Unraveling

by Rachel Lloyd

2022 Flash Contest Honorable Mention

The day her family was moving to Europe, Jessica ended up unconscious at St. Mary’s Medical Center and they missed their flight. Jessica’s mom, the only woman my mother knew who had real gold jewelry, blamed me. 

“It’s your fault,” I told her. “She doesn’t want to go!” Jessica’s family had moved six times by her tenth birthday, and now that her father was retired, they were moving to Europe. Her mom pinned up photos of the French countryside and dressed Jessica in long printed scarves and big dark sunglasses, and my mom said poor girl as Jessica walked home, her scarf dragging on the ground, netting rocks and branches. 

The day they were supposed to move, Jessica brought me a piece of her mother’s jewelry. She came over for our final playdate. We sat mostly in silence for two hours on my bedroom floor, Jessica teasing threads out of the strawberry shag carpet and placing them in my open palms, which I held out to her like I was cupping holy water. The threads clustered like coagulated blood, and I wished they were, that she was unraveling herself for me here on the floor, leaving me little bloody bits. 

By the time her mom’s car pulled up, we were hiding under my bedcovers. The parents all searched for us in escalating panic. They passed into the room and over us as Jessica and I lay there holding hands, trying to be as flat and still as roadkill, locked in the feverish anticipation of discovery, when the grown-ups would throw off the bedclothes and tear us from each other, and the blood which seemed to flow between us would pour out wide as the sea that threatened to divide us. Whenever they passed by again, I giggled and shushed her, though Jessica made no noise. She just breathed heavy and slow like a bellows stoking a fire. 

We lay there until the air was stale and our hands slid with sweat, apart and together again, until we heard the front door close and two cars pull away. “Let’s run away,” she said, grabbing my hand tighter before sliding out of bed like a seal off a wet rock, dragging me along. She led me by the hand through the rooms and halls of my own house, and I kept pace with her soft footsteps—sometimes hurried, sometimes cautious—and never thought to ask where we were going. 

Outside, Jessica grabbed my brother’s and my scooters. We ran them up the steep hill behind my house that led to the strip mall, to the town border, and beyond. We stepped on, but before we barreled ourselves away to nothing, she said, “I brought you something.” I cupped my palms and she pressed into them a gold and emerald engagement ring, her great-grandmother’s. 

It was the prize of the jewelry box. We used it to play jewelry store when I would present it to her on my knees and ask her to marry me. I’d slip the ring on Jessica’s finger, and her trim, pink-painted nail would score the meat of my palm and I’d linger. 

Without waiting for my reply, Jessica flew down the hill on the scooter, hit a bump in the concrete, flew even higher, and crashed. I don’t remember who found us wrapped in the warmth of Jessica’s blood like a long red scarf, but she ended up in the hospital while our parents argued in the waiting room and pointed fingers at me. As they yelled, I stroked the matted ends of my hair which Jessica’s dried blood had clumped together into red icicles. When no one was looking, I put them in my mouth and cried. She had to get one cast, two false teeth, and eighteen stitches. 

It was that many years before I saw her again. The scar on her lip looked like a starfish. She was married now. I admired her ring, said it was just like the gold and emerald one she’d left me. “I’d like that back if you still have it,” she said. I told her I didn’t have it, but not that I’d flushed it down the toilet out of lonesome spite two summers after she’d left, after the day she had promised to visit but never arrived, after she stopped answering my letters; that I’d watched it spiral away like the last of summer. “That’s a shame, this one’s fake.” She smiled, and her two false teeth shone brighter than the rest.

Published November 20th, 2022