Write the Year 2023—Week 49: Samara

A prompt from Writers Write sparked this bit of flash memoir. (of course, it’s about a seed I didn’t plant, but still. The prompt prompted. At least it’s not a poem?

Title: Samara
WC: 500

Darlene and I peeled helicopters in the gangway between my house and the Hickeys’ two-flat. The brick was cool at our backs as the pile of tiny green seeds grew on the flagstone between us. We’d hidden cigarettes under it the summer before. Two, stolen from her mom’s pack and wrapped up in a sandwich bag from my lunch or hers. We never smoked them. Darlene forgot. I went back for them, terrified we’d somehow be caught. I’d torn them to pieces over a sewer grate and lived in fear for days afterward. Today, though, we were flicking feathery yellow tails, their heads split open, in the general direction of the cement beyond our bare feet.

I was methodical. Darlene was sloppy. The pale, rice paper skin on the seeds, I thought, would doom the whole operation from the start. I stripped it carefully away with the nonexistent edges of my chewed-down fingernails. Once in a while, it came away in a minute sheet, leaving me with a wriggling sense of satisfaction. Darlene refused any work beyond snapping the neck or sometimes squeezing the seed out between her fingers. She was growing bored.

“We should just plant them all,” she said.

She made a sudden move to scoop up our pile. I’d just coaxed the translucent sheet free of the seed in my hand. Her impatience stopped the wriggle dead in its tracks.

“We can’t. They need space and water,” I protested, “Their own water. We need to pick the best one.”

It’s what we had agreed. It’s what we had planned, but Darlene’s fist was closing around the pile. A few seeds squirted out between her white knuckles and bounced away. Those that didn’t were crushed under her bare foot as she quickly scuttled into a crouch.

She clawed at the flagstone with her free hand. Her longer nails caught at the thick plastic my dad had laid out underneath to keep the weeds from growing up between the flat, irregular rocks.

“This won’t tear anyway,” she snapped. She thrust her hand toward the house in a gesture of disgust. Her tight fist opened and the remaining seeds pattered like unexpected rain against the window of my sister’s basement bedroom. “This is dumb.”

“Dumb,” I echoed. I set the last of the seeds delicately on the window sill, trying and failing to keep the gesture casual.

“Let’s go do something,” she demanded as she shoved her feet into her thongs.

“Yeah. Okay.” I pushed myself up.

I searched blindly with one foot, then another as I hurried to find my own pair, even as I kept my eye on Darlene. She’d leave me behind if I wasn’t quick enough, if I let her out of my sight. I found the sandals, deep under the bush where she’d thrown them, laughing as she did. I moved to hurry after her, sparing barely a glance for the lone seed on the windowsill. The best one. The one I would not plant.

Write the Year 2022—Week 15: Wail

Just a dashed-off memory in response to this prompt

Title: Wail
WC: 900

I must have been fourteen. It was summer and I’d gotten what was supposed to be a regular babysitting gig. The kids were a girl my little brother’s age—not quite seven that summer—and a baby, eight or nine months old. Amy and Allison, respectively.

They were half-sisters. It was their mom who hired me, their mom who had taken a job at the Dominicks deli counter, or something like it, so she needed a sitter. The baby’s dad—not Amy’s dad—was a complete blank to me. He was a second husband (maybe). He was a stepfather (I suppose). It was exotic in my world, half-sisters and second husbands were not thick on the ground.

The first time I met him, he was surprised to see me. I was mortified by this for some reason, as though I’d crawled into the house through the bathroom window or something—as if I wasn’t the person his wife had hired to watch his infant daughter, apparently with zero involvement from him.

His wife had had to work late. She’d called twice, three times to ask me to stay later. She’d pay me time and a half. She’d pay me double. They wanted her to work late. Late turned into later than her husband (probably) had worked. There he was and there I was and neither of us knew what to do with one another.

He wanted to know how much he owed me. I truly had no idea at that point. There was time and a half and double time, but all that had been rushed and informal. It seemed indecent to ask for money from a man I’d never met. I clearly exasperated him. I have no memory of how much he actually paid me—if he paid me at all. I only remember walking home alone in the dark, a pretty long way. It never occurred to him to offer to drive me. It might well have killed me to ask.

That wasn’t the day the baby cried. It was a different day that she would not stop crying. She’d rolled off the bed earlier in the day—a low junior bed in the older girl’s room—when I’d stepped into the kitchen to get their lunch. Amy, the older girl, had screamed in fear. The baby had screamed, by all appearances, to keep her half sister company.

The baby had calmed down first. She’d stared in puzzlement as I tried to talk her sister down. She’d kicked her feet in her high chair and stuffed chubby fists full of Cheerios into her mouth, shooting sidelong glances from Amy to me as if to ask What’s that about?

An hour later, maybe two, she started crying again. It was unusual. She wasn’t a particularly fussy baby, and it started small. It was a noncommittal whine that I figured a little time in her bouncy chair would solve. But the bouncy chair seemed to make things worse. The whine built to something more substantial. I picked her up and danced her around to—I’m not making this up—music by Jem and the Holograms. She was unmoved.

Soon, she had worked herself up to that serial roar that babies do, the kind where they startle themselves by running out of breath, which scares them and makes them cry all the harder. I checked her diaper. I changed it even though it didn’t need changing. It was hot in the house, so I stripped her down to just a t-shirt and an unnecessarily changed diaper. When that had no effect, I unsnapped the shoulder of her little undershirt and whipped that over her head. She roared in protest.

I tried offering her milk, Cheerios, forbidden juice. I tried putting her down for a nap, even though I’d been afraid to try to let her sleep after the bed incident, even though she’d fallen less than a foot into an enormous pile of laundry in her sister’s untidy room.

It felt like the walls were marching inward, as if the baby’s screams rattling the windows in their frames was calling everything closer. I walked the length of the house with her in my arms, talking a mile a minute. Amy trailed after me making the kind of distinctly unhelpful suggestions that seven-year-olds like to make.

I knew the neighbors must be wondering why I was murdering the kid. I knew they must be wondering why I couldn’t just be quick about it. I took both kids out on to the front porch. I told Amy it was because we were also so overheated at that point, but I think I was scared. I think I was hoping someone would be annoyed enough to come see what was going on, and I was fully prepared to push that wailing, twenty-pound nightmare into adult hands.

But no adults, annoyed or otherwise, were forthcoming. I sank down on the step with the baby on my knee. I turned her toward me. I was prepared to plead. I was fully prepared to negotiate with this terrorist. With my hand spread wide on her naked back, I dipped my head to look her in the eye. She sucked in a breath. Her mouth opened wide. And she let out the most earth-shaking belch I have heard to this day.