Gelato

JR Fenn

My daughter keeps the scissors on her bookshelf in a little white box, beside her earrings and her sewing kit. When she holds them up, their tips glint in the light of the window. In the box’s lid, under a layer of glass, is our first ultrasound image of her—a black square where her face floats in profile—her forehead, her snub nose, her balled fist reaching up toward her chin like Rodin’s Thinker, her habitual posture in the womb, and for months after. How we marveled over that picture, over our tiny baby when we carried her out of the hospital into the cool, gold air of the city, toward the dark rooms of our apartment by the Thames. But over the following days, she lost weight, she grew yellow. We set the alarm to feed her every two hours, round the clock. The midwife came, examined my breasts, raw from nursing. We learned the frenulum connecting my daughter’s tongue to the bottom of her mouth was too tight.

The tiny silver scissors loosened my daughter’s tongue. She nursed until the bleeding stopped. She doesn’t remember any of this—she only remembers the stories. How the midwife rinsed the scissors, dried them with a cloth, held them out as a keepsake. How, at nine months, she walked—tripping toward me in a sudden, giddy rush, her face exultant. How she kept us up all night long in Rome, babbling, after the sugar and caffeine in the gelato I’d eaten passed to her through my milk. I wonder now at how quickly she grew, how she waxed fierce and strong, how she jokes and grins, repeating the funny parts of books or the pun that made her middle school science teacher laugh so hard his drink came out his nose. A chatterbox is what you’d call her, words slipping out of her like a gossamer purse with its drawstring cut.

JR Fenn’s work has appeared in many places, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Split Lip, 100 Word Story, The Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was awarded the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction. Other recognitions include the 59th Annual New Millennium Award for Flash Fiction and Stone Canoe’s Robert Colley Prize for Fiction. Her chapbook, Tiny Vessels, won The Masters Review Chapbook Open and is now available from Red Mare Press. She teaches Fiction and Environmental Writing at SUNY ESF and lives in Western New York with her family. Read more at www.jrfenn.com.