Pictures of You: Kathy Fish

“For Tom,” by Kathy Fish

What I remember: eating dusty sandwiches in the car, my brother reading to me from “Chariots of the Gods,” the way my other brother had been so uncharacteristically silent on that trip, the motel beds that vibrated if you paid a quarter, the long walk to the municipal pool and the man wearing big black shoes who asked me to sit on his lap. I remember the tire swing on my aunt’s farm and the uncle who unfolded himself from a rusty Volkswagen in full, military regalia, who saluted us, and our father asking him where he got the costume. I remember green popsicles and a chicken getting its neck wrung and slippery, gray hotdogs on slices of bread and a cousin who climbed a tree and threatened to kill us all with a hammer. It was no small comfort to see there were people in the world poorer and crazier than us.

This photo was taken at the end of that trip: the three of us, bedraggled and parched, standing under the “Welcome to Missouri” sign in various poses for our father, who’d used eight rolls of film to document a single weekend with his children in the summer of 1968. I don’t remember the drive home. Maybe we slept, the car windows down, the wind boxing our cheeks. Maybe the rolling clouds gathered themselves into fists above us. We could not know what lay ahead for us and the larger world. But as we did then and do now, we have each other.

Postscript: It’s a gray and icy March morning here in Iowa as I write this. My brothers and I have gathered at a hospice to say goodbye to my older brother, Tom, who lays dying of multiple sclerosis. We are heartbroken, but draw strength from each other. I am so grateful for this family of mine. Goodbye big brother. I love you very much. This piece is dedicated to you.

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Kathy Fish’s stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press), Slice, Guernica,Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the author of three collections of short fiction: A chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (Rose Metal Press, 2008), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011) and Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2013). She will be joining the faculty of the Regis University MFA program in January of 2016, teaching flash fiction.