Honorable Mention – Flash 405, August 2024: “Otherworldly”
Fiction
My mother tells me the horseshoe crabs are disappearing. Their blood is harvested by biomedical companies and soon there will be fewer eggs that will be eaten by fewer red knots travelling north to the Arctic. We travel south to the bay on the horizon of summer to flip over the unlucky ones tossed about by the ocean. She says it is the least we can do for survival. Fear had made us inseparable, so much so that she and her friends would call me her shadow. I, an extension of her: the child who looks like their mother who looks like their mother. In college, she was known as Flip, a remark on her quick and mercurial nature. Now, the worst of her is reserved for me alone. We came to the water in hopes that it could be enough to sustain us. Here, she documented everything, flooding the present with our fabricated selves. My mother had been an environmental science teacher, and as her only child I spent much of my time with her at the watershed. For years, we planted trees, reinforced the riverbanks, and removed invasive species together, me and her students. On this day, she explains the water cycle, carving out space in the air with her fingertips. Students hunch over pH test strips, comparing their saturated yellows while she hovers nearby. I have already vanished, tracing the perimeter of the riverbed to map where each new birch tree might have the best chance of survival. Every sapling is ordained with a meaning well beyond its wishes. Here I make myself anew. Coat myself in the sap of milkweed. Dissolve into the small dunes made by crabs burying their young. Make debris out of history. I became everything I could. For years I fasted from myself. An act of self-abandonment that promised to uninvent fear. Most days, I fled from cameras, my body memory’s residue. On other days, I fixated on every detail of my face; I wished to catalog the future person I would become. Today, my mother is dead and the horseshoe crabs are still returning. Every so often I submerge myself in nostalgia and fantasy becomes memory. There is a future where the birch trees outlive us all. Slowly, I grow into my old skeleton and embrace the overdetermination of history. In the mirror I see someone like my mother. In grief we are a single truth.
Judge’s Comments:
I was moved by the mother, her science and knowledge of horseshoe crabs, her teaching, and more, alongside the grief of the narrator, her child. Told through beautiful lyrical prose, this is a catalog of self, a catalog of grief, a catalog of the mother, a catalog of water cycles and saplings. This knowledge is immortal.
Morgan Ridgway (they/them) is an essayist and poet of Black and Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape descent living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They earned their PhD in History and graduate certificate in American Indian Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Their work has appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Olney Magazine, and elsewhere. Find them online @riidgwayy or morganridgway.com
Photo courtesy NPGallery