by Amy Barnes

There’s a beach ball in the apartment toilet. The realtor lady points at anything but the stuffed potty. I’m three-years-old and have never seen a beach. White paint blankets everything but the smells: urine and strangers and strangers’ urine, a refrigerator of no-longer-cold food, flop-stacked musty mattresses, cigarette ash piles of confused ants and flies, under underwear piles and moldy green ghosts behind builder white paint. We exit to paper mill and refinery air as my parents argue how much smells cost and the realtor rolls her nose. They decide we’ll live with grandparents who leak smoke and coffee crystals.

***

Hello the grandparents say in cartoon smoke balloons. My not-so-grand parents stand reduced to a suitcase and rummage sale remnant coats. There is money for two things: coffee and cigarettes. They grind at black collar jobs topay for grinds and Virginia Slims unfiltered, but not always heat. I shiver and steal my grandma’s purse lighter because my parents have money for no things.

***

Grandma leaves heavy heart ashtrays as love notes and inhales grandpa’s every o’clock shadow when her day’s cigarettes are gone. There’s a reddish smoking dog on her dresser that guards us as grandpa drives his semi truck, a semi husband home only a few months. He brings me green beans I hold like long-filtered cigarettes, a TV commercial lady, not granddaughter in a cold two-bedroom.

***

My grandmother was a smoking hot woman who chain smoked white shoes to charcoal gray. A magic bottle hung on the bathroom door to warm ashy feet. I chain run from home to buy her cigarettes from a 1970s plastic vending machine. No one asks how old I am or where the dollar comes from. We live surrounded by white cigarette pickets until my sister arrives. Her lungs are declared too new for us to stay.

***

My grandfather sneaks a chain of silver cigarette packs in his last hospital suitcase. The wrappers whisper as they steal his voice. Don’t let anyone take those from me. He begs. What’s left of my grandpa’s lungs would fit in my palm, a black card deck of smoking Jacks. Lungs regenerate like starfish. I tell him as he pleads for one cigarette. I’m nine and know cigarettes and oxygen aren’t a good combination but I buy him a crushed vending machine pack. He lights up for his favorite granddaughter.

***

I’m nineteen when the pastor says ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My grandma blows smoke roses on my grandpa. We scatter her in snow six months later. That day is hard but my mother is harder and stomp stamps her mother into winter ground. She smells money. I smell Prince Albert cherry pipe tobacco in a carved pipe I sneak in my purse. We take pictures off walls, curtains off rods and housecoats off hangers leaving yellow Marlboro ghosts etched in newly skimmed white plaster. A realtor walks in a new family. Their noses twitch even after we spray Lysol in every empty room.

Originally published in New Flash Fiction Review. Click here to read Amy Barnes’ reflection on writing about caregiving.

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Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three collections: AMBROTYPES (word west,) “Mother Figures” ( ELJ, Editions) and CHILD CRAFT, forthcoming from Belle Point Press, She has words at The Citron Review, Spartan Lit, JMWW Journal, Janus Lit, Flash Frog, No Contact Mag, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, Gown Lawn, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s and many others sites. Her writing  has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction and  long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021 and 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for NFFD, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively.