We received numerous powerful entries to the Spider’s Web Flash Fiction Prize writing contest this year, and Angélique Jamail’s piece was certainly one of the standouts. Angélique impressed judge Rita Banerjee with her excellent world-building, tension, and character development within the tight confines of flash fiction. We’re honored to share this writer and teacher’s creative composition with our readers!

Mother

by Angélique Jamail

By the third sparsely attended intersection, Sylvia began to consider running the reds. The driver to her left lay on his horn, peering up at the traffic light swinging like a sagging trapeze. A flyer stapled to a nearby light pole tore off and somersaulted into a splat on her window. “Lost puppy,” it read. “Reward $75.” A phone number.

Sylvia looked at the billowing green-tinged clouds and muttered, “I wonder if it answers to Toto.”

The light changed. She hurtled down the feeder, debris tumbling off the landscaped freeway embankment. When she turned onto Mom’s street, the wind struck her small sedan with such force her back right tire came off the pavement. She gripped the wheel, the bones of her hands straining against her skin. The wind shrilled around her, air pressure rattling inside her skeleton. She felt hollow as a bird.

Mom had called thirty minutes ago, insisted she leave her doctor’s appointment right away. A tornado was coming, and Mom didn’t think she could handle Sylvia’s two young children all on her own through a storm. The doctor was delayed from an emergency C-section, throwing off his whole schedule; the nurse didn’t know when he’d show up in Sylvia’s exam room. She’d already rescheduled twice, but she threw her clothes back on and left, cursing under her breath all the way to her car, through the garage, at the payment kiosk. Seven dollars for parking, she hadn’t even been seen.

Sylvia remembered the world had once felt vast, more realms open before her than responsibilities. But now?

Mom’s house was a block away. One more block of three-story stuccoed homes whose wrought-iron balconies and flagstone courtyards could weather all but a five hundred-year flood. A slew of bougainvillea and crepe myrtle blossoms swept past her, and she turned just in time to see the top orb of someone’s topiary break off, tumble toward the street. She accelerated, then made a hard left onto her parents’ driveway, grabbed her purse, and stalked up to the house.

When Mom opened the door, Poppy was clinging to her grandmother’s leg, looking more worried than any six-year-old should. Four-year-old Thomas, sitting at the bottom of the staircase, watched them all with the dispassionate gravitas inherent to the young and highly intelligent. “Grandma said rain is gonna boom down her house.” He sounded skeptical.

Sylvia pushed the door shut behind her. Mom leaned over for the requisite kiss and hug hello, but Sylvia pretended not to notice as she lifted Poppy into her arms. “You okay?” she asked the child. “You know rain’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“We should get into the downstairs bathroom,” Mom said, trying to herd them all in that direction. She reached for Thomas, who grabbed Sylvia’s hand and peered up at her.

“Do we have to?” he asked.

“We don’t mess around with tornadoes,” Mom said.

“Fine, fine,” Sylvia answered. No point in fighting about this, too. “Get in the bathroom. I’m sure this’ll all be over in a few minutes.”

Mom had prepped the marble-tiled bathroom with overstuffed throw pillows from her bed and unicorn- and dinosaur-themed fleece blankets for the kids. Two flashlights and a hand-crank radio by the sink. Mom fussed over the kids in a singsongy voice meant to make this all seem like some fun adventure, but Sylvia knew, on the inside her mother was an electric tangle of fear. She’d always been this way about storms; no amount of impatience on Sylvia’s part had helped her mother…well, grow up.

“Is water coming in the house?” Tears hovered on the edge of Poppy’s voice.

Mom worried her lip. “I­­––I don’t know.”

“Grandma’s house GO BOOM!” Thomas said, stretching out to his sister in cruel exuberance. When her face crumpled, he laughed. “Joking! Joking!”

Poppy cried in earnest, Mom looked like she wanted to curl up in a fetal position. This was nonsense. Sylvia put an arm around each of them.

“We’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Thomas, settle down.” She pointed to a cream dupioni silk pillow. “Sit there and take four big, quiet breaths before you say another word.”

Poppy buried her face in Sylvia’s neck; Sylvia rubbed her back. A deep crash of thunder overhead startled everyone into silence. Mom was barely holding it together. Sylvia hugged her gently.

“Hey,” she murmured. “It’ll be okay.” She surveyed her world, her responsibilities vast. She kissed the top of her mother’s graying head, her instinct, finally, to soothe. “Really.”

***

Angélique Jamail’s poetry and essays have appeared in over two dozen anthologies and journals, including New Reader Magazine, Waxwing, Time-Slice, Improbable Worlds, Pluck Magazine, The Milk of Female Kindness––An Anthology of Honest Motherhood, Untamable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston, Femmeliterate, Bayou City Magazine, and The Enchantment of the Ordinary. Her work was selected as a Finalist for the New Letters Prize in Poetry in 2011. Her magic realism novelette Finis. (Odeon Press), first published in 2014, has been praised by fiction writer Ari Marmell as having “some of the most real people I’ve encountered via text in a long time,” and by poet Marie Marshall as “a witty tale of conformity, prejudice, and transformation, in a world that is disturbing as much for its familiarity as for its strangeness.” Her poetry collection The Sharp Edges of Water (Odeon Press) came out in 2018. She teaches Creative Writing and English in Houston. Find her online at her blog Sappho’s Torque (www.SapphosTorque.com).