• Facebook
• Instagram

And She Still Has Her Christmas Lights Up in June, Too

Chelsea Stickle

__________

The dogs noticed first. They yapped at every passerby, so none of the neighbors noticed for awhile. It was when Ivy was late to walk her dog that she saw a woman in ballet flats—her face like a bear awakening from hibernation—exit the end unit, place an empty Trader Joe’s marinara jar on the sidewalk cement, and smash the ever-loving-shit out of it. Ballet Flats cleaned it up afterward, of course, as if all she was doing was walking her dog like everyone else. Ivy told her neighbor who told everyone else. Then the rest of the neighborhood was on the lookout, but Ballet Flats was clever. She avoided the typical dog walking periods, and nothing in the HOA bylaws prohibited the act. Of course, we agreed to add it to the bylaws at the next quarterly meeting. Ivy’s teenage daughter overheard us, and at the next daily destruction, she went outside with her Doc Martens laces trailing behind. We watched through curtains, through blinds, through fake stained glass how that girl talked to Ballet Flats, nodding and commiserating. We longed for open windows closer to the action so we could hear what this consistent commotion was all about. Ballet Flats disappeared inside. When she came back, she had a pile of plates in her hands and a baseball bat. Carefully, she placed the plates on the cement and handed Doc Martens the bat. Together they smashed, screamed, and stomped until what were once plates were now as smooth as cremains with the occasional bone fragment sticking out. It’s only then that one of us remembered what they heard second or third-hand about the ambulance that drove her husband—the forty-something marathon runner in seemingly perfect health—to the morgue because an aneurysm killed him before he hit the pavement.

__________

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing, 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in Passages North, Fractured Lit, Identity Theory, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and 2025, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022, and the Wigleaf Longlist in 2023 and 2026. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit, George. Learn more at chelseastickle.com.

__________

<< Back Next >>

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.