That night we are jumping on the twin beds in our room. Everything is flowers in our room, climbing up the wallpaper, creeping over our bedspreads. We hear our mother call us to come and say goodbye to our father. My parents’ room is dim, and my father is on his side in bed, covers pulled up over his shoulders, his head bent in towards his chest, as if he’s asleep. It’s time to say goodbye, our mother tells us. When I lean in to kiss him on the cheek I feel his whiskers on my lips. He doesn’t move. Afterwards, we sit on our beds and run our toes through the green shag carpeting.
~
At night, I dream of climbing things: a sand dune, a hill, a whale that’s been beached. I keep trying to get to the top. I dig in with my hands, my knees, my feet, but I keep sliding backwards. When I slip down the enormous side of the whale, its skin feels bumpy against my cheek, my lips, and when I claw at the dead animal’s skin it peels off in my hands.
~
At night, my sister and I push our twin beds together to make one big bed. We are afraid of everything: the closet, the branch that scratches the window, the creaks of our old house. I remember my father sitting at the foot of my bed. Once I watched him army crawl out of our room and down the hallway. His body slid across the wood lit dimly by a candle-shaped nightlight. When my sister stops responding to my questions, when her breathing changes and I know she’s asleep, I push the closet doors tighter, I touch the window eight times, I reach out to feel my sister’s cheek which is soft like silk, I creep down the hallway to look in my mother’s room. Her body makes a hump in the covers.
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Lately I feel like my legs won’t work, like they’re both numb and ticklish at the same time. I fall on the grass on the way to the car, and my mother yells at me to hurry up. I try to tell her my legs feel funny, but she tells me to stop making up stories. At night, I tell my sister that I might be going cripple, and she tells me to stop acting weird. When her breathing starts to change and I know she’s almost asleep, I tell her that one day we’ll both have kids, and our father will never meet them. I hope this keeps her awake. My legs feel like they are full of buzzing bees. I rub my feet together beneath the blankets, trying to make the buzzing stop.
~
I stand over my mother’s bed and watch her sleep. Her eyelids twitch, and the bedcovers rise and fall with her breaths. Her face cream smells like lavender. I poke her lightly on the shoulder, and she turns over, her back curled away from me. I whisper the Our Father at my mother’s back eight times. On my father’s side of the bed, the sheets feel cool beneath my hand. I take his pillow to my room and rub my bottom lip against the soft, worn case. My legs buzz and ache. I do not want to dream of hills or dead whales, so I listen for the tree branch scraping the window, I look for shadows on the hallway walls.
~
Yasmina Din Madden is a Vietnamese American writer who lives in Iowa. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Idaho Review, PANK, Carve, The Masters Review: New Voices, The Fairy Tale Review, Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, The Forge, Hobart, and other journals. Her short fiction has been a finalist for The Iowa Review Award in Fiction, The Masters Review Anthology, the Wigleaf Top 50, an honorable mention in the Fractured Journal’s micro-fiction contest, and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.She teaches creative writing and literature at Drake University and is completing a collection of short fiction.