Cracks
by Kathy Fish
e signed We shook We paid We owned We sowed We sought We booked We thought We knew We learned We packed We moved We patched We nailed We roofed We aimed We shot We fought We knocked We knocked the locked doors
Roof caved Floods rose Pipes froze We were brave We were strong We fixed We patched We built We tore down Bore down Bore fruit We went to seed We saw We dreamed We tried
We dreamed We worked We tried We failed We were not big We were not strong We were not bold We were not good This was not hard This was not all
We roomed We wombed We wombed the child Floored and floured and scoured Kept on Kept up We said we don’t give up We said you can Do it We said you can Do it Don’t give up
Roof door land yard bricks room walk patch child day moon light loan knees heart bones lungs feet hands arch walls floor stairs stove plates crack plate glass cracks
We bent We dug We pulled the weeds The house was too much green To say you know You see You can To say it won’t hurt to say It won’t You’ll feel a prick See? To say you won’t feel it To say At this point in time To say we gave it some thought We are We were We will be At this point in time It starts It fails It stops We try We fail We fail to stop
A house is too much dream In dreams the self The soul a house A dream housed The self a soul in search of To self a soul The walls are bones The floors are feet The hearth a heart The soul The self is housed A dream house The house was brick
We dug in We tore down We patched things up We nailed We hung the lights We hung Green Red Plum Black White Fern Blue Gray Closed Bare Fist Full Hung We hung the sign A sign
We patched the roof We trimmed the path We laid the stones The bones The bones were too much white We cleaned We cleared The lawn was too much grass Too much green Too much weed We claimed the space We cleared the land We felled the trees Time fell flat We went round And round like flat This was not hard Our house Our time Yours Hands Heart Lungs Bones Feet Arms Legs Trunk Butt Brain Face
Heads hurt Eyes dim Bones ache On its face a house is too much Too much green Too much broke On its face it is too much We built and bent and tore and dug Time is too much flat A house is too much dream
W
Author's Note
I began with a self-imposed constraint of using only one-syllable words. Since I love the first person plural point of view, I began with that as well. I moved my hand across the page, scribbling a series of two-word declaratives, with no sense of where I was going with them. Gradually, a story began to form in my mind. The “we” became a married couple. Newlyweds, at first. I wanted to convey the feeling of endless strife around a first home. The relentless upkeep of it, and themselves. The endless yearning to love and be loved. To fully live.
I also wanted to play with the symbolism of houses and bodies and rooms. I was keen to create a very particular vocabulary and cadence. I decided to leave off punctuation, allowing the capitalized letters to guide the reader to each new sentence or fragment rather than interrupting the flow with full stops, (but I do like the tiny shift that single question mark creates). This story was very much written with sound in mind. I read it aloud many times, obsessively tinkering, until it pleased my ear. And I felt it needed white space here and there to provide some oxygen between those fast, gasping, staccato paragraphs.
Kathy Fish’s stories have been widely published and anthologized. They may be found in Ploughshares, Guernica, Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Denver Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Norton Reader, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America (2023). Honors include the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize, six appearances in the Best Small Fictions series and a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship. The author of five short fiction collections, Fish teaches a variety of writing workshops online. She also publishes a popular monthly craft newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, which was recently named as one of the 20 Best Creative Writing Substacks by Writers at Work.
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