiller had done everything he could to keep her from harm. Fearing even the yarn store, the library, the meat shop where she ordered pork tenderloin, he drove her everywhere. She didn’t mind. “What a handsome chauffeur I have,” she’d said one day, poking him in the ribs, laughing. After weeks of it, though, she became annoyed. “It’s like you don’t trust me to remember my way back?”

“Of course, I do.”

She chewed at the inside of her cheek, stared out the side window.

“Did you read something on the shells?” she asked.

“No,” he said, then placed his hand back on the wheel quickly.  

He had to try and be less obvious. She didn’t need to know he checked the appliances, the hot water heater, obsessively worried about carbon monoxide poisoning. He had the stairways carpeted, took out the hall tables lest she trip and fall. When she questioned him, he said, “I thought I’d re-stain these.” He snugged up the loose handrails. He stopped parking their vehicles in the garage or anywhere near the house; something in either one might short-circuit and set them aflame in the night. He kept imagining it happening in various ways, her untimely death, the symbols of loss like mottled dots or streaks on a photo’s negative he wanted clear, sharp.  

The worst time was between the fall and spring clutches when the nests were empty. Still, he walked to the marsh and back each morning, as if an egg would somehow appear.

Nothing—thank goodness—had happened to Mai. No wreck, no accident, no awful diagnosis. But he couldn’t shake the thought of her passing ahead of him, leaving him alone. For the past year he’d moved around his life, holding his breath for minutes at a time in a panic until he’d simply found himself lightheaded and exhausted. 

* * *

“You trust your eye,” his grandmother had instructed when he was ten. “Trust that tickle in your spine, that shake in your hand when you hover over the signs, see?” She’d held his small hand over the tea leaves, closed her eyes. 

Macie Shanty was known in the valley for her gift of “reading the cup,” a spaewife. She knew how to read not just coffee grounds and tea leaves but bark, shale, cracks in roads, woodgrains, and corn tassels. She taught Tiller each gift, made him practice with her. He heard many years later from Crazy Miss Jean—one of her students of tasseography—that his grandmother could read eggshells, too, but he’d never watched her do it. When Tiller met Mai, near the end of his tour in Vietnam, they found they had at least one thing in common: divination. Mai and her grandfather had deep sight too.

“You have eyes for reading,” she’d said the first time he’d met her, as she rang up his tab at the bar.

His fellow soldiers laughed. One answered for Tiller, “Yes, he does. And a dick for screwing.” Tiller stood there, silent, unable to move or speak while the Filipino band played CCR’s “Run Through the Jungle,” the harmonica notes yammering through the place. 

Mai ignored the other men, shook Tiller’s hand. He was sure she couldn’t know he was MIBARS, an imagery interpreter. She meant something else. She knew?

The next day, he returned to the bar, asked if she’d like to have dinner, maybe take a walk together. She said, “Of course,” and that’s when she told him her grandfather had taught her how to read nests.

“I am not so good as he is, but I can teach you. If you like?”

Tiller lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. He let his breath spill over her knuckles. “I’d be honored,” he finally said.

“Oh. Honored,” she said, laughing. “Well, we will see.”

In the lovely weeks he spent with her, she taught him to read nests—the pair of them poring together over eggshells at a swamp nearby the base, laughing, making love and promises and plans.

Tiller had to leave without her and it took two years to get Mai to the states, but he predicted, with Mai’s help, each step of the bureaucratic craziness with the markings on shells. She read the nests near her, sending sketches of what she saw. He did the same with clutches at the marsh near where he started building their future home. The paperwork came through the day the shells said it would, as did her arrival. The shells also predicted he would quit the military upon returning stateside. It didn’t tell him what he’d do next but he quickly found a job working for the telephone company. Even Mai’s first miscarriage, just seven months after they’d settled into their home, was foretold clear and plain on the shell.

That was the first time Tiller kept a reading from her until after the fact.

She had him pull over at the marsh on their way home from the hospital, her empty womb still full-looking. He sat in the truck, waited while she ripped a cattail from a thick stand of them and got back into the cab. She held it across her lap the whole way home and then placed it on their windowsill. “It is the way it has to be. We will keep trying,” she said, running a finger along the brown seed head.

By the time the cattail opened, exploding its white fragile insides onto the sill and the floor below, she was pregnant again, as she said she would be.

But the shells showed they’d lose that baby, too. The shells showed three more miscarriages.

Mai was thirty-three with the last pregnancy. The day after he alone saw the broken circle, the bisected spiral to its left, she had made up the crib again. Second trimester.

He could not bear to tell her.

That night bleeding awakened her. He said nothing. She demanded to see the egg.

When they got to the marsh, he held her hand to steady her in the reedy stands of cattails. He shined his flashlight and before he could stop her, she pulled the egg from the nest—something neither ever did—and she threw it against a rock. When Tiller tried to help her from the marsh she simply collapsed, sinking her knees into the brown water. She mumbled something over and over but Tiller couldn’t figure out the words, didn’t ask her what they meant.  

He kept the shell’s fragments in his workbench’s drawer, fearing if he left them there on the rock, a worse fate would track them.

Every day during nesting season, Tiller and Mai read the eggs of red-winged blackbirds together, and the shells held much good news, too. A job as a language teacher at the branch campus for Mai. Her far-off cousin’s move to the States. Tiller’s promotion.

Most readings had to do with the growing season, the weather. Some showed their meanings to them immediately. Others took a few days to read, in which case they’d revisit the marsh to see an egg again several times. These eggs, their markings, had predicted the flooded creek banks along the Sidle. They’d predicted the shooting of the albino buck and the massive heart attack the fool who shot it would suffer two months later. Sometimes they’d get hints of names, places, and other times just images and symbols. A tiny casket. A boot. A buck. Smashed ditch lilies. A couple held at gunpoint, a man twisting the neck of a fighting cock, a pregnant woman bleeding. He tried to blink the difficult images away, to rub them from his eyes, but they stayed. Often, thankfully, there were images of kindness, of love, of connection: hands touching, a forgiveness, an embrace, so vague and limited, but filled with joy, and he was lifted by these. 

It got so people would come, even the rich ladies from town, to try to talk him into making a reading on their destiny. He’d say he’d let them know if their initials showed up, but it wasn’t something he could control. They offered to pay him but he wouldn’t take money for this gift that had been laid upon him.

The marsh sat along a tar-and-chip road about a mile from their home. Usually, Tiller visited the marsh in the morning to study the nests alone. Most times he’d take his notebook along and sketch the egg markings as he viewed them in the low marsh nests. Then he’d walk back home and make his reading. Sometimes he could read the eggs quickly, right there, before a blackbird winged him, swooping down near his head, warning him away.

In the evening, Mai came along, and he’d finalize his reading with her. The wavy lines, the squiggles, and dots on the shells told of births, deaths, fights, accidents, disasters, needed rain, healthy crops, windfalls. Sometimes Mai’s smile stayed fixed for the length of their walk back, sometimes her brow remained furrowed. “There are times I wish I didn’t know what’s to come,” she said one evening. And Tiller told her she didn’t have to go along, that he could read them on his own. And she simply stopped.

He’d also kept a reading from Mai about Mùa hè, the dog they’d lost just after Mai’s last miscarriage. Tiller read the sign for cancer, that ugly five-pronged series of lines, the “s” shape next to the sign for a dog—two dots like the stars of Canis Minor. He knew the dog’s passing might be days away by the proximity of the signs. At first Tiller thought it may have actually been an “S” for his neighbor down the road, Spencer Singleton, who’d been in his final rounds of chemo, but when Tiller returned home, his beautiful jet-black dog was limp again beside the door. It raised its head briefly as he entered, its tail offering up only two quiet thuds.

Tiller unlaced his boots, wondering if he should tell Mai it would be only days until the dog passed. He stood again watching the dog’s labored breathing keeping time with the mantel clock’s ticks. He thought he smelled ammonia? Blood?

“She won’t drink,” Mai said. “She hasn’t moved from that spot since you left, Til.”

The whole way to the vet’s office, Mai whispered into the dog’s ear and hummed. The eighty-pound shepherd lay across the bench seat, its head on Mai’s lap. Every so often Mai       looked out the side window. Tiller could tell she was trying not to break down by the way she closed her eyes, rubbed at her throat.

On the way back home, she kept repeating, “We’ll get you fixed up right away, Mùa hè. These pills will help.”

Tiller pulled in the drive, shut down the motor. The dog tried to get up but Mai held her to the seat. “Whoa, Mùa hè. Wait.”

“It’s all through her, Mai.”

“I know. But we never know how healing works, right?”

Three days later, the dog could barely lift its head from the floor. Urine leaked from around its back end. That’s when Tiller told her about the shell’s reading. She nodded, said, “Then we’ll go now.” And she helped him carry the dog to the truck.

Mùa hè died before they made it to the vet.

In her grief, Mai didn’t speak to Tiller for days. When she did, she said, “It was unfair, what you did. Don’t ever keep a reading from me again.”

“But you said you might rather not know.”

“I want to know.”

She walked out to the garden to tend to her vines.

Years later she could be brought to tears just by the mention of the dog’s name. She even mistakenly called Chạy Mùa hè several times, her eyes lost in grief. And when Tiller corrected her, she shook her head.

* * *

Chạy wagged her tail as she waited at the bottom of the stairs for Tiller to come down. Mai was pouring his coffee when he finally got himself to the kitchen. He sat down, acted like he was scanning the paper. Should he go now? Should he just get it over and done with and see what the eggs showed? 

“What were you doing so long up there?”

“Sleeping in.”

“Well, happy birthday!” She kissed him on the cheek, set his plate in front of him. “You going to the marsh today for your birthday reading? You missed yesterday.”

“No, I went yesterday.”

“You did?” she asked. Chạy whined. Mai shushed her.

“Yes.”

Mai looked confused, leafing through the mail, sipping her coffee.

Tiller worried again that she had decided to get back to reading nests, that she went to the marsh herself, had seen the same markings. It was true that the last few times he’d returned and tried to show her his sketches, she acted as though she was too busy to help figure out the reading. “You’re the expert, Tiller.”

“That’s not true,” he said, calling her out, desperate to know if she’d seen something.

“It is.”

In fact, one night, after Mai had fallen asleep, he was checking the wiring of the junction box, convincing himself she’d been to the marsh without him, panicking that she’d seen something bad. Earlier that day, he’d been finishing up re-stoning the small footwall along the pond where Mai had misjudged her steps because of her bifocals and fallen in. It had taken longer than he thought to repair, more rock than he’d estimated, and when he drove to the creek bed to harvest more, he came upon Mai on the road to the marsh. She was startled to see him. She said, quickly and stuttering, “I’m looking for mushrooms.”

That had been weeks before. Since then, he followed her around the property, always asking where she was going, could he join her?

“I know what I’m doing. You treat me like a child,” she’d said.

Now Mai got up from the table, set the letters on the counter. “More coffee?”

“What? No. I’m heading out.”

“Are you okay? Have you seen something?” She settled the pot back in its cradle.

“What?”

“Have you seen something that troubles you?”

“No. Nothing much lately.”

“No cancer’s back for Spencer?” She nudged the dog out of the way, sat back down.  

“Mai, Spencer’s been in remission for years.” He pulled out the crossword page from the paper, slid it over to her.

“But I haven’t seen him.”

“He was just here the other day. Remember? He brought smoked salmon.”

She nodded and grabbed a pencil, tracing the tip of it over the empty spaces on the puzzle. Tiller kissed her cheek and stood. “Well, I guess I’ll head out,” he said, his words elevated to a question.

She nodded again.

Tiller was exhausted halfway there but forced himself to the entrance just off the road. The wind picked up, sending dust from the berms into his eyes. The first nests he came upon at the more solid end were filled with two eggs each, so he made his way deeper into the thicket, slopping through the marshy mess where cattails swayed as he walked. Larger clutches could always be found within denser cover. An egg jostled loose from one nest near his left knee and he reached for it, watching his hand act on an impulse his heart knew was dead wrong. As he caught it, cupped it there in his palm, he thought, “Put it back, man.” But he couldn’t. This egg would have to go home with him. He felt its warmth in his hand, knew the spiral was there. He couldn’t read it now. He wouldn’t. He wrapped it in his handkerchief.

As he walked the long path back, a route farther than the regular road, he did all he could to resist looking at the egg, and when he finally got back home, his T-shirt soaked with sweat, he set it on his workbench.

“Who’s there?” Mai yelled out.

“It’s me. I’ll be there.” Tiller quickly closed the door behind him and met Mai in the backyard, where he found her on her knees digging up the flower gardens.

“What are you up to?” Tiller asked.

“I guess I was weeding and—”

“Got a little carried away?”

“I did,” Mai said. She smiled, wrinkled her brow. Could she see his worry, his guilt? Was she upset? She’d been asking Tiller to quarter her lilies for weeks, but he was so preoccupied with his safety measures—adding fire extinguishers to each room, checking the outside banisters for rot—he’d put it off.

All at once, Mai started weeping.

“What’s wrong, Mai?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll help.”

“No. No. Let it go.” She got up and ran to the house.

He decided he’d tell her tonight. He’d study the egg first, then he’d show her. 

* * *

When they first met, Mai had told him how her grandfather predicted many deaths in their village—including his own. In fact, the egg that showed it was one Mai had carried to the states with her.

Back then, she took Tiller to where her village had once been. He could almost see the scene as she described the day it burned. She’d been afraid to go back for months. She told Tiller she knew it was risky for her to take him there but she had to get something left behind. “Má and Ba, we ran all the way, but when we got here, too late.” They saw the skeletal messes, strewn across the weedy growth, in place of what was once, she explained, a gathering of small homes, one of which was her grandfather’s, the place she’d lived with him. 

“The smell, Tiller. Horrible.” She shook her head, squeezed her eyes closed.

He could imagine the scent of charred flesh as she explained more, her voice dropping off with some words, becoming louder with others. She spoke some in her native language, would catch herself, translate into English. At one point she was silent, staring at him. Holding back. What did she see when she looked at him? What wasn’t she saying? That American soldiers set that fire?

He said, “I’m sorry,” and again, in his best Vietnamese, “Tôi xin lôi, Mai.”

With that, she continued describing it. Sparks, flames. Wood burning. Roofs collapsing, screams. “My grandfather, he could not get out fast enough or maybe he was knocked out when the roof collapsed. We don’t know. He was found here.”

When Tiller heard this, he scratched at that spot on his neck that seemed to always ache when he’d seen a destroyed village. He never saw these scenes in person, just from the God’s-eye view while staring into the lightbox at the post-mission aerial shots.

Mai said, “Wait here.” She walked to a tree a few feet beyond the charred leavings and dug at the ground. A small box emerged from the loamy soil, a small tin box he figured held her family’s money. He didn’t ask what it contained that day as they drove silently back to base. He only heard her tears tap the lid of the box, watched them wash the gray dirt away in lines to reveal a dark green tin.

When Mai finally arrived in the U.S., he drove her past the marsh, pointing it out in the dark. He carried her over the threshold of the board-and-batten house he’d built while he’d waited for her and straight to their bed. Just after they made love, she rose from the covers, opened her suitcase. She pulled out the now shiny green tin, and revealed, not money, but a journal and a single small blown egg adorned with what he thought at first was some sort of calligraphy for the markings were much darker than any he’d seen. Then he realized these were the kinds of eggs her grandfather read.

“This is the egg that showed my grandfather’s death and the death of our home.” Tiller nodded, taking in the markings. “But look here.” She turned it over. There he could see what looked like a perfect heart and a “T” and an “M.” She grabbed his hand. “This means we were meant for each other. My grandfather said I would someday meet a man named ‘T’ and fall in love.” Certainly, Tiller believed it. He needed to believe the markings on eggs. Back then, knowing even a hint of a certain future centered him.

* * *

This egg on the workbench had nearly the same markings as the one on his birthday a year before. The meaning was clear. He was losing her. He sat staring at it in the light of the garage’s overhead buzzing fluorescence. He turned it over and over again. Then, he gingerly wrapped it.

What if he just put the egg back? What if he just started living without the readings?

He didn’t want to wake her—Mai had gone upstairs early, was now surely sleeping. He hadn’t heard a sound in hours. He stole out the back of the garage with the egg tucked deep in his coat pocket. He could drive but he didn’t want to wake Mai with the sound of the truck starting, so he walked the mile to the marsh, searched for the exact nest with his flashlight beam. When he found it, he placed the egg back in the clutch.

Birds startled and mobbed him, screaming out their annoyance. Instead of taking the time to read another egg, he headed back to the house, walking a longer route, a path through the woods, trying to slow his heartbeat, calm himself, trying to think only of the sound of his footfall on the tar and chip road, the bawling of the frogs, a screech owl off to the north, its penetrating song.

In the morning he’d tell Mai about reading the egg a year before and now this one, with the same reading, that had fallen from the nest. Perhaps she’d say they were flawed readings—those of eggs outside the nest—that her grandfather had made the same mistake, misread the egg as telling him to stay in the village the day their village burned. Maybe she’d go back to the marsh in the morning with him. They’d find another egg that would negate the ones he’d seen. Had she ever said that could happen?

He could still see Mai’s lips telling the story of her village. He could hear her describe the way her grandfather read eggshells to her, explaining each detail, how he showed her the sign for fire—letting her know that the flame listing left meant actual fire, flame listing right meant passion.

That’s when he thought of the candle, and he ran. Mai always lit a candle when she did her nightly reading. Sure, she had always blown it out when she was through, but what if she’d forgotten? His lungs burned like they were set afire. He could barely catch his breath. He already saw in his mind, as he rounded the bend and came upon the entrance of their driveway, the flames sneaking around the baseboards, the smoke billowing from the fractured bedroom windows.

But when he got there, nothing. No smoke, no fire.

From the outside, the house was silent. 

Still, he bounded up the steps, the dog following close behind, barking. He flung open the door. When he lunged to her side of the bed, Mai screamed out.

“Mai, Mai, it’s me. I thought the house caught fire.”

“Who? Who are you?”

“Mai, Mai, it’s me,” he said, hugging her close despite her hands holding him away. But she said it again into his neck, barely a whisper, “Who are you?”

He pulled himself away. “Mai?”

She pushed his hands away, but slowly she came to, like she’d been on a drug, or waking from a nightmare. “Tiller?” He realized in that moment he’d seen this in her eyes before. The day he met her on the road. She was lost. She did not remember it was Spencer who dropped off the smoked salmon. And she couldn’t remember the ingredients for her favorite banana bread, their phone number, and when he found her wading in the pond, she was confused about how she’d fallen in. All those misplaced things. And earlier today when he saw her in the yard, the perfectly fine plants she’d cultivated and fertilized and watered, uprooted and flung from their beds, their leaves wilting in the sun, their bulbs split, their twisting unearthed rhizomes, like the exposed guts of an animal, surrounding her. 

He climbed into bed beside her, fully clothed, smelling of the marsh. She clutched him, her body taut and trembling. Neither of them spoke. Just breathed until their rhythms slowed and met. He didn’t know then that for the next seven years he’d hold her many times just like this. Some of those times, she’d recognize him. Other times he’d see she was trying to find her way to him again, and he’d whisper, “It’s me, Tiller. I’m here.” This would be before he’d move her to the care facility five miles away where he’d set up the blown-out shells on a shelf so she could see them, where he’d read novels to her, where he’d feed her raspberries, and smile and point at the birds on the feeder outside her window.

~ ~ ~

Jolene McIlwain’s work appears online or is forthcoming at New Orleans Review, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Litro, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Net, and the Best Small Fictions anthology. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and novel set in western Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and son.

Trauma

I stabilize the boy’s neck by holding C-spine. His hair curls around the knuckles of my thumbs. His name is Terry. He’s maybe twelve, skinny as a rifle barrel, and fell from a big oak in the yard of a bargain bungalow—it’s more a shack. This is Holly Hill, a tiny city sandwiched between Daytona and Ormond Beach, and though the coast is less than a mile away—so close that the breeze is constant and salty—the city limits don’t reach the ocean.

Terry lies in a sandy patch of yard where his uncle laid him after the fall. I tell Terry to keep still. “Don’t move your head. Look at clouds,” I say. “Imagine pictures.” He can’t move his legs. His arms, he said, feel prickly. Fire ants scale his calves, patrol red bites.

Feet away, the uncle squats, knees to his chest, staring at Terry from the threshold of an open door. Inside is dark and crammed with things like the home swallowed a house with twice the square footage. The uncle is slightly deformed—a canvas of scar tissue drapes cheek to ear. The deformed ear pins to his skull. He’s a large man with a beachball belly and arms that could bend a tire iron. He wears a bleached shirt and paint-stained jeans, work clothes that probably haven't seen a job in a while. He pants madly and retreats into the house only to emerge moments later.

On the street, the ambulance pinks the sandy yard. My preceptor and his EMT partner retrieve the stretcher, a cervical collar, and a backboard. I’m in EMT school. So far, the calls have been mostly elderly people—heart attacks, diabetes, falls. A few younger adults overdosed. Terry is my first pediatric. Looking at him, I feel lightheaded. The sand further swallows my knees, and I can hear ocean waves, though I know the beach is too far.

A firetruck crawls along the center of the narrow street, avoiding trash cans and haphazardly parked cars before settling behind the ambulance. The uncle’s facial scar tissue blushes with emergency light. He is red-eyed and sniffling. He looks insane. My preceptor places the backboard next to Terry, and he and the EMT set the cervical collar as I stabilize the vertebrae. The EMT takes my place, and my preceptor asks me to lift Terry’s shirt. He snaps his fingers inches from my face until I come to, then I lift Terry’s shirt, revealing a side doused in a red-wine-colored bruise. My preceptor instructs me to run my hands along Terry’s torso. I start with my fingers near his neck, and when I reach the base of his ribs, near the perimeter of the blood pooling beneath skin, the flesh is hot.

“Maybe you can handle this,” I say.

My preceptor looks at me for a moment, just long enough to register that I’m not okay. He says he’ll take over. Once we switch positions, he tells me to watch and continues sweeping. We roll Terry on his side. A golf ball sized lump protrudes from the middle of Terry’s back. I look away, focus on grooves of pitted sand. My preceptor lets out an affirmative hmm, as if he’s a plumber who’s found the source of a leak, then he pulls the backboard under Terry, and the firefighters slide him into the ambulance.

The uncle asks if he can ride in the ambulance. “I don't have a car,” he says. My preceptor says it's fine, so the uncle sits across from me.

Terry scrunches his face as I bring an oxygen mask to his mouth. “I don’t want it,” he says.

I look to my preceptor for guidance, and he asks the uncle to hold the mask. The uncle keeps the mask to Terry’s face like a mother with a bottle.

“This is my fault,” the uncle says.

I take blood pressure as my preceptor checks for a pulse in Terry’s foot.

“I wasn’t watching him,” the uncle says. “I wasn’t watching him.”

We speed toward the hospital. The Daytona Speedway blurs in tiny windows, and I flash to my first huddle in an ambulance. I was sixteen. My brother’s corpse was within reach, and the smell of sea mixed with antiseptic. I imagine the color of Alex’s gradient skin—the blue started at his fingers and toes. His hair was slick with saltwater and crusted with sand.

* * *

Halifax is close, so in no time we hand Terry to staff. This brings us to the halfway point of our shift. Nurses orbit as my preceptor signs a report at the emergency room counter.

Leaning on the counter, I ask my preceptor, “What’s it like responding to a dead child?” I recall training videos with families strewn with debris across highways.

“You never get used to it,” he says.

“How do you handle it?”

He flips through pages of the report. “Not everyone can do the job,” he says as if he knows I’m in over my head. Then, “I’ve got to piss.”

If medicine isn’t for me, what am I left with?

Too anxious to lounge for the next twenty minutes the way I usually do before returning with the team to the ambulance lot, I wander the hospital, through halls with elevators broad enough for beds. Upstairs, where they open children, the ceiling tiles are checkered with hand-painted images of butterflies and Disney princesses. I pass janitorial closets and nurses’ desks and find myself looking into the glass walls of the emergency surgery waiting room. The uncle sits among other exhausted people.

I wonder what it’s like to anticipate surgical news, wait for doctors to sew shut a loved one. Alex was brought straight to the morgue that night. Incapable of forming coherent words, I had the hospital phone my father. Then I swallowed an entire roll of mints from a vending machine. When my father arrived, he’d clearly been drinking too. He went down to see Alex, his fifteen-year-old football star son—alone—then told me to get in the car.

I enter the waiting room. The uncle sits with his elbows planted in his thighs, his hands supporting his head and masking his face.

“Your nephew will be okay,” I say.

The uncle parts his hands. “Yes.”

I take a seat across from him. “What are they doing now?”

“An MRI,” he says. “He won’t be done for a couple hours, at least.”

I offer my hand. “I’m Tim.”

“John.”

We shake.

John asks, “How long have you been doing this?”

“Just over a month,” I say. “I’m an intern.”

“Do you like the job?”

“It’s draining.” I realize this isn’t the best thing to say. I smile and quickly follow with, “But rewarding.”

John nods, sinks a bit into his chair and looks at the television. “I told him to be careful, but I wasn’t watching.”

“Kids fall,” I say. “That’s what they do.”

The television is almost muted, so the crinkle of magazine pages dominates the room—a woman rattles through pages, not really reading.

John removes his gaze from the television. “I moved Terry.” He takes his hands from his face. His scar tissue is wrinkled like waterlogged skin. “After he fell. I picked him up and tried to bring him into the house. Then I remembered moving a person is bad for a back injury.”

I nod with nothing to say. The pages of the magazine scrape like a shuffling deck of cards. I look at my watch. “I’ve got to get back to work.” I almost forcibly shake John’s hand, hold his forearm with my left hand like a politician. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

I meet my preceptor and the EMT and climb into the ambulance. The defibrillator is across from me at eye level. My preceptor keeps open the little window that divides the cab from the back. He turns so I can see the side of his face, part of his mouth, and says, “It’s always a dumb accident that ruins people’s lives. Text at the wheel, and you’ve killed a friend. Fall from a tree, and you’re in a wheelchair. Etcetera. Etcetera.”

I want to say, swim while drunk and you drown.

We go for coffee, to a Latin supermarket with a converted deli where rice and beans, plantains, and pulled pork heap behind a sneeze guard. The woman at the deli register is middle aged but looks young. My preceptor knows just enough Spanish to make her laugh. She asks if we want our coffee strong and my preceptor says, “Claro.” She fills Styrofoam cups with mostly espresso. I tip her extra and we sit at one of three tables. My preceptor takes a chair to keep eyes on the woman.

“That last call was a bad one,” my preceptor says.

“I hope the kid will walk,” I say and blow on my coffee.

“You good?” my preceptor asks.

I nod. I’m a little exhausted from the shock of seeing Terry, his snapped spine. Too much stress does that to you, turns you into a pressurized container, an over-pumped soda bottle rocket, then leaves you deflated in the weeds.

We get a call, return to the ambulance, and head to a gas station in the shitty part of town. Old bikers gas choppers at the pumps. One wears a leather jacket with the sleeves butchered off. Inside, an obese woman with stained sweatpants, a giant T-shirt advertising Disney World, and no bra sits on scuffed tile, leaning against a rack of packaged peanuts. Her feet are bare. Overturned flip flops mine the aisle. A scruffy, half-Beagle mutt lays on a little dog bed next to the door. The dog follows us with its eyes, not bothering to lift its head.

The man behind the register points to the woman. My preceptor kneels beside her.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“A paramedic,” he says. “What’s wrong, ma’am?”

“Get away.” She kicks at him. The effort is minimal, but my preceptor still takes a step back. “I’m thirsty,” she says. “My throat’s the Sahara.”

“She has diabetes,” the clerk says, then shouts, “Janet, they’re here to fucking help.”

“Ma’am, do you know where you are?”

“The Mohave!”

“Do you have water for her?” my preceptor asks the clerk, who rolls his eyes before searching under his counter. He tosses a little warm bottle of Dasani.

My preceptor hands the bottle to the woman. “What’s this?” she asks without taking the water.

“Water.”

“Who are you?”

“The paramedic.” My preceptor cracks the cap and places the bottle beside the woman. “Can you stand, ma’am?”

She stares at the water bottle. The dog stands and stretches, steps from the bed, stops to sniff the bottle before plopping against the woman’s leg.

“Can you stand?” my preceptor asks.

“I’m too thirsty.” The dog sets its chin on the woman’s shin.

“Whose dog is this?” my preceptor says.

“It’s her dog,” the clerk says.

“Ma’am, do you know where you are?”

“The fucking gas station,” she says.
“And you have diabetes?” my preceptor asks.

She looks around, then nods, finally sips the water.

“You may be in hyperglycemic shock. I need to check your glucose.”

“No,” she says and takes the dog into her lap. It yelps because she grabs it funny.

“Ma’am, you could die,” my preceptor says.

“I’m not going with you.”

“I need to check your glucose.”

“I’m not leaving my dog.”

“I can try,” I say. My preceptor takes a step back, and I kneel beside the woman. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Sanders,” she says and pets the dog.

“Sanders will be fine. We just want to check your blood. We want to make sure you’re okay. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

She pets her dog a few times. “What do you need to do?”

“A quick finger prick.”

She says okay and lets me draw blood. My preceptor asks if she has insulin on her. She says no. He tells her she needs insulin, and she shouts she doesn’t have any. He tells her, in that case, she needs to go to the hospital. She says she’s not leaving her dog, that she’s not going anywhere.

“How do you know her?” my preceptor asks the clerk after disengaging from the woman.

“She’s a regular.”

“I can hold the dog,” I interrupt. “If we’re allowed to take the dog.”

“She’s not impaired enough for us to force treatment,” my preceptor says. To the clerk, “If she gets worse, call 911.”

Once the door closes behind us, my preceptor exhales.

We leave and drive a mile to a Wawa. We gas up and then wait for more calls. My preceptor gets some boneless chicken wings from the heater then watches the double door entrance to point out the ass of every third woman that walks in. “Look at that one,” he says, chewing. I can’t decide if his behavior is more appropriate than last week’s preceptor. My preceptor last week stopped at a flea market so we could stretch our legs. She bought a potted succulent and kept it in the cab all day.

The ambulance has an audio port, so we listen to a history podcast from my preceptor’s phone. The voice goes on about Ancient Greek phalanxes, and I feel like my blood is coagulating in my head. I question if it’s possible to really help anyone. I think about how far from saving I am.

For months after Alex was put in the ground, I dreamed that he was buried alive, that I heard him wailing through coffin and earth. In these dreams, I always saved him, reaching him just in time.

* * *

We get a last call that will bring us to the end of our shift, a car accident. On a ramp to I-4, three cars are pulled to the shoulder. Two are really smashed up. Everyone sits around looking like they’re waiting out a storm. No one is really hurt, but a woman claims whiplash, says she feels a vertebra popped out of place. We collar her and take her to the hospital. I think she’s just getting her pieces set in case she decides to sue.

At the hospital, as my preceptor finishes paperwork, I find the emergency surgery waiting room again. John, the uncle, is in the same chair. The old woman is gone, and the magazines are disordered on a little table.

“Any word?” I ask.

John turns. “Not yet.”

I want to tell him to try not to think about it too much, but I know that’s impossible. “Stick in there,” I say. I stand by him for a while before leaving to find my preceptor.

In the ambulance lot, we gather Styrofoam coffee cups and McMuffin wrappers from the cab, sterilize the back, and ensure equipment is locked down. We check the engine. Shaded by the hood, my preceptor says, “It’s been an interesting day.” The EMT inserts the dipstick, and I inspect the undercarriage for leaks.

The hood clangs shut, and the three of us say goodbye, but my preceptor follows me to my car. “You don’t have much experience, but you have enough.” We stand face to face beside my car’s taillights. “You can’t react like that again.”

I want to tell him that I can handle shit. I was in the Army. That I froze up because Terry is a kid. Then I realize, what’s the difference?

“I’ll figure my act out,” I say.

“Sometimes the best candidates are the ones to drop out,” he says as if I could take pride in failure. “Think on it before you start the job.”

I get in my car. My preceptor calls out that he’ll see me later, and I say goodbye. As my preceptor pulls away, I dread being alone in my childhood home and decide to go back inside the hospital.

Outside the waiting room, John is staring into a vending machine. I ask if he’s hungry. We find the cafeteria. There’s a sandwich line, a salad bar, and a coffee shop. I treat him to the sandwich line, then we settle at a table with black trays in hand. Scooping mayonnaise clumps from my sandwich as John stares at his roast beef, I say, “Don’t worry about having moved Terry.”

“What if I paralyzed him?”

I take a bite. “Where are his parents?”

“His mother is going to kill me.” John opens a bag of chips and dumps half on his plate.

“When will she be here?”

“I haven’t called her.”

I put my sandwich down, swallow. “You need to do that.”

“She’s working.”

“She needs to be here,” I say. “In case a decision needs to be made.”

“People break their backs and still walk all the time,” he says with a chip pinched between fingers. “I saw it in football.”

“I’ll take you to her.” I stand and begin rewrapping my sandwich in brown deli paper. John doesn’t budge, and he doesn’t seem like he will. “You want to call her first?” I ask.

“I just need a moment.” He sucks in air. “She’s going to kill me.” He takes out an old iPhone with a shattered screen, and I give him space.

I think of how the nurses had to call my father that night, how impossible it was for me to speak. Even with two years on Alex, he was nearly as tall as me. The summer before he drowned, muscle thickened his frame. He could rocket a football and was fast, wanted to play at West Point—to be a war hero and a football star.

After his death, I stopped attending high school football games. There was sentiment around the school that Alex’s death wasn’t a tragedy, but a logical conclusion to underage drinking—that in some way, he deserved it. Circles whispered, well, he was drunk. When the Homecoming game came around, I thought the celebration would bring normality to my life. The team huddled as they pumped up. They rocked around the quarterback, that space where Alex should’ve been. I couldn’t watch.

John gets off the phone and asks me if I can take him to get Terry’s mom. I nod, tell him no problem.

In my car, John adjusts the A/C vent. He gives directions, but, otherwise, we don’t say much. I drive west, and he bites his nails. After a couple of songs, he handles a cigarette pack, offers me one. I shake my head. He asks, “You mind if I smoke?”

I do, but I say, “Just keep the window down.”

“I’ll keep my head out like a dog,” he says and does, at least when he exhales. He exhales so often that, while the wind whips his hair, he neglects directions, and I miss a turn.

“What did you do before this?” John asks as I get back on route.

“I was in the Army.” The military was the best way to escape my father, so I joined. I signed my enlistment contract in Alex’s honor and had the government take me in like an orphan. I was seventeen, so my father signed as well.

“You a medic?”

“Military police. The slots were full for medic.”

“I was a cav scout.” John rolls up his sleeve to show a tattoo of the cavalry scout insignia: two golden, crossed sabers—though the tattoo is an ugly, faded yellow. “First Iraq.” John points to my bicep, asks, “What’s yours?”

My brother’s name is tattooed on my right bicep.

“What happened to your brother?” John asks.

I consider making something up, but after a moment I say, “He drowned.”

John tosses his cigarette butt out the window. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

“I have pictures.”

“I don’t remember what my dad looked like,” John says. “I was little, ten. I was in the car too. It’s why I have this scar.” He traces the glob of skin on his face. “Sometimes I still get upset about the crash.”

I’m on the verge of choking up. Grief is strange; the person’s memory fades, and healing becomes traumatic. I say, “Terry will be okay.”

“If Terry died, I’d kill myself.” He lights another cigarette.

We reach a shopping plaza. The strip is lined with empty stores and the ruins of a Kmart. The weathered outline of the long-removed storefront letters is etched into stone. Sparsely parked cars dot the littered parking lot. At the end of the lot, there’s a Dollar Store. “That it?” I ask.

John nods. “Let me finish my smoke.” He steps out and leans on the car, frames his head in my passenger window to look at me, looks away to blow smoke.

“Be quick.” It’s incredible I have to tell him this.

“You got any kids?”

“No.”

“I’ve got a daughter.” He takes a long drag. “She turned out well.”

“Okay.”

“I wish she’d meet a good guy. Someone doing something with their life.” He inhales. “Medical jobs are good.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be doing this much longer,” I say. “Let’s put a move on.”

John takes a last puff. The cigarette burns bright before he drops the butt, grinds with his toes, and gets back in. I pull up a few hundred yards to the dollar store.

John looks like a child going to a beating before disappearing behind dollar-sign-stickered windows.

I fiddle with the radio, look at the years on quarters from a grimy cup holder. I still count Alex’s birthdays, imagine what he would look like in his twenties. He would’ve stepped through the ranks if he had gone to West Point. I was grounded to lower enlisted, glued to gate duty for years. Even when I’d been promoted to specialist, I felt I’d been wasting my life corralling drunk soldiers and keeping fucked up sergeants from striking their wives. I wanted to help people. Really help them.

My father’s heart seized up before I signed away another four years. We hadn’t spoken in years, but he left me everything. That was the closest I came to earning back his love. He was beyond forgiving me. I know because I was beyond it, too.

Alex’s room is still the same. His clothes, other than a few Jacksonville Jaguar jerseys, were donated, but his backpack and schoolwork remain in a closet corner. The bed and the television and the stereo with a stack of pirated CDs and the shelf of Louis L’Amour paperbacks are all the same.

I think a couple songs play before John emerges from the Dollar Store with Terry’s mother. She’s a small woman, older than John, with long graying hair. She seems prematurely frail, like an actress miscast into old age. She marches with her arm on John’s back as if she’s escorting him, holding him up. She opens the front passenger door, and John gets in back.

“This is Tim. He’s the paramedic,” John says.

“I’m an intern.”

“Tim says Terry will be fine.”

“Things could be much worse,” I say.

“Thank God,” she says.

I pull out of the plaza onto the main road.

“Let’s pray for my boy,” she says and turns for John’s hand. Her other hand rests on my shoulder.

“I need to focus on driving,” I say.

“Just send good thoughts.” She cups my shoulder, squeezes.

I do just that. I think good thoughts. Terry’s mother starts with an Our Father, and I think of the calls I’ve been a part of, the relief I’ve seen on patients’ faces after successful surgeries, the smiles of those checking out of hospitals, the care and dedication of the staff. She asks God to protect Terry. Then she prays for us. She asks for guidance and absolution, and she asks God to bless me, says, “Guide all of us to be more like Tim.” When she finishes, she says to me, “You’re a blessing. Keep healing people.”

The doctor enters the waiting area. Terry’s mother stands and links arms with John. I stay seated. She says to me, “You can hear this too.”

The doctor leads us to a room with a large computer monitor. She cycles through ghostly MRI images of Terry’s spine, pointing with a pen to the fracture-dislocation at L2, the compression at L3, potentially severed nerve roots. The doctor goes on about the surgery plan. The butt of her pen rests against the monitor in the place where the spinal canal narrows.

There’s something satisfying about this horror—the struggle for a good outcome. Listening to the doctor is like the moments before the paramedics on the beach decided they couldn’t get my brother to breathe.

~ ~ ~

Thomas Sokolowski earned an MFA from the University of Central Florida and is currently working toward a PhD at Florida State University. Tom has also served in the Florida National Guard. He grew up in DeBary, Florida.