Going Once, Going Twice

They’ve stuffed everyone thigh to thigh into that windowless gymnasium. Dusty sunlight seeps in through the slits in the metal rafters, and the woman feels like she’s among a bunch of fish, salted and deboned and patiently waiting for someone to peel the lid back, please!

The woman’s child, gripping a wooden gavel, stands on an apple box at the podium. The child wears a tuxedo suit custom made by the child’s grandmother specifically for the occasion. The grandmother has those types of skills with which women are thought to come pre-programmed. Like how to sew, bake a cake, and bandage a skinned knee. The types of skills the woman never learned. This has made the woman an undesirable candidate for the “Borrow My Mother” charity auction. 

The child clacks the gavel on the block and the crowd rolls to quiet. The woman is certain some of the children bidding growl at her and snarl. They’re using the piles of cash handed over to them by their parents and they’re already hungry for a new mother to manage and love. The woman watches her child wait for silence to settle in, and she admires her brave boy. The child’s fingers don’t even shake. Hers on the other hand are slick and trembling. One of the other mothers getting auctioned off offered her a bottle of water earlier, but her hands have stayed too shaky to actually drink it.

“Don’t, for a second, let them know you’re scared,” advised the other mother.

The woman laughed.

“No, really,” the other mother said.

So, the woman has stayed parched, sitting on her hands, while she waits to see what kind of dough she’s worth.

The woman’s child leans into the mic and begins rattling off the bullet points they agreed to earlier: good listener, can help you manage your allowance, will make the bed. She and the child decided to throw that last one in at the last minute. The woman chews on her bottom lip and scans the crowd for interested parties. Any takers?

None. Other than loud slurps off nearly empty juice boxes, the room is close to silent. Someone coughs, another smacks their gum, blows a huge bubble, and cracks it.

The child wobbles on the apple box, which rocks imperceptibly to everyone but the woman. And the woman remembers the time she walked into the child’s room, bringing a glass of water for the handyman. He was older and had a bad back, he explained, as he white-knuckled the ladder, climbing to the highest rung to replace the bulb in the child’s chandelier. The woman had walked in and caught the boy’s face right as, in one swift motion, he kicked the ladder over.

The child has gone off script now. “She’ll let you play with glitter,” he offers. “And she’ll super glue the head back on your Stretch Armstrong. She’ll buy you full-size candy bars and clip your toenails.” He’s flailing. “She’ll Play Power Rangers. Build Hot Wheels tracks. She can do waffles. Brownies. Pot roast. Your homework.” The paddles begin to rise.

When it’s all over, the child smacks the gavel down hard and yells “Sold!” He joins the crowd in applause as a beefy boy with dried chocolate in the corners of his lips and biceps far too large for a kid his age, meets the woman at the edge of the stage. She’ll be the kid’s “mother” for a week. The woman doesn’t glance back at her son over her shoulder. She already knows the face he’s making.

“Because I wanted to see what would happen,” the boy had said when the woman asked him why he’d kicked the ladder.

Laci Mosier is a poet and fiction writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been nominated for Best Small Fictions anthology (2021) and named a finalist for Bellingham Review's Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Maine Review, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, American Journal of Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Rejection Letters, and others. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.