Some of Your Favorite Things Aren’t Made to Last| Laurie Marshall

At first, you think it’s snowing.

“Look dad! Huge flakes!”

“Those aren’t snowflakes, honey.”

Your dad tries to smile at you in the rearview mirror but you ignore him and turn back to the window, still angry about being crammed against the passenger side door by boxes and baskets that were also crammed with as much as he could stuff in them before it was time to go.

You wish you were headed to a place that had snow. Somewhere with tall trees and mountains and mysterious forests. No, that’s not true. You wish you weren’t headed anywhere at all but were still in your house with the broken screen door and the swing set in the backyard shaded by normal trees. You wish your mom wasn’t in an enameled jar with a little silver label in a small cedar chest in the trunk along with her cookbooks and the dollhouse she spent weeks building and decorating after you went to bed and finished just in time for your eleventh birthday party.

Your dad wishes he didn’t wake up every day with his pulse racing, drenched in sweat. But you don’t know this yet.

“I wish it was snow,” you lie.

“So do I,” your dad says, not smiling now.

You stare out the window as your car passes a truck loaded with crates carrying large white turkeys. The birds are packed in trios and quartets, eyes staring and wattles wobbling under their open, panting beaks, on their way to an industrial death. Their feathers drift and drop, dusting the shoulder of the highway like a temporary trail of breadcrumbs.

You think if you toss your Cheetos out the window one by one, you could leave a trail. Some evidence that you’ve been in this place, like the souvenir penny collection you buried under the azalea while your dad loaded the wagon. But you and the turkeys are only here for a blink and will be somewhere else by Thanksgiving.

You pull your hoodie on backward over your arms and flip the hood up to cover your face. Your dad glances at you in the mirror again and turns on the radio. It’s just static.

Laurie Marshall is a writer and artist working in Northwest Arkansas. Recent stories have been awarded the 2021 Lascaux Flash Fiction Prize, included in the 2022 Bath Flash Fiction Award anthology, and nominated for Best Small Fictions 2022. She reads forFractured Lit and Longleaf Review. Words and art have been published in New World Writing, Emerge Literary Journal, Versification, Bending Genres and Flash Frog among others. Connect on Twitter @LaurieMMarshall.