I have few memories of being small enough to hold
At five or so, quaking in a fever, I hinged on sleep, cocooned in my father’s coat under a card table. I sensed the light change from behind closed lids, felt his weight shift the air as he knelt down next to me. He raised me up, carried me in his arm to his father’s open casket. Feebly beating against his lapel, my eyes whimpered tears of diamond dust. I burned up in his right hand as he reached out with his left and laid it flat on his father’s cold chest. I watched him take stock of this last time, and I warmed him in the in-between. To rouse a sleeping child from a fever, from a dream, he must not have been able to do it alone.
Vic Nogay is a writer from Ohio whose work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction. She has been published in Gone Lawn, Fractured Lit, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. She is the author of the micro poetry chapbook under fire under water (tiny wren 2022) and is the Micro Editor of Identity Theory. Find her online at vicnogay.com or haunting rural roadsides where the wildflowers grow.
