Today we feature the second place winner in our 2025 Fall Flash Fiction Contest.

by Dawn Miller

Mother said I was air

my hands long, fingers spindly like hers, no softness around the knuckles. The first time she read my palm I was twelve—the year we left my father and spent two nights on a Greyhound headed east—and she clasped my open right hand in hers, spit on her thumb and drew it along my heart line as if trying to erase a blight, an error, some element that shouldn’t be there.

On Saturdays, women came to the kitchen in the small month-to-month apartment we rented behind a greasy spoon—soft knocks on the back door, mumbled whispers, worn bills curled in fists. My mother tucked the cash into a rusty cookie tin, called it insurance.

She sat at the stained Formica table all day Saturdays, hand outstretched, the veins on her inner forearm blue like a river, and waited for each woman to offer up theirs, upturned—breath caught in their throats at what they’d hear about their sons, their daughters, their meddling in-laws—the women translucent, bones thin as wafers of soap.

I’d sit in the alcove near the back door, legs folded to my chest, and listen to the women, voices halting, worried about empty wombs, or wombs too full, worried about hotel receipts in husbands’ pockets, worried about pinpricks of light seeping through.

My mother squinted hard when reading the women’s palms—feathered lines springing from the corners of her eyes, lips pressed tight—as if she couldn’t quite believe what was in front of her. Red-knuckled from Monday-to-Friday housecleaning jobs, she’d trace the head-heart-sun-fate-life lines, trail the fleshy mounts, stroke the smooth plains. She’d suck in a lungful of air, hold it, then release, and I’d stretch my arms to catch it. Cup hands over my mouth and inhale.

The first time she read my palm, crammed suitcases knocking knees because she refused to store the luggage in the bus’s storage compartment, she turned my hand over, back and forth, back and forth, the warmth of her fingers shooting lightning bolts to my elbow. She leaned over, pressed chapped lips to the tips of my fingers. You’re not fated to this life, Jenny, she said, the shadows of trees whipping past making the circles under her eyes a deeper purple. You can fly.

At night I’d dream I puffed up like a big, fat balloon and drift over the small town where I was the new girl, the girl with no father, the girl other girls’ mothers pretended not to recognize in the day-old food section at Walmart. I missed my father even though I wasn’t supposed to. I’d float to wherever he was, take his square, calloused hand—nicotine-yellow nails chewed to the quick—and soar up high in the sky, the two of us a fluffy white cloud hovering over a small, crystal-clear lake.

Twice the same woman came to the back door of the apartment—a bird of a woman, shoulders slighter than a boy’s—a line of bruises like ripe blueberries along the soft flesh of her upper arms. The last time the woman came, my mother shuttered the door to the alcove, casting me into the stuffy darkness while the woman wept. Face pressed to the crack in the door, I watched how my mother held the woman’s narrow hand—not looking at her palm; watched how the sharp slant of late-afternoon sunshine ignited the soft down on their cheeks; watched how they leaned toward each other, shadows taffy-pulled on the linoleum.

My father had taught me all about shadows: palest gray, thunderous dark, the shifting gradients of light in between. My father taught me how shades could exist in one person at the same time.

In my quiet spot in the alcove, a sliver of sunshine falling across my face, I could see the air had been slowly siphoned from the bird-woman’s lungs, and I filled my lungs all the way to the bottom, pressed my lips to the door and breathed through the narrow slit, forcing air past the shadowy corners of the dimly lit room while my mother whispered—a murmuring, a string of words, an incantation—the same word over and over and over: Leave.

Photo by Billy Pasco on Unsplash