by Tinna Flores
Fiction
Suzie is lying sideways on the gray love seat so that her legs dangle over the armrest. She’s a thin girl, all knees and elbows and long, thick dark hair. She’s glued to her iPad, utterly absorbed, watching god knows what. Two years ago, it was unboxing videos on YouTube. Although there were no boxes, only these plastic egg things with bug-eyed little dolls that had cotton candy-colored hair. Laura watches Suzie’s feet dangling at the bottom of those long limbs. She will grow into them, but right now, she’s like a faun or baby giraffe.
“Mom! Oh-em-gee, you’ve got to see this!”
Suzie slides weirdly off the love seat, rolling down to the floor, wielding the iPad above her head as if she were holding it up out of water. Laura watches her cross the living room toward her like she’s watching a nature show, full of amused curiosity. Suzie slides next to her on the large gray couch and moves a pillow to climb into Laura’s lap. Suzie’s always been a clinger. No regard for personal space.
“Oof, okay, what have I just got to see?”
“Look!”
Suzie holds her iPad and shows Laura a video on TikTok. The phone is angled down at the top of a flight of stairs. The volume is on high as different glass jars are dropped. Each one shatters and explodes. First, a jar of pickles. Then some red jam. Apple sauce, baby food, olive oil, banana peppers.
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s ASMR.”
“Do you even know what that means?”
“Yeah, it’s like meditation except you don’t have to close your eyes.”
“It looks like a mess to me. They should show videos of themselves cleaning up after all that. And what a waste of food!”
“Look at this one!”
Another video. This time it’s glass bottles. Jarritos, Fanta, kombucha, Coke. Then another one: mason jars filled with colorful beads. Another one: jumbo jars with colored liquids. It gets mesmerizing pretty quickly. Suzie looks up at Laura periodically to make sure she is still watching. Laura stares at the iPad but isn’t paying attention anymore. She feels her daughter’s warm, gangly limbs sticking against her skin and remembers the alien feeling of pregnancy. She’s never told anyone about it, but when her children were growing inside her, she felt as though she had been invaded. The fetuses leaching nutrients from her food, siphoning calcium right out of her bones.
The sliding glass door behind them by the kitchen slides open and Leo, just two years older than Suzie, comes bounding in.
“MOM!! You gotta come see this!”
Laura pictures a day when they outgrow the show-and-tell and imagines the word “mom” coming from their grown-up mouths without so much need.
Leo holds a glass jelly jar in both hands. His grin is lopsided and his eyes are wide with pride.
“Stop right there, kiddo. Whatever is in that jar, you better leave it on the kitchen counter.”
Leo is good with all kinds of creatures, and while he loves to catch them, he always lets them go unharmed. Lizards, beetles, spiders—he is curious and brave and gentle. She loves that about him, loves that he is like his father in that way. Laura’s oldest brother, Ricky, was the exact opposite. He caught roaches and would douse them in lighter fluid, strike a match and set them on fire before setting them free. Crazed little balls of flame made crackling, popping sounds until they dropped dead, blackened and charred.
She and Suzie get up off the couch to see what treasure Leo has to show them. It’s a scorpion. Small and mean-looking, stinging tail curved up above a hard carapace glistening and dotted with a few specks of dirt. Suzie squeals in the girl-child pitch Laura swears might break glass. She runs off and Laura hears the door to her bedroom slam shut. Leo is delighted.
He and Laura huddle shoulder to shoulder, inches from the glass, looking at the alien thing.
“Do you think it’s more afraid of us, or we’re more afraid of it?”
“I think Suzie’s the most afraid!”
“You might be right, but do you think it’s scared of us too?”
“I dunno, Mom. I think it would sting us if it got the chance.”
“Yeah, but not on purpose.”
Laura runs a hand through Leo’s hair. The doorbell rings. She takes a deep breath, holds it while she counts to three in her head, then lets it out in a long, measured exhale.
Suzie appears in the hallway, poking her head around the wall, like a prairie dog looking toward the door.
“Is it Grammy?”
“I think it might be.”
Her children follow closely behind her as she opens the door. Laura’s mother is standing in the entrance, holding a bunch of balloons and a pastry box, which Laura takes from her.
“Hey, Ma.”
“Where are my babies?!”
“Grammy!”
Laura gets out of the way and watches Suzie go in for a big hug. Laura’s mother squats and wraps her arms around Suzie. Her mother’s face relaxes and, when it does, the furrow at the center of her brow and the hard lines around her mouth soften. Her eyes close and she smiles. That smile. Large, straight teeth and full lips stretch into a grin that settles as an ache in the center of Laura’s chest. Her mother stands to hug Leo, who is affectionate, but slightly awkward about it. Laura watches her mother shapeshift into their Grammy as she takes Suzie and Leo by the hands and leads them to the couch. Suzie chatters on about ASMR and Leo’s “totally gross” bug jar.
Laura enters the kitchen, places the pink pastry box on the table and looks for a spot to tie the big metallic balloons. One is in the shape of a unicorn and the other two are a number one and a zero. She fastens them to the back of a dining chair and takes a seat, watching her children and her mother, who is now their Grammy. Suzie has moved on to showing Grammy her Roblox character outfits. Leo has retreated to his room and likely a video game.
Laura watches her mother with Suzie. Her affection for her granddaughter oozes, but her patience is thin. Laura knows it won’t take long for Grammy to tire of Suzie’s attention. Laura remembers a picture of herself around Suzie’s age. She was seated at the foot of her parents’ bed, her long brown hair held back from her face in a headband. She thinks she wore a yellow shirt and jean shorts. Tied to her wrist was a single red balloon on a string. Her distant and pensive expression looked so serious, like she was far away inside herself.
“Why don’t you go play with your brother for a while, until Dad comes home and we can eat your birthday cake?”
“Okay!”
Suzie bounds toward Leo’s room as Laura unloads the dishwasher. Grammy’s transformation back into Laura’s mother happens like she’s kicking off a too-tight shoe.
“I don’t understand why you even use that thing. You should wash them by hand, otherwise they won’t get clean.”
“Okay, Ma. Next time.”
“You should get Suzie into ballet. She has too much energy and she needs to put it somewhere ladylike. Also, tell Leo to stop playing with all these creatures. Those reptiles carry salmonella, and this thing he brought inside could have stung him.”
Laura’s mother taps the side of the glass jar, sending the scorpion into a defensive stance, backing toward the opposite side of its temporary prison.
“Don’t tap the glass—I don’t think it likes that.”
“Awful things. When I was a little girl, your uncle Tomas used to trap them in jars, too. Sometimes he would feed them to a junkyard dog down the street, to keep him mean. Other times, he’d drop tequila on them to watch them sting themselves to death.”
What is it with the men in our family? Laura almost lets the thought out, but thinks better of it and says instead, “Leo’s just curious. He would never hurt them. And he’s cautious. Besides, even if he did get stung, these aren’t lethal.”
Laura watches the expression on her mother’s face and starts talking again before she can open her mouth.
“Scorpions can’t sting themselves to death. They’re immune to their own venom. They’re no more awful than we are. Matter of fact, we are definitely more awful. They are creatures of instinct. We, on the other hand, are creatures of malicious intent.”
“Well, what are you trying to say to me?”
“Nothing, Ma. I’ll get rid of it.”
Laura’s phone dings and she picks it up. Her husband, Marcus, is on his way home from work. Laura feels relieved; Marcus is a peacekeeper. He charms his mother-in-law by smiling and laughing at everything she says and deflects all her comments away from Laura. He is as solid and reliable a shield as she could hope for. When Laura looks up from her phone, her mother has emptied the dishwasher into the sink and is handwashing the already clean dishes.
Laura grabs the jar with the scorpion off the counter and makes her way outside through the sliding glass door. The desert behind their house stretches toward mountains the color of dull rust. The back patio gravel crunches beneath her feet. It’s late afternoon and the sun throws deep shadows across the folds in the mountain face. The dry, spindly branches of creosote bushes stick up and out as far as she can see. She kneels near a small pile of rocks and stares at the scorpion through the glass, trying to imagine what it might be like, to live on thoughtless instinct. No motives, pure survival. Memory for this creature is … what? Genetically encoded behavioral expression? No regret, no longing to be better or different, just one precious infinite now. Sure, and then some kid comes along and traps you in a jar for a while, if you’re lucky. Feeds you to a dog, if you’re not.
Laura gives the glass jar a few hard shakes, sending the scorpion careening and clicking against the glass, before opening the lid and letting it out into the center of her upturned hand. She can only project a sense of panic onto the small thing and watches, enthralled, by how fast it scrambles upright to strike its venomed tail into the thumb pad of her palm. Laura winces, letting the scorpion fall and scurry away. She holds her wrist and looks at the tiny puncture wound, already ringed in red, searing pain running along her nerves. She turns toward the house and starts to walk back inside, pressing a thumb, hard, into the wound and feeling a tingling numbness creep into her tongue.
Tinna Flores was born in Honduras and raised in Miami, Florida. Before earning a BA in narrative studies from the University of Southern California, she dropped out of four different universities. She won The Fred Shaw Poetry Prize at Miami Dade College in 2002 and the Jimmy Gauntt Memorial Award at USC in 2023. In between, she waited tables, sold drugs, drove a refrigerated truck, sold shoes, waited more tables, sold more drugs, and finally got sober. She used to strip and breathe fire and now she leads a creative writing workshop at a rehab in Hollywood.