"Weightless Words Meant for Letters" by Cheryl Skory Suma — Our September 2020 Silver Medal Winner

Cheryl is our second place winner from the contest posted in our September 2020 issue!

What the judges had to say:

“While starting out melancholy, this story took us through a range of feelings and sensations. The author took the prop and used it effectively to glide us down the character’s streets, figuratively. We rolled with her, we felt her anguish, and we rejoiced in her freedom. Well done!”

“This is a very strong story with thoughtful insights into how words can add up over years to heal or harm.”

“A thought-provoking depiction of the power of words. The author successfully takes the reader on a journey through hard places and emerges with hope. ”

Meet CHERYL

Cheryl launched her writing career with a YA fantasy novel, Habitan, which made the longlist of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and her second novel, gods Playground, was a 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition semifinalist. In 2020, she won Blank Spaces Flash Fiction Contest (Mar), was a finalist for Longridge Review’s Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction (this piece received a 2020 Pushcart nomination), was longlisted for both Pulp Literature’s Flash Fiction Contest & Prize, received an Honorable Mention for Spider Road Press Flash Fiction Contest, and was a finalist for Exposition Review’s Flash 405 (Apr). She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Weightless Words Meant for Letters

the unedited story by Cheryl Skory Suma

My grandmother saved letters of love. Not just my grandfather’s — those who came before him. Reminders of a younger self lost in the certainty of the newly beloved.

I wish my husband was forced to put his words to ink. To see them for himself — how they’d brand their blister to the page, leaving smoke trails to rise in a regretful stream from what has become our story.

***

My mother disappeared shortly after I was born, so it was my grandmother who raised me. When she passed away, I pushed through my grief to begin the difficult task of sorting through her belongings.

She’d always been a lover of words, spinning poetic observations in her measured tone. As a child, I adored her not just as a substitute mother — her words enchanted me. I would sit at her feet, listening to her observations on life. She’d end every story with the same warning.

“Words matter, sweet pea. Choose wisely, for they’ll live on in the hearts of those you leave behind.”

In addition to the engaging love letters, the biggest surprise I discovered in her bedroom closet was a pair of red roller skates. I pictured my grandmother in her youth, lacing up those bright, here-I-am skates, then gliding off. Seeking weightlessness.

When I arrived home from her apartment, I set the skates aside on the front porch, intending to give them a twirl in her honor after dinner. I liked the way their defiant red contrasted with the dreariness of the aging veranda, echoing better days.

I was startled by the slam of a car door.

“More trash from your grandmother’s? Seriously, babe, I think you’re getting dumber by the day. Is dinner even on?”

My husband joined me on the porch. Before I could explain their value, he jabbed my side.

“Are you trying to piss me off? Throw that shit out.”

I nodded, avoiding his eyes until he went inside. I left the skates where they were, bleeding my grandmother’s footprint onto his porch. Sinking onto the steps, I watched the children playing across the street and tried to find the peace between breaths.

This was nothing new. Criticism, mockery, outright nastiness — these were the words my husband chose to feast on these days. It wasn’t always this awful. His angry outbursts used to be separated by weeks of harmony, but lately, they’d increased in frequency and intensity.

Even now, I can’t understand how he can say the things he does and think his words will just float away. That I’ll forget. Cruel, cutting words don’t sail; they don’t disappear into the atmosphere like forgotten dreams, new butterflies, or snowflakes on long lashes. They stay, lingering like bad smells. Like smoke on your overcoat or the wrong person’s perfume in your hair, they follow you around. Cruelty is clingy. It demands to be heard.

While I’d accepted that the man I fell in love with left a while ago, I couldn’t embrace this walking carcass he’d left behind, spewing anger and hate. How much longer could I drag his shadow around? I’d become lost under its heaviness. He taught me that — hurtful words have weight. His words were tenacious in their thickness. They dragged us deep into a pool of shared hurts and past pains until I couldn’t breathe. A mire that he was all too happy to splash around in, stirring up angry muck and oily angst until we were both drowning in its downward pull.

I rose to go inside to start dinner. Once again, the cheeky roller skates beckoned, piercing my dark thoughts with the promise of unburdened flight.

Screw it, forget dinner. I’m going for a skate.

***

As my grandmother’s skates carried me down the street and into the park, I was reminded of the pure joy of being. The evening breeze lifted my hair to flow kite-like behind me. I spread my arms wide, enjoying the feeling of floating without wings.

I skated past teenagers walking dogs, children on bikes, couples holding hands. So many smiling, happy people. Their voices and laughter lifted me further upward, beyond the shadow of his words.

I breathed the lightness in, then asked myself the hard question I’d been avoiding. Could I envision my life without him? Perhaps, it was not my fate to let his words drag me grey into his sorrow’s stain. Staying wasn’t going to fix the fact that anger had become all he knew. I needed to find my voice again, to share my life with others less drawn to heaviness. To find words like those in my grandmother’s forgotten letters.

As I glided onward, I encountered other, lighter words. Words that moved like the wind on a toddler’s hair, still thin and transparent, as she laughed past me on her tricycle, her mother dancing behind. Words mirrored by the image of the elderly couple sitting on the park bench throwing bread to the swallows, who stopped whispering love into each other’s ears long enough to give me warm smiles as I sailed by. The memory of my grandmother’s feather kisses on my five-year-old eyelids, offering tenderness to a child so that she’d never feel forgotten despite the mother who ran.

Words born well on compassion’s cradled arms. Words meant for letters.

***

Later, as he sat on the couch, drinking before the glow of the television, I packed a bag upstairs — not just the essentials, but also things that would remind me of why words matter. My diary, my grandmother’s letters, the roller skates.

As I slipped out the back door, I left words of empathy scribbled on the kitchen table. I also told him why I needed to leave this house — to let words I could live with back in.

I would surround myself with words that embraced the page, that illuminated, that were meant to live on in the hearts of others.

Massive words that were weightless.