Stories by Claudia Monpere
Word Palate
The more my mother shames me for my weight, the stronger words taste. The word sun is watermelon, juicy and sweet. The word violin tastes like warm, velvety chocolate sauce.
My younger sister, Katie, is the favored child. Mother fawns over her. (Fawn: the inside of a roasted marshmallow, that sweet, gooey middle.) Just like our mother, Katie loves shopping, mani-pedis, Sephora. Only ten, she already has a skin care routine. She loves social media. And she loves me. Last week our mother cooked steak, baked potatoes and garlic bread for dinner for everyone but me. I got salad with chicken slices. Dad begged her to let me at least have a little steak—“She’s thirteen,” he said. “Way too young to be dieting!” But Mother was adamant. Later that night, Katie snuck me the good stuff. She served it on a tray with the best silverware and a lace napkin. “Oh no,” she said, “I forgot the daisies.” (Daisy:mangoes mixed with honey and apricots, a hint of cream.)
The average person has about 10,000 taste buds which are replaced every two weeks. I think I have Googleplex taste buds, and they must be not just on my tongue but in my brain, too, because words taste as delicious as real food. But I’d give up all the good word tastes because the bad is so bad. Body is slimy, rotting fish. Weekend: gelatinous fat. Time: a mouthful of wet wool. Daughter: chlorine mixed with broken glass.
Most people when they eat are suckers, chewers, crunchers or smooshers. I am all of them, depending on the word. I am a girl who will grow fat with words. Who will open her mouth so wide one day she will swallow her mother. This girl will suck, chew, crunch and smoosh her. Then she will shit her out and flush her into the stinky, wretched darkness.
Elastic Music
Father played “Hush Little Baby” for me first. When I was but a week old, he entered my nursery with his guitar, a hand-crafted Bourgeois made from rosewood. He sat in the rocker and sang. He played better than he sang, but his voice was tender. Then he picked me up from my cradle and held me sweetly against his flannel shirt. He smelled of woodsmoke, his eyes shining like tiny sapphire planets. I was the favored one. This I knew the instant my lungs began to expand with my first breaths outside Mother. As Father sang, I waited for her. But before Mother could come, Father’s mouth opened, stretching like elastic. He swallowed me whole, head-first. His esophagus bulged and he gagged, but I made it into his stomach which was warm and sticky-thick with mucous. I slept lonely and dreamed of Mother float, candles burning in bronze lamps.
Father played “Hush Little Baby” for his second child, too, but this time the guitar was a mahogany Bourgeois— the sound was warmer and fuller. I shivered as he sang the last line, “You’ll still be the sweetest little babe in town” and it didn’t take long for me to meet my sister. We snuggled and sang together—but never “Hush Little Baby.” We made mucous art. We tasted each other’s fingers. Siblings 3, 4 and 5 followed, same song, different guitars. No one was ever bored, but it became crowded and chaotic.
We were all sleeping when I heard “Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,” yet again. I awoke the others, and we stood on shoulders to prevent another sibling from crowding us. But the thud of something round and heavy destroyed our makeshift ladder and we fell, bruised and confused and did our best to make room for Stone Baby who had no face and never wanted to play. We stopped playing, too. It seemed pointless. Time. It stretched like Father’s mouth or shrunk into sticky particles. It trembled, smoldered, erased. But one day it flatlined. Father retched. And there we were, the five of us outside his dying body, Stone Baby left behind. There was no music. We unzipped the dark, becoming.
Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Trampset, Milk Candy Review, The Forge, and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has a story in Best Small Fictions 2024 and a micro forthcoming in Best Microfictions 2025.
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