EJ GREEN

EJ Green's short fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Pidgeonholes, Monkeybicycle, Juked, Lost Balloon, HAD and many other fine places. They made the 2024 Longlist for Wigleaf's Top 50 short fiction for their micros in Pidgeonholes. Their debut novel, Confessions of a Curious Bookseller came out in 2020 through Lake Union. In their spare time they practice martial arts, fall off boulders at the rock gym, and study Spanish. More at ejgreenwrites.com

FLOODPLAIN

The night I decided to run away was like any other night after my brother George’s death. He had been gone a year and the conversation, a rattling plastic bag over the AC vent and the occasional scrape of the knife on a plate, had never changed. An early dinner, as usual, because my father worked 5 pm - 1 am at the paper mill. The summer sun marked his remaining time better than any watch. Once the light hit the prism in the kitchen window and washed the dinner table with an alien beam of Pepto Bismol pink, it was time for him to wipe his mouth and push to his feet with that little groan of acquiescence and exhaustion. I watched his movements, and like a clairvoyant, predicted them all. My mother’s, too.

He turned the chair forty degrees and set his boots in front of it. Sat and bent over to wrestle his large feet inside. My mother gathered her napkin and held it tightly, watching his back as he folded forward and tied, the whites of her eyes a bloody spiderweb.

“Well,” she said, like every time. Another acquiescence. She dropped her napkin on the plate and also stood, chair scraping, her still youthful skin washed in pink as she dragged her small frame to the trash to begin shoveling the food scraps into the bin.

It was a predictable night, like any other night, but I was going to change things. George had played the drums, and was so good that he helped the music teacher give lessons to the middle school marching and jazz bands. When he played in his local band, a death metal band called the Croc Suckers, he elicited so much interest and praise from the audience, especially the girls in the audience, that the frontman sort of hated him but in that sporting kind of way. They made it into a shtick. The frontman announcing his name in a mumble, as an afterthought. It was funny, it made me proud to see, even though it was hard to convince my parents to let me go to those basement concerts. George taught me how to play a little, and he said I was good, a natural like him. We would bang on the drums every weekend, and I was just starting to get good. After he died, my father covered the drum set in a moving blanket and though nobody said as much, it was forbidden to remove the blanket and play. 

George’s death brought a silence that went beyond the muted drum set, a silence so vast and impassable that it shocked us all. You can never really know the various ways someone’s absence hurts. Not until it’s at your doorstep in the form of two police officers.

My mother stopped her scraping, and the familiar ping of the trash can lid harkened the jingle of keys as my father rolled them into his hand. An arrhythmic demonstration of how a house sounds after a loss. My father pushed his chair into the table, and I played my part, gathering the two remaining plates.

“Thanks for cleaning up,” he said looking at the door.  

But I didn’t speak my line. A mumbling “No problem.” Instead, I said, “I want to learn the drums.”

“No,” my mother said, so quickly that it shocked me. Maybe she’d known this was coming. Her face was ashen, and her bony fingers gripped the back of her chair, knuckles white like the undulating plastic bag over the vent.

My father stopped at the door, his hand on the knob. Back to us, he said, “Louise.”

“Why not?” I said through gritted teeth.

Then my mother lifted the chair a few inches off the ground and slammed it down as hard as she could. Eyes staring ahead, she raised it again, and again slammed it. The AC kicked off, and the plastic bag stopped dancing. The prism was now washing the table in blue, and my father was never here when the table was blue. He was supposed to be gone, George was supposed to be here, and I was supposed to be the good kid.

“I hate this,” I said, and walked out of the room, up the stairs, slamming my bedroom door. A few moments later my father’s truck started up and drove off. The TV turned on downstairs.

A few nights before I decided to run away, a rainstorm swept through the area, flooding gulches and swelling rivers, turning roadways into rushing streams. The wind howled through the forests that surrounded our house, testing the integrity of the trees’ roots, dragging them left and right as if they were swept by a giant broom. Many fell in the storm, and road crews were still working to clear the roads. But the night George died, it was a still and beautiful night. Weather was not to blame, nor was alcohol, nor anything else we could all get good and angry at.

My father was at work, and my mother and I were driving back from the Croc Suckers’ concert, held in our local Universalist Unitarian church basement. She didn’t often attend these concerts, but something had inspired her to go that night, despite the fact that her presence would likely be embarrassing for any teenager. Not for George. He was thrilled we had come, and even showed us around the small stage before the concert as if we had never been to one before. My mother and I dressed the part of metalheads, or at least as well as we could. I found some of George’s makeup and smeared black across her eyelids. I wore one of his oversized black t-shirts and a choker. This was Friday, and tomorrow we would all load into the truck to watch me play shortstop on the varsity softball team. It would be my debut game after the coach pulled me from JV softball because he saw how fast I was. He told my parents I had the quickest reflexes he’d ever seen. Apparently I had “some kind of future.” A strange phrase to use, as if only the very gifted have a future worth thinking about.

We laughed hard on the way home, tucked inside my mother’s Ford focus, windows down, the metal music ricocheting around in our brains like a phantom pain. George stayed back to pack everything up and would follow us home in his own car. I had never seen my mother mosh before, and was both amazed and perplexed by her efforts—her small body like a reed during a storm, tossed around relentlessly, yet somehow strongly planted, unshakable. Together we bore the burden of a few dozen teenagers with energy to burn. I was big for fourteen, as tall as any of the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds there, but there was still something frightening nestled under all the fun. Maybe it was a premonition. Maybe I knew that soon I would be the one protecting my mother.

Running away felt nebulous up until the moment I looked around my room deciding what was worth bringing on my vague trip to elsewhere. I didn’t know where I’d go, but living in Upstate New York surrounded by trees and mountains, there was something appealing about retreating to a part of the country that was the polar opposite. As I shoved my clothes into my backpack, an image of New Mexico came to mind. A place I’ve never been, but felt I knew already. Sand, craggy trees, oppressive sunlight, scorpions, the scent of sage. A landscape far less unforgiving than the kitchen table, than this entire life.

"I can’t believe you moshed!” I laughed.

“I moshed and lived! I think I’m bruised, though.”

“That means you did it right,” I said, sounding undeservedly authoritative. I knew nothing, and she knew it, but she was kind and let me have it.

“Are they good?” she asked. “Don’t tell your brother, but I can’t tell if they’re good.”

I laughed again. I was prone to it that night. Everything was topsy turvy. My usual quiet mother had impulsively decided to attend George’s concert while my father was at the mill, announcing her plan over dinner. My father had laughed too, then thrown her a genuine smile and said, “Well, tell him I wish I could be there.”

“They’re good,” I said. “Because George is a perfectionist, and he wouldn’t be wasting his time with people who weren’t as good as him.”

“My ears are ringing. I can’t hear anything.”

“Hah?” I said, doing my best impression of my grandmother.

“Hah?” she repeated, louder.

George’s room had remained untouched. Working up the courage to enter it was like jumping off a high dive. You are in freefall, but full of hope that once gravity carries you down, you are well-prepared for the inevitable impact. When I opened the door, I could still smell him, though faintly. He used Axe body spray, original because it didn’t have a smell, but it did whether he believed it or not. That, mixed with the Tide that washed his clothes and his usual sweat, created the stink of my brother. A stink I missed, that was disappearing even in his bedroom. Now, it smelled musty, like my grandmother’s house. I turned on the light and looked around, hoping to find his ghost crouched among the metal posters, the wire hamper, the tiny trashcan, the piles of Rolling Stones, Decibel, and Revolver magazines. In a strange way his ghost was here, infused in his belongings, and it was then that I understood why my mother refused to change anything about that room, right down to his still dirty clothes.

Quietly, because I didn’t know how she’d react if she caught me, I opened the drawer that held his twisted, unorganized jewelry collection. Mostly spiky chokers and clip-on nose rings, and rings with skulls and crossbones. I passed my phone’s flashlight over the shining costume jewelry and landed on what I was looking for. Pulling it apart from the rest of the jewelry proved difficult, and I worried that if I spent too much time untangling it I would lose my nerve and never leave, so I shoved the necklace and the accidentally attached choker into my backpack and left the room quickly, unceremoniously, but I looked back. I had to.

A pale figure hunched in the corner.

I froze, unable to look away. Even though I was terrified, I didn’t want George to know that. I wanted this to be normal.

“Hey,” I whispered. When I blinked, he was gone.     

The night wore on and George still hadn’t come home. It was only an hour and a half after he was supposed to be home, but my mother had a sense about things. She paced the kitchen, texting George and then, getting no answer, calling him. Calling my father, telling him something was wrong. I reassured her, stationed on the couch, playing with the half-moon friendship necklace I rarely took off, a piece of jewelry that he had won at an arcade when he was twelve and I was nine. He didn’t intend the necklace to be for us but for one of my friends and me; however when I gave him the other half and said it was ours, his brow furrowed, and he smiled brightly. I thought he was going to tell me I was stupid, but instead he put it on, rolling with it. After that, he never wore the necklace, but he kept it, and that was good enough for me.

My mother was about to grab her car keys to go searching for George herself when we heard the familiar crush of gravel under car tires through the open windows.

“Oh, thank god,” she said, hanging her keys back up and opening the door. From the couch, I watched her body language go from mother about to scold to bereft. Her hand flew to the doorjamb, and by the time the police made it to the porch, they didn’t have to say anything. I couldn’t pick her up off the floor.

When the flood came through, a burning barrel’s worth of detritus slammed our mailbox pole and hung there as if begging not to be dragged farther down the road. In the mess of sticks, limbs and trash was a curved piece of somebody’s front bumper, likely from the nearby junkyard. Unrelated to George, obviously, as an entire year had passed. But it didn’t matter. When my father went to get the mail after the rains stopped, I watched him stand over the pile for a long time, not yet knowing what he was staring at. When I joined him, he had tears in his eyes. When I asked him what was wrong, he just went back into the house without a word. I don’t know what made him cry, but if I had to guess, it was the small curve of scraped and dented metal painted black. The insidious thing about losing someone close to you is that grief is a flash flood. You can be performing the most quotidian of tasks like getting the mail, when something makes you think of the one you lost and all of a sudden, you’re drowning.

The stairs creaked under my feet, but it didn’t matter. My mother didn’t look up when I came into the living room and said, with my backpack slung over one shoulder, that I was going out. There was nowhere to go unless you could drive, but I had just gotten my learner’s permit, so I was free on a technicality.

“I’m going out and I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I specified.

She cradled her glass of red wine, her feet propped up on the coffee table, one bare foot lazily tapping the half-finished bottle. She stared at the TV.

“Do you want me to turn the television on?” I asked.

She blinked, as if roused from a dream. Straightening slightly, she gave me a miniscule shake of her head.

When people die, sometimes they take everybody with them.

I picked up the remote and turned the TV on anyway, because I couldn’t bear to let her stare at that black nothingness. I turned the TV on to a nature show about “beautiful national parks.” The craggy cliffsides of Acadia. The narrator was talking about Thunder Hole, a space of narrow rock that, when at high tide, gathers the roaring water and spits it out at such a velocity and with such might that it creates a thunderous boom. The video showed tourists watching, their cameras and phones dangling over the metal rungs of the staircase that leads down to the base of Thunder Hole.

“I bet people drop their phones in there all the time,” I said.

“Where?”

“In the water.”

“No, where are you going?”

The backpack in the passenger seat of my mother’s car, which I was currently stealing, I guess, felt more like an additional guest than an inanimate object. I began talking to it even before I left the driveway, justifying to it that I’m only driving her car to the nearest bus stop, where it will be found and returned. No harm done there. The bag was incredulous.

“How’s she getting to work tomorrow?” the bag asked in my brother’s voice. I looked over without turning my head and saw him there, manifested, conjured. He didn’t look ghostly or pale or dead like he did in his bedroom. He was my dark-haired, brown-eyed, black t-shirt wearing brother, complete with the snaggle tooth that the orthodontist couldn’t fix but an imperfection the girls loved. This wasn’t real because I wasn’t scared, didn’t even swerve a little upon seeing him. It all felt so ordinary.

“Don’t know, don’t care. Maybe she’ll finally lose her job and that’ll be her wake up call.”

“I think losing you would be more of a wakeup call.”

“I know you’re not really here and this is just me talking to myself.”

“This is great. A great idea. The more you disappear, the more they love you.”

“Shut up.”

I turned my head, and it was just a bag.

Five minutes later my headlights illuminated what at first looked like a large animal in the middle of the road, but the closer I got the more it took shape. A craggy limb, a hollowed eye, a trunk still and lifeless. The tree must have fallen recently, a late casualty of the flooding in the nearby woods after the creek swelled and weakened the roots of the old trees.

I eased the brakes as much as I could, still getting used to that, and put the car in park. Thought about turning around, but around was back home as we lived on a dead-end road. One side was a sheer drop into a gulch, the other, sodden forest.

Keeping the high beams on, I stepped out of the car to get a closer look at my obstacle. The tree trunk was broken in a few places, shattered like a bone. A sycamore. The branches felt dry and dead in my hands as I pulled them from the fallen beast, like the carapaces of desiccated insects. Trees fell along this road often enough that the sight of an obstacle wasn’t too unusual. My father was so tired of it that he had asked the town to come by more often and do maintenance on some of the dead trees, but it was a low priority to them. Lower down than the intermittently dysfunctional traffic light by the bank, and lower down still than the relentless potholes that formed right outside the elementary school next to the outdoor skate rink. Because we were the only family on this road, it was our burden alone to bear.

And right now, mine. But I had time. My father wasn’t due back for hours and when I told my mother I was just going for a drive, she didn’t so much as look up from the TV, as unusual a statement as it was.

“So, you’re really just going to abandon them like that?”

“Can you blame me? That place is a tomb.”

George shook his head and took the other side of a limb I was struggling with. Together we moved it to the side of the road and watched it plunk into the gulch.

“You want me to give you permission to be a coward?” he asked.

If he hadn’t been a ghost, or a figment of my imagination, I would’ve shoved him.

   “Am I really a good drummer, or were you just telling me that?”

“You’ve got promise. Rhythm runs in the family.”

“I think I’ll go to New Mexico. Work in a restaurant and save up for a drum set.”

“I know.”

“There’s a lot of sunshine there, and happy people.” Another branch into the gulch. I just needed a small space big enough for the car to squeeze through. Then freedom. A bus ticket, forests turning to red sand, cacti and roadrunners. When I introduced myself to people, they would call me by another name, though I didn’t know what yet. I would be simultaneously someone else and my true self. At least that’s how I imagined it. I didn’t really know New Mexico, but I knew what was behind me.

“Thing is,” I said, hauling a limb as long as the car, “they didn’t even see me when you were alive. And don’t you dare stand there and tell me I’m lying.”

“You’re rewriting history.”

I rolled the limb off the road, the wood cracking like broken bones on impact. We stared at it together. “Why did you have to leave us?”

The air felt lighter, and when I looked around, George was gone. The emptiness was a strange comfort. Though really, he was never there to begin with. I wondered then if I would continue talking to him like this as I put miles between myself and that house. If I would spend the rest of my life constantly justifying my actions to a dead person, giving nothing to the living I’d left behind.

I paused, looked down at the mess of limbs that I had hardly made a dent in. This would be a lot of work.

When I heard the voice, I almost ignored it, thinking I had conjured my brother again. But it was not my brother’s. A thin, shadowed figure stood at the back door of her own car, arms crossed. I knew that body language anywhere. George had gotten it from her.

“I saw the taillights,” my mother said. “Thought you were having trouble.” She wore pajamas and hiking boots—a strange combination indicating she’d rushed out of the house, an act which I doubted she was capable of anymore.

“I’m fine.” I grabbed an unreasonably large hunk of wood and began to drag it. Her tongue clicked and she was there, picking up the other side and helping me. “I can do this by myself.” We released the hunk into the gulch and listened as it thump thumped until it came to rest.

“Sycamore,” she said quietly. “George’s favorite tree.”

I fought a smile, and quoted him. “‘They look like they’re wearing camouflage.’”

We returned to the debris, and I was the first to move, grabbing a bundle of broken branches. I wanted to leave her with something, something she’d remember or think about in my absence, if she even noticed it.

“I hate your sadness.” I tossed the branches down and returned to the pile, grabbing more. Not looking at her, but feeling her stillness, that ominous quiet before a storm.

I was halfway to the roadside with another armload when I saw her lift a limb five times her height and toss it.

“You don’t have to—”

Her scream cut my words like broken glass. A cry so deep and guttural that it sent chills through me.

“Jesus Christ,” I breathed.

But she wasn’t finished. I stepped aside and watched her clear the path on her own, this frail woman finding the strength of a body builder, her face stoic. She raged at the fallen tree, tearing at the pieces, sending them into the woods until there was a perfect space for a car to fit through. Looking through to the other side, I thought I could smell sage. And it was then that I understood her. That she wasn’t sad. She was angry.

We both were. Anger takes many forms.

I watched her shoulders move up and down as she stood in the newly cleared space, her head bent low, arms at her sides. The headlights illuminated the ribbons of red that ran down her forearms. Scrapes mostly, but some bled.

Where before that open road looked like freedom from pain, now it just looked like another way to hide, and I questioned its ability to fix me.

George had been gone a year, and there was a time right after where we all held each other, where we all mourned as a family. That was the sadness. But none of us expected the anger. None of us had the tools with which to fight it or even recognize it. And sometimes, when you have nowhere to put the anger, it just goes inside.

“You’re bleeding.”

She looked at her arms as if they didn’t belong to her, and I knew then I couldn’t leave her there, not like this. We drove home, and I washed the dirt and splinters from her arms, spread antibacterial ointment along the wounds until they shined. She was still sitting on the closed toilet, her arms resting uselessly on her thighs when I walked in and put the drumsticks in her hands. At first she looked at them like she didn’t recognize what they were. Then she looked at me like she might hit me with them.

“Come here,” I said, cocking my head toward the hallway. “Mom, please.”

I flicked on the garage light and pulled the moving blanket off the drum set, and the Zildjian cymbals teetered on their stands. The high hat fell over entirely in a messy, ear-splitting crash. I righted it and together we stood, shoulder to shoulder, staring at the snare, the base, the whole damn thing.

“He taught me some,” I said. “I could teach you.”

“I don’t know the first thing.”

“It’s okay. All you have to do is take a seat. That’s the start.” I adjusted the stool a little lower for her and she gingerly settled into it, the cushion sighing under new weight. My mother’s eyes rested on the drums in turn as if each one deserved an introduction. As if each had a story to tell. She looked so small behind it but at the same time so powerful, the way my brother did, how he tamed the beast every night and made it sing.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“You just hit it,” I said. “You just hit the damn thing hard as you can, and you don’t stop. And you do it every day until it sounds like something.”

“Show me,” she said.

So, I showed her.

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