five shorts

Amy Marques

excerpted from Chrysalides, 2nd-place winner of the Beautiful Pause Prize, 2024 

DEAR NICE-FAMILY-WITH-THE-SCARECROW 

I didn’t mean to steal your pumpkins. 

I was on my way to my gran’s. You might know her. She lives three curves beyond, where there’s a stone wall and an old gate that’s always open. The hinges got so rusty that it stopped moving, and gran said we might as well leave it open because she lives in the safest place in the world. 

Now I’ve ruined it. 

I didn’t mean to. Honest. 

That is, I did mean to take them. I didn’t think to question it, just grabbed as many as I could and plopped them into my car. Now I can’t return any because we ate them all. 

Gran is the best cook I know, and she was delighted with them. She stuffed and baked the littlest ones and made a pumpkin puree with her famous herb butter. Have you ever tasted her herb butter? She adds sage from Harry’s garden, lemon zest from Ms. Patty’s orchard, and everyone in town gets their butter from Old Sam. 

See, gran always said that family gardens grow the best food. 

There’s nothing like it. It’s the realest food in the world. When I was growing up, it was our special game. Mom and I would pick things up on our way to gran’s. Nobody ever bothered to put up a sign or charge any money. It was surplus harvest, and everyone was welcome to it. We’d stop for plums here, greens there, and eggs if we could find them. After a while, I came to recognize the stops. Sometimes we’d see someone and wave. Sometimes we just took our basket and filled it up with whatever they’d left at the gate for us. 

I haven’t done the route in years because I was away for university. This was my first time doing it without mom. I worried that it wouldn’t feel the same without her, so when I saw that there were eggs set out by the yellow barn house, I couldn’t help but feel like it was a sign that this place would never change. It would always welcome me home. I forgot the basket, but that didn’t matter. The passenger seat of my car sags and nothing rolled away. 

When I reached your place and saw the pumpkins waiting, I thought nothing of it. I stopped the car, waved towards the house just in case someone was watching, and grabbed the bounty. 

Now everyone thinks there’s a thief in the village. I say “everyone” because I heard it from the butcher who heard it from Ms. E. If you were in The Eye’s third grade class like I was, you know that she sees everything. Problem is, what she knows, the whole village will soon know. 

Even gran is scared (and gran is never scared) and is going on about how we need to fix the gate so she can lock it at night. I don’t have the heart to tell her. 

Please accept these peas and spinach and pumpkin cookies in payment. I’ll never do it again. I swear. Is it too much to ask that you stop saying they were stolen? It’s bad enough that gran thinks there’s a stranger skulking around, she would be so disappointed if she knew the truth. Can we please put this behind us without gran finding out it was me? 

Signed: I-did-it-but-it-was-an-accident.

A LETTER FROM MR. M ON THE EVE OF HIS NUPTIALS 

Dear Captain Walton,

When we last spoke, I vowed, over Frankenstein’s dead body, to burn myself on a pyre to free the world of my vile existence.

I cannot regret that I failed to keep my promise.

I was grief stricken. At the loss of Victor, of course, but truly at the loss of hope. My priest says I should not be beholden to promises made when I was clearly not in my right mind and, despite my build, little more than a child.

I have grown. I have learned that, while unforgivable, my crimes were those of a juvenile with incongruent strength. An infant squeezing a kitten. A child kicking a rival. I digress. I promised myself I’d cease asking for a forgiveness that cannot be forthcoming.

That is not why I write to you today. I write because you might be the only person alive who could beseech the Frankensteins to share Victor’s notes. I would do so myself, but they would never give me access to what I seek, and I am loath to cause further pain.

You see, I am to be married, and while nothing would please me more than to become a father, I am painfully aware that not all of me is human. Excuse the indelicateness, but our family physician suggested we access Frankenstein’s sketches and records to uncover the source of my reproductive organs. Microscopy has shown swimming flickers in my output, but we cannot know what they might become.

My bride says it should not matter. She says even if it were to be the next Minotaur she would mother it well.

Though her love has taught my heart to beat and my blood to flow, I cannot take that risk. Hopefully yours,

M

A LETTER TO THE SISTER WHO SAYS THE BOY SHE WISHES WEREN’T HER EX IS HER SUNSHINE 

Spoiler: I think she’s wrong 

Dear Emily, 

I’m sorry Allan broke up with you. 

That’s not accurate. 

I am sorry you are so sad because Allan broke up with you. 

I am also sorry I accidentally made you cry when I said he couldn’t be your sunshine because the basis behind why the sun shines is quantum physics and has nothing to do with love. 

It’s a metaphor. I get it. 

But see, I still don’t think he’s your sunshine. Not like the song says. Please don’t stop reading. 

I’m writing this in a letter because if I tried to tell you, you might start crying or yelling again and I’d start rambling and I might hurt you again and that’s the last thing I want. Just like a thing can be both a wave and a particle, sometimes a nice thing I say also comes out as a mean thing, even when I didn’t mean it to. 

What I was trying to say is that if he’s your only sunshine, then how come you’re still shining? Sure, maybe somewhere in the multiverse, the two of you stay together forever. Maybe in that version, you’re not as amazing as you are in this one. I doubt it, though. 

I think it’s okay that your metaphorical heart will always be his. It’s like superposition, how objects can be in two places at once. That part of what you said I think is accurate. He can have your heart and you can have it back. At the same time. Maybe he’ll always have it. Maybe you’ll also give it away again. That makes sense to me.

So I’m just writing this to explain why he can’t be your sunshine and why I know you’ll be okay, because even if stars dim a little bit sometimes, they never completely vanish, but everyone knows that quantum physicists have proven that black holes disappear over time.

Love,

K

P.S. I know sometimes you’re annoyed because I always think I’m right, but I really think I’m right about you being okay. Nobody said this was going to be easy. But you’ll be okay. You are a star, and you generate your own light.

ONCE UPON THE END OF HER TIME 

An old woman wept under the tree that watched over the grave of the only child that had returned home, for her other sons and daughters had long since drifted away to other lands. 

The tree showered soft leaves on her, brushing a cheek, stroking a hand, as the woman said she should never have let them go. Never have given them leave to move away.

Now the wise old tree had known the old woman since before she was a woman, had watched her grow into her strength and give birth to children with hair the color of the setting sun and laughter that rippled like the brook behind the clog-shaped cottage she called home.

The tree was older than the children, than the woman, than the cottage, older even than the brook.

So the tree said nothing.

A gentle breeze blew through, ruffling the woman’s hair and the tree’s branches. Pods fell, shaken out of the branches, onto the old woman’s lap. She fell silent as she poked them open, rolling the seeds between her fingers, threading them together into bracelets that she wound around her arms. 

Later, when the woman slept in her empty cottage and the tree alone kept watch over her baby’s grave, strong night winds charged through the sky, rattling the tree’s branches, snapping at her pods until they exploded, casting seeds to faraway lands of fertile soils. 

CHRYSALISES 

You won’t remember that I said I liked blueberry jam even though I preferred strawberry, just because you didn’t like red in your food. French fries were hard to eat because they didn’t taste right without ketchup, but ketchup made you cry because sometimes squirrels couldn’t cross the road quickly enough. Our mom’s garden was full of yellow peppers and cucumbers and squash and a single plant of golden heirloom tomatoes. After that year when I picked all the red tomatoes before they were ripe, mom had said we might as well be the only family in the world that made pizza with yellow sauce. 

You won’t remember that I stood behind you when the school bus door opened and glared at the bus driver until he said good morning to you too. I stood until you’d removed your backpack and checked your pockets three times before sitting down. He wasn’t supposed to drive until we were seated, and everyone knew I would tattle if he did. The bus was always full, and I wished I didn’t have to sit beside you because I knew it was too close. But I was the only one who knew to scoot to the far edge of the seat and sit perfectly straight and pull in my backpack after every left turn and not ask you questions you couldn’t answer. 

You won’t remember that I learned the eloquence of your silences and the way your hand fluttered when you were excited and how you hummed when you wanted me to pay attention. We watched Robin Hood every afternoon after school, and I begged mom to buy three extra copies of the DVD just in case. I said the petting zoo was excitement enough for me and I didn’t want to go to Sandy’s backyard camping sleepover anyway. Summer camp was only a daydream and while other kids splashed in the public pool, I stared at the ground helping you track the trajectory of bugs.

Then I grew up. Out. Never away.

You couldn’t have known that I fell in love with Ben because he talked to you even when you forgot to look at him and he made you a mixtape for your old cassette player with every one of your favorite songs in just the right order. He even watched Robin Hood with you and swore french fries tasted better with ranch anyway.

You had never held a child until my son was born.

He won’t remember that you seemed to always know why he cried and that, even though you didn’t like being touched, you pulled him into you and hummed until his tears subsided. He might not understand what it meant that you sliced strawberries—his favorite—into perfect quarters and even swallowed the one his little fingers stretched out towards your mouth. He might not remember that you walked him to his bus every day before school and even learned to wave at the bus driver when she called out a cheery good morning.

Now I watch you both. Boy and man. You sit in the shade, arms thrown over the other’s shoulders, fingers gently fluttering in excitement as you wordlessly watch a new butterfly unfurl its wings.

I once thought I had to make myself small to fit into your world. But my son has always understood that your world has the vastness of the unspeakable.

I’ll always remember that.