On the seat

May 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’d been picturing this scene but couldn’t get myself to sit down and write it. I finally drafted it today while at Whole Foods after work.

On The Seat
By Laura McHale Holland

Carly and Chloe, a mother and daughter long separated by force, sit on opposite sides of a love seat; they are now separated by choice, a shoebox full of pictures between them.

Carly taps a bare foot on the plush carpet below; Chloe swings her little legs out and back, out and back.

One by one, Carly lifts pictures from the box and tells Chloe stories about them. One by one, she hands the pictures to Chloe, who stacks them on the seat next to the box. Carly talks of birthday cakes, Cabbage Patch dolls, sleepovers, Great America, her grandfather’s 80th birthday, her first crush.

When the box is empty, Chloe picks the pictures one after another from her pile and drops them back into the box. She says solitary words as the pictures drop: closet, dark, bruise, bam, bang, blood, splat, drive, waterfall, beach, puzzle, bye bye. When the box is full again, Carly replaces the lid, puts her hands in her lap, sighs. 

“Again?” Chloe asks. “Of course,” Carly replies. She removes the lid. Chloe inches closer to her on the seat.

Filed Under: Blogging, Family, Flash fiction, Relationships, Women Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

She doesn’t know them

May 7, 2012 By 6 Comments

Here’s the next installment. It’s difficult to create connected segments, each of which stands alone. Perhaps in the editing process I can achieve this. It’s something to shoot for–just because.

She Doesn’t Know Them
By Laura McHale Holland

I sit on the bank, bare feet dangling in the bracing water, and I listen to the gurgles, always changing yet always the same, eternal. Though they lived far from here, sometimes I hear my ancestors’ voices in the wind, beside the river rocks, in the rustle of dogwood branches overhead.

It turns out the brown-eyed girl I thought was orphaned, the one I came to know between errands for the guy I thought was her dad, the girl I came to love, that girl, has a birth mother who never chose to give her up: a young mother who was locked in a basement and couldn’t search for her baby. She has a grandma and grandpa who have missed her too. It is their right to have her; she is their blood. But she doesn’t know them.

The social worker told me, “Stay away. Chloe is where she belongs now.” Chloe. The name suits her, though I liked to call her Pia because her eyes reach into the soul, like Edith Piaf’s songs playing on a foggy Sunday morning.

I see no path before me. So I wait at the river, seeking wisdom as the sun sets. I can see Chloe spurning her grandmother’s cookies, shrinking from her grandfather’s hugs while her mother, rescued just one week ago, is sedated in an upstairs bedroom where she was tucked in every night of her childhood. And the media, stationed at front and back doors, has the family under siege.

Filed Under: Flash fiction, Life, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

A dime a dozen

April 29, 2012 By 18 Comments

Another episode in my series of connected flash fiction.

A Dime a Dozen
By Laura McHale Holland

Two uniformed officers break down the front door of a ramshackle home in an otherwise nondescript middle class neighborhood. The suspect, a spindly, gap-toothed man in ripped jeans and white T, flees out a back window. He is apprehended in the weeds by another officer who cuffs him, escorts him to a police van and shoves him inside.

In the basement, the police find the meth lab they’d suspected was there. Behind one locked door they also find a cache of assault rifles and ammunition. They expect to find the same behind another door, but when they clip off the padlock and pry open the door, they enter a windowless room with padded walls. A young woman cowers on a cot in a corner. She holds a small yellow blanket in one hand and a pink baby rattle in the other. She faints at the sight of them.

One officer rushes to her, lifts her up and carries her out in his arms. “You’re okay now. Whatever you’ve been through, it’s over now,” he says.

She opens her eyes, searches his face and asks, “Have you seen my baby, my baby girl, Chloe?” She passes out again.

Later that day, a few blocks from the meth lab, Janet, a middle-aged woman with worry lines creasing her face, watches the evening news. She observes an officer carrying what looks like a bone-thin young woman to a police car. Janet can’t see the face, but she notices the yellow blanket and pink rattle in the woman’s hands.

“Jasper, Japser, come quick!” she calls. “I just saw Carly on TV. They were carrying her out of that house that got raided today. Our Carly, Jasper. I saw Chloe’s blanket and rattle in her hands.”

Jasper sprints into the room and wraps his wife in his arms. It’s been more than three years since Carly, then only seventeen, nestled her baby, Chloe, into the carriage Janet and Jasper had just purchased for her. Carly planned to take five-day-old Chloe to visit her best friend one block away. But Carly and Chloe never made it there.

Initially, investigators on the case thought Carly had hitchhiked to visit her former boyfriend, the baby’s father, who was away a college. But they found him studying for exams in his dorm room. He hadn’t spoken with Carly since they’d broken up five months before. He said he’d relinquished his parental rights and didn’t want to have anything to do with Carly or the baby.

“Now, honey,” Jasper says. “Don’t get your hopes up too much. Those baby blankets and rattles are a dime a dozen.”

“We have to go see, Jasper. We have to go see.” She grabs her purse, picks up a framed picture of Carly and Chloe from a table by the door and runs outside. Jasper follows.

Filed Under: Blogging, crime, Family, Flash fiction, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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