Vertigo, Matthew Sutton

Johnnie held the card closed, creased over her middle finger. After some time and by an act of her thumb, she opened the card and reread the words.

Johnnie, your vertigo and the anniversary of Cooper’s passing—two reasons to let you know I’m thinking of you.

Love, Your Brother.

Clasping the card, she brought her hand to her mouth and stifled a grievous ebullition. The movement was detached from her will as if she had been manipulated by the whim of a deft puppeteer.

Her husband’s thudding footsteps preceded him. “Morning, hun.” Two hairy-knuckled hands came to rest on her shoulder, and Doug planted a breathy kiss on her cheek.

Johnnie winced, but her gaze remained forward, out the back window. Beyond the chicken-scratched Bermuda grass and over the gentle lake, the day made its morning lustrations, cleansing itself of the night. Sunlight flickered through undulant tree-tops while dissonant tweets and whistles from dining birds kept rhythm with the dull hum of a far-off boat.

“I’m thinking eggs,” Doug said. Johnnie’s mouth cinched tight, a futile attempt to smile, amplifying the delta of wrinkles flowing from each corner of her lips.

Johnnie and Doug had two hens. They used to have three, but a couple of years ago, one had been run over. As Johnnie descended the porch stairs, she recalled the day Jenny, the Ameraucana, was hit by the 4Runner. Cooper, her son, had left the front gate open, and Jenny, who was keen on escape, ran blindly into the grill of an oncoming SUV. A severely broken leg caused her bloody rump to gyrate wildly with each step as if she were some Vodou dancer possessed by the pounding of a drum. As she died, Cooper’s detached gaze and emotional absence confirmed Johnnie and Doug’s suspicions. Back then, it was not yet an “epidemic”; they had never heard of Fentanyl or Narcan.

A distant ringing in Johnnie’s ear accompanied her to the coop. The hens were broody as usual, but Johnnie was patient and gentle—she knew their pain, “us mothers of dead children.”

She collected three brown eggs and, using her shirt to carry them, returned to the porch. On the first step, the ringing in her ears intensified, but the puppeteer willed her forward. On the second came a wave of nausea. She lurched hard to the left and became terribly aware of her own fleshy agency, her impotence. The strings had been cut loose. A single egg fell from her shirt as she stumbled onto the porch landing. Albumen and yolk leaked from the cracked egg onto the porch like overdose spittle onto a T-shirt.

MATTHEW SUTTON works as a Machine Technician in Greenville, South Carolina. His story, “Vertigo,” is his first published work, and about it, Sutton says, “This story has three distinct points of genesis: an odd letter found at a Buddhist vihara in my hometown, a gruesome scene involving a family of geese on a highway, and a story titled “J.J. FTW,” written by Karen Tucker and published in The Yale Review. Each one of these points, whether witnessed or read, elicited strong emotional reactions and left indelible marks upon my mind. I intended to write separate stories inspired by each, but through the picture of the broken egg, the three inspirations were woven together to create ‘Vertigo.’”