Inheritance by Brooksie C. Fontaine

                       a.pasquier CC



Inheritance 
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   A young mother whistles as she sews her secrets into the ground. She rolls them between her fingertips until they’re the size of sunflower seeds, and presses them finger-deep beneath the soil, where she’s sure they’ll never be found. 
   A child is ripening inside of her, and she wants its birth to be a baptism. She wants it to enter this world clean of secrets, hers or anyone else’s, and she wants it to stay that way. She wants her child’s skin to be so clean, the world’s secrets will roll off it like summer rain. 
   Sweat buds the back of her neck, and she takes off her straw hat to fan herself. Clouds are brewing above her, blotted like curdled cream. Fat drops of rain would be a welcome respite, but she makes herself keep smiling, even though there’s no one there to see it. Things could really be so much worse, she reminds herself. She of all people should know that. And isn’t it nice, isn’t it wonderful, that her baby will never know of the world that came before?
   Her husband, shirtless and glistening like an oiled horse, breaks the stones of his secrets, and stacks them into the foundation of the house they’ll share. It’s backbreaking work, but it’s for the best. His wife can never know about the mistakes he’s made, and his child can never know about who he was before he became its father. He doesn’t understand about the way people speak without words, and about the truths they learn without realizing them. He hides relics of his youth and vulnerability between the stones, like sacred objects in a sarcophagus. 
   Someday, long after he leaves this life behind, his children will find and ponder these artifacts, revonants of an era when he was still tender. Part of them will grieve the version of their father that they never knew, the untapped seam of love amidst the resentment of growing up on a foundation of secrets. 
   The mother will spend her life behind a shell of calcified sweetness and willful ignorance, saccharine as melted sugar and hard as bone, and her children will find themselves unable to connect with her without ever knowing why. Her planted secrets will take root, twining together into an elm-sized tree. The house will stand in its shadow, and the children will eat of its fruit without ever knowing its origin. Her tree of secrets will be omnipresent in their crayon drawings, dwarfing the house and the family of stick figures who stand beneath it.    They’ll inherit their parents’ secrets, and they’ll bear their own. 
   But the couple is still young and it’s a fertile day in summer and their children are unborn, and all that will unfold has not yet unfolded. The air is alive with it, with everything that hasn’t started yet, but is about to.

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Brooksie C. Fontaine was accepted into college at fifteen, graduate school at nineteen, and just received her first MFA at twenty-two. Her articles, short fiction, and illustrations have appeared in Report From Newport, Soft Cartel, Literary Yard, Eunoia Review, Boston Accent Lit, and more. She currently tutors students of all ages, gives art lessons, and spends her spare time drinking all the world's coffee. 

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