2021 Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize Runner-up

Paloma and I were sistered by a violence we could not name. 

Others tried: newspapers in blocky typeface, neighborhood mothers with their unstable eyes, officers whose badges lost fairy dust in our hands.

They gave us pastries pregnant with strawberry preserves and assumed our distracted mouths plugged our ears. Kidnapping was their go-to, although there was no evidence of it, which Paloma told me was the marker of a good kidnapper. Their discussions often devolved into unproductive specifics: stranger or friend? opportunistic or planned? Finally, they would arrive at the last, damning question: why take the older kids when they could have had the younger ones? They followed this line of thinking until it stilled them, soldiering their heads to the window and watching as streetlights revealed shuffling bodies on the sidewalk below.

Paloma was four years older than me and indulged a self-styled eccentricity that I cheapened into my own. All her clothing contained some unsettling shade of green, which she contrasted with lace chokers. I wore pickle-colored sweatshirts, sleeves rolled into fat donuts around my elbows, and throated myself with twine. She held her mouth slightly parted, her lipstick the color of jujubes; my own face, as basic as a bead. With my nails, I carved crescents into my lips until red broke under it, wet and angry. After, we showed each other pictures of our lost siblings as we remembered them, their faces preserved behind glass: her brother grabbing at his blonde thatches of hair, my ponytailed sister, her face cracked open, Jack O'Lantern smile. 

When two months passed, people began dropping from the search parties, leaving casseroles mossed by breadcrumbs on our doorsteps to signal their withdrawal. In response, our two families continued with increasingly deranged optimism. They began utilizing Paloma’s family dog, an eight-year-old Pomeranian whose eyes were already dreamy with cataracts. Each morning, they returned sequined in sweat, their boots souped in dirt, the sky the color of weak tea.

At four months, a string of livestock thefts in a neighboring town stole away the last of the police, leaving Paloma and me to man the tip line. Paloma’s parents had purchased a phone for this singular purpose and posted a financial reward worth three of my houses. Afterschool, we waited in the cello-brown walls of Paloma’s house, playing hopscotch with the laddered sunlight that fell inside. When the phone shrilled, we jumped to it. We pressed our heads close, receiver balanced between our shoulders, and struggled to fill our lungs with air. Some of the callers gave us messages mutated by many mouths, their tongues licking the stories pointed, ice-cream coning them into an entirely different shape. Others offered us impossible truths: they had seen two children, one boy and one girl, carried off by wild birds. Later, we would recount these messages to our parents, winging our jackets to describe their size. Upon finding us to be two girls alone, my least favorite callers suggested what anatomy we should suck of theirs, of each other’s. Paloma always took these calls without me, whisking the phone to her far ear, a throaty catch in her voice that I could never approximate. I took notes on the yellow pad her parents had bought for recordkeeping, the lewd ones of which Paloma corded and eased down her throat. She said this negated her using the words at all, only borrowed and returned. 

I always dreaded going back to my house. Once home, my parents joined in whispered conference beside the kitchen, their eyes pinked by burst veins. Alone in the bedroom I once shared with my sister, I worried my scabs open every night. If I listened too hard, I could hear my sister reducing her romantic relationships down to playlists, songs that she pretended she could no longer listen to.

That is, until we stopped returning to my house, and Paloma’s father and my mother to us. In the ninth month, Paloma’s father took a job across an ocean, with the promise to send money home for the search, which was better than what my mother did, which was disappear with no promise of anything at all. It will be easier for now, the remaining parents told us, sitting us down on their sectional, its cushions so plush they retained the memory of our bodies for hours. At first, I slept on the floor of Paloma’s room, watching her fist the sheets as if they were capable of giving her something. By the tenth month, my spine knobbed through my skin. In the eleventh month, Paloma’s mother led me to her son’s room, where planet stickers had begun to fade into yellow corpses on the walls. 

Just after the one-year mark, one of Paloma’s classmates suggested a website. Some missing people end up on there, he told her, nodding severely. We opened the first video, a girl with a plaid skirt flipped up like a flower, between her legs, a dark cavern webbed white. I held my skin taught, trying to look only at faces as Paloma persisted. The next girl’s face was made margarine by the poor lighting, her expression sharp like chipped glass. This one is sorta like yours, Paloma said, as the girl plugged her face with something that looked like an uncooked fish. I shook my head. None of them look right, I said, before running to the bathroom. As I spent my stomach into the toilet, Paloma parted my hair in two and held each like reins. 

When I was done, we lifted our shirts in the mirror, her stomach tight, mine empty but the consistency of grass jelly. Paloma sunk her fingers into my hair, disappearing them to their third knuckles. Kneel down, she said, leaving the room and returning with scissors that flashed their teeth in the light. She palmed the top of my head, coring my hairs into a root. Through the mirror, I watched her reflection watching mine, my hair petalling around our shins, becoming what we had lost.

Nicole Tsuno is an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins University where she writes about feral teen girls, the space between platonic and romantic love, chronic illness, body horror, and light dystopia. Her short fiction has appeared in HAD, No Contact, The Offing, Passages North, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore with her disgruntled dog, Spooky.

Greeshma Chenni Veettil (b. 1988, Kerala, India) (from the series SLOPE OFF INTO, digital inkjet print) is a visual artist based in Syracuse, NY. Her work combines photography, alternative processes, text and installation in an attempt to re-contextualize the everyday details of our lived environment. She is interested in creating immersive visual experiences by transforming flat photographic prints into three-dimensional photo-sculptures. In their new spatial configurations, her images seek to draw out new responses towards recognizable mundane objects. Greeshma is currently a graduate candidate in the Art Photography department, at Syracuse University.

This piece was originally published in Salt Hill 48.