My First Ever Short Story - A Signal Fire Debut

The Matchbook | 11.28.25

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A few years back, I received an interesting email that I didn’t know at the time would rearrange part of my life in the future.

A publisher reached out and asked if I’d be willing to take part in a project for a book series they’d already published a first installation of, Disconnected. In the series, they chose a handful of published poets, had them all write 3 new poems, put their names in a hat, and then drew names to do a poetry swap of sorts. Whomever’s name you drew, you had to choose one of their three poems to write an entire short story about. The rule was, it had to both be inspired by that poem, and include at least one line from it in your story.

I said yes. I’d never written a short story before.

My story is in the book [Dis]Connected Volume 2: Poems & Stories of Connection and Otherwise (A [Dis]Connected Poetry Collaboration), and my story was based on a poem written by a wonderful poet named Komal Kapoor.

I wrote it all in one short sitting, I didn’t plan it, I didn’t know where it would go, and the moment I started writing I realized something strange: I was writing from the point of view of a much older narrator, who was a parent, who was also a woman. I still have no idea where the story came from, why this point of view. I just wrote.

For you, today, I wanted to let You read it, too. First, Komal’s poem, then my words, my story, told from such a bizarre place. I hope you read it, I hope you enjoy.

Your face is lean now,
outlines of bones
I did not know existed.
The years have hardened you,
skin silky fragile
peppered with freckles
accumulated over time.
Your eyes, once smokey grey
are now dark tunnels,
speaking of dreams
smothered to cold coal.
But when you smile,
I can still hear the laughter
bubbling out of you at six
as you licked the ice cream
running down your wrist,
gleeful and free;
when you smile, I can see
someone I may love still.
-Komal Kapoor-

They called it a disappearance, didn’t have another name for it back then, so they gave it mystery, gave it magic as if it was a trick left unfinished, someone just forgot to bring you back again. I thought of it that way for a while, if I’m honest, told myself a vanishing was better than the alternative, imagined a million scenarios that could have played out; some helped me sleep, others stole it, but still we didn’t know and didn’t know if we ever would.

I remember it fading, the missing, but I remember telling people it never did, never would. Live long enough with an ache and it starts to feel normal, stops stinging. I wouldn’t have told you this, not ever, it’s a guilt I think I’ll take with me when I go, but these are the truths I know, this is the way I went through it. These are the letters I won’t ever send for there is nowhere to send them, no one that could deliver them to you for me. The beginning was the hardest, but all beginnings are hard. Eight months we looked for you, arm in arm in arm in arm, a whole town hunting across the fields behind the house, two dozen frozen feet in the rivers on the outside of town, everyone hoping they’d find something, the two of us hoping they wouldn’t. Dad was questioned, more than all the others, fingers were pointed, and we learned you can’t unpoint a finger, it changes things, plants a divide that only knows to grow. Three times for me, three rounds of telling your story the best I knew how. Three interrogations, no bare bulbs in empty black rooms, no good cop bad cop, just questions I thought would never end. Just thirteen bad cups of stale coffee, just three and a half boxes of Kleenex, just the sound of my own voice becoming robotic in its exhaustion. Yes I thought you were happy, yes you were loved, no we never hit you, I have no idea if you kept a diary, blue jeans and a black shirt last I saw you, what is an enemy at 18? No notes, no letters, no signs of struggle in the house, no sightings of your car within a thousand miles of home. All I knew of the facts was that you were here, and then you weren’t.

Start at the beginning, they said, the beginning. So I worked my way backwards. They called it a disappearance and I didn’t know what else to call it either, but if stories of you were the magic words to bring you back, I could try.

…

If pressed for an admission, we would have told them we always knew you wouldn’t be the valedictorian type, we never held our breath for a final speech before caps littered skies like confetti ringing in a new year. We were proud, I remember that, beaming like idiots from the bottom row of wooden bleachers, early Summer sunshine raising our hands like salutes just to see you across the sea of faces. We stood when you walked across the stage; I felt your father’s arm wrap around the bottom of my waist and it felt like a parachute in that freefall. We both wondered, separately and only rarely spoken of together, where you would end up. What do you do when passion hasn’t found its way to someone yet, you asked us, how do you know which road is the right road? School wasn’t one of your things, we always knew, though we started losing track of what things were somewhere along the way. Told ourselves it was natural, the quiet that started growing between us, but I wonder now if we should’ve shouted across it, shaken you until words fell out, some words, any words to tie us back together. Doubt. I learned to live with it over the years, some questions don’t have answers.

You were 16, I was scared to death on the front porch. Dad joked about calling all his friends to get off the roads, we laughed mostly out of courtesy, and you stood with one leg already in the car, one hand on the top of the window. Strange what details stand out, what pieces of memory embed themselves a bit bolder than the others, which stick. I can still see the excitement in your eyes, still feel the warmth in the late Autumn air; I can still feel the wish rise up in my chest like a stifled sob that I could just freeze things, right there, stop time and keep you where you were, one moment away from stepping into the rest of your life. I felt things change that day, didn’t say it out loud, but felt the distance between us stretch just a bit. I’d always imagined the cord between us intact, invisible but never actually severed, told myself I could feel you wherever you were, that I hurt when you did. I was wrong, and I knew it that day. We never got the full story from you, never pressed it hoping the lesson learned was enough, the embarrassment and the pain combined to say all we could’ve said with lectures about responsibility and maturity. First time alone behind the wheel and you ended up with a fractured wrist and an overnight stay in the emergency room. I never felt a thing.

Almost a full year before the wrist, you were all oversized pants and a belt with a homemade hole cut three inches beyond the last, too much tail sticking out the loops above your left pocket. Dad tied your tie, did a decent enough job, some men are the tie tying type, some men aren’t. Dad always fell pretty clearly on the latter side of that fence, but fumbled his way through it. Sneakers in place of dress shoes, told us you planned on dancing if you were going to a dance, half grin and one of those small laughs that leaves through the bottom of your nose, not a trace of fear. I wondered where your courage came from. I drove you, alone in the front seat while you sat silently in the back, hands folded over a plastic case holding a flower already on its way to dying. Not a single fidget in your chair the two miles over to your date’s house (for the life of me I cannot remember her name); I couldn’t stop looking in the rearview mirror, sneaking glances when I thought you were staring out the window, your hand riding on the wind that passed the car, on the space between childhood and all that comes after. I remember staying completely quiet the entire way to the high school gymnasium, offered no advice, asked you no questions, vanished myself into the steering wheel and fading September light. Only once did I peek, only once did I adjust that mirror to hold both of you, opposite sides of the back of the car, and I saw your hand reach across that terrifying space between the two of you to rest your fingers against hers. I wondered again, what seed your bravery grew from, what sunlight fed it. Homecoming, they called it, not a hint of irony in that word yet. I didn’t cry until I dropped you off.

A strikeout ended your short baseball career, but you lasted the season, I’ll give you that. If you got on base three times over the course of the Spring, I forgot two of them. I remember the walk, four straight pitches into the dirt that put you on first, I cheered so loud my throat burned and led to side-eyed looks from other parents in the stands. A groundball and you were out at second, but I didn’t care, you still slid, still tried to break up the double play, still dusted your pants off and ran back to the dugout. It’s up to you, Dad said, you don’t have to play again if you don’t want to, and so you didn’t. Folded up twice over in a bin in the crawl space I have your jersey still, couldn’t bear to let it go, so I paid the $30 replacement fee to the coach without you knowing. It still has the red dust and grass stains, it always will, some things we can freeze.

Cooking together when you were just a shade over 10, the mess we made when Dad was out of town and you chose breakfast for dinner. If I sit quiet for a moment, I can hear the sizzle of bacon on the griddle, the microwave beeping when the berries had thawed, the music wafting in like a scent from the living room. I can see you singing into a spatula and raising your arm for me to duck under, a spin before beginning again. We ate too much, laughed too hard, and felt sick for hours afterwards but none of that mattered. Those hours were ours and we went to bed with a sink full of dishes and flour scattered across countertops and cabinet doors. Why is it the little seconds like these that hurt more than the big? A thousand marquee moments have come and gone, faded like ghosts, but these…give me a handful of these and I will feel full, I will never ask for anything more.

…

Does any of this matter, I remember asking them? How is this helping you? Some mumbling about painting a bigger picture, trying to understand who you were and why you could have vanished into thin air and ether, an exit with no puff of smoke, no mirror or curtain call. More questions into more details and all I felt was hollow. You must have known then you’d make suspects of us both, you must have known how much it would hurt; their questions gave way to mine. I could feel myself getting angrier, I could feel the bitterness swelling inside like a tumor, for every answer they demanded, I wanted two more. Why, I asked, why you, why us, why now? What, I wondered, what did I do wrong, what did Dad say to you the last time he saw you, what didn’t we give you, what more could we have done? How is this helping, I asked again and again. Some questions stay unanswered, they told me, repeating my own words back to me.

…

I think you were 8 when you first learned what anger could be, what colors it could wear, the soundtrack of rage. Swimming pool, mid-Summer, and I still feel like it was my fault. I asked some teenage kid to stop cursing, told him there were kids swimming, told him it wasn’t appropriate. Fuck You lady, shouted across the deep end and my mouth probably hit the concrete, footprints drying, kids warming themselves belly first on the warm ground. I don’t know if you even knew what the words meant, not really, but it was enough. You rose from the water like a mythical thing and screamed before you knew which words to choose. Rage in you, and for those minutes you forgot your size, forgot the physics of things, forgot that wanting a thing to be true doesn’t make it so. I tried getting to you before he did, wanted to slow you down, wanted to protect you like you were trying to protect me, but he got there first. Thirteen is old enough to blacken the eye of an eight-year-old, we learned that day, but not old enough for me to hit back. I held your chest, wet and heaving, while you cried and struggled to get back to the boy who hurt you. How were you so brave? Will you teach me what you know of ferocity?

I made birthday cakes for all your birthdays, I told them. This has no relevance, I said, but I did. Maybe if they saw that effort, they would understand how hard we always tried, how naturally it came, being there for you. Hot air balloons, whales with sharks, Volkswagen Beetles, a guitar, a castle, and a baker’s dozen more, forgotten by now but for the photographs of them that remain. Games too, I told them, always games at the parties, we tried so hard to make it fun. I’m sure it’s not your fault, they said more than once I’m sure, but those words feel weightless when faced with what we were faced with. I hope I told them I appreciated the sentiment, I hope I explained away my frustration back then. I hope a lot of things, still, and wonder to myself, where my own courage comes from.

Twenty-one years like a blink, twenty-one years like an eternity, and some of my hair still holds color. I refused to move, refused to give up the idea that one day, you’d need to have a home to come home to. Some days it gets so quiet in the house, only the wind between the storm door makes a sound. Dad still hasn’t found his voice, maybe it was the questions, I think to myself, maybe he answered one too many. Wordless we still find each other in the moonlight some nights, flesh against flesh and the motions of what was romance, what was pleasure, once. You don’t want to hear this I am sure, but it is part of this story, part of our story. I sing to him in the evenings, still, while he cooks dinner or I clean up after it, soft songs and I think he enjoys them. He still holds my hand when we go on long drives, still squeezes it when something beautiful finds its way into our vision. He says he’s watching the road but I think he’s always looking for you, after all this time.

Winters are the hardest, the cold comes and buttons up the house like a tomb. We orbit one another like moons, grazing each other from time to time but never colliding, at least not for long. Something about the darkness, the way it comes early and stays late, the way it steals sunlight from the front windows, feels too familiar. Darkness has a way of reminding you it’s where we came from, where we’re heading back to. Time feels too slow in the frozen months, and everything feels more like surviving than actually living; I feel you though, when steam rises on the windowpanes, I swear I can remember your tiny fingertips tracing tiny letters. Nevermind this, memory is a road I try not to go down too often. Winters are the hardest, but like I said, live with an ache long enough and it starts to feel normal, starts to lose its sting. We’ve come through enough of them now to know we’ll come through them again. Repetition is a soothing thing, if you let it be.

In the warmer months we sit on the front porch, the sounds of birdcalls in those haunted fields behind our house. We watch the light fade off behind the hills to the West, right out beyond the driveway we watched you drive away in all those years ago, unbroken wrist, not a hint of apprehension. Dad goes in before me, every night without fail, I think he is afraid of the woods out beyond the treeline, I think he hears you calling in the black like some howling thing. I think. Some questions don’t have answers, I remind myself. I close my eyes and feel the warmth from the teacup in my palms, and think back to your fingertips sliding against that young girls (who I still cannot, for the life of me, remember her name) and I think of the courage I saw you in, I see in you still. I tell myself, eyes shut to the sunset glowing on the back of my eyelids like lanterns, you left because you had to leave, you chose a life unwritten and couldn’t bear a goodbye. I tell myself you were not taken, you were not harmed, you were not broken or in despair. I tell myself it was a kindness, this, that somewhere you’re changing someone’s world in a million better ways. I rock back and forth, hours I do this son, and listen to the music of the floorboards beneath me. I find a rhythm to the song and I get lost in it, hours after your father has gone to sleep on moonless nights. If I do it long enough, I hear footsteps in the sounds, I hear steps, slow and shuffling coming up the porch stairs, and I hear them grow still and steady in front of me. I tell you this because it’s the only truth I know, the only one I have left to tell and I tell it so you’ll hear it somehow, for we are still connected, umbilical and invisible, still. I keep my eyes closed for I know you are there, in front of me, and I know your face has changed. Aged and handsome, the years have worn you smooth in some places, wrinkled in others. I feel the weight of you between us, and I hear you whisper of where you’ve been. I pretend to open my eyes to see your eyes, tunnels now, and I wait for you to lend me that half grin. I wait and ask no questions, but when you smile, I am no longer here, I am there, years before this, I can still hear the laughter bubbling out of you as you licked the ice cream running down your wrist, I can still see the melting remains of the cone that fell, and I can still see you tell me that it was ok, that it was so good while it lasted.

I wonder, always, where your courage came from.