IT ALL STARTED WITH MOM. Tapping out a beat in three four time on her water glass, boot soles a metronome on the linoleum at breakfast. Anything to stop the quiet, she whispered into the kitchen, whispered to me. Her brown ringlet curls bouncing and bobbing as she hummed off-key. When cars drove past the trailer park with radios so loud the windows rattled, Mom would spring upright and dance, elbows and knees bending and flapping like a chicken happy for feed. One day Dad brought home a boombox from his construction site, the equipment victim of an errant brick so every few words crackled. It became Big Band at midnight and Hip Hop at dawn and Country at lunch. She’d pull Dad in for a twirl, teach him the two-step of her own creation, before he’d leave for work. The volume stuck at maximum so that the sunrises and sunsets bled into a single rave of sound. Mrs. Whitney from two doors down brought her jobless nephew Randy and a broomstick with half a mind to complain since there’s a time for grief and there’s a time to move on, but Mom challenged them to a limbo match, going so, so low Mrs. Whitney’s cigarette burned a hole in the carpet. The landlord called a noise complaint into the police as more neighbors turned up and turned out with kegs and logs for bonfires and guitar amps, and when the police showed up to the cardboard disco floor splayed in the front yard, the officers found confiscated fireworks in the cruiser’s trunk and turned the night into a heavy metal show. The tent preacher looped his snakes about his shoulders but ditched his holy water to lead the conga line. And the music went on and everyone linked elbows weaving around the double-wides and the caved-in roof abandoned plots alike, winding through the trees. Everyone out dancing except for Mom, who had locked herself in the bathroom, except for Dad kneeling on the other side of the locked door. She held the urn close, not bothering to wipe her mascara racoon mask. We swayed back and forth, back and forth. Shards of my little bird bones rattling a call to hers: move shake skip dance, dance, dance like I always loved, dance while your skeleton still can. •





Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. Cold Signal, Milk Candy Review, Flash Fiction Online, Lost Balloon, and Best Microfiction 2022 are just a few of the fine publications that feature her stories and poems.

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