Lisa Fay Coutley
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This piece is part of a unique new genre: the literary nonfiction short-short, alive with detail, and immediate in its use of the present tense. “Honeycomb” is narrated by a child (with a skillful indication that the events happened thirty years ago), but the intense emotion behind the speaker’s loss is balanced by Lisa Fay Coutley’s careful attention to details: the Cabbage Patch doll’s name, a homemade ribbon to console a toddler, what kids do to imitate their parents. Coutley has composed a masterful micromemoir, attuned to the complicated ways we identify with the objects that matter to us.
To hear Lisa Fay read her piece, click below:
Honeycomb
Callie Pascal is a limey, Daddy says, which means she came all the way from England—ordered special—just for me. I’m worth crossing an ocean for, Daddy says, so I get a special Cabbage Patch doll while my friends don’t. Just like I always leave Jenny’s or Becky’s or any friend’s on our alley with the best Barbie clothes or shoes or whatever I ask for. When I was three, I sang “You Light Up My Life,” like Mommy taught me, in the neighborhood talent show, and everyone said I was the best, yet they called my name in second place. Mommy says when she explained I didn’t win, I sobbed. The next day Leila and Patrick brought me a ribbon they made from a paper plate and a giant bow tie, with names and notes from every neighbor on the alley. The plate had a big #1 on it. Maybe I did sing best. Maybe I cried best. Maybe the whole neighborhood knows I’m Daddy’s Special Little Lady even on the nights the cops have to come to stop him. I spend most days making rock forts on the dike by the bay shore in our backyard. One day I took Callie Pascal down there to play with Becky and her doll, and while we were having grown-up time, fake smoking our bamboo sticks and guzzling pretend beers, the girls were sassy, so of course we had to punish them. I whacked Callie Pascal’s ass so hard she fell from my grip into the green water and lay there, floating facedown, waves pushing her against the rocks, her yarn braids dragging in the sand. I screamed and yanked her out and cried I’m so sorry and so sad you made me hit you so hard you fell in the water and got ruined. I ran past Mom doing dishes in the kitchen, straight to the bathroom for the blow-dryer and into my purple bedroom where I hit On and Hot and aimed at my baby’s belly until her insides singed and looked like honeycomb and the tears come even now thirty years later. She fell in the water, I told Dad. An accident. Who would hurt their special girl on purpose? What kind of monster? We’ll fix her, he said, and took her to his friends Vi and Bucky’s doll and furniture shop, where he’d taken me for years to choose from their best handmade selections, and sure enough—Callie came home as if nothing had happened. Not a single mark on her. As if she had a whole new torso. As if I’d never seen that gaping empty space inside her where so much melted away so quickly—that hollow honeycomb, which never held anything sweet, where no sure future had been sown—just beneath her surface.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
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