SUNDAY MORNING AND THE WORLD IS BEHIND YOU — DAKOTA CANON
/You sit quietly on the sofa when the Dunbars arrive, all high-pitched so-good-to-see-yous and awkward embraces, apologies because they meant to bring champagne but the Mrs. grabbed a red by accident, and you know for pretty-damn-sure this won’t end well, but there’s nothing your ten-year-old powerlessness can do about it. Your mother’s wearing her yellow dress, the one with white flowers she used to wear to the lake on those searingly cloudless days when her skin shone like unbreakable glass and you had to squint just to find the tuna salad in the picnic spread. It’s like she thinks that dress can turn back the days, make them sunny again, even though Donnie’s been gone two years now.
At the breakfast table, you wrap a foot around what used to be his chair, with its own place setting, even its own wineglass, though Donnie wasn’t twenty-one yet when he died. You consider scooting over because Mr. Dunbar keeps eyeing the empty chair, the full wineglass, and scowling, which your mother notices, too. But sitting in Donnie’s seat could be its own catastrophe, so instead you ask Mr. Dunbar to pass the chicken.
“Put some meat on those bones, eh, boy? Maybe you’ll make the team someday, too?”
Everyone freezes except Mr. Dunbar because that’s how Donnie died: a pileup, his head bent under his chest, six guys projectile-missile jumping onto his spine with their two-hundred-eighty pound cannonball selves, and all you can think about is Mrs. Dunbar’s perfume, so sickly sweet like rotting fruit—it’s suffocating you. Mr. Dunbar’s laughing, elbowing your father and thrusting the dead chicken right into Donnie’s wineglass. Glass shatters. Wine splatters. The stain spreads all over your mother’s sunny dress, blood-red darkening the spot where her heart must have been.
You’re on your feet as she scrubs over the sink, sobbing. You reach out tentatively with your best caresses—her arm, her back. You want to fling yourself untethered around her, be her baby again and have her be your mom, but she stamps a foot, tosses the rag in the sink and turns to you, teeth gritted. “You’re not helping anything!”
You step away, stung, squinting through your own tears because you used to make her happy. And you’re sure you could again. If only that dark spot were gone. If only she’d hold you one more time.
Dakota Canon’s work can be found in Witness, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, Moon City Review, Fiction Southeast, Literary Orphans, The MacGuffin, Citron Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, North Dakota Quarterly, on Wigleaf’s 2020 longlist and elsewhere. Her novel, The Unmaking of Eden, won the 2019 Caledonia Novel Award and the 2018 Hastings Litfest Crime Novel Contest, placed second in the 2019 First Novel Prize, reached the finals of the 2019 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and was long-listed in the 2019 BPA First Novel Award and the 2018 Yeovil Literary Prize, among other prizes. She’s received mention in the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Writer’s Digest Annual Short Story Contest and has served on staff for Cease, Cows.
