Pieces of Us
By Ashley McCurry
Little by little, I packed you away. When the hurt was fresh, I locked you in an old cedar chest, tucked tightly between monogrammed handkerchiefs, a few dead moths, and yellowing photographs of my great-grandparents, unintentionally recreating American Gothic with a shovel on their crumbling porch. Pale, stoic faces. Colorless floral curtains drawn. I’m sorry you’re stuck there, amid the origin story of my generational trauma.
I heard you were dating again, so I zipped you tightly in my duffel bag, folded within a vintage Duran Duran t-shirt. Once mountains turned to shore, I considered filling the bag with rocks and letting the murky depths consume you, a corpse to be lost to a vast sea. Instead, I gingerly placed you in my skirt pocket, and we walked along the champagne sparkles of sand before anyone else awoke. We basked in the ocean spray and encircling gulls until the darkness subsided and the sound of childhood laughter grew shriller, ominous, threatening to snap me back. My bare feet at the water’s edge. My hands setting you afloat, to be carried off by the next gentle tide.
I stored you in my childhood piggy bank. One that was solid the entire way around that you had to smash with a hammer to reclaim your money. Each time I needed a little extra cash, it felt like a scene from Misery. The porcelain creature is still intact, but unfortunately, I can’t get you out.
Where did you put me these past fifteen years? Am I at the bottom of a Christmas cookie tin or programmed into a video game or sewn into the stomach of a tattered stuffed bear? Maybe you have been delicate with my memories, safely preserving my belly laugh and nightly teeth grinding in a climate-controlled warehouse. Or, perhaps I was butchered and left to rot, strewn around the yard for stray dogs to consume.
I’ve thought about it often. You, retrieving my Saturday morning shower song and dusting it off with care to enjoy, for only a moment, before relinquishing it to the darkness of a shoebox at the top of your closet. Pieces of us, some scattered on the wind after a thunderstorm, to eventually land on the edge of a rural town or in a city gutter. One writhing through my intestines on a bolus of gourmet pizza. Another, pungently smelling of mildew and sage, hidden behind an antique medicine bottle in a curio cabinet.
***
Today, I set the sound of your fist punching through drywall on fire. I scooped the ashes neatly into a dustpan and dumped them into the trash bin in front of the house. One final lingering piece, a gangrenous limb that should have been amputated years ago. Plaster cracking so closely to my face.
The trucks are roaming through the streets now, wild beasts pausing intermittently to scavenge discarded memories throughout the neighborhood, scheduled to abandon them in ever-expanding landfills. Those repugnant graveyards, full of decomposing rubbish and unnecessary waste that will never, ever go away. Staring blankly out the window, I wonder which you will be.
THE END
Author Bio: Ashley McCurry (she/her) is a speech-language pathologist, currently residing in the Southeastern United States with her husband and four rescue dogs. Her work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, The Metaworker Literary Magazine, Six Sentences, Microfiction Monday Magazine, FlashFlood Journal, The Dillydoun Review, Shirley Magazine, Pigeon Review, and others.