Mikki Aronoff

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Transmission
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His ghost comes, nestles in my ear, coiled, the wintered husk of a spent roly-poly. I’ve instructed him to visit only when no one else was around. Otherwise, I startle from the sudden static. But this time — with someone else in the room! — his familiar tenor draws close, pitches low, curls into my tympani not unlike a fiddlehead fern, spoons there like a mother tucking around a sleeping child. Then, a thrum: I’m safe, two necessary words that crossed the cosmos, tinny from the passage, as though squeezed through a rusted trumpet. What we do to stay together.
 
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This was originally published Grey Sparrow Journal.

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Everything turned into a tree the moment she came up to it
 
after Lewis Carroll
 
She flicks aside wisps of hair from a forehead damp with thought and salt, determined to scale the next tree to spring up like a Jack-in-the-Box in her path. Seconds later, a vertical challenge to contemplate. Alice cranes her long neck back at the task ahead, chin over nose, wobbly on her heels. Her body corrects, calves clenching with intention. They muscle and stretch over gnarly roots, scrape against branches as she legs her way up the trunk. Knots used as rungs grimace and moan. Leaves quiver and turn, perturbed. Owls tucked into boles and holes blink at the disruption. Her steps lighten the higher she climbs, past whorls and burls and squirrels twitching with irritation. She catches her breath at canopy’s top, where the air is thin, unties her apron strings, flings the pinny to the air. It spirals through clouds, floats helplessly past flustered swallows, touches down on a surprise of snapdragons. Vistas blur as the treetop spreads its long shadow over the patchwork meadow far below. Knights and rooks scurry to escape the darkness, dormice scamper towards it. Alice stretches to take it all in. Her fingertips touch sky, tease down rain — roots, soil, rings sip and gulp as though tipsy, quenched again.
 
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This was originally published The South Shore Review.

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That was the day the blue boulders landed
 
She stands rooted to the stoop, squinting against the harsh white sun, braced against the sky loosing its treasure, or a pox, upon the parched patch of earth circling their sharecropper’s shack. In the doorway, her husband suffocating in her thin shadow. Their fifth child hard-turning in her belly. To be trapped like this, on a day like bleached bones! With all that they had, and all that they didn’t, they rolled the biggest boulder onto the porch, now expecting reward, now wondering where the punishment might come from.

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A version of this was published at Thimble Literary Journal.
 
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Every Winter Evening Before Bath Time, Momma Tweezed the Lint from My Bellybutton and Saved It in a Jelly Jar with a Label Marked “Spring”
 
It’s for the nesting robins, she’d warble, picking at the hollow where the soft cord that once bound us used to be. Then she counted my toes and chirped me to sleep. Today, gathering bottles, baubles and boxes for the estate sale, wingbreeze and birdsong sweep sorrow to the street.
 
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This was originally published at The Offing.

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The Scatter of Flowers
            
after Ceija Stojka
 
Hands up in the air! Wondering if it could be a game, we threw our heads back and laughed and lifted our arms. We twirled our skirts and whooshed our shawls, embroidered with leaves and berries and herbs. We tambourined and danced our brilliant colours. The yellows! Such yellows! 
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Our parents stood stiff as sunflower stalks. Their shivs were no match for the rifles. They should have listened to the daylilies. Even they know you can’t count on the sun for long.
 
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Hopscotch to Heaven etched in ice. Snowmelt and mud. A giant eye watching from the sky, icicles dripping from its lashes. Barbs. We stretched our necks looking for yellows. 
 
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The train barreling down the tracks. The rails closing like a zipper, stuck there with us jammed inside the cattle car. The sky borrowed our corals and reds, so we thought we were home. But where were our horses?
 
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We knew nothing of games. Of crosses. Or naughts.
 
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The snow has thawed, and leaves are beginning to sprout. I invite you for dinner for the first time. You’re clutching sunflowers in one hand. In the other, my favourite cake. How did you know? Had you heard my heels strike the ground at guitar’s first thrum? Did you note the birds carved on my caravan, see the return of the fox to my garden? How did you know of my love for almonds?
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This was originally published at trampset.
 
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Mikki Aronoff advocates for animals and scribbles away in New Mexico.  Her work has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction, with stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and Best Small Fictions 2024 and upcoming in Best Microfiction 2025 and Best Small Fictions 2025.