Leaving (flash fiction)
The early morning view from the back door has always been Fran’s favorite thing about the house. Down the stone path through the garden, past the greenhouse with its empty pots and dry soil, and up the hill to the small copse of trees. It will be what she misses most.
She stands at the open door and tightens her cardigan against the chill. The trees huddle together for warmth and reach their branches toward an uninterested sun. The only thing that moves is a fox’s neat shape trotting across the face of the slope. From the angle of its neck Fran can tell it is carrying something in its jaw. Something small that paused to sniff the air for just a moment and stayed too long. The fox stops, quite still, and turns its head in her direction. She holds her breath. A light whiteness, more frost than snow, gives the scene a prettiness it usually lacks this time of year. Like God has sprinkled icing sugar through a celestial sieve. Satisfied she poses no threat, the animal continues toward the trees. Fran’s breath makes smoke in the frigid air.
Fran can recall only one January, in all the fifteen years they’ve lived in the house, when they’d had snow deep enough to play in. The neighborhood children had joined hers and streamed through their backyard and up and down the hill, bearing plastic storage bin lids and folded cardboard or whatever else they’d been able to slide on. The snow had fallen all day like a blessing. The children came into her kitchen when it got too dark, pink-cheeked and soaking wet, to the hot chocolate she’d made. She’d felt like a proper mom that day. The kind of mom you read about in stories.
Fran toes the loose piece of stone she’s been asking Owen for years to fix before someone trips over it and breaks their bloody ankle. Usually she nudges it back into place, but today she pushes it off the step. It slips over the edge and arrives on the path with an unsatisfying drop. Propped on its edge and tented against the step. She’d hoped for more drama. More collapse. The heavier crunch of stone against stone. More cracking, more breaking, teeth against bone. If only she wasn’t barefoot, she would give it a good kick.
She tells the neighbors that she’d imagined they’d live in the house until their children brought their own children to slide down the hill, plant seeds in the small pots in the greenhouse, and run through the sprinkler. She will be the perfect grandmother, fun and playful, allowing the children ice cream for dinner. All the things she has not managed to be to her own children. This earns Fran sympathetic looks and she basks in the brief celebrity status their abrupt decision to sell has given them. People she barely knows stop her in town to ask her, Why? When? Where are you going? Will you be back? Who made the decision to leave? She both resents and enjoys the attention and plays up the part of poor Fran, victim of circumstance. But if she’s honest—and she can be, standing barefoot in the cold on her broken step—Fran has always known that she and Owen would not grow old in this house. Or together.
She bends to pick up the loose triangle of stone, but instead of tucking it back like a puzzle piece into the frame of cement, Fran carries it down the path. She grits herself against the cold, which rises through her soles until her ankles ache. A few feet from the greenhouse, Fran plants her legs, lifts the heavy slab with both hands, and hurls it as hard as she can toward the greenhouse. It smashes into the side, splinters glass panels, splits the wooden frame, and sends a stack of terracotta pots and neglected soil ricocheting into the space. Fran watches until the last spinning piece of clay comes to rest. She takes a final look up the quiet hill and turns back to the house.
