Scratches

Written by Scott Lambridis
Illustrated by Angie Needels

450-word flash fiction piece written and illustrated for a Ferret Press publication (the theme for this anthology being the ferrets themselves).

Since it’s short enough to post, here’s the full text.

Johnny got a ferret for his thirteenth birthday. He was too kind a boy to ask what the creature was and just assumed his mom thought she was buying him another cat. It certainly scratched like his old beloved kitty Jasper did before he died. After accidentally pricking himself on a spine of his mother’s favorite cactus plant Jasper ran into the killing fields of highway 89. Since then, Johnny had developed a weak heart.

Johnny’s step-father complained about the smell as soon as his mother brought it home. Johnny liked the smell though, despite his heightened sense. It was pungent enough to take him somewhere else, somewhere beyond the seeming perfection of his suburban surroundings. Johnny’s step-father said the ferret would be a lot cuter if it smelled less like a skunk, but Johnny wouldn’t let him take the ferret away.

On the fifth day Johnny and his mother went to show their doctor the raised spots and beautifully sinuous markings the ferret left on his skin. Puffed and raised like the Braille Johnny read with his mother every night, the doctor claimed Johnny was just very sensitive. Johnny’s step-father called the ferret a mongrel with dirty nails, but Johnny wouldn’t let him take the ferret away.

On the tenth day Johnny lay still as the ferret scratched and scratched at the door, sending his mom’s dreams into haunting places where her marriage was more than its de facto state. His step-father roused first, found him, and saw the extremely exacerbated swelling. The ferret hissed at the man and jumped over to his usual spot atop Johnny, not letting either of them be taken away.

It stopped hissing when his mother came in and touched the edges of the swellings, now almost an inch tall. She traced the Braille-like words with her fingers, reminding herself of the giant wooden letter blocks Johnny loved in the years before she realized why he never made sentences. He loved the geometry of the letters, the dotted mirror of which lay now on his cold skin. She never told her husband, but she swore she could read Johnny’s words in the ferret’s scratches. She read Johnny’s love and hopes for her. She read the passages from the stories she read him in her unpublished book. She read Johnny’s instructions on how to find the life he knew she truly wanted. She silently thanked the ferret and told him she would never let anyone take him away.

On the fifteenth day, Johnny’s ashes were carried in the soil of a six inch potted cactus pot in his mother’s left arm, and a suitcase in the other, containing, amongst many things, the manuscript to a book she had finished years ago. At her feet, attached to a small red leash hooked around her left arm, was the ferret who was quiet and not scratching for once, being occupied by the task of suckling the meat off of the middle aged make finger held between his two small front paws. Though he struck her when she protested, she didn’t let her husband take the ferret away. 

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