I WANDER THE ROOMS, THOUGH my house has become outsized and impossible, rivered with long hallways and wide, winding staircases. I encounter different versions of my children, at different ages. My son in the kitchen with his wife, preparing a meal for Christmas. My son sitting up to the kitchen counter, head bowed over his Gameboy. A younger, thinner version of me is folding and stacking clothes on the dining room table. In the living room, my oldest daughter is teaching my youngest to waltz, but she is little, her younger sister quite tall.


We pass through each other in the rooms and on the staircases. Round cheeks melt into gaunt faces, then reconstitute. Ceilings as high as an auditorium’s. I discover a room filled with beds and ornate furniture, scattered and illogical. Tall, tall windows with mote-filled light and billowing curtains quietly entering like polite guests. The beds are empty.


In order to get back to my kitchen, I must climb out one of the tall windows, down a rope ladder and into the neighbors’ living room. They do not look up from their newspapers when I enter. There’s a cupboard housing mismatched shoes and mittens I understand must be crawled through. In the kitchen, my family is waiting for me. My family, but others too. They are unsurprised to see me sprout whole from the linoleum. The others are my parents’ friends from the country who used to drop in on Sundays. I cannot remember their names.


When I was a child, the meter man used to drop in to everyone’s houses. He’d walk through the back door without knocking, and shout meter man! and my mother would turn from the stove with a spoon in her hand, or glance over from the telephone, a cigarette burning from her fingertips. Sometimes she’d be sitting on the toilet in the alcove when the meter man came. When that happened, she’d stay very still and wouldn’t acknowledge him at all. He’d go down to the basement, then back up and out with a thank you! I can see the name embroidered on his shirt, but I can’t read it. He was handsome.


Repeatedly, I loop through the neighbor’s house and back into my own. Their house is quiet, but mine is muffled with time and voices and laughter. The dimensions keep changing, My children’s dimensions change too. They are all around, but I can’t see their faces. Just as they begin to come into focus, I must again climb out the window, down the rope ladder into the house next door.


As a child, I was terrified of the leftover balloons from the birthday parties. How gradually they sank to eye-level and bobbed mutely from room to room. How they stared with blank and shriveled faces. How their strings skimmed the floor like the hems of ballgowns. Once, a cold draft blew through the house, startling them into a corner like frightened old women. My mother, suddenly reminded of their existence, murdered them one by one with a straight pin. •





Kathy Fish‘s stories have been published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Five Points, Guernica, Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Denver Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Norton Reader, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America. She has been honored with a Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize and multiple appearances in both the Wigleaf Top 50 and the Best Small Fictions series. The author of five short fiction collections, Fish teaches a variety of writing workshops online. She also publishes a bestselling craft newsletter on Substack: The Art of Flash Fiction. Her writing has been generously supported by fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Kerouac Project.

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