byChrisWhite – 2024

The story was written in response to a flash-fiction challenge called – Family Secrets. A 500 words or less challenge to write a story using the challenge-phrase (Family Secrets) somewhere within the story.

IT STARTED WITH A MISSISSIPPI BIRTH CERTIFICATE, folded and yellowing in a lacquered box beneath the cupboard. A name he didn’t recognize. A date that placed the child years before his own arrival. His mother’s name in tight, deliberate print. His father’s, absent.

Jonah sat on the linoleum, the air laced with the strong scents of cat urine and Chlorox. The pipes above him dripped in rhythm with Mick Fleetwood’s steady beat as The Chain played in the background. He read it again. And again.

At dinner, he turned his fork over in his hand. His mother set down a dish of mashed potatoes doused in a pool of butter.

“Who’s Matthew?” he asked.

The room stilled. His mother’s face, so familiar in its weathered quiet, didn’t shift. His father cleared his throat, sipped his beer. Jonah’s sister, ten years old and all her big-eyed curiosity, turned her head between ‘em like a tennis match.

His mother sat. “Where’d you hear that name?”

He told her. The wooden box. From the browned and brittle paperwork, like dead leaves or something.

She exhaled, long and thin, pressing her fingers together. His father got up, walked to the sink, and stared into the empty basin.

“I had me a brother?” Jonah asked.

His mother pressed her lips together, then nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked,” his father said.

Jonah felt something inside break. “That’s dumb. I didn’t ask because I didn’t know he existed.”

His father wiped his hands on a dish towel. His mother, ever careful, folded hers in her lap.

“He died Jonah,” she said. “A long while back.”

“How?”

His mother’s mouth opened, but his father spoke first. “He drowned… The creek.”

His stomach tightened. He had lived in the same house his whole life. Waded through the creek out back every summer since he was little, felt the water swirl against his legs, let his sister ride his back ‘cross the deeper parts.

Never once was Jonah told to be careful.

Never once been warned by his parents.

Searching for the right words, Jonah’s mother reached across the table, grasping at his hand.

“It was an accident.”

His father turned, the muscles in his jaw working.

“I was supposed to be lookin’ after him.”

Jonah looked up.

Jonah’s suddenly fragile mother’s fingers twitched against his own. “I wasn’t but twelve,” his father said in a whispered breath. “I told him,” his father cried, “Stay close to the bank.”

Quiet permeated the room like water in a sinking ship. His father wiped his dampened eyes, exhaled hard.

His mother sat up straight. “Jonah,” she sighed. “Now ya’ know.”

Nothing like the explanation he wanted. Not an apology. Just the truth, spoken out loud for the first time in decades.

Maybe ever.

Jonah swallowed; mouth dry as cotton. He thought of the creek, how the ground there sometimes worked loose underfoot, how he had never known what family secrets lay beneath its surface.

He thought of his father, twelve years old, standing on the bank, looking for a shape beneath the water.

He pushed his chair back. “I’m going for a walk.”

No one stopped him.