Runner-up, 2026 Contest for Flash CNF
Maybe those petty people are just being catty when they say adopt a cat instead, but you tell them you’ve already filled out the paperwork for a kid — an eleven-year-old boy with a file thick as a phone book, a single-spaced list of diagnoses you can’t pronounce. They say aren’t you brave. They say bless you. You smirk, shrug, because what do they know.
Then you study the medical histories, the photos of a boy’s smile bracing for rejection, and you make the hard choice. You say no to the cat, yes to the boy. Maybe the boy is wild — climbing curtains, pouncing and pacing. Those rubberneckers love your wreckage. They feed you I told you so’s like catnip. They become voices in your head: in the grocery line when he melts down in aisle seven, in Sunday School when he refuses to sit, in the school office when the principal says again.
You tell yourself you are bigger than adversity, stronger than trauma, above regret — until one night he asks if this is his forever home, and your mouth opens too slowly.
What if they were right? Maybe adopting a cat would have been in your wheelhouse. A cat could be fixed with hypoallergenic litter and laser toys. A cat wouldn’t ask impossible questions. Maybe wishing for easy is itself a betrayal.
What do they know about a child who hisses and scratches? Public scrutiny? Private doubt? What do they know about loving something you can’t return?
Tracie Adams, a retired educator and playwright, writes flash fiction and memoir from her farm in rural Virginia. She is the author of two essay collections, Our Lives in Pieces and Not Finished Yet. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, longlisted at Wigleaf Top 50, and published widely in literary magazines including Cleaver, Stanchion, Pithead Chapel, Fictive Dream, and more. Find her at tracieadamswrites.com and on X @1funnyfarmAdams.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Enoch Leung
So beautifully written. “Those rubberneckers love your wreckage” hits especially hard.
I think this is a poignant and hard-hitting piece, Tracie!
Ohmigod, the heading alone wouldn’t have made it past a sensitivity reader. But an entire Flash CNF editorial team of editors and readers who went on to not only accept this piece but nominate it as a contest runner-up winner? Wow.
This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative that’s been centered for way too long. The thinly veiled saviorism and virtue signaling couched as cynicism for the “petty people.” Heck, I think the only thing this piece stopped short of was throwing in a blue plaid animal collar and talk of euthanasia after “the boy’s” meltdown in aisle seven.
And then to come full circle from that title to that closing line of “loving ‘something’ you can’t return” at the end?! Oh my. It’s no wonder we adoptees grow up to hiss and scratch when we read stuff like this. Ugh.
But at least now when people ask me why I write, I can point them here.
Wonderful! Love the title, love hot it pulled at my heart.
As an adoptee, I found the title possibly the most offensive headline I have ever seen. Comparing a child to an animal is a choice, but wow, certainly not a choice an educated and attuned adoptive parent would make. My heart aches for this child.
This is but are the most tone deaf article I have read anywhere possibly ever. First, comparing children to animals is loathsome. Second, your final paragraph tells a lot about who you are: the “it” that’s can’t be returned is a person without agency, options, or, clearly, a decent parental figure.
This is an absolute disgrace.
I’m embarrassed by my rage typos (never use a phone when reactive), but I’m not the only one who should be embarrassed. Hippocampus had NO readers who flagged this for what it is?
“You tell yourself you are bigger than adversity, stronger than trauma, above regret — until one night he asks if this is his forever home, and your mouth opens too slowly.” This is looking in a mirror and seeing nothing.
Adoption is not a “gift,” it is not a “good deed,” and it is especially not centered on the adults who choose to adopt. Being adopted means you lost everything, literally, and then had a random stranger take you in. You don’t get to choose who that random stranger is. If the stranger then centers themself in the narrative, you, as the adoptee, are not being seen.
Adoptees are not “lucky” that they were adopted. Adoptees are placed in the worst situation imaginable, and then perhaps offered a decent alternative. But so often, not a decent one at all.
This is not to say being the adoptive parent of a PERSON (not a cat-adjacent option) can’t be very tough. It can. I am the adoptive mother of two sons.
But the language of this piece shows such an utter lack of awareness that it literally took my breath away – and not in a good way.
If you can’t pronounce the diagnoses then learn them. Educate yourself. If you answer “too slowly ” when asked by a child in pain if you’re their “forever home,” then what work have you been doing on yourself to answer that question well ahead of time? This is dereliction of parenting, which this child has had more than enough of already. This possibly difficult, sad, abandoned, in pain child. This “something you can’t return.”
There are ample resources for adoptive parents who struggle, and many more resources provided by adoptees who can attest to the experience from a first-hand point of view. I hope the author takes advantage of all of them. I hope this child is OK.
I hope they never read this piece.
Actually you can rehome a kid, and many adoptees have been. Some more than once. We lose in the comparison to rescue animals, however, because most kittens and puppies get to stay with mom for 6-8 weeks instead of less than 24 hours. Happy to connect you to adoptee spaces if you want to learn more.
Your story cuts to the core.
Thank you for writing this, Tracie.
Thank you for reading! ♥️
Beautiful, Tracie!
I appreciate you!🙏🏼