LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED: FLASH FICTION BY AMY ROSSI

Like Nothing Happened

It would be better if we had different neighbors. These ones have been around too long. I babysat their children years ago but what they really know about me is that my default state is gone. Yet I have been back here for months now, avoiding eye contact, always wearing my brother’s XXL sweatpants that don’t hang off me the way they used to.

Sometimes I wonder if the neighbors think I am back because I am recovering from a breakdown. In that way, the neighbors might know more than my own parents. The sweatpants are comfortable and also too long. I help out by taking down the garbage barrels.

*

The bad haircut I got a few months ago is now the bad haircut I got a year ago, but I know better than to confuse time with progress, usually. I want to cope in my usual way — the nighttime way, the stranger way, when the smell of beer and cigarette smoke on the wrong man’s breath is enough to drop my stomach to my knees — I just can’t is all. Now body is just another word for barricade.

*

I’m hesitant when I drive. All those years of city living have left me feeling more vulnerable encased in metal, the balance of power swinging this way. I think about a program I watched when I was younger. About people who are terrified to get behind the wheel of a car because they think every bump and dip in the road is the jolt of hitting something, someone. I see darting shadows even in the light, a trick of the shadows or are my eyes seeing beyond my control. It all is. I pass a dented mailbox and wonder if it is my fault. Look in the rearview mirror to be sure the cyclist is still upright. I understand the old man on the show muttering that was definitely a body over what someone else would call nothing.

That’s a lie; I didn’t watch it. My sister just told me about it. And all these years later I am still shaken by those people who still hit the gas and go, despite the wreckage they believe they will cause along the way.