Potsy
Exclusive Excerpt
. . .
Too afraid to move, I convinced myself I invented the word and repeated it inside my head to soothe myself like an obsessive compulsion or intrusive impulse. I even tried to hear a different word, but it persisted, Potsy, Potsy, Potsy… until I fell asleep counting each Potsy.
The next morning, I asked my mom, “What’s Potsy?”
She looked at me with her tired eyes, confused. “Ask your Dad.”
When I asked, him he said, “Oh, just an old game for kids, kinda like hopscotch. Why?”
“I just thought of it and wondered if it was real.”
Dad nodded and went on to explain the game. “Sometimes, they’d throw broken pottery or flat stones and other times coins or smashed cans, whatever they had available.”
“Eggs?” I asked, thinking of Millie.
“No, not eggs. Never eggs. Eggs would just roll way and get lost.”
I thought about the egg I gave Millie the day she died. That had been a game, too, one that turned out not to be any fun. None of the parents had packed a gold egg, and no one knew how it ended up there. They all knew Millie was too little for anything but soft chocolates and marshmallow eggs, yet the coroner cut Millie’s neck open to reveal the jawbreaker that had been hiding inside of the egg and then inside of Millie.
I only knew because I was very good at hearing all the things that I wasn’t supposed to hear. I saw where they stitched her throat closed before she went to live in the ground forever. I wasn’t supposed to see, but everyone was preoccupied, just like on the day Millie died. It was hard not to be curious, in search of something, so of course I pulled down the high collar of my dead sister’s dress and peeked as far as I could see.
Potsy came to my mom first, not long after Millie’s funeral, she just didn’t know its name. It was a game that wasn’t very fun, more like a compulsion. Her doctor kept prescribing her more and more pills because nothing would take her sadness away. Late at night, she would lock the bathroom door and line up all the bottles, there were five now, and she would decide which one to swallow whole. Afterward, she’d throw up all the pills and cry. She would lie to the doctor later and say, No, that one didn’t work either, so she could get more pills. She never actually took them, except all at once. She was saving them for the day Potsy would stop whispering in her ear—How can you be so selfish? Potsy didn’t want the game to end.
The game my dad played with Potsy was called euthanasia. They played Dad’s work because that’s where Dad had unlimited access to drugs strong enough to kill a horse. There was no fail system, just the turn of a key in the cabinet where the IV was kept next to the pentobarbital. He used it hundreds of times throughout his career. It would’ve been an easy game, but Potsy made Dad shake so much, he kept missing the vein in his arm. He would then lock the cabinet back up and let out a loud sigh that only he and Potsy could hear because they only played the game when Dad was alone, just like with me and Mom.
. . .
Read the full piece in issue 15
Kaci Skiles Laws is a closet cat-lady and creative writer who reads and writes voraciously in the quiet moments between motherhood and managing Crohn’s Disease. She was a 2023 winner for Button Poetry’s short form contest, and her short story “Eugene” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022 by Dead Skunk Mag. Her most recent poetry has appeared in 3Elements Review, River Teeth Journal, Blood Tree Literature, and elsewhere. Her poetry books, Strange Beauty and Summer Storms, are available on Amazon, and her most recent chapbook, Smile, Child, is available from Bottlecap Press. Her collection of two sentence horror stories and short fiction, Whose Hand Was I Holding?, was published in 2023. Find her at: https://kaciskileslawswriter.wordpress.com/