By Barbara Diggs
And here they go again, the family insisting that she accompany them to the beach this summer because Walt says she spends far too much time sunk in her old corduroy La-Z-Boy watching Matlock and Murder She Wrote and Colombo with all the shades drawn, not getting a lick of sunlight unless she steps out onto the porch to chat with the mailman, who only comes three times a week at best, and hasn’t Jonathan, LaTasha’s oldest, the one studying to be a pharmacist, told her time and again in so many words that Vitamin D is essential for a musty old bag of brown bones like herself, and won’t it feel good, Gamma, to breathe ocean air sitting in the shade of the umbrella, sipping Hawaiian Punch or eating Dee-Dee’s deviled-eggs, surrounded by family and watching the littlest girls pretend to be dolphins or mermaids in the surf, and all she can do is shake her head because she can’t explain that for her a beach is nothing but a battlefield crisscrossed with invisible lines, and they don’t understand that the whole time her eyes will be jumping around like sandflies, searching for the line in the ocean, the line in the sand, the line in God’s blue sky, just like she had to when she was a girl, back when even a stray gaze flying across the invisible line could trigger a beatdown like the one that killed that boy, like the one that made Willie talk funny and drag his leg till the day he died, like the one that gave her the moon-shaped scar over her eyebrow, and she knows folks say these lines don’t exist anymore, that the kids would say Oh Gamma in the way that they do, but she knows deep lines like that don’t just fade into nowhere, they’re still etched in her, so they must be etched somewhere out there too, waiting to spring up and surprise her, surprise everyone, and frankly, living through all that once was enough, so she’d just rather stay at home and watch the her crime shows where at least there’s a little bit of justice and all the lines are hard and bright and visible.
Barbara Diggs’s flash fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. Her stories have also won Highly Commended awards with The Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Awards and appears in the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology. She lives in Paris, France with her family.
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