The first sound Liza hears is her own cry and the cold is a shock and the world is too bright and instead of the thrumming she’s always felt in her bones she is wrapped in a stranger’s embrace as a woman cries and laughs and cries and nothing is right and nothing will ever be right again as she wails a wordless word that even newborns know: Mama!

***

As she grows she hears the story over and over of how she was a chosen child and that makes her extra special and Liza understands that she must be grateful because she’s so lucky to have a good life so she makes a secret pledge to be the goodest girl because if she was chosen then she can be unchosen and returned to an unlucky life where she won’t be special and being good won’t matter anyway.

***

They tell her more when she is eighteen, what they know and what they don’t and how her mother never held her but surely loved her because how could it be any other way, so Liza lets the bottomless river of longing carry her to the place where she heard her first cry and a mother did too and surely the mother mourned the special girl she loved but could not choose.

***

Liza buttons the blouse that matches her eyes and smoothes her fly-away hair and asks, “How do I look Mom?” and turns down her company because this is something she must do on her own and at twenty-one she doesn’t need a hand to hold, but when she stands outside the squat gray house and no one answers her wooden knock she is disappointed and relieved, but then the weathered door cracks open just enough to reveal the resemblance and even though she’d planned a careful greeting the words tumble out like lemmings over a cliff: I’m your daughter.

***

The woman opens the door a few inches more and Liza smiles and stands a little taller as though she’s there for a job interview, but then horror dawns in the woman’s eyes that match her own and the fantasy disintegrates like flash paper touched to a flame and Liza stumbles back to her car and drives like a homing pigeon to the powder-blue house with hydrangeas out front and falls wailing into familiar arms as her mother soothes, My baby, Mama’s here.

# # #

Traci Mullins, a non-fiction book editor by day, discovered flash fiction in 2017, and it’s been a love affair ever since. Her stories have been published in three anthologies, Panoply, Spelk, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Boulevard, among others. She was named a Highly Recommended Writer in the London Independent Story Prize competition.

Photo: travelnow.or.crylater