photo by Daniel Newhouse Unsplash+
by Didi Wood
You won’t remember me, an unfamiliar, undersized, unkempt child of five clutching your coat in Woolworth. Why would you? It was so many years ago and it was nothing, nothing happened or so my mom said. We were walking, walking fast, my mom my little brother my little sisters me, the baby already fussing so no time to linger by the toys, although my steps slowed as we passed, eyes gulping all I could before it was gone. There was the Barbie I asked for but Santa forgot; there was a tutu like Christine Vickers had because she did ballet but we had no time for ballet, my mom said, no money, the wrong hair, we were not ballet people. And then we were in vacuums and I looked up and said Maybe next year Santa will – and the woman whose coat I grasped wasn’t my mom, she was prettier than my mom, shinier, gleaming curls and a ruby mouth, her coat so soft and her perfume, oh, sometimes all these years later that scent wafts by me in a store, on the street, and I pirouette back to that moment, my grubby hand clutching your coat and you smiling, allowing it, a brief tranquil interlude we spent just considering one another before my mom bustled up, scolding, my siblings a roiling moat around her, and I started to cry and you said Everything’s fine now and even your voice was velvet and my mom bundled us all away but it wasn’t fine, I wasn’t fine, I would have gone with you, resplendent in the shimmer of your scent, your smile, I would have been your ballet girl or your Barbie doll or anything at all, anything, anything, I wouldn’t have looked back.
Didi Wood’s stories appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Ghost Parachute, Okay Donkey, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best Small Fictions. More at didiwood.com.
