Bare Hands

My Uncle Louie beat a man to death with his bare hands, the same hands that now hold my baby in the living room of my newly dead grandmother’s house. I’m surrounded by my mother’s relatives, a few dozen Callahans spanning four generations. It’s a lot. Too much for my husband, who got a migraine after the funeral and is now in our dark hotel room throwing up while I introduce our child to my family.

“She looks just like your mother,” says my Aunt Clara, leaning over the baby.

“I know,” I say, even though she doesn’t. She’s adopted. No Callahan genes.

“She would be so proud of you,” says Clara, and I smile. She wouldn’t be. She’d be ashamed I ran away, that I changed my name, that I haven’t been back in over a decade, that I haven’t visited her grave.

“When are you leaving?” Clara asks. She’s sitting next to Uncle Louie and I can tell she wants to hold the baby. She keeps reaching towards her and then pulling back like she thinks I might do something if she touches her. The last time I talked to Clara was the night I showed up at her house, wet from the rain, bleeding from my broken nose. Uncle Louie answered the door and I told him everything. Clara heard enough to understand, and as her husband drove away, she told me she was tired of cleaning up my goddamn mother’s mess, that this would be the last fucking time. It was.

“We’re flying back tomorrow,” I say. “Work,” I say, and then, “I should go.”

“You just got here,” Clara says.

“Leave her alone,” says Uncle Louie. He shifts my baby to the crook of his other arm. And then to me, he says, “Thanks for coming.”

I came because he called me. Because it was the first time I’d heard his voice since the night he killed my father with those hands that are now cradling my baby. He told me it was okay to come back, that he’d be here, that he’d make sure I was okay. He didn’t say the word “again,” but it was there. I told him I wasn’t sure, that I had a job, that I had a husband and a baby. He told me to bring them. He said please.

Uncle Louie’s oil-stained finger traces my baby’s tiny nose, circles her cheek, moves over to her ear. He cups her head in his palm.

“You look just like her,” Uncle Louie says to me, and I know he means his sister. I go to him and kneel at his feet. He reaches his hand out and places it on top of my head. “Just a few more minutes,” he says, “and then you should go.”

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Flash Frog, Okay Donkey, Ghost Parachute, and Frazzled Lit, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site.