For our latest flash essay contest on sister site Narratively Academy — inspired by Phillip Vance Smith II’s Personals piece — we asked you to send us a story that has haunted you for years. Some of you took that literally, leaving us with a host of delightful ghost tales to read. Ultimately, the one we went with felt closer to what we had intended, the kind of story that, though small, lingers and looms large for years to come. Enjoy, and thank you to everyone who submitted!
I learned it from Elliott. There in the family room is where I watched him trick his mother, and I learned to trick mine, too.
Of course, Elliott had a more pressing reason to do so, having discovered an extraterrestrial with excellent taste in candy. Elliott needed to stay home from school to save E.T.; I merely wanted to skip my math class.
Elliott knew a fever would be enough to keep him home. He touched a thermometer to a warm lightbulb, then slipped it under his tongue for his mom to find.
Inspired, I snuck a thermometer down to our family room. This was where we watched E.T. on a rented videocassette. Where we fought for the one upholstered recliner we called the Big Chair, leaving the other four siblings to splay across the rust-red shag carpet. Where a gooseneck lamp perched, its tiny bulb in a brassy metal shade.
I clicked it on, admired my fingers’ amber glow. Held the thermometer’s tip to the burning bulb, just as Elliott did. The silver strip rose steadily up the glass tube. Fingertips warming in the incandescence, the thermometer warmer still. Then, suddenly, the light splintered, my hand glittering like a Christmas ornament fallen from a bough.
In my palm, beside the thermometer’s broken spine, tiny silver pinballs danced. I was 10, old enough to know this alien substance was mercury. And to know I’d be in so much trouble if caught. I quickly flicked it beneath the Big Chair’s thick-coiled springs, in the dark and lonely recesses the vacuum never reached.
Was it enough to poison me? I didn’t know. Elementary science hadn’t taught me yet that mercury never ever degrades. Though even at that age, somehow I knew to sweep it under the rug.
Math class awaited.
Kathryn Ganfield is a nature writer, essayist and teacher in the Twin Cities. She’s drawn like a moth to flash and micro writing — you can find more of her work here.
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