HEAT
By Barbara Diggs
My mother and I are in a standoff, each of us holding an oven mitt patterned with tiny green Christmas trees. The turkey is in the oven, glistening a Rockwellian golden-brown. My mother’s possession of the mitt is a farce, as we both know she cannot take the heavy bird out of the oven nor slide the rack forward to baste it. She cannot even hold the baster. It would just slip through her gnarled claws, as do forks, phones, pens, hairbrushes, keys–anything that would make her life easier. Still, she can clutch her convictions, however unreasonable.
From the living room, a somber voice speaks of a faraway war, the global repercussions of which have prompted me to invest in a bike to save money on gas. Out the kitchen window, I see my sister’s husband’s silver Mercedes slide into the driveway and idle there. All the windows are tinted black. I imagine Delilah checking her make-up in the passenger side vanity mirror, patting at her foundation with thin, anxious fingers. She doesn’t realize we’ll always see a plum-black swelling under her eye, a puffy corner of her lip, even if they aren’t there. We’ll see them forever.
Demetrious, my little brother, my parents’ late forties surprise and our collective darling, is home from medical school in his old room making strangely beautiful sketches of neural pathways or trawling for married men on Grindr, or writing a treatise on meditation, or jotting down ways to murder someone without getting caught. He is always surprising us.
My father hacks and gasps and coughs in his reclining chair near the fireplace. His lungs flap like wet cardboard. Mom and I hold our breath while he struggles, as if our inhalations steal his air. His crisis passes and we exhale. Then I remember that Delilah still has not come in.
My mother tries to put on the oven mitt, but it falls to the floor. She stares at it with a hollowness that I refuse to let break me. Instead, I ask her to open the oven door. She avoids my eyes as she hooks her perma-curled fingers around the oven’s handle and pulls down the door, her arm trembling like fracturing glass. I am a diamond. I pick up the turkey baster from the counter and stick my head close to the oven’s mouth. Four hundred and fifty-degree heat screams in my face, but I don’t even flinch.
THE END
Author Bio: Barbara Diggs is an American flash fiction writer who has work published or forthcoming in journals such as FlashBack Fiction, mac(ro)mic, Ellipsis Zine, as well as the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology and Oxford Flash Fiction Anthology. She was awarded a Highly Commended prize in the Bridport Prize Competition in 2022, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. She lives with her husband, sons, and turtle in Paris.