Claudia Monpere
I drive my dad to the air-conditioned Ace Hardware. I’m visiting from out of town, and it’s 110° in Fresno, too sweltering for his daily walk around his condominium complex, but he is determined to walk today. He moves well with his walker. On every aisle: awe. A hose like the one his mother watered the strawberries and roses with. A battery charger and jumper like his dad needed to get the old Ford running. A red wheelbarrow. In spite of his slipping memory, he recites the Williams poem beautifully.
I drive my dad to the Shinzen Friendship Garden in Fresno’s Woodward Park. It’s fall and the Japanese maples dazzle: Fireglow, Ruby Stars, Moon Rise, North Wind. My father reads each tag carefully. Oh, he exclaims. And oh oh oh at the peacocks’ iridescent plumage. Deep blue, violet, emerald green. I push him in his wheelchair which he needs more and more often. Spotting a dragon fly in the pond, he tries to remember the Gary Snyder poem he used to recite each day. He speaks the last three lines: “Did you leave your seed child/ In a mountain pool/ Before you died?”
I drive my dad to Barnes and Noble. My Fresno sibs discourage this; he’s too frail, they say. I’m stupidly determined. The countless times we wandered these aisles—cane, walker, wheelchair—even as recently as four months ago. And his aide will accompany us. But he’s exhausted by the time we arrive. So difficult for him to get seated in my car, to get buckled in, and his wheelchair won’t fit into my trunk so we have to switch to his aide’s car and we have no disabled person parking placard and he melts into his wheelchair as we wheel him through the parking lot—it’s summer again—and he has to go to the bathroom when we enter the store and the wheelchair accessible restroom is being remodeled and he and his aide must wait until all the stalls in the women’s restroom are empty. And and and. Out of the restroom, he tries to muster enthusiasm for the books I show him. Subjects he loves: nature, politics, history, poetry. Coffee table books with pictures. But within minutes my dad is nodding off, he’s confused, he’s cranky. Not even Wordsworth, his favorite poet, cheers him. “I’d like to go home,” he says. On the way out, a Harry Potter exhibit. The plastic 3 headed dog sparks something in him. Broad smile as he holds out his hands. “Cerberus!” he exclaims. I place the tiny hellhound in his palms.
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Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Trampset, Milk Candy Review, The Forge, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine, and the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Prize. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and in Best Microfiction 2025.