Flash Nonfiction: CNF/Essay/Memoir/ Vignette
Alida Dean
I Try to Understand My Fear
Fear of becoming my mom, fear of my daughter becoming me, but most of all fear of my mom becoming her mom who, at sixty, swallowed a fistful of pills and taped a plastic bag over her head, ending the show two-thirds through.
Fear of J not coming home. I can’t sleep, not even with my daughter snoring softly beside me, her exhales making her bangs dance. I wait for the front door to open, remembering the night my mom didn’t come home because, I found out the next morning, she was in jail for assaulting an officer, and all the nights she spent at Evil Boyfriend’s house, even though I know J isn’t in jail or spending the night with an evil woman; he’s planing boards in his shop on the other side of town, he’s making wood floors for our house. Fear of Evil Boyfriend who, thanks to a bee bee gun accident, had a foggy glass eye with a thin yellow crust around it, and who once spent an afternoon crawling through the bittersweet vines in our yard hiding cans of tuna laced with rat poison in hopes of poisoning our dog because, he told the judge when my mom finally filed a restraining order against him, she loved that dog too damn much.
I’m not afraid of drowning. I love the way my mind goes blank, at last, lets me be, when my head is underwater, and I’m a strong swimmer besides, but I’m afraid my daughter will drown; she can’t swim yet and drowning is a leading cause of infant mortality, so why did I take her out on the lake in a kayak with no life jacket on a breezy day? Why did I tell her to say bon voyage to Daddy? We stuck close to shore and she loved it, she bounced on my lap and laughed every time a wave rocked us, but why?
Fear of becoming a single mother. Fear of poverty, fear of not being able to afford raspberries for my daughter on the days she spends with me if J and I break up. Fear of her associating raspberries with J and only bananas with me even though poverty, I know, doesn’t have to mean lousy food; my mom and I hitchhiked to school events, when the hot water heater broke, we took cold showers, squirrels scrambled in and out through the hole in our roof—still, there was always something wonderful in the fridge: smoked bluefish pate, honeydew melon, even raspberries. We couldn’t afford internet and the toilet didn’t flush unless you added extra water, but we ate like queens. We were queens, if of a hovel.
I didn’t used to be afraid of being alone, when I was twenty-four I biked cross country by myself, slept in a one-man tent the whole way and did not wish for company, but now I am. Or, I’m afraid J won’t come home. I’m afraid he’ll die in a one-car wreck like his brother. I’m afraid he’ll get sucked into the planer and survive but lose both arms and I’ll have to bathe him for the rest of his life, feed him soup with a trembling spoon. I’m afraid my daughter will judge me for resenting the care her father requires in this scenario. I can’t sleep. Mostly I’m afraid of losing her, afraid she’ll fall off the boat I insisted she get on in the first place, or open the gate and step out into the road when my back is turned, or die in her sleep tonight, it does happen—but more than that I’m afraid of losing her the way my mom has lost me. Because how is it possible that when I was a child I was scared to be in a room without her, I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was holding her hand, or better yet pressing my whole body against her, and now it takes me weeks to return her calls? I see her once a year, if that, and when I’m with her, even if it’s only for half an hour, the whole time, I am desperate to get away.
My daughter doesn’t seem to be scared of anything. She startles when the dog barks and when I use the coffee grinder, but this is not the same as being afraid. I’ve seen her feed a mule, whose teeth were as long as her fingers, a handful of grass. I’ve watched her dance by herself with her eyes closed in a crowd of grownups at a zydeco show. One time I pulled her fifty miles in the bike trailer, and when we visited my mom last summer she wasn’t afraid of the rats in the yard, or the moldy rugs, or the heaps of dirty dishes and bottles, or the coarse white hairs on her grandma’s chin. She let this strange woman hold her. She said, “Hi! Hi! Hi!”
About the writer:
Alida Dean’s writing has recently appeared in The Forge, Ninth Letter, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other venues. Her unpublished novel I Don’t Think I’ll Miss You Much was a Finalist for the 2025 Rising Writer Prize from Autumn House Press, and she is a 2025 fellow in poetry at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Alida teaches writing workshops through the nonprofit Literary Cleveland and at Tompkins Cortland Community College. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her partner and daughter.
Image: Girl with Jennet (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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