Fashion Fair, the new indoor mall in Fresno, devours the fig, walnut, and orange orchards. Transforms the outdoor downtown mall into an abandoned geometry of shuttered storefronts, splintered benches, silent sculptures and fountains: the bronze Dancing Waters, Rite of the Crane, Talos, Three Fires. Good-bye glistening water, spouting water, flow-through-your-weary-day water. Tara has spent many lunch breaks listening to the water, dipping her fingers in to slow the chiseling in her head.
The new mall flytraps people and money. Tara reluctantly becomes part of it, getting a new job at a shoe store. She leaves behind the old downtown jewelry store whose owner, Marianne, hired her when she was a pregnant teen and high school drop-out. Marianne who put up with her mood swings, gave her a flexible schedule when the twins, Kelsey and Keith arrived, and knitted two yellow blankets in soft, cotton yarn, one with ducklings, one with lambs. “Yellow is such a cheerful color, don’t you think?” she said, hugging Tara, apologizing that slow business meant layoffs.
Fresno creeps north; downtown shrinks to shadow. Tara’s sleep shrinks to nothing. The twins are colicky. The new job is demanding, and the manager doesn’t have Marianne’s patience for flexible hours or Tara’s worsening mood swings. Complaints from Tara’s mother swarm the small house: baby paraphernalia, the twins’ crying, finances, the utter stupidity of Tara getting pregnant. Oh, how good that vodka and seltzer tastes each night! The bottles wink at Tara.
Fresno leapfrogs North over residential neighborhoods, small commercial districts, dying orchards. Kelsey and Keith grow: toddlers with bath toys, drooling kisses, ear infections. Preschoolers with potty training deadlines, kindergarteners with new facts: the 4 seasons, the 5 senses, the countless times Mommy and Nana argue. The bright spot is Shark Dentist, a game Tara creates to calm the twins about a dental visit. The three plastic sharks that splash in the tub come along, too, and the kindly dentist makes a show of cleaning their teeth. In Fresno’s sweltering summers with only a window air conditioner in the living room, Tara and the kids regularly take the sharks—Sammy, Maddy and Woof-Woof— outside with buckets, a hose, and toothbrushes. The first time she sips a screwdriver during Shark Dentist, she reassures herself that it’s mostly orange juice.
Fresno speeds North past the San Joaquin River with luxury river view housing. Tara speeds through a stop sign one vodka fueled night after getting fired. Minor injuries to the other driver, but Tara’s back and neck injuries are painful enough for an oxycodone prescription. Seven years old now, Kelsey tries to cheer her mother with Shark Dentist, but Keith is mad that his mother sleeps so much and he flushes one of the sharks down the toilet which throws Nana into a fit because a plumber has to be called and when Kelsey shakes her mother, telling her what happened to Sammy Shark, this rouses Tara to the flooded bathroom where Keith weeps in the doorway, clutching the other two sharks. And she sweeps the two children into her bedroom, locking the door to her screaming mother, and they cuddle with one another and they cuddle with the remaining sharks whose teeth Tara pronounces perfect after all that dental work.
Fresno bolts North to the foothills where Tara moves with the twins into a shabby trailer park with low rent since it will be demolished soon for custom log and timber estates. Where a neighbor who grows African violets watches the twins while Tara tries Narcotics Anonymous and AA and the twins hate their new school and Nana shows up unannounced demanding the twins move in with her and life is a carousel of rehab relapse rehab relapse.
The fountains were drained long ago, but Tara visits them often, especially the Three Fires near Marianne’s vacant jewelry shop. Recently Tara’s shopping cart was stolen. It held most of her possessions in plastic bags. But she got another and she’s trying to practice gratitude now that it looks like she’ll be accepted into Hospitality House next month. Huge gratitude toward Hospitality House. But she’s also grateful that she still has her sleeping bag, that this new shopping cart doesn’t have a gimpy wheel, and that the street counselor checks on her daily since her release from the hospital. But mostly she is grateful that the yellow knitted blanket with the ducklings is safe in her backpack. Keith had loved the lamb blanket to rags. And mostly she is grateful that wrapped tightly in the yellow blanket are Maddy and Woof-Woof. Someday she will give her children the toy sharks. They will sit together. They will remember.
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Claudia Monpere writes from the San Francisco Bay Area in the tiny town of Kensington where turkeys often congregate on her roof. She received the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025 and 2026. Her collection, The Periodic Family, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press on Oct. 13. Read more at https://claudiamonpere.com/