“There Until She Wasn’t” by Niles Reddick
flash fiction
“After Apollo From Launch” by Jennifer Weigel
She didn’t know the rabbit died in the spare bedroom underneath the bed. She just knew it didn’t hop through the house with its big white feet to eat the food she dumped in a cereal bowl on the kitchen floor, too weak to stoop and pick up the bits that scattered across linoleum. She thought the rabbit’s feet were too big, and she assumed it had gotten out and ran away.
She told me on the phone, “I sometimes look at my own feet and feel they don’t belong to me; they are so puffy.” I just let her talk and listened, or not. I often made dinner, cleaned up, took the trash out, or whatever while she rambled away about her week, the chemo, why she was even doing it at eighty-six; if the insurance didn’t pay it, she would give up. I was good at “uh huh,” “yes,” and “oh nos.” Sometimes, she stopped and said, “I thought that was good. Why’d you say, ‘Oh, no’?” and I’d make something up. Later, when the pallbearers heaved her casket out of the hearse and carried it to the gravesite, I stood with others from church and regretted not listening more. Maybe I should get off the church Care Committee. Serve truer in some other capacity.
I wondered if Danny, the youngest of her grandchildren, would come. Wondered where he was staying since she’d died, her children selling the house and him having to move out. They needed the money to pay her bills at the funeral home, pay off the little Ford with a scrape and dent from one end to the other from when she tried to park in her carport after chemo. The wind from the storm had blown her plants off the stand, clay pots breaking, dirt everywhere, and she’d tried to avoid a flat tire from the jagged pottery shards. She was in tears about her flowers, and the Ford had ended up scraping the pole all the way down the side of her car. They also had to pay off her credit card Danny charged up, living with her, waiting on her hand and foot. I’d heard her: “Danny, bring me a tissue.” “Can you get my slippers and put them on my feet?” “I didn’t quite get to the toilet in time. Can you wipe back there for me?”
No rent and free cable, phone, and electric weren’t enough. He used the car, the charge card. He ate the food. He’d run the vacuum for her, but he didn’t dust or sweep, mop, or clean toilets. It was the wall that had to be cleaned when he moved out, not the toilet, I heard from another member of the Care team. Couldn’t aim that damned thing into the bowl. Acted like it was the Wild West is what they said. There was also an inch of dust on that furniture they put out front for the yard sale they’d wiped down before people showed up, the sun not even up yet.
Danny’d found her rabbit from the dead smell. They thought it was a rat. They’d had one a couple of months back. She accused Danny of killing her rabbit.
“Only thing I had left,” she said. “Flowers’re all gone.”
“Rabbit’s supposed to die,” he said. “Wasn’t no chemo for him.” He burned it in the rusted barrel out back when he had a can full of trash for a fire.
She didn’t like what he said about her rabbit. She knew he wanted her dead. She wasn’t giving him anything in the will but knew he might steal it. They would all come for her stuff like vultures. Told everyone on the phone how cruel he was. Said she didn’t have to take him in. She could’ve managed just fine without him, but at least he was there until she wasn’t.
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Niles Reddick is author of a novel, four short fiction collections, and two novellas. His work has appeared in over five hundred publications, including The Saturday Evening Post, Cheap Pop, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres, Citron Review, Midway Journal, and Vestal Review. He is a ten-time Pushcart nominee, a three-time Best of the Net nominee, and a three-time Best Micro nominee. Find him on Instagram at @nilesreddickmemphisedu.
Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory and forgetting, socio-political discourse, and institutional critique. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and has won numerous awards. https://jenniferweigelart.com/