Eileen Toomey: I'LL BEAT YOU WITH A WET NOODLE

Flash by Eileen Toomey
I’LL BEAT YOU WITH A WET NOODLE

It was Mrs. Knickerson, my upstairs neighbor with the cackling laugh, who nicknamed me Tilly. She’d appear out of nowhere, pointing, “There’s Tilly,” like she was identifying me in a lineup. I’d jump. “Don’t give me any sass,” she’d wave her Pall Mall. “Or I’ll beat you with a wet noodle!” Even at five, I knew this was an empty threat.

I liked her.

I guess Santa called me Tilly, too. Christmas morning, I found a doll named Tickle Tilly under the tree. Because I was a tomboy who’d wanted Micronauts, little space guys so popular in 1977, for the next year, I’d hurl Tilly into trees to prove I didn’t care about dolls. Except I did. I’d spend hours tickling Tilly in her little rocking chair. I’d squeeze her belly with the exactness of a safecracker so that the soft doll with the hard plastic face would rock backward and giggle from the voice box embedded in her middle.

One spring day, Tilly got wedged up between two branches like a stuffed hostage. I cried until my brother knocked her out with a basketball. Which made me cry harder, because now she was injured.

My mother applied a band-aid to her cracked nose, and everything was better. Sort of.

Tickle Tilly’s laugh box now wheezed like an asthmatic at a track meet. Less giggle, more gasp. But she was mine, and I loved her, even broken.

Mrs. Knickerson died that winter in her kitchen, cigarette still burning in the ashtray. Heart attack while heating a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. At the wake, I pressed Tilly’s belly. That broken wheeze echoed through the hushed viewing room at McInerny’s—not quite a laugh, not quite a scream.

My mother grabbed my arm so hard it bruised. “Stop,” she whispered.

But Tilly kept laughing.

Eileen Toomey is the author of the chapbook How to Make an Espresso Martini (Bottlecap Press, 2026). Her work appears in The Rumpus, Does It Have Pockets, Flash the Court, Contemporary Haibun Online, and elsewhere. “Widow Training” (Flash the Court) was nominated for Best of the Net 2027. “Immunotherapy/American Ghazal Helix” won second place in Cleaver’s Form and Form-Breaking contest, judged by Diane Seuss, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She teaches at Project Write Now in Red Bank, NJ. Find her work at eileentoomey.com.