Yasmina Din Madden ~ Night

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.

~

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.