Zara swam in her backyard pool wearing mermaid flippers her mother made. Her mother tossed rings, and Zara obediently retrieved them. Her brother threw a fork, and Zara plucked it mid-air and used it as a comb. Her father lobbed a Barbie that fluttered before it thunked in the pool and Zara skimmed her from the surface and held her under her arm. Her dance instructor threw a pearly pink tutu that Zara had once worn seven days in a row, and she performed a grand jeté, the tutu and Zara both landing without a sound. On and on it went, Zara swishing through laps for days, years, so long her fingers wrinkled, her arms tired. She begged for a pool noodle, a life jacket, a float board. Instead, a professor who questioned everything Zara knew about physics thrust in her thesis. A micromanaging boss she’d grown to hate pitched a doll Zara had mistakenly loved rocking to sleep, striking the side of her head with a reverberating ring. A man she wouldn’t marry shoved in Barbie’s dream house and paper dolls that melted in her hands, the ink staining her fingers. Zara stacked each item, using the pages of her thesis like plaster to hold everything together. She tore the tutu in half, lacing the fabric through each ring before tossing it over the pile and heaving on the line until it went taut. She unzipped her mermaid flippers and climbed, hooking a toe into the dream house’s kitchen window, bashing the fork into the water-logged doll to hoist her up until she reached the top and planted the tines of the fork into the heap, the metal glinting silver from the sun, her reflection in it like some kind of treasure she had just discovered.
Kelly Pedro is a Portuguese Canadian writer from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. She is the winner of the 2024 CRAFT Literary Flash Prose Prize and shortlisted for Room’s 2022 Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in CRAFT, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Cleaver, Archetype, Flash Frog, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Moon City Review. She is a 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow. She lives on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples—land that was promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River. Find her at kellypedro.ca.
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