by Claudia Monpere
You meet the eight-year-old girl and her mother who live next door when they dash through your back yard chasing their escaped chickens, the clucking chaos a golden spiral spinning you far from your own life. Once the chickens are back in their coop, the girl says she has something to tell you that will scare you, and you say ha; nothing scares you anymore. She tells you she has a pet rat. You laugh and say you did too until your beloved Tasha died, and there is an instant ionic bond between you and the girl, probably sodium chloride, as you trade stories about rodent salt stones and Himalayan salt licks.
The plan is for you to meet and hang out with her and her rat, Oats, but Oats dies before this can happen. The girl invites you to the funeral. But you’re out of town dealing with yet another explosion—the injury to your mother, the injury to the walls— coming as always from the combustible dust that haloes your father or the static discharges sparking from his hands or perhaps malfunctioning safety valves which you thought were working because you’d finally coaxed your mother to leave your father. Here mom, your studio apartment. Here mom, a credit card in your own name. Here mom, the date for our appointment with the lawyer, for your session with the therapist.
But your mother and father were back together after less than a month. And for the first time ever, you chose yourself, moving two hours away.
But the texts and phone calls beckon you, leave you that kind of exhausted that no sleep will repair. Yet you are determined not to miss the second Oats funeral which the girl has arranged just for you even though the tiny furry body was buried weeks ago. It’s just you and the girl in her living room, her mother tactfully stepping aside because she never understood the soft shimmer Oats and Tasha carried in their fur and jumps and cuddles. The girl has laid out objects and photos of Oats on a soft blue blanket. Her voice chirps and catches as she describes building the popsicle stick fence for Oats to jump over, as she holds up the bag of beef jerky Oats tried to pull into his cage and the washcloth where Oats wiped his paws after eating something greasy. After the objects, the girl reads her poem about Oats. You think of how tenderly the girl must have laid Oats into the little flannel lined box and you think of the drift of days, the detachment of epidermis and fur, the bloat, the active and advanced decomposition, the eventual skeleton. No fractured ulna bone in the forearm, no nasal fracture, no cracked ribs. Just perfect tiny bones sleeping the years and one day collapsing into dust.
Claudia Monpere received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize, the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025. Her flash collection, The Periodic Family, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press.
Emerge Literary Journal 