Diane Zinna: FALL DICTIONARY • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Diane Zinna
FALL DICTIONARY

Rainbow Coffee Mug: Noun. A broken cup found in the still-running sink. My mother must have been washing it. It lay in four white pieces in the silver-gray basin, and she lay on the floor beneath it, her face broken on one side from her fall.

Parakeet: Noun. A small, cherished, green bird that dies slowly, feet pulsing open, pulsing closed, clutching the tan plastic perch, as though death were the bottom of the cage. The bottom of the cage is a slope of millet shells. If you watch the bird, it will not die. If you sleep, it will flutter down to the soft millet and be buried inside it. You decide to never sleep. And then your boyfriend—before, his words always sweet, wholesome, you thought he was a heart walking around as a person in a plaid barn coat, in a pale green baseball cap with a curved brim, in a T-shirt for a microbrewery that just said Magic and you believed it—he says, “I can finish this.” And then he is forever a different person.

You look at him as if to say How could you?

He looks at you and gestures as if to say, I could snap its (noun: small, green, cherished bird’s) neck.

Birthday: Testimony, confession, lie. A bonk on the head, the evening of the day my daughter turned eight. I was getting something from the fridge, stood up too fast, and hit my head on the freezer door. I felt dizzy for a moment, screamed. I always cry when I get hurt. A feeling that I am a bad person rushes forward, but physically, that day, I was okay.

My husband rushed to the kitchen, and my daughter. He looked at me in panic. “What should I do?” he repeated, over and over. I slid away from him onto my back, onto the kitchen floor. “What should I do?” he asked. I heard the water running in the gray-silver basin. I wouldn’t tell him. I contorted my face, trying to force him into action, into decision. I always knew what to do in a crisis. I hated that he did not know. I hated that he did not even gesture, charades-style, Should I snap the neck? Prepare for you a soft bed of millet? Stare at you with magnet eyes to keep you perched there upon your elbow?

He offered nothing. I whispered, “Call 911.” He said, “Should I call 911?” And I felt separate from him for his not knowing trauma, for not having learned the lessons I learned early, like when I found my mother’s broken

coffee cup

face

on the

floor

in the

millet.

Vibrant green wings spread, velvet.

He said, “I should call 911?” I thought, “I can haz cheezburger?”

I was not getting up until he figured out what to do. I remembered his father pleading with his mother on her deathbed, What do I do? And she couldn’t respond. I would not ever, ever respond. I would not

Ever

And then my daughter, who had just turned eight that day, who was still in her birthday dress, screamed, “Mommy!”

And I stopped acting a fool.

To this day, she remembers all of this with pride. She says, I helped. I was the one who helped.

Diane Zinna is the author of the novel The All-Night Sun (Random House) and Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss, a forthcoming craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories. Her short work has appeared in Brevity, The Bellevue Literary Review, CutBank, MER, and elsewhere. Since 2020, she has led the free online class Grief Writing Sundays. Meet Diane Zinna there or at www.dianezinna.com.