Finalist, 2025 Contest for Flash Creative Nonfiction
That earthy smell, cotton starched stiff by the sun. A sheet on the line.
I chase my brother from the front yard to the back and then along the side, where the clothesline stretches, sheets and shirts and things all in a row. Remember to duck, I tell myself.
Thirty years later, a sheet lies on the floor of my brother’s apartment, near the couch where he has died of a drug overdose. The landlord must have placed it on top of him before the police and coroner arrived. It is white as the one on the line but dried soft in the laundromat downstairs.
In the days and weeks after cleaning out his apartment, I will think often of his body waiting two days to be found. When I do, a white sheet will cover my vision, rippling slightly as if blown by a breeze. And then a knife will appear and shred that sheet to bits. A defense mechanism, I will assume. Whenever I get too close: annihilate the thought, rip it, slice it. My memory, wiped.
It’s not that easy, though. The slashes mend; the vision comes back, again and again.
The sheet is semi-transparent. If the light catches it just so – if you’re, say, running around the bend of the house, you can see the outline of your brother through it. He’s in front of you, racing on the newly mown grass, nearly to the front stoop now. Ghouls, safety, only a few strides away.
Hillary Wentworth earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Fourth River, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among other journals. She lives in southern Maine.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/KirkD2009
