Competition Twenty-Four Highly Commended: Don’t Look Away, Don’t Look Back, Don’t Look by Fiona McKay

Sissy rolls her rock up the garden path, again, again, again. Always dawn. Crepuscular light creeping through ivy falling like fringes over the eyes of the house. The ivy keeps gawpers out. Keeps us in. Sometimes, I catch my reflection in the dank glass, no more than an outline, a wave of particles taking shape. I know it’s not really me there. Not Sissy either, busy rolling, rolling. Like the stone from the tomb, like Gethsemane, rolling the stone away, away. Always starting over. Always, in the dappled light of the remaining trees.

Momma always said the woods were sacrificed for the house. Always creeping back. ‘Keep an eye on them at all times,’ Momma said. ‘Never turn your back on a tree, or a man with a gun.’ A trick of the light, a trick of the mind, that’s all Momma is now. Sometimes I think I still see her.

Sissy still moaning and pushing with the effort of the rock she’s bringing into being. She labours with it. I would help her with it if I could. But she is outside, and I am inside. Those are our places; where we were when it happened; where we must stay. Always.

Daddy got clean away, his truck bumping along the rough road away from our house. Cordite in the air; he was always gunpowder and smoke. Always about to go off. We were so careful. Almost always. Momma was, schooled me to be, but Sissy always had something to say. If my eyes are closed, how am I the one who can still see everything; everything happening at the same time, all of us falling, one by one, Sissy his favourite, Sissy last, Sissy still struggling. She almost got away.

Fiona McKay is the author of The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), and Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). Words in Bath Flash, Janus Literary, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset, and others. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Photo by Ulla Shinami on Unsplash

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