Pierced

Margo Williams

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Tish missed Caitlin. 

Mostly she missed who she was when she used to play with Caitlin. Laughing, running, swimming and sharing secrets. 

Two years had quickly passed, and Tish lost all that stringiness, looking more and more like her mother, soft curves, wavy auburn hair, sad eyes. The fabric of her worn swimsuit ever-stretching over her widening hips. Her face taking on width too. Even her freckles seemed to stretch. 

Tish’s father stopped teasing her or roughhousing with her, and her mama remained pretty much the same. Detached. Quiet. Staring right through people or focused on something a long way off. 

Tish was mystified that other girls seemed so, well, so happy.

Other girls chattered and wore makeup and flirted with boys, but Tish didn’t know how to do that, and she didn’t really want to anyway. Oh, maybe just a little. If she was honest, she wished she knew how to flirt with that one boy who sat at the back of the school bus, his t-shirt torn, his hair uncombed, even if everybody said he was trouble. It was the trouble that made her notice.

Tish missed her thinner body too, and her Daddy’s cajoling voice while she swam laps without having to worry about her cycle showing up or her small breasts showing through the swimsuit fabric. The cold making her skin goosy. The other girls at the pool whispering behind her back. 

One chilly afternoon Tish ran into Caitlin in the hallway at school. The end of the school year was fast approaching. Caitlin’s hair was still long, braided in a thick rope that hung heavily down her back. She was thinner. She looked more like her mother, with the same long neck and high forehead, the lips rigid. Even prettier. Tish wondered if Caitlin had lost the ability to blow bubbles. It certainly looked that way. 

Tish sucked up her courage and walked over to Caitlin.

“Hey, Caitlin. Remember me?” 

Caitlin looked back at a cluster of girls that stop talking to watch.

“Yes, I remember you.” Caitlin turned away and walked off toward the other girls who snickered, and Tish felt prickly heat underneath the skin of her face, felt her stomach lurch and her feet grow oddly heavy. Caitlin looked over her shoulder back at Tish, and said, “We’re not friends. We never really were.”

When Tish arrived home that afternoon, she went out of her way to bake a cake for her mother. A lopsided cake with sugar and butter icing; she studded the cake’s surface with sugar frosted pecan pieces. 

Her mother came into the kitchen and reached over and flattened her palm across her daughter’s forehead for a moment, as if checking for a fever, and then she poured herself a tumbler of bourbon, sliced a large piece of cake, taking it to the back stoop where she sat alone to eat her cake. 

Tish wandered outside toward her mama and asked, “You like it?” 

Mama nodded and said, “Why don’t you and I go to the mall on Saturday. Maybe you want to buy a two-piece suit, get your ears pierced. Just you and me, what you say?” 

Tish felt tears stinging the corners of her eyes but remembered how much her mama hated tears, so she swallowed them, her eyes went dry, and she nodded and smiled at her mother.

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Margo Williams holds an MFA in writing, literature and publishing from Emerson College. Williams studied playwriting and set design at Harvard and interned at The Atlantic Monthly Magazine. Her publications include an anthology (The Big Picture) and literary magazines: Glimmer Train, Prick of the Spindle, Moonshine Review, Southeast Review, Beacon Street Review, O: J&L and more. She is a produced playwright (2008-Snake Oil) and an artist in residence at Elsewhere Studios and Hambidge Center. Her poems have been created into performance pieces or short films at Ars Poetica and Blue Sage Center. Her ekphrastic collection of flash fiction entitled Falling In Love Like Little Girls Fall in Love, includes twenty stories based on Carolyn DeMeritt’s photo series of pubescent girls, exhibited alongside the photos that inspired the stories at Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum and at the Wilma Daniel’s Art Gallery. Currently she is working on a memoir and a novel and serves as the Chair of English at Cape Fear Community College. (Two stories from the collection are featured here). You can email her at margowilliams59@gmail.com.

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