Kayla Rutledge Page

Contest - Flash Fiction

Kayla Rutledge Page has an MFA in fiction from North Carolina State University. She is the recipient of the 2019 James Hurst Prize for Fiction from NC State and the 2020 Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is currently querying her debut novel.

 

Crux

My nanny Silas had only one story. That was how God intended it. See here, she said, slapping her open Bible, these people—you meet them at the crux. By the time she came to work for my father, Silas lived in the invincibility of her own epilogue. She had big teeth and a man’s name and did not love me, which, she said, meant I could rely on her. She walked me to school every day, the sidewalks like overturned dominoes in the sun.

Her crux came early, hiking the El Camino after college. A pilgrimage, she said, on peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, high school Spanish and compression socks. My father scoffed at that, the way he scoffed at things he thought were womanish. He did not believe in indulging what my teachers called sensitivity, or feeding me religion. He was a timid, artless man. He had wanted a son.

The story went like this: At the final cathedral, whatever Silas had been running from caught up to her. She stood, hypnotized at the sepulcher of St. James, feet throbbing, pack stinking of rain. What had she expected? The vibrancy of a saint, she said, who grew up fishing, who had God for a cousin. Not black, nauseous marble, the iron star slung low like a guillotine. At the sight of it a stillness in her took hold.

And I was so young then—idea of Jesus even vaguer than a mother—but I understood. All I wanted was something that demanded my attention. Once, a girl in the upper school next door had forgotten to walk down to my classroom for her brother, to get him for the bus. I stayed with him long after the final bell, pretending someone was coming to pick me up too.

No one came for Silas either. Visiting hours ended. A guard locked a gate.

She spent the whole night in the grave. Some people could learn from a metaphor. Not me, Silas said. Her big-teeth laugh. She had to go down into it, that place dark enough to lose dimension. To sit with what closed in her like a fist. I asked her to tell it again. The school year passed in a blur of eyeglass puddles and the boats of leaves, Silas blinking at the dawn and a friar so surprised he rebuked her as the devil.

The day my father fired her, I was home sick from school. He always fired help in the yard; he said it kept people from making a scene. I saw it from my window. Their two heads, the square beds of marigolds, the scalp of the ground. Silas did not say goodbye, and she didn’t let my father drive her to the airport. She just started walking in the direction we always walked, on those sidewalks cracked and craggy as a shore. I watched until she was gone. Afterward, my father told me she had lost a child. He said it was why he had chosen her as a nanny; it was a mistake no one made twice. I think he was trying to say he loved me. Anyway, he said, I could walk myself to school, and no one was a resurrection. Each life had a lion’s den of ghosts.

Still, I knew Silas had told me the story for a reason. She wanted me to know it was all right, that thing in me he didn’t understand. I didn’t have to kill it. If I waited long enough, what I buried would escape the story, slip from me like a bone from its socket.

I could meet it on the other side.

Like most of my work, ‘Crux’ explores the networks women form inside patriarchal spaces and the role of religious imagination in identity formation. The reader gets caught between two different narratives of Silas’ life, but our dissonance doesn’t seem to touch the narrator. Childhood is biblical in its cadence this way; characters appear and disappear on the page at random, stories have morals and heroes and lose their sense of time. This particular piece grew out of a prompt from the SmokeLong Summer flash intensive.