Good Things by Aliceanna Stopher
Associate editor Camila Garcia on today’s bonus essay: Aliceanna Stopher meditates on the nuances of grief with unflinching tenderness, illuminating the ways joy is intimately linked to loss. “Good Things” is a vulnerable act of preservation.
Good Things
The year my mother died she worried I’d forgotten all the good things. But I remember collecting chicken eggs, the joy there was in that. Remember red and yellow tulips in the yard. I’d tell her how I smell cigarette smoke in worn flannel sometimes, and acrylics and oils, thick and wet on canvas, that particular smell, those persistent ghosts. Tuna sandwiches packed for the river, fishing with Dave; coiled snakes, sleeping in the in-between, waiting for spring on the mountain; the metallic tang of chewing gum left overnight on your bedframe, pressing the cold, hard lump of it behind my teeth; your pens everywhere, and notebooks, scraps of paper and newspaper clippings, the heavy slant of your letters; how good the music coming out of the speakers my brother stole sounded; how we danced; rides in the truck, searching for deer in the crowded woods, winding out green down into the valley; pouring salt into palms held open like a prayer for rain, closing my eyes, bringing the taste to my tongue; sparklers in the yard, summer-time; that fallen tree we used like a bench-why hadn’t it rotted?; gunshot, gun smoke, my own two hands clamped over my ears, beer cans, shot, taking flight; sleepless nights, you rubbing my back, singing lullabies you’d stitched together, made your own; spending the night in that Super 8 on 50 after we’d lost power—or maybe it flooded, I can’t remember—but still, sometimes, feeling the heat coming off that TV, flipping channels all night long, trying to get to the end; grits with Tabasco, an egg or two on top, a bit runny; nuzzling the baby through the mesh of his playpen, a crisscross pattern appearing and disappearing on our cheeks; glass-filtered light in the big room; bare feet on tile, on cobblestone, on grass; feet black on the bottoms; my chin tucked into the mess of my brother’s blondness, me on his slim shoulders, him naming winter stars; French toast, the way only you could make it, and café au lait, too much sugar; light speckled through trees, how it dyed the grass every shade of green; I’d tell you, Mama, when I dream I dream our mountain before all of us were dead or gone—I dream the screen door flapping open, air so thick with coffee and smoke and paint you could taste it, and even if my mind rearranges everything, expands or collapses distances, it’s still our mountain, isn’t it? Can’t you see me there, where our world met another, summoning some witness to see we were all still here, together, and that even we, blue as our mountain, could be happy?
Aliceanna Stopher’s fiction and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Pank, Split Lip, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Her flash has been featured in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and she was a 2022 Best of the Net finalist. She lives offline in Colorado and online at aliceannastopher.com or on Twitter @_itwillbeloud.
