BY MICHELE FINN JOHNSON
You show up with a cardboard file box. Our mediator, Frannie, gives you the scowl she typically reserves for the sessions where she dissects our joint tax returns and calls us fiscally irresponsible. You hate to be scolded. You blush.
I want to mock you; after everything, it still seems natural to play into the tease of us. “What’s in the box?” I ask.
You don’t smile, you don’t blink. “You’ll see.”
It’s hard to concentrate on the things Frannie’s trying to talk about tonight—division of assets, 401K splits, stock divestitures. Boring stuff. The stuff you always handled. You look adequately engaged for the both of us. Frannie’s counsel floats all around us, a highway of words I’ll never be able to reassemble. I’m drifting.
Frannie closes her laptop. Session’s over. You ask if we can stay in her conference room for a few minutes. When she sighs, I smell the remnants of her lunch—pastrami, I’m guessing. I imagine Frannie with a half-gnawed sandwich, hunched over a thesaurus, searching for new ways to say awful things like division, split, equitable.
Frannie leaves, and you open the file box. You lay out souvenirs from every trip we ever took on the conference room table. A ceramic leprechaun mug from Galway. A tin Eiffel tower, the height of a quarter on edge. A keychain with a photo of us riding in the front car of the Runaway Mine Coaster. There are dozens of these tchotchkes. The crap of our lives.
“You took nothing sentimental when you left,” You say.
You fondle each souvenir on its way out of the file box as if it’s fragile and precious instead of plastic and plated. Once they are all out on the table, you say ‘Voila’ and Vanna-White-wave your magical arm in the open air between us. “We had some good times, you know. I just wanted you to remember that.”
I vow to stay silent. Sixteen years taught me that my silence is the thing that pains you most. Your eyes freeze open, just like the photo on the Runaway Mine Coaster keychain, captured in that moment where the front car dropped and our stomachs flew up into our throats. Remember that moment, I think. Remember how that felt.
I pick up a hand-painted calavera we bought together in Mexico City. I assume the skull is a woman. Her hair is a wreath of painted flowers—deep pinks and yellows—and though her eye and nose sockets are hollow, her teeth gleam white in a wide smile that belies her current condition. She’s as light as a dozen paperclips; she rests comfortably in my palm. I slip her into my pocket and walk out the door. She grows heavier and heavier; she weighs me down like a million World’s Fair pennies, flattened.
Michele Finn Johnson’s short fiction collection, Development Times Vary, was the winner of the 2021 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and is forthcoming in October 2022. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work was selected for the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology, won an AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction, and has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. Michele lives in Tucson and serves as contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine. Find her online at michelefinnjohnson.com and on twitter at @m_finn_johnson.