Another snippet of a flash

Here's another snippet of a flash fiction I've been working on. I think it's about ready. For those of you who aren't familiar with my family, it's more or less autobiographical.

The Molten Core

My father was a man of stone and earth. His figure and face seemed square or rough as if chiseled by a sculptor only half done. Even his nature was quiet and steady, preferring to reflect before acting, growling before barking. He was a geologist, and I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t dirt beneath the crescents of his fingernails or mud tracing the treads of his boots. We spent family vacations visiting canyons, geysers, and mountain ranges. “Look,” he would say, directing our attention to a valley formed by the creeping movement of glaciers thousands of years ago. “Isn’t that amazing?”

Snippet of a parasite

Still Untitled

Grace put Doris in a large, empty mayonnaise jar, the kind they only sell at the bulk stores where everything is cheaper, but more than you ever wanted in the first place. She had cleaned the jar out a week before the procedure to be ready, and now, Doris sat, or floated rather, in the cloudy water of the mayonnaise jar on Grace’s bedside table. Grace liked to watch Doris drift in the soft light of the lamp behind the jar that illuminated the milky water as she drifted off to sleep.

Grace’s doctor had advised her against keeping Doris.

“It’s a cestoda, Miss Henry. A regular Taenia saginata. Do you understand?”

Grace understood. She understood very well. It was a tapeworm. A common tapeworm that ran through over fifteen feet of her small intestines and had grown inside of her for almost three years. It was the parasite that had made her sick. It had made her nauseous in the mornings and just before bed. It had robbed her of so many vitamins and calcium that the doctors warned her of early osteoporosis. It was the doctors who didn’t understand.

Grace had come to them because she thought she was pregnant.