Floaters by Kelle Groom
Kelle Groom writes her heartrending flash piece, “Floaters,” in a child’s voice, halting and haunted. The story moves forward in half sentences and phrases. Dreamlike metaphor envelopes the reader in the world of a young narrator who is aching to make sense of the adult realm with all of its frights and complications. Pine trees are ship masts; cigarette smoke “a gritty fog.” Groom wields poetic concision to create an emotionally precise world. In her author’s note, she writes that the story is “an exploration of darkness, of loss,” of characters who “stand on the edge.” At first, the reader is struck with the beauty of the language. Yet as the reader sits with the piece, the emotional depth is revealed, each word, each image speaking to the harrowing liminality of childhood. —CRAFT
Dark birds fly from my eyes. Disappear.
Where do the kittens come from? We don’t have a cat. Just kittens lumped together like a single entity. A litter. In a box a blanket a bag on the passenger seat?
It’s night. I’m in the back of the station wagon. My brother younger, quiet. Beside me as we’re too small to be left alone. My father in the military, away on the base in Rhode Island. On duty. His uniform like paper bags pressed.
During the day, my mother works. I take a bus home from school. Stay with a tall woman across the street, her two kids. Found in a closet, found with our pants down. Wonder how we are different. It made sense in the dark, door slats letting in a churchy light. Don’t tattle, the neighbor woman says. As if that is the worst thing a person can do. In her shade, I feel how little I mean to her. A drawing of a girl. A girl on TV.
It is a relief when my mother comes home, and I can cross the street to our house. Bathe my teeth in sugar. Walk around the basement with metal pillars holding the house up. Once my brother banged my head against one of the pillars—I wouldn’t let him ride in the toy car as I was riding. My head hit metal with a clang, but the clang was just in my soft head. It didn’t break, it rang. A phone inside, someone calling.
No snow. But colder, winter coming. When my mother drives my father to the base at night or in the early morning, we ride in the back seat, each under a blanket. Go to sleep, my mother says. My father’s cigarette smoke a gritty fog. I sleep, the dark like my own bedroom but rocking, stop start. Like when my cousin Janie takes me riding on her horse.
We have a collie. There won’t be money for feeding kittens, then cats. We won’t make room.
In the front seat, whisper mewls rise in cartoon bubbles. Mostly the kittens sleep like me. Red sequins inside. We drive to the dirt road where the woods begin. Hundreds of ladyslippers here in the spring, pink veined. Moss full of vases, each with an egg. My mother walks on a soft mat of pine needles in her Keds, carries the kittens in their box blanket bag into the woods. Comes back without them. My mother gives the kittens to the woods.
The pine trees breathing out our breath could be masts, the forest a ship about to set sail. Ground cold with damp, leaf litter. Twigs. I’m thinking about hunger. How when I’m hungry I can’t think of anything else. A clang that won’t stop.
We never talk about the kittens. Or the words get erased. As if this is a dream, something I’ll forget: driver’s side door clicking open. Woosh of cool marshy air. Door shut. The warm dark of blankets, our candy breath. My mother carrying the kittens in her arms like a mother, and walking into the woods. Disappearing in the night. Coming back empty-handed. As if they are creatures in a cartoon, an image floating by.
Eyes not yet open. Inside my body is a cavern, the dark of the forest where I carry them.
KELLE GROOM is the author of How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press); I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and four poetry collections, most recently Spill (Anhinga Press). A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Prose, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, and recipient of two Florida Book Awards, Groom’s work has previously appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, New England Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, Southeast Review (as a finalist in the World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest), and is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review. “Floaters” is from her fiction manuscript in progress, The Citronaut. Find her on Twitter @KelleGroom.
Featured image by Road Ahead, courtesy of Unsplash.
