Photo by Sujan Naik on Unsplash
by Meg Pokrass
Ten years later and Edna still felt like pushing that beanstalk baby.
“Someone needs exercise,” she said on the anniversary of the disappearance, so I invited her out with me to the balcony to smoke a cigarette, where she asked me to describe in detail what her child would look like if we saw her on the street alive.
“She’ll be wearing a sparkly tutu, hair in a bun,” I said, keeping my voice even, trying not to look in her eyes.
Last year I described her as a tomboy on a bike, and the year before, a chubby imp with ringlets.
When it was time for the baby’s outing, we wrapped the beanstalk in a blanket, brushed dust off the stroller, made our way toward a group of mothers.
“She’s grown!” one of them chirped in a delighted voice, because they all knew sorrow, but privately I thought the child should get out of that pram and run.
Meg Pokrass is the author of Breath and Shadow: Six Sentence Stories (with Robert Scotellaro), First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories(Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines. Meg is the founding editor of Best Microfiction.
