Pickle Juice by Kelly Pedro

When the water comes, it seeps through the windows. Dad says that’s because the windows are wood and rotten, just like Mom’s teeth, just like her breath that always smells like pickle juice and Mom hollers that if Dad keeps insulting her, she’ll turn him into liquid.

The pickle juice is for Mom’s leg cramps. She stands all day at a cash register ringing in people’s groceries and marvels at how they always buy something they don’t want or need. Once someone came in and bought all the banana-flavored Snapple in the cooler, slapped the bottom of each glass bottle, popping the seal, then returned them.

“Imagine all that perfectly good juice just going to waste,” she said after work one day while shelving her jars of pickle juice in the cupboard.

Dad hasn’t worked since he got sick fighting fires so now it’s just Mom that we rely on. He asked for compensation, but the city’s lawyers said Dad got sick from smoking not fighting fires, and a judge said they couldn’t be sure which was which and so now Dad spends most of his days in the bathroom crying while pretending to shave his bare face. He thinks I can’t hear because he runs the hot water and doesn’t bother cracking a window or running the fan. When he finally leaves the bathroom, a plume of steam follows him like a ghostly shadow. Mom always rushes into the bathroom after, but then she almost always rushes right back out and clutches her chest and says, “Jesus, I can hardly breathe in there.”

Dad makes mac and cheese for dinner, and it sits on my plate so long the cheese isn’t a runny sauce anymore but a congealed lump. Mom says processed food will kill me, and Dad says, “She can’t just eat pickles, Janice, at least I’m trying to feed her.” And Mom says, “‘bout time you did something around here”, then cracks open a jar of pickles, drops a handful of ice cubes into it, and shakes the jar like it’s a fine tumbler of whisky. She rubs my cheek before she heads upstairs to shower and it’s like I’m standing in the sun.

Dad throws the pot of mac and cheese in the sink and turns on the tap, filling the pot until the macaroni floats to the top like an aquarium of dead goldfish.

That night, it rains so hard the sewers overflow. When the rain stops the next morning, Dad pulls me through my bedroom window, and we sit on the roof and watch the police rumble through the swollen streets in dinghy’s, trying to corral floating caskets from the funeral home down the street. “School’s cancelled tomorrow,” he says, and I say, “no kidding,” and he cracks a smile and says, “maybe we should just cancel everything?”

Mom yells up that she’s heading to work. Her manager called and wants her to help protect the store from looters. I stand to go with her, but Dad stops me, tells Mom not to leave, if she opens the door she’ll flood the basement and make a mess of everything.

“Everything’s already a mess,” Mom says. Then we hear the door open, the gurgle of water rushing inside, the latch as the door clicks shut.

Dad shakes his head, and I ask him if he misses it.

“Miss what?” he asks.

“Saving lives.”

Dad watches the sluicing water down below and I wonder if he’s going to tell me he needs to shave, but instead he stands.

“I’m going to grab some towels and start cleaning up,” he says, and climbs back through my bedroom window.

After he leaves, I climb back inside too, but I don’t head downstairs. Instead, I sneak into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, where Mom’s left a soggy towel on her side of the bed. I lift it, and there’s a blob on the sheets where they’re soaked, and I want to crawl in and lie on the wet spot, but I don’t.

On Mom’s nightstand, there’s a jar of leftover pickle juice. I pick it up and swirl it, then take a long gulp. I choke as the warm pickle juice lights up my chest like flickering neon lights.

Outside their bedroom window, the sidewalks have disappeared, buried under roiling muddy water. My breath fogs the window, and I press my hand into it, then pull it away. Drops from the sweating window fill the gap that my palm has left behind, my hand like a ghost that’s here and then gone.

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KELLY PEDRO — Kelly (she/her) has won the CRAFT Literary Flash Prose Prize and was a 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow. Her fiction has appeared in CRAFT, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, New Flash Fiction Review, jmww, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and was shortlisted for the 2025 SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction and Room’s2022 Fiction Prize. She lives on the Haldimand Tract—land that was promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River. Learn more about her work at kellypedro.ca

Art by TINAMARIE COX — Tinamarie is an Arizona-based creative. Her written and visual work has appeared in many online and printed publications under various genres. Explore more of her work at: tinamariethinkstoomuch.com and follow her on social media @tinamariethinkstoomuch.