Angela’s Wake
Amy Barnes

VULTURE BALLOONS follow me. Wrist-bound with invisible string, none are for sale.

They hover but can’t anticipate when — without warning, I reach; plucking the lazy, low-flying  — hiss-snuffing their life. They squawk dirges but I don’t grieve them. 

Instead, I sky-scream my question.

“How much did she weigh?”

Twelve birds. I measure them out like a butcher. Each one a birthday cake’s weight or her pair of left-behind toddler saddle shoes. 

At home, I weave their feathers into mourning brooches, pinning them to still-wrapped size-4 ballerina pajamas.

My pockets fill with bits of balloon bait for tomorrow’s services.

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Amy Barnes has words at sites including The New Southern Fugitives, FlashBack Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, X-Ray Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Museum of Americana, Penny Fiction, Elephants Never, Re-side, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Lunate Fiction, Rejection Lit, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Bandit Fiction, NFFD and others. Her work has been long-listed at Reflex Press, Bath Flash Fiction, Retreat West and TSS Publishing. She volunteers at Fractured Lit, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD and Narratively.

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