Olivia Brochu
When One Thing Ends
We pull weeds. Grip their green leaves. Pry from their base. Hope to expunge their white, spiny roots. They reach out from their hosts like the fine and unruly postpartum hairs growing back around my head. The roots and my hairs are both spindly, wild and delicate.
My 6-year-old son teams up with me. He names the big ones daddy weeds. He calls them strong when he struggles to pull them out of the ground. It reminds him of his father. Of his father’s muscled arms that still sometimes need to hold him in a crowd or carry him from the car when he’s fallen asleep on the way home.
There are “big kid” weeds, and baby ones too. All based on size, and the effort it takes to get them out.
“I feel bad pulling the baby ones,” my son says.
“Why? Because you love babies?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
We both stop pulling for a moment, and look, together, at the darkened window above us on the second floor of our brick house. Just inside those black out curtains, his baby sister sleeps.
She’s our last baby. He knows it, and so do I.
He knows it because when he and his two brothers ask if maybe they’ll get a second sister, we always say no. Just one sister for this family. One special baby girl. A simple answer to a not-so-simple question. An answer that sometimes feels like death, like we are inching closer to death by no longer making new life.
My son and I continue our chore in silence. We slowly clear away the unwanted plants, and leave in their wake bare dirt ready for something new.
Olivia Brochu’s flash has been featured by The Citron Review, Emerge Literary Journal, and more. Her fiction and essays will or have been featured by Cutleaf, Pithead Chapel, Anti-Heroin Chic and more. Two of her essays were finalists in WOW Women on Writing contests. Read more at oliviabrochuwrites.com.