Snap
by Jessica Staricka
Out the window, a white Crown Vic parallel parks, and my Aunt Elle, dressed like a gothic diva, steps out. I squeeze through aunts, uncles, and cousins to escape the stuffy park building and call to her, “Hey, it’s been a few years.”
My whole life, Aunt Elle has made irregular family function appearances. Her arrival turns the whole clan into a nervous bunch of clucking chickens. In the eighties, she was charged with murdering her girlfriend, and though the jury found her innocent, our family has not.
I beckon her to join me at a picnic table. She’s tall, but wears heels anyway. Her hair and her glasses are huge. Her bulky dress reminds me of a sleeping bat wrapped in its own wings. She reaches into the black folds, pulls out a box of toothpicks, and puts one in her mouth.
“Oral fixation,” she explains, and offers me one.
“Did you quit smoking?” I ask.
“Only four times so far this year.”
I place a toothpick in my mouth and hope the family is watching from inside. Aunt Elle used to petrify me, too. But when I started dyeing my hair black, buzzing my own undercut, and showing up to each family function with a new piercing, I realized the depths of my family’s judgement, and that Aunt Elle was innocent. Theatrical, but innocent. She’d strut into Grandma’s house on holidays and smile crookedly at the nervous chill she generated. Her sisters would start squeaking, like they had to treat her delicately, or else she might break into their homes, shoot them twice in the head, and pistol whip their teeth out for good measure like the prosecution claimed she did to her cheating girlfriend in Moorhead, Minnesota in 1982.
“I like your tattoos,” Aunt Elle says.
“Guess who doesn’t?”
“The whole clan?” Aunt Elle nods toward the park building. “I bet they’re stacked on top of each other at the door trying to hear if I’m offering murder techniques.”
Her eyes twinkle with mischief, and I grin at her, because I’m in on her joke. I’ve spent years of family reunions laughing silently with Aunt Elle because she has kept our foolish family spooked for forty years.
But our alliance, our shared joke, does not yet equal closeness. I want to be more than her welcoming committee. I’d happily spend the rest of the reunion out here getting real with Aunt Elle and nobody else. So I ask the kind of question the others steer clear of.
“Did you ever date afterward?”
She laughs. The toothpick between her teeth bounces. I joke that she’s killed all subsequent partners, too. She loves it. Then she admits that, no, she never really dated afterward.
I expect her to open up about loss. Trauma.
Instead, she says, “You and I both know why romance and I shouldn’t mix.”
She pulls her toothpick from her mouth and holds it with both hands. She keeps laughing with her eyes. But I can’t join her this time. My insides feel dark. Cavernous. All these years, she and I have been laughing at different jokes.
She snaps the toothpick in half.
Jessica Staricka grew up on a family dairy farm in Minnesota. She earned her BA in Creative Writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is earning her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Her work has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, the Ninth Letter web edition, Hypertext Magazine, and elsewhere. She can be reached via Twitter @jstaricka.