My collection of short fiction pieces has a tentative release of fall 2024. Here is a selection from that collection, to act as a "sneak preview".
Copyright © 2018 Krysta MacDonald
CHRISTOPHER
Something’s wrong with Christopher. The six words chased one another around in Lovey's brain, playing some inane game of tag. They shoved and skipped and leapt, but she wouldn't allow them the pleasure of bringing their idiocy out into reality. Instead, when her husband commented on her appetite, on her food scattered across her plate, asking if something was wrong, she smiled and shook her head.
"No, Darling," she said. "Everything's fine."
But everything most certainly was not fine, and as the auto-table cleared itself, Lovey went in search of her son.
She found him sitting on the edge of his bed, an album spread open on his lap. She leaned against the white imitation wood door frame, watching him consider the page, tilting his head to the left, then the right. He pinched the bottom corner of one page between two fingernails and flipped it. Then he repeated his consideration. Head tilt, left, then right. Corner pinch. Flip. Head tilt. Left. Right. Pinch. Flip.
The fourth time he repeated this ritual, it occurred to Lovey that he was studying each page for the exact same length of time. Her nerves fluttered and the skin on her arms pimpled.
As if in response to her shiver, Christopher looked up. He smiled, two perfect dimples framing the corners of his lips.
"Hello, Mother."
Lovey smiled back, the shine of his eyes lessening, but not quite eradicating her concerns. She twisted the ring on her finger, as she always did when anxious. Her mother had always done the same, and her mother before her, and her mother before her. When she was a little girl, she used to watch and mimic her mother’s nervous fidget. Now there was nothing purposeful about it. She twisted her ring as though she could screw down her nerves.
"Hello, Christopher. You didn't come to dinner?"
"No, Mother."
"You weren't hungry?"
"No, Mother."
She warmed to the steadfast way he held her gaze, his eyes wide, his expression all openness and sincerity. Stepping forward, tenderness and affection heaved themselves into her syllables, her stance, her smile. "What are you looking at, Christopher?"
He looked down again at the album, and spread his palms on the pages, sliding them out from the center, flattening the pages. His shoulders rose and fell.
"Is it an album, Christopher?"
"Yes, Mother."
"An album of what?"
Another rise and fall of his shoulders.
Lovey knew she shouldn't pry, shouldn't prompt. She knew he was in a difficult time, that all boys went through phases when they didn't eat, when they answered monosyllabically if at all. But some thread between herself and her son tightened, pulling her towards him.
She looked at the page. Faded faces smiled up at her.
"A photo album?"
"Yes, Mother."
Odd. She couldn't remember him ever looking at old photos before. When did that start? She pressed her lips into a thin smile. "Thank you for showing me," she said, as though he'd offered.
His shoulders rose and fell again, and she turned back toward the door. She glanced back at him just long enough to see him tilt his head to the left, then the right, then pinch the corner between his fingernails. She fled before he finished flipping the page.
In bed that night, Lovey again thought of telling her husband. But what could she say? She couldn’t explain this concern eroding in her gut, this certainty that something was different about her boy. Her precious son. Her Christopher.
There was nothing substantial, no flashing error or warning signs making her feel this way. Just that nagging, gnawing certainty. Something about his meticulousness, his absoluteness, his head tilt.
She knew what her Darling would say. She could imagine his low chuckle, his assurance that he was a little odd when he was young, too, that she just didn’t understand boys. And what was she so worried about, anyway? An interest in photo albums? A head tilt?
Lovey rolled over to the side, watching the door to the hallway, always left open a crack. The light from Christopher’s bedroom cast long shadows across the floor and walls, shadows somehow sinister in their substantiality.
She closed her eyes, willing sleep to come. When it did, she dreamt of a giant book, with giant pages and giant faded images of smiling women. She was lost in the images, anticipating and dreading the inevitable swish of a turned page.
In the morning, Christopher came to the breakfast table with uncombed hair and ruffled pajamas. The tension in Lovey’s back drained at the sight of his disheveled appearance. This is normal, she thought. She hummed a nameless tune at the stove, where she stood monitoring the sizzle of butter in a pan.
“Do pancakes sound good?” she asked over her shoulder.
Christopher kicked his feet back and forth. “Yes, Mother.”
She nodded and gave the instruction to the stove. “Pancakes, please. Four.” Then she moved to the coffee machine and pressed the glowing red button. Coffee beans fell into the clear cylinder at the top, and the whirring and grinding began. She turned back to the stove, where a mechanical arm was sliding the fourth pancake onto the top of the small stack already waiting on a plate.
She went back to the table just as her husband walked into the kitchen. “Lovey, you’re working too hard.”
She shook her head and sat down. “It’s nothing. I can handle bringing the food to the table.”
“It’s not nothing. You shouldn’t have to serve us. Isn’t that right?” He reached over and tousled Christopher’s hair.
Christopher brushed his father’s hands away, running his own over his locks, smoothing them down, and parting them from the middle with his fingers.
Lovey looked at his plate. In the seconds since she’d brought it to the table, Christopher had taken one pancake and cut it into precise squares. Not a crumb was out of place. The rounded edges were pushed to the side, piled on top of each other so even those lined up.
“Yes, Father,” Christopher said, his hands pulling at the sleeves of his pajama top. His feet, no longer kicking, were flat on the ground.
“I don’t mind,” Lovey insisted as she held out the syrup. “Do you want some of this?”
“No, Mother.”
He pierced one square of pancake with his fork, lifted it to his mouth, chewed it ten times, and swallowed. Another square. Ten chews. Swallow. Another. Chew. Swallow.
The scrape of her Darling’s fork on his plate startled her. She dropped her hand, which had been twisting her ring again. It’s probably nothing, she told herself. He’s just being a little neat. Neater than usual. Nothing odd about that. Nothing at all.
Her Christopher was her boy, her precious son. She’d hoped and prayed and wished on every star in the sky for him.
So he had to be okay. Normal. Everything had to be normal.
Besides, what was she worried about? What mother wouldn’t want a clean, quiet child?
That afternoon, after Lovey returned from a shopping trip with a neighbor, she found her husband and son in the library.
Darling was talking, waving his arms about, explaining to Christopher all about the cat and the spoon, pirates and buried treasure, knights defending their kingdoms.
Christopher was sitting cross-legged beside stacks of books. Each stack had five, except the one closest to him. He had a solitary book in his lap, and he was tracing the edge of the cover with his index finger. Then he moved it to the stack. Four in that one now.
In the doorway, Lovey’s breath stuck somewhere in her chest.
When Christopher pulled another large tome from the shelf, Darling stopped talking and looked down at him. “Are you listening to me?”
The boy started outlining this cover. “Yes. Father.”
Of course, Darling wouldn’t have noticed. He didn’t have her instinct, that motherly tie that tightened and creaked at trouble, that pulled and loosened and strained and knotted around her heart.
Darling patted Christopher’s head, then moved to the window as though studying the world beyond it.
From the window, with his back to the boy sitting on the floor, Darling could not have seen Christopher’s rigid movements, the way he raised his arms, an inch at a time, until he rested his palms on his head, smoothing out the mess his father had made. He couldn’t have seen Christopher’s hands returning down, his fingers again tracing the outline of the book in his lap. And, though he may have heard, he couldn’t have seen the boy heave it to the top of that pile, sliding it straight, lining it up just so. Five.
The father could not have seen it, but the mother did.
But she said nothing. She left the scene, straightening her back as she walked down the hall to her bedroom. Her chin raised, she thought of her child’s fingers on the book, his vacant eyes as he smoothed his hair, the tilt of his head as he flipped the pages of the photo album.
She remembered when he first arrived, the first time she saw him, the first time she held him. He was everything she’d wanted. He was her precious thing. She would not lose him. Nothing was wrong.
Her ring was gone when she woke up the next morning. She kept it in a tiny dish by the bed, afraid to sleep with it on, afraid of snagging the sheets or scratching her face. The last thing she did every night was take it off; the first thing she did every morning was put it on. So when she reached over to grab it and slide it on, sleep still fading her vision, dreams still cobwebbing her mind, she noticed.
At first, she thought it must have fallen. Perhaps the bed hadn’t rocked her to sleep soundly enough. Perhaps the motion detector hadn’t recognized a flailing arm during the night. With her thoughts so preoccupied with thoughts of Christopher and photo albums and stacks of books, surely it was only natural to have active dreams.
But she didn’t see it on the floor. The auto-scanner didn’t find it either.
Perhaps it was lost in the blankets. She flung them from the bed. Nothing.
She threw apart the clothing hanging in the closet, though it was in the middle of its auto-clean cycle. Clothes went flying as she searched through pockets, under socks, anywhere it may have fallen, even places that made no sense at all.
When she’d torn apart her room and was standing in the chaos, her chest heaving, her hands on her hips, she retraced her steps in her mind. She’d been in the kitchen with the family before bed. She swept out and down the hallway, her pulse pounding in her temples. The ring was important to her. The ring was precious to her. More than any other object she owned.
A voice somewhere within her consciousness whispered something to her, but the words were intangible and fleeting, and so easy to ignore, easy to forget in her frenzy.
It wasn’t in the kitchen. She ordered every appliance to auto-clean in the hopes it would be removed with any crumbs. Nothing. She set the room scanners on, but there was no trace of any foreign object, no matter how small.
She was on her way to the sitting room when she heard a noise from the hallway, from the direction of her bedroom. With Darling gone on his morning errands for the home, there was only one possibility for the source, and Lovey closed her eyes, swallowing the fear and certainty that bubbled up her throat.
She sped back to the bedroom. She knew she wouldn’t be happy with what she’d find when she swung open her door, but she never would have imagined seeing her son standing in the middle of the clothes and blankets she’d left on the floor. His two small hands gripped the small canister that he shook over each item, and the unmistakable smell of fuel burnt her nostrils. Questions sprinted through her mind, clanging alarm bells and pounding in her ears.
“What are you doing, Christopher?” She wanted to scream over the bells and sirens in her mind, to rush at him and yank the container from his hands. Instead, she breathed, and she was quiet, her voice only shaking on the last syllable of his name.
He turned to her, tilted his head to the left, then the right, and smiled a slow, assured smile. “Messy. Mother. Too messy. Everything’s too messy.”
“What, honey? The clothes? We can clean that up.”
“No, Mother.”
“What do you mean, sweetheart? We can clean it up.”
“No, Mother.” He looked around him, then at her. He tilted his head again. Left. Right. “Too messy. It has to go. All, Mother.”
His head righted itself. A step towards her. There was no head tilt now, no blinking, just focus and realization and determination. It hadn’t occurred to Lovey until right that moment that her son, her precious son, may find her too messy, too.
When she saw the spark, she finally lunged at him, but it was too late. The flicker hit the clothing, and there was an awful woosh.
Lovey stopped, frozen, as her clothing melted and burned. The flames danced to the blankets, then to another pile of dresses and shirts.
There was something almost lovely about the way the yellow and orange and red leaped and licked at the floor, at the cloth, at each other. It consumed and blackened.
“Christopher.” She almost didn’t realize she’d spoken, her voice was so calm. She didn’t even shift her eyes from the flames. “Christopher, I must ask. Did you take my ring?”
“Yes, Mother.”
The heat warmed her skin, but inside she prickled as the ice in his tone seeped through her
“Do you still have it?”
“No, Mother.”
Lovey breathed in the acrid smoke. “Where is it?”
“It’s messy, Mother.”
“What is, Christopher?”
“Everything.”
Then the house took over. Water poured from the ceiling, windows flung themselves open. Lovey experienced this through a tilting, careening fog, aware that her legs were buckling and her senses collapsing.
When Lovey awoke, there was a group of women in long, white coats. She was on the grass in front of her home, somehow sitting, a blanket wrapped around her. Christopher was nearby, also surrounded by women, and was looking around very calmly at the commotion he’d caused.
Their house was dark.
“Ma’am.” One of the women knelt before her. “I know now’s a tough time. But considering everything” – she waved her manicured hand at the husk of boards and beams and wire and wood – “I think we ought to take him.”
“My boy?”
“Yes, Ma’am. It’s for the best. Just the boy.” When she adjusted her glasses, Lovey noticed a ring on her finger, and a pang of loneliness for her own shot through her. “We need your consent.”
Her Christopher. Lovey thought of the sincerity in his eyes, the way he smoothed his hair over that bump on the back of his head. He was so precious to her.
And she remembered her clothes. Her home. Her ring.
Her ring, identical to the one her mother wore, and her mother before her, and her mother before her, identical to the one this woman wore, and all those women gathered around her, and all those women gathered around her son. She twisted at the empty space where her ring should have been, at the phantom band there, and across her memories flitted all those faces of all those women in that album, those faces all ash now. They’d all had rings, too.
She couldn’t say the words, but she nodded. The woman rose, spun on her heel, and went back to the group. She whispered something in Christopher’s ear. The boy looked back at the woman who was once his mother and nodded at her. Then he bowed his head, allowing the woman in the coat access to the cover of the small panel beneath his hair. As Lovey watched, the boy shuddered, then stiffened, and his eyes dulled.
Through the others milling around, Lovey could see the woman at the panel, pushing buttons and pulling out a small disc. She snapped it in two, dropping the halves on the ground. From inside her coat, she pulled another, this one so shiny it glinted even to where Lovey sat.
The woman pushed in this disc and pressed several more buttons. Then she snapped up the panel and smoothed the boy’s hair over the bump. She stepped back.
The boy’s hand stirred. A tremor shivered its way from his feet to the tip of his nose. Then his head turned, and he looked at Lovey through the group. He took a step forward.
Another.
“Hello, Mother,” he said, in the same even tone as every one of his predecessors. “My name is Christopher.”
Copyright © 2018 Krysta MacDonald