After by Claudia Monpere
and after and after and nothing changes, just the names of the children. This one drew birds wearing hats. That one had an orange juice popsicle for an imaginary friend. The parents cradle these shards. The communities create tributes: favorite superheroes, favorite colors, photographs, flowers, candles. The politicians offer words and guns for teachers.
Someone builds a school garden for resilience. The live children and the ghost ones plant pole beans, sugar snap peas, squash. They plant carrots and sunflowers. They watch giant yellow suns shoot to the sky. They watch tiny yellow flowers bloom, shrivel, turn to tiny cucumbers, tiny green tomatoes, turn plump, red, sun sweet. Everything grows. The children harvest and eat. They make art in the garden, study insects, prepare salads.
But it’s the vines that fascinate them. Tendrils gripping. The strength of suckers, leaves, stems. Far stronger than any fruit or vegetable. Long after harvest, the vines keep growing. At recess, that’s where the children cluster. No hopscotch or dodgeball or four square. No slides and monkey bars. Attempts are made to prune the vines, then remove them. But they only grow faster, stronger, creeping across the school yard and into the street.
It’s a long trip to Washington D.C. and the children ride their vines who are gentle ponies by night, swaddling the children in leaves as soft as flannel, the ghost children lullabying them to sleep. By day, the vines cheetah, the children and ghosts giggling, safe in tendrils. They vine through the gun shops, transforming steel and aluminum into whatever color the children choose. Yellow wax beans, crookneck squash, golden Romanos in one shop; zucchini, green peppers, and chayote in another. The White House and Capital Building are close. The tanks and rockets are close, but see how the vines are already climbing steps, thickening, wrapping themselves around walls. Ready to bloom and fruit. Or do something else. Whatever is necessary. And the children? The little ghosts? They’re scattered across the land, composting the soil, planting seeds, waiting for the harvest.
Claudia Monpere’s flash fiction and flash CNF appear in Craft, Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, Trampset, Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. She was awarded 1st place in Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize by Uncharted Magazine, 2024, and she received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize. Her story, “Solar Flare” appears in Best Small Fictions 2024.
