14 Sunday Feb 2021
The magic turtle, the most powerful animal in the swamp, failed to use his power to save the other animals from the Burmese python. After the behemoth was freed, the magic turtle stood on a very high and guarded platform to lecture the ravenous apex predator.
13 Saturday Feb 2021
The Saturday night before Valentine’s Day, there was a sharp rapping on Ms, Myska’s door. By the time she slipped on both of her face masks, her face shield. her gloves, the visitor had gone. On her doormat was a red foil gift bag with tufts of tissue paper jutting out. She looked in all directions, but there was no one in the hallway of her apartment building. She retrieved the package, stepped back inside, and applied the deadbolt.
She set the package on her hall tree bench. She gently removed the tissue paper to reveal a large box that smelled faintly of something rich and sweet – chocolate. She removed the box from the bag: “St. Basil Gift Box Assorted Specialty Chocolates.” There was a card. All it said was “Tony.”
She had met Tony Lasko, the ice cream man, months ago, when he drove his truck through the neighborhood. After he became sick from the coronavirus, she had not heard from him. And after more virulent strains had entered the population, she was even more reticent to go outside. She doubted she would have met him out anyway.
She took off her disposable gloves and sat on her sofa beside her window, the window where she had first seen the ice cream truck go by. She hugged the chocolates of her motherland to her chest.
10 Wednesday Feb 2021
Along the shore of his lake in the city of lakes, he fashions boats from waxed paper, affixes huge tissue heats to the corners, sets candles inside and lights them so that the miniature craft are drawn along on the dark water. Lovers pay fifty cents to see their boats glowing and drifting only to witness their incineration somewhere near the opposite bank, the cinder and ash ascending into the grey twilight, the smell of burnt paper, like kindling that flames and is quickly gone, filling the air, an acrid, comforting smell of home fires and warmth.
No one asks him any questions about the meaning of all of this or how or why he started, nor does he think of it too much. He thinks only of the delicate feel of the tissue, the lightness of the string, the slippery paper smoothed and sealed by wax, the fire on the water, the lovers’ faces as they stare at what they have paid for, prompted by who knows what, fascinated to see what becomes of their boat though they all must know what will be so why do they stay to watch? It is a mystery. Are they sad or satisfied somehow in the justification about their beliefs about tissue and hearts and fire, or had they hoped to see their boat, of all others, land safely on the other side?
Every night a woman who brings him a snack of rice and vegetables wrapped in a tortilla pays him fifty cents to place something small in her boat – tiny babies from Mardi Gras cakes, bodkins she wore in her hair when she was a girl, pieces of wool from her sewing basket in which she keeps materials to make socks for soldiers, crosses she buys in packets of ten, pieces of kibble. She always has a prayer and dedication which she asks the man to recite though every night he protests he does not have his glasses and every night she gives him her late husband’s readers from the nightstand. As the boat floats out, he says her prayers for the soldiers, the young life, the married couple, the single women, the woman herself and her cat and her grandchildren.
One night, he found himself reading a prayer in which he was the subject. He had set a boat in the water containing a gold heart. He snatched the boat back, soaking his trousers. He retrieved the heart. This is my gig, he said gruffly, as if she had taken something from him. She asked for his blessing upon the heart. She asked him to kiss it. Instead, he chucked it out into the lake with all of his force where it plunked into the dark center and disappeared. They stood for a moment, the frogs screeching in judgment. It’s time to get a move on, he said. People are waiting. Indeed, a line had formed and that was the last night he saw her.
Every night he was hungry for the food she gave him and every night he had nothing to wonder about, what she would put into her boat, how she would ask him to pray, the feel of her late husband’s glasses upon his nose. How he missed that feel, strangely enough, and the strange prayers she had written, not like the coherent prayers he knew, but her erratic thoughts upon a subject, not a petition, but a statement as if she were telling someone how things were. He missed it.
And so he collected things for her, things he thought she would like, things he liked too, things forgotten and dusty in closets, things from childhood and a career and family from another life, and he put them in boats and watched the boats burn and sink with prayers on his lips uttered in a strange tongue, her way of speaking and thinking that had become his way of addressing God. He believed himself capable of finding that gold heart had only there been money for proper equipment and younger lungs. In its depths the dark lake held his gift and he did not mourn but for the first time understood why couples waited until they saw what they knew would come to pass, and that in the waiting they anticipated what was most beautiful, a beginning and an end, all at once.
20 Wednesday Jan 2021
There is nothing more satisfying than to fall asleep to a dying candle only to awake to a burnt wick. Something old has gone, something new has come.
There is nothing more satisfying than to wake to remember the words you were trying to say, words your broken heart prevented you from recalling. When you wake from your brokenness, you go straight to your notebook to take the words down in a rush.
There is nothing more satisfying than a parade. Everyone is laughing. Everyone is cheering. Everyone is dancing. Well, almost everyone. The ones whose fears cosset them in sadness, anger, and regret will warm slowly to the clowns who produce candy, flowers, and doves. Even the fear filled ones in jail cells, even the fear filled ones in hiding places – abroad and at home – will wake to an unexpected grace. And after the parade, all will spend years at a banquet, feeding their families and healing their bodies.
There is nothing more satisfying than a child speaking of her grandfather, the great liberator. She speaks to an echo of a dream, buried but not forgotten, to white and to black, to all shades of beauty between. She stands at the microphone and the crowd is hushed, the children are thrilled: One of their own brings hope from a forgotten country.
There is nothing more satisfying than to wake from a dream of your father. You have sliced your own hand with a kitchen knife and to hold it together and help it heal, he will take you to the hospital. He is the same father of your childhood who allowed you to brush his hair with a tiny brush. He and your mother made you a beautiful dollhouse many Christmases ago. You are divorced now and middle aged. Your houses have all been sold or broken. But in the dream, your aged father sees you through to the end.
03 Sunday Jan 2021
Every now and then I will receive a request for a funeral in the tradition of the old ways. In rural, agricultural Florida there is an older generation whose families have passed down stories and practices of funerary traditions in which the body is laid out in the dining room upon an unhinged door for viewing. What is not so well known is that various beliefs have arisen around this practice. What started out as a practice necessitated by the lack of resources for handling the deceased, has, in some family circles and regional subcultures, become a religious rite, even a godly demand.
I came to live and practice in Belle Glade or “Muck City” just south of Lake Okeechobee when I graduated from mortuary school. I had not planned on this profession but it had became necessary during a depression as a result of the pandemic. My adopted town was named “Muck City” because of the “muck” in which sugar cane grows. When the agriculture changed from farming vegetables to growing cane, many lost their livelihood and the area became depressed, crime ridden. But every city needs someone to handle their dead, dead from the pandemic, dead from murder, dead from complications of drugs and malnutrition.
The area considered the Florida Heartland is more like the deep south than other parts of Florida. And it is here where, among some pockets of Bible Belt believers, superstitions abound and religious beliefs intermingle with old time practices. It had become common among certain people to believe that a too early enclosure of the body in a solid box would not allow the spirit to grieve its own passing, would risk that the spirit would re-animate the body and would cause the corpse made alive again to live the horror of being buried alive. Therefore the old and seemingly defunct practice of laying a body out on a door for viewing was of great importance to such populations. In addition, the act of the dead lying on a door had become a sort of practiced fulfillment of the words of Jesus: “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved.” In addition, cremation was beyond the question. Again, Biblical verses were employed to explain the rationale: “Our earthly bodies are planted in the ground when we die, but they will be raised to live forever.” What happens when Christ comes again if there is no body, if it is burned?
I began to observe closely the faces of the deceased and try to discern their aspects to see if I could determine “rest” or “unrest,” to try to compare post death funerary rituals. In most cases, I was able to convince these fundamentalist families to allow their beloved dead to be laid out on a door in our refrigerated storage facility as opposed to the old school – and frankly, unsanitary way of letting it sit in their dining room or parlour – and so this gave me opportunity to make my observations. I had lost my wife in the pandemic a couple of years ago and so had no one else to answer to. We had no children. I lived in the craftsman home converted and dedicated to my business “Peaceful Rest.” Legally, it was not allowed for me to live where I plied my trade, but I secretly managed with a cot and a small electric stove, as well as a separate address, a post office box, where I retrieved my mail.
Two clients, a couple, had a fight over how they were to bury the husband’s mother. It was early in my practice and I was incredibly nervous over how to handle these kinds of situations. My job was to soothe the anxious, grieving spirits of the living, to be a reassuring presence, to provide some sort of authoritative mediation of differences. Apparently, the woman had become quite close to her husband’s mother and of course the husband was feeling his own loss deeply. The wife’s family had practiced the old ways of Appalachia and she insisted her mother-in-law had spoken about the beauty of these old beliefs and practices. The deceased was born and raised in Georgia and grew up in many of the old customs, still practiced by some.
The husband was a successful businessman, one of the city’s few, and saw such practices as primitive, arcane, and certainly only for those who are uneducated. He had in mind to cremate her and had been looking through options for urns while his wife tearfully implored him not to be rid of her body. I was able to find a middle way: A more traditional yet relatively modern casket viewing, ceremony, and burial. The wife still seemed unsettled by this, but was not quite as frantic, and the husband acquiesced to this seemingly more conciliatory way of interring his mother.
On the day of the viewing, several hours before, the body of the old woman having been prepared, dressed, and placed in the casket, the lid closed until the hour for visitors, I awoke to a dark silhouette against the window of my office where I slept. There was no noise, only a shifting figure of something dark lingering in the room in the earliest break of day. “Louisa?” I said, thinking somehow that it may be my deceased wife. But there was no response. I felt as if my heart might pierce my chest. I watched with a sense of foreboding but must have drifted to sleep at some point for when I woke, my office was flooded with light and there was no dark shadow. I had no sense of dread. I made my coffee and prepared for the day.
In the quiet time before the body was set out in the viewing room, I would go over everything and make sure of the makeup, the proper placement of the jewelry and hair, the collar, cuffs of the blouse.
But when I entered the refrigerated storage room, I saw that the lid of the casket of the deceased woman had been tossed aside and the corpse’s wig lay on the floor like a discarded mop head. Looking back, what should have occurred to me first is that there had been a robbery or some act of vandalism and desecration. What actually occurred to me was that an undead corpse, suffocating in a box, had made its escape, and was out in Muck City, seeking shelter, food, and family.
01 Friday Jan 2021
There once was a woman who wanted unconditional love from her father, the King. Yet, somehow, she had been consigned to polishing his crown, shining his shoes, preparing his royal throne. No one knew how this came about, not even the woman herself for while she should have been asking herself this question, she was busy focusing on what he said, how he thought, what she could do to finally cause him to love her without conditions. When she was a little girl, he loved her blond curls. And maybe, thinking back on it now as she made the a feast for the royal family, he loved her silence.
As many teen princesses will do, they will both attempt to please their royal parents and to rebel. It was hard to work out where Father and Mother ended and where a teen began, so such princesses pull away to see what happens, to try to detect the division, to confirm it actually exists, and to find out if love exists when there is separation. This young lady learned early that love does not always exist when you pull away. But there had still been hope for her: She could marry royally, and so she did, though there were still demands to appear at court, to raise children in royal traditions, and never tarnish the name of King and Queen.
As time went on, and the fanfare of royal weddings and the celebrations of royal births were distant memories, the woman met a kitchen mouse who whispered to her secrets about other worlds, other realities, places where children were valued for simply being alive. This perspective opened a door in the mind of the aging, royal princess, a special room she could return to again and again, an imaginary world where children were messy and chaotic, parents didn’t always have answers, and families simply gathered and let conversation unfold. The princess was so engaged with this dream she became inattentive for large portions of the day. Her children were grown and so there was only her husband to care for, but she forgot to order food and press his clothes. She didn’t attend royal gatherings and she didn’t attend to her father.
The ineffectual princess stumbled upon an island during one of her royal visits to the colonies, a visit her father insisted she take to clear her mind and restore her sense of duty to the Kingdom. And yet, the island struck her as a perfect place to daydream. What’s more, she met people on the island who liked to daydream too. Their conversations were free and easy. They took long, meandering walks. They sat for hours, simply waiting for the sun to set. They did not wait for special occasions to celebrate. Every day was a celebration. They were like children together and she insisted they were not treat her as a princess.
Word came from her Father the King by royal messenger on a royal boat: Come back or be forever disowned. Expect Me to never approve of your life forthwith. Your Husband has already deserted you as reason dictates. You will receive no Royal Inheritance nor Title. I will always treat you as a peasant, a mere servant for your disobedience, your lack of loyalty to God’s Anointed.
It occurred to the princess that she was already a peasant behind closed doors. And she was in a worse situation than a peasant because everyone assumed she was being treated as a princess. She laughed so hard the messenger departed, confused and offended.
It didn’t take long for her grown children to visit. They were shocked by her casual attire and attitude. Her son lectured her and her daughter became watchfully silent. But the princess begged them to spend time with her, to not let their discomfort dictate an immediate departure. They relented, and over time, they began to relax with the ebb and flow of the tide, with the free form of island life. She watched something new arise in them, a comfort in speaking with her more naturally. This state of circumstances felt like the dream life the kitchen mouse had whispered to her years ago.
“Mom, I don’t want to be a prince,” said her son. “I don’t want to be next in line to the throne.”
And her daughter said: “I want to be an artist, I have many dreams.”
To my readers: I am a writer of dark stories but I will not insist all dreams are tarnished by darkness. I believe in whispering kitchen mice. And I believe in bright islands where there is love and acceptance, even joy. And as silly as it sounds for dark writers to say so, I believe in a better new year, even if I am proven wrong. I don’t know, exactly, what happened in this family of this little story of mine. And I don’t know what the grown children eventually became, and where they decided to live, and how they relayed these decisions to the Throne and the Kingdom’s subjects. I don’t know how long the princess lived after finding freedom and happiness. But I argue for the open ending. We don’t know, do we, what will happen in our world. We are suffering, yes, but there may be an island, a space between the pain in which we draw breath, long enough to dream of something: What could be.
18 Friday Sep 2020
I think of the Florida Gulf coast in this hurricane season. I wrote this story several years ago and published with an Australian journal. Growing up, it meant everything to me to learn how to fish in the Panhandle during the summer and sell crabs on the roadside. “Ladybug’s” passion for the sea and its creatures are modeled loosely on experiences I had with my aunt. Be well. — Meg
Her chair is a basket weave of rainbow, her floppy hat a mushroom cap. Every day she sits under the Australian pine, her thin legs stretched out toward the bay, heels dug into the soft sands of Anna Maria Island.
She speaks to birds. She tells them where to find mollusks, greenies, pinfish, tube worms, anemones, mullet, stonecrab, blue crab, fiddlers, spot, black drum, croakers, ballyhoo. The longer-legged wading birds walk along the shallow areas, knobby knees clear of the water for more than a hundred feet out. They are her friends: the common egret, the snowy egret, the white ibis, the roseate spoonbill, the great blue heron. When one of the larger birds is near, she speaks in soft tones. She embraces their world through her sympathy.
Sometimes she helps a grounded boat. She walks out on the bar and dislodges sand from the propeller. She gives the careless boaters a map, shallow areas at low tide drawn with her red pencil, the channel markers with an x. Had they had her aboard, she could have helped. But the birds need her more.
Once a week her daughter visits. She says Mother I really don’t think you should… and Mother I don’t think it’s wise that you… and Mother why don’t you try to see if you can… and Ladybug, for that’s her name among the locals, says “Umm hmm” until her daughter leaves for the city. The birds listen to her complaints. They nod their silent ascent.
When her son comes, he casts his rod, the only sound the fine unspooling of the line from the reel. She has taught him all she knows about fish and where they feed and when, the patterns of the tides, what he can find just by looking and what he has to know, too, in a deeper sense.
Her husband died pursuing shrimp. He allowed her to navigate while he went below to haul in the catch: At that time, the highest compliment any man could give a woman of a fishing persuasion. Superstition had it that this killed him. She did not remind them he died saving one of their own, a crew member entangled in a net.
During the long days she grieved him, she dreamed of pregnant nets, the breeze in her hair, her husband’s strong neck, the feel of his unshaven face against her cheek in a private moment. His expectation that she could endure anything, could do what she must, helped her survive. She sensed him with her, protecting her still and she began to understand something like faith.
Once her children were raised and gone, once the town forgave and forgot, she became Ladybug, a woman who talks to birds, a woman who graced the town – the grocery, the bar, the peel ‘n eat, the library, everywhere – with a red bug tattoo on the bone of her wrist.
First appeared in Pure Slush
18 Friday Sep 2020
I found a motel on St. Pete run by a quiet German couple. Earlier that day upon my arrival to town, I had deposited the money from the policy with no fanfare.
At check in I wore the black of a widow. I was very quiet, subdued, some might even say I seemed to be appropriately mourning.
On my first evening I wore to the pool a conservative kaftan, had a drink from the bar only at the cocktail hour and only one.
The police had questioned me a few days ago when my late husband died but only to rule me out, had made note of an alibi.
There would have been only the one motive, though a considerable one: the sizable life insurance policy.
After the questioning, I had to survive the duties – the mourning wife, funeral director, hostess and I was surprised I had it in me to be so cold and unfeeling. But all I had to remember was my husband’s iron grip on my arm, the bruising, the years of indignities, and I was a woman of steel. Before I left town I paid the death expert, my white knight.
At the beach, my first sunset there, how good the warm breeze felt on my cheek as I followed the path between the dunes, the setting sun on my back, the knowledge of the money tucked away in my account, my German hosts polishing my car in the lot.
There was a little brick hut apparently for storing beach equipment along the path. And beside it, a small concrete outcropping where five smooth black cats lounged.
What did they know? I thought to myself, amused. Very little.
On the beach as the sun fell I must have drifted asleep.
I woke up in the darkness to mewling and purring beside me. The cats, I thought.
One had pressed its lips to mine. I couldn’t move. It had taken all my breath, its yellow eyes penetrating the dark.
I woke, gasping for air. It had been a nightmare.
I sighed in relief and returned to my room. The next day, a group of them waited for me outside my door. I could barely pass to get breakfast.
I was not able to stay at St. Pete without the cats following me, more and more of them. It made me feel conspicuous and self conscious. And of course people looked at me.
I moved to another beach town further north and stayed inside most of the time but found they clustering near the door though I never fed them. They followed me when I went to to the grocery or to town, crowding in, harassing, mewling, hissing.
It’s been months now and I’m half crazed. To be honest, I hope to die.
17 Thursday Sep 2020
The heat from the oven blasted her face. The blackened salmon was cooking nicely in the cast iron skillet, a deep rich glaze of soy and sweetener and garlic thickening under the broiler. How simple it had been to make from a frozen filet. A sweet potato was turning in the microwave.
She sat at her coffee table that conveniently lifted to table height and took her first bite of the dark pink flesh. How could life be so hard yet so simple?
She had managed to find a diabetic alternative to honey for the recipe: monkfruit sweetener. And yet, she could not tell a difference. That was what it was about: Challenge, opportunity, response, every ounce of her a scrappy animal, cancerous body parts removed in the fight, depression not an option.
And yet, her sister was well yet struggling too. They spoke frequently. And she had a good relationship with her son who had his own challenges. Her aging dog would need a vet visit soon which may lead to expensive steps to help her maintain. Storms were beginning to rip through the state. Fall always brought beauty and natural chaos and disaster.
She and her sister talked on the phone after she received word of the necessity of a biopsy. She was sitting in her car in the parking lot of a donut shop. She planned to get coffee and cream and as usual these days, eschew the donuts and bagels. She would wait to go through the drive thru until after they had dissected the situation.
There was at least this morale boosting conversation in her life. And there was this, something they laughed about but knew all too well from birth: They were made of survivor blood.
Ok, so that little “story” or vignette was about me, lols. I even tried to post it multiple times today because I haven’t mastered the new WordPress editor so if you’re seeing it in different forms and rearranged, know it’s been under construction.
Maybe someday I will make this into more of a layered story, but for today, I thought, why not share a recipe along with a little writing? It will keep me creating both food and fiction during this challenging time.
This recipe of sweet and savory salmon is quick, inexpensive, delicious, and healthy. If you don’t like salmon, I have other fish dishes I will share. Occasionally, I am going to try to share recipes you can use from your freezer or pantry. Please try this even if you think you are not a salmon lover. The delicious sauce masks some of the strong oiliness that can be a challenge and you might be converted after all.
I have to always try to find honey and sugar alternatives because of eratic sugar levels. I love honey and it would be a perfect just as called for in this recipe. But it is not necessary for the flavor or thickening of the sauce. Monkfruit sweetener can be easily and affordably secured online and is often a substitute for sugar. It has the reputation of not spiking blood sugar levels. Though like all such products, it is probably best consumed in extreme moderation. It is handy to have on hand for a pinch here or there.
Salmon filets are nice to have in the freezer, and you don’t need the crème de la crème with recipes like this. Mine come in a pack of multiple filets, skin on. Most salmon recipes are fairly of forgiving of skin and once cooked, it easily releases without need of special knives though I just serve it as is and eat the meat. I do have some recipes or methods to use in cooking with frozen filets with a variety of fish but most of the time it is preferable to thaw. Most fish filets do not take long to thaw and you can do this overnight or on the counter day of. Just be very careful not to forget about it, making it dangerously unhealthy. If you make a mistake, throw it out and start again with another filet. When the fish is thawed, use it same day and don’t refreeze. See link below. Enjoy.
13 Monday Jul 2020
Condensation by Eddie Welker, flickr
In Florida in the summertime, we populate the windows of the sleeping. We cling to glass, climb up and out, searching for a view to the inside of homes. We blanket cars, cover toys and bikes left outside, grass, bushes, flowers. Even roller coasters and theme parks, shells, driftwood, ocean piers. We bring rot and disintegration, destruction. But we are slow in our action.
We are a cousin to fog which in winter and spring is created by warm air rising from the earth at night, at times when there is no cloud cover to swaddle it to the ground and hold it in. Or it springs to being when warm air from the Gulf moves over the cooling peninsula encouraging our cousin fog. Or sometimes these two fortuitous events occur together and a thick blanket is formed.
We are warm air meeting cool. We exist at the point of contradiction.
We knew the earliest Americans, the Spanish Conquistadors who killed them with disease, fugitive and free slaves, the Seminole Indians, the early Florida cowboys whose cows were affectionately blanketed by moist droplets as they lowed and grazed in pastures of spreading oak draped with Spanish moss. Our cousin fog knew the first orange crops and trains which carried their yield.
We cling to Ms. Myska’s window of day 122 of the worldwide pandemic of 2020. She has secreted herself away inside her apartment, her air conditioning humming. She is one miniscule human dot on a teaming landmass which was nonetheless larger when the earth contained more frozen water. Back then, it was a time when things were drier, when Florida was less humid. Now, Ms. Myska lives in a jungle with roller coasters down the street, tourists from Germany who come to see alligators in cages, families who watch killer whales breach chlorinated waters.
We observe the moods of Ms. Myska in her little glassed in box. We observe her when she has spoken to her father on the phone, her sister, her son. We observe how these different interactions affect her. We observe when she is happy, when she is sad, when she cannot sleep, or when she sleeps all day.
We observe when she must put on a face covering to do an errand in her yellow car she parks out front in the lot. We observe when she opens the screen on her tabletop and speaks with faces or turns on the screen on her wall and simply observes faces and people moving around some artificial set.
The world will come to naught. It will rot, disintegrate, be destroyed. On the news of the world on Ms. Myska’s screen, people are wheeled from their homes on stretchers. People are put on machines in hospitals where they fight for every breath, where they fight mentally with hallucinations, with demons. They lose all contact with the outside world. Those most sensitive to this may die of broken hearts more than flooded lungs. It is unknown the comparatively deleterious effects of either. The ones who survive come back as if from war.
We are reasonably sure of our own existence, of continued moisture in the air, in oceans and other bodies unless of course the earth is thrown off its course. If we disappear we will go in a flash. Our demise will not be recorded on a screen yet we expect no recognition, no fanfare. There will be no one left to report our loss. We have no feelings about this. Our contingency is simply a fact of our existence.
We watch Ms. Myska shop compulsively on her screen with money she does not have out of anxiety for a dying world. She operates in a world of delusion but she always has. People always have. We say this not without affection. How much less interesting the world would have been without humans.
We cling to her windows and watch her and wait to disappear with the burning sun only to appear again in the early hours of morning as if in response to the call to matins. We say our prayers for the wee child Ms. Myska though she is an old woman. We pray our piece for her continuance, for her protection from disease as long as the Fates will allow. We even pray she would experience some measure of happiness not through her screens, but maybe through something small and real. Her little white dog perhaps. Or her gentle plants waiting patiently on her porch for a drink from her hand.
Grace only comes through what is small.
27 Saturday Jun 2020
Emma Forsberg, flickr
It had become ridiculous. Victor, a musca domestica, a common housefly, had gained passage into Ms. Myska’s apartment via the cellophane packaging of a crusty French loaf. The arrival of the groceries, having been scheduled to arrive at 11:00 a.m., had nonetheless caught Ms. Myska unawares for she had fallen asleep.
“Oh!” she said, starting bolt upright, realizing what had happened. Sure enough, the packages were on the threshold. All seemed well enough, however: All seemed in order and the milk and cream were cold.
Still, Victor had found his way in.
For days, he had bragged to Jasmine, the wild leg of a landscaping foundation plant and Ms. Myska’s porch plants – Flaming Katy and Donkey Ear – that he would find a way to observe what was happening inside and get fat from the dog food Ms. Myska put down for her little Coton.
What he hadn’t counted on was Ms. Myska’s sharp senses and reactions. Greedily, he had secreted himself away inside the cellophane for a quick snack of French bread crust while waiting for her to open the door and let him inside.
When Ms. Myska spotted him she shouted out in alarm, her second “Oh!” of the morning. She crushed him dead, instantly, while he darted about. His body was unceremoniously scraped away.
Though Ms. Myska hated this condition under which she would have to accept her bread, she acknowledged her responsibility.
Victor’s children were not far behind in gaining access for they had become concerned. He was a hard father to live with. He had never given them any breaks. Still, that did not mean they wished him dead. And he had meant his hard regimented style for their benefit as they would soon understand.
Like Victor, they all bragged to Jasmine and Donkey and Katie they would do what their father had not managed to do and live long and happy lives with Ms. Myska in their natural state of commensalism, giving birth to baby flies and getting fat.
What they had missed was the early cautionary and leavening influence of a mother who had died young while they were but pupae. “Know your limits” she would have whispered to them in their self contained infancy. “Don’t become too proud, for surely you will know death too soon.”
Victor’s children managed to ride in on packages and groceries, to squeeze in between cracks in the screened porch.
Ms. Myska kept her outside door open during certain hours of the summer to enjoy fresh air, to water and tend to her houseplants, Donkey, a succulent, and Katy, a Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, and it was mainly during these hours that Victor’s children managed to gain access.
Jasmine, the landscape plant on the other side of the porch, stepped in at times and said something. “Chillax” she hissed as she rode the waves of the wind. But they were too busy plotting their way to the grave.
“We all have self destructive tendencies,” Donkey Ear interjected sagely one afternoon from his place on the wrought iron shelf.
What did he know? thought Katy, laughing to herself. But it was so like him to sonorously opine with a wisdom beyond his abbreviated age. She allowed him this indulgence.
They would all die one day. Even Ms. Myska would die, thought Katy. They would all become husks while something inside would be set free.
Katy had heard a priest on tv read a revelatory passage from the text Ms. Myska read every morning: “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”
Katy often wondered about this. She wondered how there were some people who thought carefully of the nature and future of the earth. She wondered if she would be celebrating along with other plants, humans, and geologic formations called mountains.
She thought the passage a little too hopeful, but she tried to stay open. Maybe there would be a new earth one day. She had to admit humans seemed insanely hopeful sometimes. But Ms. Myska seemed ok. If she wanted to read it in her book and believe it who was she.
29 Sunday Sep 2019
Posted in Ms. Myska stories, original flash fiction
before the struggle to exist, there is presence: liquid painting by scott richard; flickr – torbakhopper
Florida Fall Ball was Ms. Myska’s favorite Little League baseball season. Her son used to play in the neighborhood league. He had long since graduated and moved to another city and yet there she was, working the concession stand, having kept a key. Not only that, she tidied the field and toilet, picked up the trash, wiped down the metal bleachers. The city janitor assigned to the park had been shooed away by a smiling Ms. Myska and the young mothers were also summarily dismissed when they tried to insist that she should be sitting outside, enjoying the weather. She merely smiled and turned the oil on for the fries, made the coffee. For all they knew, she kept a cot in there, they said to themselves.
By the end of each season the players and their parents had always developed a strange fondness for the rodent-like woman who scurried from task to task, never speaking much, never making much eye contact. They would have been surprised to know she remembered their concession preferences, knew their faces and voices, knew whether they were confident, shy, slow, smart, funny, knew who their friends were, knew their family members, beloved and otherwise. At Halloween, she gave each of them a candy she knew to be their favorite.
Little did they know that each summer, when they were vacationing, she was scurrying to the store for the secret ingredients to her chili. Making the chili every year made fall her favorite season for baseball. Who could resist a good chili on a cool evening? No one, and certainly no one who had tasted her version, contained as it was in a tiny bag of corn chips, the corn chips serving in lieu of pasta, the small bag a portable meal, ready to eat with a spork.
Nor did they know of her harvest moon night when she turned cartwheels in the field and tilted her head back and sang her full-throated songs. Other mysterious women, bodies worn from giving life and sustaining it, joined her, dancing, singing, drinking wine, running the bases and laughing until they ran up into the night sky and they transformed into other beings entirely, birds and butterflies and delicate moths. At daybreak, they became human again.
The season after Ms. Myska died, a young mother found a chili recipe in the cash box. “Make it with love,” the instructions said, “and you will be blessed.”
17 Tuesday Sep 2019
Posted in noir flash, original flash fiction
Misha Solkonikov, flickr
I found a motel on St. Pete run by a quiet German couple. Earlier that day upon my arrival to town, I had deposited the money from the policy with no fanfare.
At check in I wore the black of a widow. I was very quiet, subdued, some might even say I seemed to be appropriately mourning.
On my first evening I wore to the pool a conservative kaftan, had a drink from the bar only at the cocktail hour and only one.
The police had questioned me a few days ago when he died but only to rule me out, had made note of an alibi.
There would have been only the one motive, though a considerable one, the sizable life insurance policy.
After the questioning, I had to survive the duties – the mourning wife, funeral director, hostess and I was surprised I had it in me to be so cold and unfeeling. But all I had to remember was my husband’s iron grip on my arm, the bruising, the years of indignities, and I was a woman of steel. Before I left town I paid the death expert, my white knight.
At the beach my first sunset there, how good the warm breeze felt on my cheek as I followed the path between the dunes, the setting sun on my back, the knowledge of the money tucked away in my account, my German hosts polishing my car in the lot.
There was a little brick hut apparently for storing beach equipment along the path. And beside it, a small concrete outcropping where five smooth black cats lounged.
What did they know? I thought to myself, amused. Very little.
On the beach as the sun fell I must have drifted asleep.
I woke up in the darkness to mewling and purring beside me. The cats, I thought.
One had pressed its lips to mine. I couldn’t move. It had taken all my breath, its yellow eyes penetrating the dark.
I woke, gasping for air. It had been a nightmare.
I sighed in relief and returned to my room. The next day, a group of them waited for me outside my door. I could barely pass to get breakfast.
I was not able to stay at St. Pete without the cats following me, more and more of them. It made me feel conspicuous and self conscious. And of course people looked at me.
I moved to another beach town further north and stayed inside most of the time but found they clustering near the door though I never fed them. They followed me when I went to to the grocery or to town, crowding in, harassing, mewling, hissing.
It’s been months now and I’m half crazed. To be honest, I hope to die.
15 Sunday Sep 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
Rebirth of Cool, Mod and Skinhead Clothing, Dublin
At night, Billy sits with Brother John and the guys at their WAR house in the Panhandle as they watch the videos of the National Socialist Party. Billy always sits on the scratchy green tweed sofa that reminds him of his Granny’s but Brother John’s smells like earth and rain and the chocolate smell of mildew.
It is Hitler’s birthday. Mother Beulah has made a Nazi cake in the colors of the flag. She sets it on the oilcloth. Her arms are exposed and giggling like Granny’s. He imagines them soft to the touch. In the center of the sheet cake she had written in a thin chocolate scrawl: Happy Birthday, Hitler! Mama Beulah has arthritis and her hands weren’t steady but Brother John doesn’t fault her.
Billy gets a corner piece of the cake, where the piped chocolate icing has bunched up and there is a tiny SS bolt. Everybody is grabbing for the plates and tiny plastic forks. He pulls himself through sweat drenched boyhood, some bigger bodies too, shoving, the guys cackling and laughing. Mama never made a big cake like this. His birthday was on Halloween. She put a candle in a jacko-lantern. He blew it out. There was no one around.
Every night after dinner, they watch the videos of the Hitler youth in the Old Country, before The Second World War. They talk of the racial consciousness of the boy in the video who plays the drum so hard in the Hitler youth band, who looks like a live Little Drummer Boy from Billy’s nighttime book in the guest room at Granny’s. One of the guys, usually Grady, whose sideburns are so wide and long they’re almost a beard, always says that drummer kid’s got his shit together.
Grady wears black boots with red laces. Red laces mean something. Billy’s boots are red with black laces. If he grows up good in the movement and succeeds, he’ll get his blood laces and black boots.
Billy sneaks downstairs after the salute. The salute is when they stand and put an arm out to the Nazi flag on the wall and Brother John sings the anthem he plays on a cassette, a song about a pure white America. Brother John can’t sing and doesn’t always know the words but everyone has to put on a German helmet from the bin. No one smiles. You have to make your eyebrows bunch up and your eyes shaded. You have to sing very loudly and be serious and strong, like a soldier. When it’s over you have to say, very loudly, White Power!
One time they’d burned an American flag in the woods when the Klan came for speeches and a cross burning. They had a punk Nazi band play, definitely the kind of thing his stepfather hated, the sounds clashing like a car accident, screeching guitars, the band leader’s deep growls sounding like an animal. A force would take hold of Billy’s body and he would thrash about with the brothers in the heat and inky darkness, their bodies slamming into each other, girls watching from the fringes, silent and slouching.
He deserved to go to jail a few months ago, it was true. It had been while he was living with his Mama and Stepdaddy. He had held up a store with some friends and fired shots though no one got hurt. When he got out, only Brother John was there to make bail, along with Grady and a couple of guys his age, punk ass kids like him who were no longer wanted by their parents. His stepfather handed him over. He didn’t see his Mama again. He didn’t see his Granny. He didn’t hear the songs his Granny sang to him in her wavery voice, songs she sang to him at night about going to sleep, not worrying his head.
There is a mission that night of Hitler’s birthday, a ride along, an initiation of the new guys. He didn’t know about it beforehand. He is wrenched up from his bed by Brother John, his arm clamped by the same grip that held him sometimes against his will when secret things were happening, secret things even the other boys didn’t know about.
There is a group of the brotherhood in the pickup truck, the crickets and night frogs screeching all around, witnesses, and an owl its loud “hoo” insistent. They bump along in bed of the truck, Grady and another older guy, and another kid his age. Brother John is driving. The grand wizard has joined them, the wizard who always insisted from podiums in speeches they were about nonviolence. Billy asked him once after a ceremony about the noose patch on his robe. The wizard merely glared at him, his face severe under a pointed hat decorated with stars.
When they get to a house in the woods, there are some other skinheads there already with sawn off shotguns. They busted in and hauled out a black man and laid him out behind the truck. The man’s wife runs outside, screaming. A skinhead with a the big fat gun they called The Judge cocks the piece against her skull. The skinhead bending over the black man has a chain over his shoulder.
“You two boys, you young’uns!” he says pointing to Billy and the other young kid in the back. “Time to step up and be men.”
“You heard him now,” says Brother John. “Time to get out now and earn your laces! Time to see something, be someone.”
The man with the chain tells the other boy to run the chain around the hauling hitch. Then he gives Billy the rest.
“It’s in your hands, son. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Billy thinks only of Brother John. Billy has no one. Nowhere he belongs. He would get his red laces and even the older guys would think he was a bad ass Nazi and no one would treat him like a baby.
Brother John and Grady hold the black man’s ankles. The man is kicking and screaming. Billy puts the chain around his ankles. Brother John hands Billy a lock to hold the chains in place. “It’s on you, son.” he says. “Let’s clean everything out now. Be a man.”
While the man kicks and screams, and Brother John yells at him, Deep inside, Billy hears his Granny’s gentle wavering voice singing Mary Poppins’ lullaby: “While the moon drifts in the skies, stay awake, don’t close your eyes.”
Billy clamps his hand over the lock and sprints into the woods, the undergrowth slapping his jeans, the thick night air flowing over him like warm water, the throats of the tree frogs cheering him.
“Billy!” he hears Brother John call, but he is racing through the night and is soon at the highway and can’t hear them at all.
He chucks the lock deep into the undergrowth. He walks the shoulder of the highway hitching for a ride.
22 Monday Jul 2019
Hare’s Bride by Ellen Cornett, Grimm Reading
The one thing Florida hares appreciate the most is a lone woman and her daughter. And what they hope to find is a lone woman desperate to see her daughter matched. In fact, the marsh hare of the Keys, the S.p. hefneri, named for playboy founder Hugh Hefner, knows how to play such a situation to his advantage. This means that susceptible young ladies frequently go missing.
Detectives of the Keys constantly have to check the places where the marsh hare lives – protective briers, dense clumps of magnolia trees, and the mangroves along the shore. And what the little playboy lacks in size he more than adequately makes up for in charm and persistence. Many a young lady has become ensnared.
The marsh hares meet young women of the island on the garden patches of their homes. “Wanna play?” they say, nibbling a piece of sawgrass or clover, their eyes gleaming with predatory spirit, their mouths secretly watering with the capture of a young woman. Their endangerment has them thinking irrational mating outside the species.
They sit in yards, the sound of the surf burrowing into their long ears , the breeze ruffling their coats, their noses twitching to the smell of salt, dead marine life, and fresh grass. They hop. They hop some more. They spring about, stretching their sleek bodies for the benefit of their observers: admiring young women. So they hope. Someone will take note of them, they believe. That is their confidence. And they are very proud. And over-confident.
One day, a marsh hare hopped into the yard of Brynn Violet.
“What a wonderful tail she has,” he thought, observing her dark hair and lovely slim figure. “I will make her mine. She will ride on my back and I will take her away.”
But Brynn Violet only said “Shew you dirty rabbit!” just like he was any other common rodent.
And yet he thought: “She has a fire in her eyes. She is in love, she is entranced. If not, I can certainly make it so.”
Brynn Violet’s mother was watching from the window. She was pious. She had always taught Brynn Violet the hare was a witch’s familiar. She had warned Brynn Violet to never, ever go anywhere with them. They were evil, useful only for evil purposes she said. She called the girl inside and instructed: “Go out there and tell the Devil’s pet to go away.”
The old mother had told Brynn Violet tales of her great, great grandmother swept out to sea by a category five, when people were whipped about like rag dolls and drowned in the bay. Her great, great grandmother had survived it, and the only explanation: She was a witch. In fact, there was a whole line of women in the family that were witches. Except for Brynn Violet. Except for her mother.
Her mother had reminded Brynn Violet that all of the witches had died eventually, that they were not all powerful. Her mother was concerned lest the child fall prey to what those poor on the island were susceptible to – practices and beliefs, evil, shortcuts to hard work.
“Take a ride on my tail,” the hare said. “Let me take you to my home where you can stroke my warm coat and drink my tea.”
Though she shooed him away and stomped her feet, he came the next day. Yet she refused him once more and stomped her foot until he hopped into the hedge.
On the third day, however, he stood still as a statue. He twitched his nose. He looked at her with his melty brown eyes. She broke down and leapt on his tail.
Her mother, seeing what happened, raced from the house, calling out for her daughter, her heart racing. But she cannot catch them. Police and detectives cannot find them. Another island daughter, taken prisoner.
When Brynn Violet returned home after days and days and days, she told her mother the tale of how the dirty thing tried to make her his sixteenth wife, how he tried to force her to entertain the wedding party of a crow and magpie by having her cook the wedding feast. And so she collected a large bundles of mangrove twigs just outside the window. She made a huge doll of the twigs that stood at the stove, as if cooking the wedding stew and tea.
It was later said by townsfolk the impatient hare approached the doll, ordering it about, and lopped its head off in frustration thinking to goad his soon to be bride into action. When the twig head rolled off, the hare cried out in shock, alarm, and grief.
“I was so alone,” Brynn Violet told her mother when she was safely tucked away at home, enjoying her mother’s stew. She cried as she described the abusive hare was and how the crow looked at her with mean black eyes, how the magpie cocked its head and pecked her arms and hair.
“Well you are home now,” says her mother, kissing her on the forehead.
And that is how the clever Brynn Violet, whose middle name is a nod to the island of Islamorada, or purple island, restored herself to her happy life with her mother in their humble abode by the sea.
16 Tuesday Jul 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
bang pu by Roberto Trombetta, flickr
There is a link to an old story of mine below. It was first published in the Australian journal Pure Slush then I posted it on a blog I started years ago using a pseudonym. I no longer post on my old blog but I wanted to share some of my early work here.
Like many Floridians, I have always loved the ocean, and birds, and fish. It is a tale of love and loss too. Thank you for traveling to my old site. Have a beautiful week.
via lady bug
05 Friday Jul 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
lemari makanan by Dzulhaidy Abdul Rahim, flickr
It was chipped plate day. Benevolence sorted through the painted stoneware set on the shelf and yanked out one that was had a nice size chip on the edge. Namaste-nighttime- greeter would like it or she would throw the whole thing in the trash – plate, leftover chili, noodles, cheese, sour cream.
Last night, Kadin had knocked on her door on his way to his bedroom, and in a goofy manner, almost as if nothing happened between them earlier, said “namaste.” He wasn’t much of a “namaste” guy, had argued for the election of the bellicose, unhinged political candidate though he wasn’t old enough to vote. No, it was a joke. He was mocking her of course.
Earlier he had grumbled about having to take out the trash and the dog. When she started to think about how it made her feel, she sent him her special version of the shake down text. They were on different levels of her townhouse – she, on the third level in her bedroom, watching on her computer the series about debunked methods of gathering forensic evidence, and he, on the second floor, tucked into his xbox game of formula one. The meds she was taking for cancer prevention hobbled her and she wasn’t coming down to talk to him. So she sent the text. He would just have to deal. He had enough of a conscience to come up and work it out with her.
He was too old to punish. She didn’t want him to leave her permanently or ignore her or withhold like what happened with her own parents.
No, she had the art of reasoning on her side, her verbal abilities, and if the going was especially rough, tactics of guilt and manipulation. But the chipped plate seemed a good enough little satisfaction on her end. He would never know, of course. But she would: That she had a choice of what to serve his meal on, a whole, perfectly good plate, or one with a chip. Here ya go, little namaste king, she thought, handing him the leftovers he had quietly protested her making for him. Her funds were low for the month. They would have to be careful. He didn’t care. He decided to pout anyway? Whom had she raised? He was twenty years old. He would learn soon enough. Namaste. She smiled.
While she was in the kitchen, she was drenched, sweating. It was July. Florida. The air conditioning bills can sky rocket and often things break so the AC companies rake it in. Winter times, she shuts everything down and watches the power bill dip. It really was the little things. She was getting old which shown in these small pleasures.
She was drenched and so makes a joke about carrying around the box fan to help her through the weather and menopause. Namaste boy gets a little crazy, says wow, isn’t she getting like a bit explicit.
I’m not talking about my sex life she said. He could handle it. He was twenty. Well, maybe that was a little much so she added, My hormones brought you into the world and they also almost killed me with cancer. Besides, she wanted to say, changing your diaper was quite the raw and unfiltered experience in reality, if you want to talk explicit.
He would learn soon enough, wouldn’t he: the unexpected vicissitudes of life, the need to eat leftovers, learning maybe temporarily to be poor, learning he won’t be served just what he wants and when. She had not completely spoiled him. But guilt – mainly, the divorce – had slowed down some of the teaching.
When he went to work later, his summer delivery job, in thunderstorms in a city full of car crashes from severe weather, power outages, blown out traffic lights, she turned her phone on to charge. In case he needed her.
Namaste, she thought.
In the fall he would be gone to school to live off campus with his friends. She was giving him a great deal of her furniture. He was already interviewing for next summer’s internship and would probably not be back.
Her heart was so wounded. But of course this was so right.
What had she left undone? Everything, it seemed.
But maybe he would think it natural to take the chipped plate for himself, leave the whole plates for others. He would never see it as a punishment perhaps. She knew he had confidence to not see it as a lesser position.
Only the clock kept her company, and her little dog’s snoring. It was the fifth day of July and some were still shooting fireworks down the street. How quiet it would be come August.
22 Saturday Jun 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
Neil Moralee, Watchers in the Wood, flickr, Familiar by Dorcas Casey
Walking her dog beside the wood one afternoon in July, Maja noticed for the first time a black mattress in a clearing of trees. The mattress was tucked inside the canopy of green leaves, almost indetectable. The week before she had seen a huge pumpkin there. It looked fresh and it wasn’t Halloween. She had thought at the time it was odd. Pumpkins of course didn’t grow in a Florida wood.
She stopped to observe the clearing. The clouds were gathering. The trees and vines and undergrowth was taking on an intensified darkness like it did on a rainy Florida day in summer. Her dog sat her little white bottom on the warm asphalt of the street, unfurling her long tail and sniffing the wind which sure smelled to her of the rain drops and wet street and wet earth to come.
Twenty years ago, her mother had flown down from Pittsburgh to be her with her for the delivery of her first grandchild. Maja was due on Halloween. When he didn’t come on time, they tried all kinds of silly tricks – walking backwards, primrose oil, eggplant parmesan, driving down a bumpy road. A week later, Maja had still not delivered and her mother had to go home on her return flight.
The night before she left, her mother entered Maja’s room where Maja was getting ready for bed. Abel was still at work.
“Maja,” she said, pointing a long nailed finger at her, her face framed by the darkness of the room, the only light being at the light on Maja’s dressing table where she sat, removing her earrings. “I know you have delayed the child on purpose! Don’t try to hide that from me now, girl.”
Maja, mute like she had always been over her mother’s extreme paranoia and superstitions, said nothing. Eventually her mother drifted from the room.
Maja shivered that night in her bed to think of it, the tightness of her swollen belly indeed hers and hers alone, thank God. Her mother’s absurd accusation she had prevented the birth reminded Maja of her loneliness growing up, her fear.
When Maja moved to Orlando with Abel, she had been grateful for the very odd climate, the exotic green an over exuberant lushness. It reminded her nothing of home, the cobbled and slightly frail seeming streets, the huddling of old dark buildings and homes so close to one another, the grayness of the days from early fall until late spring. She had gone back for her mother’s funeral right before Justyn’s tenth birthday.
In the wood there was something over the black mattress, something standing there, large and hunched. In the place that seemed to be its face, Maja observed the dark penetrating eyes, the ugly open maw. Was it a person or a tree? She had a horrifying thought it was some form of her mother. She gathered herself and made her way to her porch.
She knew she should call the police, or someone, about the mattress She was worried about what was happening there. But she would let it sit out there for the night.
All grown up now, her son Justyn was safe in his liberal arts college up in South Carolina. He would have laughed good naturedly at his mother’s belief there was something evil in the woods.
How much his laugh had cost her, her bringing him up to be a healthy, happy child, free of fear and doubt. But her efforts to shelter him had been well worth any hardship.
She went inside her three story townhome and locked the door.
07 Friday Jun 2019
Posted in original flash fiction, original flash horror
Oakwood Cemetery, Austin, by kissingtoast, flickr
We think you should know, but you do, don’t you, dear ones, ones who have passed on, ones who now live in the street, ones who have killed and molder in prison, ones who live in underground spaces forgotten under cities until money and children and food go missing, until abandoned houses are destroyed, until libraries parks and public places reek of unseemliness, we will never leave you, the representatives of who you were before you were placed on operating tables, drilled clean through your skull, hammered through your eye socket, shocked with insulin and electricity, precious memories flying, shrieking, from your skin, old personalities, pleasures, predilections lingering saddened, forlorn, in corners of the operating room.
See? The doctors and nurses and orderlies said. We don’t have to put them in cages. Look! We don’t have to put them in straight jackets. No longer the padded cell! And yet we said to you, we pointed this out dear ones: Your tongues are now so jammed in your mouths you can barely speak. They congratulate themselves, the nurses, the doctors, the orderlies while you convalesce in the infirmary. There are cigarettes outside behind the surgery, there is wine and beer on breaks, a cake to celebrate the next hundred batch, and sex in the janitor’s closet. And finally, families can bring their smiles to the common areas and feel relieved for they are not pretending.
We the spirits of this place, the spirits that gathered when the town said We will build buildings for a keeping of those not fit to live among us, we those spirits want you to know we have been watching you and know you, the real you and not your spirit of violence and destruction, of hate, but the one you can’t remember now, the one born of God, the one who must exist somewhere, the one you hope will be recaptured, the one who will get married again, the one who will help you regain the respect of your children and community, the one your your mother and father believe will break through the face you present, the blank mind, the addled tongue, the hand that drifts up uncontrollably to pat the space on your head where a drill bored through, the drill taking you though it didn’t care, not really, leaving you sensitive to light and noise, any loud noise, any disruption to a mellow day which nowadays means just about any sound.
And for those of you who became like power plants with nothing but current running through, for those whose bodies veins were flooded through with insulin over and over, you were just as fucked. We have your memories up here on a shelf. You may never get them back but we keep them and send them back in little batches like molded leaves rotting on trees, memories of leaves, veiny outlines, lace.
When you come back in your mind to us no matter where you are, the flophouse, the prison cell, the cardboard box, the bungalow with a picket fence, we know you want the whole thing back, what you were, or, more accurately could have been. You are with us in spirit and we meet you in the air while you drift in your dreams, we meet you to try to help you find what you are looking for.
In your mind you go back to the place where you lost yourself, you go back to your old bedlam, you come home to us, your home you never intended to feel as home and yet it was the site of this terrible new self you were born into, and there is no place like home my dear ones for here we keep who you were, you will find it here, we promise, if only you return, to make yourself whole among us again, to confront your executioners as they say.
It is not as haunted as tourists say, you know that, those foolish people who want to give themselves a shiver spending a night in restraints. Idiots. We have half a mind to show them real fear, but it would be a waste, alas.
You were the real beauty and the romance, my how we miss you, our beautiful, broken ones. Bring your old and weary bones to lie here again and let us give you back your old self. Your memories await. So too the tears you cannot cry being too feeble to feel. We will give you your self to you whole, along with your pleasures, as well as a deep and lasting sleep if you come to us and find your home once more in the bosom of health. It did not happen the first time, the wholeness, the health, but let us try again. Please.
23 Thursday May 2019
Mike Kniec, To Grandmother’s House We Go, flickr
I went to a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. Often I took a path that cut through the woods, a path that connected our small campus to a street of high end shops in town. In the heart of the woods there was a little bridge arching over a small brook. Beside it there was a stone cherub. When I was unhappy senior year, I often sat beside the brook to quiet my mind. Changes would be happening soon upon graduation. Life would no longer be as simple as cramming for tests or writing papers. I had to find work. And I did not know where I might find work. And I didn’t want to go home.
Over my college years, I had become distant from my parents, my father and stepmother. They didn’t often visit at school, not even when other parents came. And they didn’t always help me get home when I didn’t have a ride for holidays, except for Christmas. When I was younger there had been other problems as well though I hadn’t remembered them until I spent long quiet hours in dorm rooms, empty, echoing halls. Was I a young woman with a bad attitude? Or had I encountered neglect, even abuse? I couldn’t know. I just felt home was dark and unknowable.
Thanksgiving my senior year I walked through the woods alone. I was a Halloween baby which means I had turned 21 and since I was alone I felt I owed it to myself to buy a drink. Not even Max was here with me, my boyfriend since freshman year. He also lived in Florida and often found himself on campus over holidays. But he went to Myrtle Beach with a friend. On Friday of the break, I sat on my bridge having had a white Russian at the bar. I felt the moss on the brick, soft to the touch and under my stockinged legs. The time between the pink sky and utter darkness had become my favorite time and in these woods there was always a dove to serenade me, or an owl or whippoorwill. I wished the cherub was real, but still, I was glad for its stone presence. Something about it comforted me.
I sensed a pre-mature encroaching darkness but when I looked into the woods I noticed it was only a darkness limited to a particular shape. As it neared I could hear clinking and clattering, like a wooden windchime. I made out skirts which swished among the leaves. And a very high pitch of hair, a nimbus surrounding the face above which floated a high ruff accentuated with clattering ornaments. The woman held a long staff of a particular shape. When she neared it looked vaguely like a giant pestle. She wore circlets of bones and skulls on her neck, wrists, and waist.
“Waste of time,” she said, “waste of a girl.”
“What?” I said, hoping I didn’t hear what I thought I heard.
“Don’t waste my time. I was going to say something helpful to you. I know you’ve been loitering around here, but I resent wasting my breath.”
She walked past, her skirts dragging on the footpath. She smelled of roasted meat, dirt and damp leaves, unwashed skin, tallow, smoke. Likely one of the crazed homeless like we have in Florida.
“I remember your babcia, your sweet little Polish grandma” she said, “And you. I remember you when you were a girl and your babcia cared for you.”
I said nothing. I let the whippoorwill speak. It was getting cooler. I had a strange taste in my mouth, like something was deeply wrong. Of course there was: How could she know me? Yet somehow I felt I was also expecting someone dark to show familiarity with me, a stalker, a murderess. I felt my blood coursing.
“You don’t know me,” I said, in defiance of the bones which clattered on her frame.
“You babcia made huge batches of pierogis every summer and took care of you and your brother and sister. She taught you about plants and flowers and placing plant offerings on the alter for the ceremony for the Feast of the Assumption. Remember? You have abandoned your ways with the Virgin Mary.”
“I remember.”
“A waste,” she said. “You will never be your babcia.”
“She’s dead, I don’t want to go home. Mother is dead too, long ago.”
“You are spoiled. I should have boiled you up in the pot when I had the chance. I should have taken you and chopped you up and eaten you.”
“The red ribbons tripled on my wrists for the Feast were my babcia’s protection against the likes of you.” I said, practically shouting now, so much louder than she was being with me. I shivered. The cream of the white Russian was not resting easy on my stomach.
“But you forget, I also eat adults. You appear to be sweet meat. I’ll bet your flesh tastes bitter.” She ran the black tips of her fingers along her tongue. “You’re a bitter, stupid girl. Who cares if your step mother abused you? Who cares if she only cares about her own birth children? Go home and pray I don’t find you or I will take away one more waste of a life and be nourished. Be glad you’re even alive. Be glad every day I allow it.”
I stepped away. I backed away not taking my eyes from her. Then I turned and ran.
When I got back into my dorm, the dark empty, echoing halls, I checked behind me before closing the door. There was no one.
I didn’t mind the rest of my holiday alone in my room. The food in my minifridge was a comfort. I made soup and tea with my kettle.
After graduation, I took a menial job shelving books at the library. It was all I could find. I lived with my father, stepmother, and stepsisters.
It was a while before I went to graduate school. Eventually, I found a job as a librarian.
I had my child baptized in the Polish Catholic church and made a beautiful offering of hawthorn, wheat, and roses at the Feast of the Assumption. I promised Mary I would not forget my faith and tied red ribbons around my child’s wrist to protect her from boginki, forest spirits who would take her away or hurt her.
At thirty I was diagnosed with bipolar depression. The faith of my childhood and reawakened faith of my young adult years became extinct with the medications. I felt I had lost some critical link to my mother and my babcia. My life was no longer as sad, scary, and uncertain. But it also was no longer as interesting. It was flat and strange, a foreign territory.
With my diagnosis, I had to assume my encounter with a cannibal witch was some delusion of my illness.
And yet, I don’t feel I would be the person I am had this thing not happened.
One week when my child was away with my husband’s family, I stayed off my medications to see how I would feel. All I felt was deeply confused. I could not accomplish a thing and I did not sense the witch of my babcia’s bedtime stories or the Virgin of her faith.
Nevertheless, I remembered Baba Yaga’s lesson to be grateful.
I returned to my medications and never strayed from them again.
19 Sunday May 2019
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What Lies Above by Kinga Britschgi, deviant art
It was Memories of Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country Day and Mrs. Seidelbraun had a major issue: She could not manage to extricate herself from the bed. Soon Taffy Day participants would be flooding the streets, floating good spirits balloons, spewing fireworks from their mouths, doing midair acrobatics with the aid of their combat-sadness-anti-gravity-boots.
On days like this, the air turned butter it was so smooth, the sun was a creamy smear in the sky, neighbors greeted each other with kindly salutations, even those who on non Taffy Days dreamed secretly of administering unnoticeable but painful papercuts over slights, grudges, micro aggressions. People baked for their neighborhoods, the smells of sugar and pastries filled the air. There was hugging and laughing and handing out candy. And of course there was taffy pulling, greased pole climbing, pig calling. Years ago, there had been a brief memorial for The Town of Daffy Day residents who had given their lives so that everyone could be Happy, but really, that part of the day started to become both boring and super triggering. And so they made do with laying flowers on the one memorial in the town: A water feature of an upright gun holding a helmet.
Every year had become worse and worse for Mrs. Seidelbraun. The first year she recognized painful gravitations on Memories of Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country Days, she managed to make it down the elevator of her high rise apartment, down to the street of festivals, parades, and bacchanalian frivolities. She didn’t laugh exactly but she didn’t exactly frown either. She played it off and no one was none the wiser, including Flora who managed to be offended at every affront to festivity. They had decorated a float together, full of paper flowers and young girls from a local ballet company pirouetting on tippy toe as the truck pulled them through a street raining with confetti. She even managed to eat a Happy Hot Dog beside which Mr. Happy was administering his annual contest of Happy Hot Dog Stuff Yourself Silly. She put mustard and ketchup and relish on it, a sign to Mr. Happy she was still A OK. A Good Girl though she was 40.
That was a couple of years ago. Last year, she made significantly less progress. She pushed herself up to standing in her studio apartment and slid her feet into her dilapidated old slippers and shuffled over to the window overlooking the street. Sshh shh sshh went her feet, the only noise in the apartment though the marching bands down below were beginning to warm up and people wearing the combat-sadness-anti-gravity-boots were whirring by, practicing their maneuvers in the air. Prayers were being sent up to heaven on balloons with strings of flowers attached. Prayers that said “Only happiness,” “only peace,” “no triggers,” “trigger warnings please.” “please be happy always and keep us all happy.” She knew what the slips of prayers said. She helped copy them from the Community Suggestion Book for Wellbeing. Flora would be upset with her for staying inside. She hadn’t pulled it off, getting to the street. And she was right, Flora had called the next day, upset and angry.
In a way she had been glad she wasn’t even going to have to face Flora this year, at least not on the day of the event. She would simply have to admit the truth: Her bed held her fast as mud in a deep bog. It would not release her, it had sucked her energy, her strength. When she closed her eyes she saw terrible things, she heard terrible and agonizing cries and explosions and pops. She tasted blood, dirt, gun powder, fear. And yet, she couldn’t open her eyes for long, she kept falling asleep again, or falling into visions, into nightmares or waking nightmares. She saw friends she knew bloodied and missing half of their faces, their eyes and limbs torn away, children running in the streets crying and naked. The sky was exploding and there was fire, as if this place were a very deep hell. Buildings had crumbled and were splitting, tumbling like large giants laid low, groaning in agony. She cried out but no one heard her. She had not discovered a way out. All day, she had dreamed of the past, or maybe some distant time in the future, maybe sometime soon.
08 Wednesday May 2019
Posted in Fantastical Village, original flash fiction
Chimney Pot Papers, woodcut Fritz Endell,1919, flickr
There is an interesting place called the Land of Absolutes. I would like to be able to tell you about every aspect of this land, but alas, for the storyteller to be heard, she must be believed. I will provide a sketch along with an example family from the town to give you some rough idea. You will hardly believe it. It is better than a ride at Disney.
In the Land of Absolutes, there is nothing in between. There is no person that is in between. To live in Absolutes, you must be so tall, you are the tallest of humans who have lived on the planet, or so small so as to be the size of a little mouse. If you are going to be fat, let’s do this right, round yourself out, roll around like Violet Beuregarde! If you are going to be skinny, be invisible when you turn sideways. When you yell, yell all the way, when you talk gently, talk so soft that someone needs to get right up to your mouth to hear you. They might not even hear you at all!
When you are political, march every day for your cause. Carry signs. Bash people over the head with them. Punch the opposition. Carry weapons. Go to jail. When you are apolitical, sit at home and stare at the dust particles filtering through the air in a shaft of sunlight slanting in. Count the particles. Make note of them. Make a chart. Compare the number of particles from day to day and see if the numbers correlate to anything. Leave your tvs alone, a sad gaping eye in your living room. Pretend the outside world does not exist. Order your groceries delivered, your clothes, your shampoos and soaps, your sex toys, your love, your religion, your peace. Be quiet and uninvolved. Keep to yourself.
You know what people do when they aren’t either all the way tall or all the way short? All the way fat or all the way skinny? All the way political or all the way uninvolved? They can’t exist long in the Land of Absolutes. Imagine it. Where are they going to find clothes? How are they going to find food? It’s either packaged for tiny mice sized people and twig people or huge tree sized people or barn sized people. When the in between people are out and about in the Land of Absolutes, they get bashed over the side of the head or swept along in the latest political riot. When they knock on the door of the apolitical they never receive an answer. There is a hush still as the grave.
The “in betweens” as they are known are really tourists, looking for a place to exist. They make do. Often, they are observers. Actually, nowadays as migration patterns have set in and people move from town to town looking to escape Absolutist policies and public life, they have founded communities for themselves. It is not possible for In Betweeners and Absolutes to cohabitate or be in relationship. Their separate communities, with guards and their own fly over helicopters, curfew hours, checkpoints, ensure there is some measure of peace. Though sometimes there is an attempt to mingle.
I tried mingling once, getting out there. I wasn’t finding anyone in my community with whom I wanted to settle down for a while. I wasn’t looking for a Bond, which is what they are calling it nowadays. More like something a little more tuned down. A Mutuality with Happy Consequences and Occasional Challenges But Overall Happiness. There is a kind of person I always tended to be attracted to in the Absolutes and that is the tall tree-trunk kind of a person with big opinions, someone political and passionate, who does not get their love in the mail. I met him in a town square one night at a rally. He was so gorgeous. And so ambitious. Nothing he did was halfway. How very Absolute of him. I was attracted immediately.
What I didn’t know about the Land of the Absolutes is a rule that applies to them: All things must be done absolutely. As an example, what that means in family life in the Land of Absolutes is a strict obedience to the rules laid down by an iron fisted matriarch or patriarch from time immemoriam.
On our first date I ate at my new love’s house. The family was served plates by another family who worked for them, some of the thinnest people I had ever seen. I have seen needles thicker. These thin people laid plates of meat, potatoes, and vegetables in front of us. It is amazing these thin people made such gorgeous, delicious looking food. It looked like food they never ate.
We commenced to eating. Now, I happen to love potatoes. Imagine my joy when a white, fluffy potato was found in front of me, next to the succulent meat and buttery vegetables. I lovingly lavished it with butter, salt, pepper, sour cream. I was starving. I took a bite, looked around and smiled, just in case I needed to say something or listen. But everyone was eating. I took another bite, and another, and another! I ate it all! How tasty!
Suddenly, there was a dead silence, no clanking utensils against plates, no scraping with the labor of cutting meat, not even the tinkling of ice in a glass. I looked up. They were all staring at me! These huge people! What did I do?
“We eat everything in rotation here,” said my love. “This is crazy, the way you are eating!” he crashed his hand down on the table so the dishes and utensils clattered. He was yelling and I was scared. When he had been yelling about politics or people he didn’t agree with, other people, I had found it funny. Now, it terrified me. Everyone in the room was huge, staring. Their heads barely fit under the ceiling. I marveled at the table. How did they find enough wood to build it? “You will fill all up on your potato and won’t have room for the other things on your plate! Are you even sane? Do you even know what you are doing? Are you even a grown up?” There was growling then and leering, baring of teeth. I backed slowly away, and made it through the door. I ran all the way home, I don’t know how. I am hardly an athlete.
In my own house later, the moonlight shifting through windows in a room I’m sure contained dancing dust particles, I pulled out the photo album of my childhood. I flipped on the light and turned to the page of my three year old self who had buried her hands deep in her birthday cake. She had stuffed her mouth and the icing had stained her lips blue. Her head was tipped back and she was smiling. Her mom was holding her on her lap and smiling. The dad I knew who took the picture was smiling as well. Though you cannot see him in the picture, I know he was there and how he looked at his little love.
30 Tuesday Apr 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
Massimo ankor, flickr
How to explain the skinned elbow. It wasn’t like the time Miska hopped up on top of the bar to dance and had fallen, some of the guys coming to her rescue.
No, this was Berta home alone with her frozen dirty martini, underestimating her body’s ability to absorb the alcohol on no carbs. But also, self medicating when her midlife boyfriend reunited with her and her fear of abandonment set in. Overweight, middle aged Berta, divorced from a 20 year marriage to a doctor, grateful for a man’s expressed interest in her even if it was only for the easy sex. And it was always hard for Berta to know the difference: Was he just interested in the sex or did he have a truly vested interest? And did it matter any more? Was she supposed to care?
How to explain the loose skin at her elbow when she showed for girls night out. An hour before, standing at her sink, a sudden sensation overwhelming her and a slow, slow tipping of her body like she had heard cows tip at the slightest pressure at night while asleep. She couldn’t stop herself. She tried, but she kept going down, to the kitchen linoleum, her midlife boyfriend having told her only hours before it made him really hot to watch a woman emerge from a bathtub. She had been secretly grateful he had yet to see her creaking up to standing from her townhouse tub and she had wondered what would happen when he finally witnessed it.
She had lain on the kitchen floor when the dirty martini laid her low. She absorbed the humiliation. Of course, she would never tell. But what if she had been forced to alert someone because of broken bones, or worse? She would have rather died. And she thinks: She probably just would have died. Before calling. Before texting. Just died.
11 Thursday Apr 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
girl, before 1823, public domain, Barbara, flickr
Sister, do you remember when, scared in the old manse in Texas, you and I whirled and whirled through the hallway during a thunderstorm? Do you remember when I left you in the hall so I could go find our mother? I remember what she said to me when I entered her dark room: Where is your sister? Why are you not taking care of her? Why did you leave her alone?
Sister, do you remember when, many years later, you held my hand while I had my hair buzzed off? Do you remember when I was sick, when I had cancer? Do you remember going to my appointments and asking questions when I was weak? Do you remember begging relatives to come to my surgery when everyone seemed to have better things to do? Had I died you would have arranged my funeral, you would have seen me honored.
I wanted to say to our mother then, when I survived: Here is my sister, Mother. She has taken good care of me. She has not left me alone. I will always be in debt to my sister. She loves me. And I love her.
for National Siblings Day, April 10, 2019
10 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in original flash fiction, original horror
Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, currated by Dana and Greg Newkirk
Linda was new to it – goblins, Bigfoot, ghosts, witchcraft, Tarot cards. She had married into it. She had met Rob at the seminary where she had served as a secretary and he had been a student.
One day, when they were home and he was studying, they received an email from an old friend who had begun to coin himself a synchromystic: Things were suggesting themselves, said his friend. His friend had received a note from a man describing beings in his yard, beings with large, round eyes, beings similar to a sighting reported fifty years ago at another location but connected to it by an underground cave system.
That night, she baked sugar cookies in the shape of large domed head. She used shiny licourice pieces for eyes. She cut plump three toed feet cookies like the shape of the footprints the writer of the note had seen around his house. When Rob came into the kitchen and saw what she had done, he smashed the cookies with his fists, despite the hot pan. This was serious, he said, and he was going with his friend to check the cave where dark shapes had been seen.
She actually hadn’t been aware she meant it in fun, though maybe she had, she couldn’t be sure. Certainly when he was buried in studying predestination, atonement, salvation, sanctification, she was on more certain ground and she understood him as well, so much like her father and her father’s father. She wasn’t sure what had happened, and she didn’t relish finding herself in a cave with his newfound zeal.
The next night, she did find herself in a cave where the locals said dark beings emerged from an old defunct mindshaft. She was there, in her old hiking boots and a sweater, the air having been cleared with sage and an evoking call to the goblins. What in the world would her father have said? He had died and was lost to her, she acknowledged to herself with a great sadness like a hole opening up in her and swallowing all thoughts. It was the strangeness of this that made her miss him most, this most unexpected turn of her marriage.
They sat at the lip of the cave overlooking a drop down into the trees. And the light was fading and all the familiar sounds of her Kentucky were being parsed for hints of the extraterrestrial, the alien, the spiritual, whatever wanted to speak. It was decided she should participate in the “Spirit Box,” the thought being she was a virgin to the process and would have fewer preconceived notions. She would wear noise canceling headphones attached to a constantly scanning radio, the idea being that spirits use electronic frequencies as a means of communication.
Rob had developed a hardened expression for her since he picked up on the idea she might be making fun of him. He had not smiled, except around his friends. He had rarely touched her, except to help her climb. Would he be pleased she was helping? She was not sure. She was worried of course, and felt a tightening in her stomach. How about what my stomach is communicating to me? She wanted to say to the cave of men but of course dared not.
“It will take a while to get used to this,” instructed Rob’s friend who was holding the earphones. “Listen for a while before letting us know what you hear. If something or someone is trying to make contact there will be a pattern.”
Of course she was somewhat familiar with this, having transcribed many meetings as a secretary, having taking dictation. She appreciated that she was given the opportunity to wait before being expected to report.
The headphones descended, soft and snug around her head. It was cool outside and she had worn her hair down, a light jacket over her sweater, jeans. In a way it was like hiking and camping, no different than when she was in high school with her friends and they scared each other with stories and local legend. But had they really believed anything then? Or was this just an excuse to scream and hold hands and hug and share a time which was fast disappearing before them? Adults doing this voluntarily doing this struck her as odd and slightly pathetic.
Then she heard it, a voice from the Spirit Box that sounded strangely deep and resonant, like her father’s. “Kill,” she thought she heard it say. “Kill him,” it said. Then: “Kill Rob.”
She took the headphones off and trembled. She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.
“It’s a little disorienting at first,” said Rob’s friend, but just try it one more time. “It would be really helpful. It’s ok if you feel a little bit apprehensive, it’s normal.”
She relented to having the headphones slipped back over her head, having caught a glimpse of Rob’s hard, foreign stare across the cave, illuminated by the lantern. He had never looked at her like he did now, like he might murder her.
There was silence, on the headphones, only static like white noise, then a loud booming voice: “Kill him!” Then more static. Then at last an unmistakable instruction: “Push him out!”
It was her father, warning her!
She stood up, walking over next to Rob at the lip of the cave overlooking the drop. She did not let on. She had the Spirit Box attached to her jeans with a clip and the soft headphones covered her ears.
“Kill him!” commanded the voice. “Kill him before he kills you!”
“Dad?” she said. She saw Rob’s face grow even angrier, his brow furrowing deeply, his jaw set. She was still making fun of them, pretending the spirit of her father was contacting her.
He reached for her but his friend put a hand on his shoulder to stop him and shook his head “No.”
“Kill!” said her father. “Now!”
Rob’s eyes glowed and burned. He wanted her to die.
Without warning she shoved his shoulder and using his surprise to her advantage, pushed. He fell from the mouth of the cave and disappeared, screaming, down, down, his friend, in shock, holding her arm, lest she fall after him, the white headphones glowing around her neck like the primitive necklace of a matriarchal tribe.
18 Monday Mar 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
The Language of Flowers, or, floral ensembles of thoughts, feelings, and sentiments – Internet Archive Book Images, 1869
She knew she was getting over him when she threw his shriveled dead flowers in the trash. They had been drying in the sun on the bookshelf next to the window. When she had received them she put them in a cream china vase, a wedding gift from long ago. She had received a life and home from someone else back then as a bride and now in her townhome life of temporary lovers on the outskirts of town she received flowers not from a husband, but from a friend who is a man.
She put the flowers in one of her favorite vases and displayed it on the black table in the middle of her living room, taking a picture for him, showing her friends and her sister. She then moved the flowers to the top of the fireplace where it half obscured the tv and she welcomed the intrusion. That was before he came over for the last time.
When things began to fall apart only a week after she received the flowers, this the landmark of their three months together, she moved the flowers out of her line of sight, over on the kitchen counter, though at that time the flowers were still opening and drinking in water. She kept them there because she didn’t know if the man would call again. She couldn’t bear to get rid of them altogether. Maybe there was still hope. She called him. She received no response.
She moved the flowers over to the window, on the bookshelf, an out of the way place. But she couldn’t throw them out, not quite yet. Soon a pizza box was set beside the flowers, a used box which needed to go out with the garbage. Dried flowers drifted to the kitchen floor, a floor which needed to be swept and mopped. There were a lot of things she needed to attend to after the breakup. She tried to reach him again, No response.
She replenished her kitchen with the little money she had left, picking up a basil plant she loved to have on hand, a little indulgence. The bag clerk at the store had asked her what it was and sniffed it deeply.
At home, the woman put the basil plant next to the vase of drying out flowers, on top of the pizza box, its simple plastic container holding a plant that would last her the summer.
The man’s flowers dried and drifted down. They became ugly.
She watered the basil and put some fresh leaves in a dish to make it more fragrant and flavorful.
Someone else called her and showed her kindness, another man. She felt: What usefulness, drying flowers? There is no call.
She threw out the dried flowers into the plastic bag in the garbage container and shoved them down so their stems broke. How much she had felt for this person. Tomorrow she would clean out the vase. Tomorrow she would put soap into its creamy cavity as well as warm water.
Maybe when she got her house cleaned up and her sink fixed she would make a meal for the new person. But for now she would let him treat her. She would leave her house behind for a couple of hours. And she would try to forget about this man, whom she loved.
She held the vase and felt its coolness in her palm. Its smoothness was like a good love that should only hold living things. It was a beautiful vase she got for her wedding many years ago. It had always been one of her favorites. It didn’t matter it had served another purpose in a previous life. It was still hers. To do with as she saw fit.
13 Wednesday Mar 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
German poster for International Women’s Day, 1914. The poster was banned in the German Empire.
A little less than a week after International Women’s Day, I still would like to participate by re-posting a story of mine about a woman’s abuse by her significant other. This is a critical topic at a time we are recognizing women’s rights.
I think I am going to read this tonight at a local reading. It fits the word requirements. And I also think because of its detailed dialogue and descriptions it will be easy for an audience to follow.
Thank you for following my post, the link is listed below. If this is a repeat for you: I have made improvements. Thank you for your support and for reading.
11 Monday Mar 2019
Posted in fantastical fiction, original flash fiction
Raped house by Florian L., flickr
At Eastertide when the moon sets over the lake of Old Cheney Highway the Easter bunnies walk out of the bougainvillea on their hind legs to join the risen ones, who, ancient and young, dance noiselessly, gape in windows, eat candies, and murder the complacent. The undead hoard: former humans and creatures, witches, natives who were infected by white men, criminals, slaves, children who worked the celery fields, babies murdered by their mothers, drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless, death row inmates electrified or killed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison. Many had grown up with songs of Easter, the trappings of wealth and elaborate parties and champagne. Some had not been as privileged and had grown up in meaner states. None had been missed or glorified or given their due. No, quite the opposite. They pop open plastic eggs with gummy fingers and drop chocolate candies into their maws and tear the heads off of candy bunnies and chickens. Nom nom nom they say, chewing. Nom nom nom……If a concerned homeowner comes out to protect his property, they make short work of him too. Nom nom nom…..blood mingling with chocolate dripping down chins. Most people know on Eastertide to stay indoors at night on Old Cheney Highway. And the alligators are there to help if a project seems too big, storing flesh under the banks of the lake until it rots. Nom nom nom…Don’t be a hero on Old Cheney the evenings at Eastertide. Nom nom nom……nom nom nom…..Stay inside and eat your candy Easter morning.
14 Thursday Feb 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
heart by goandgo, flickr
Continuing on with Valentine’s Day celebration is a stark little story called Dark Hearts. It is amazing how much pathos exists in life and in stories when the subject is economic disparity. More than heartache, the despair of falling short and not being able to take part lives long and cuts deep and sometimes causes people to act out of desperation.
Dark Hearts
It was Valentine’s night and Vicky only had fifteen dollars. When Jim her husband passed out, she told her daughters she had an errand to do and they were to go to their rooms without disturbing their father.
It was a freezing New Hampshire night, the temperature hovering somewhere around zero. The drive was icy and the Corolla was almost cowering it seemed, begging her to be left alone under its blanket of snow. But she scraped the hood and windows clean and ran the engine. She took off down the drive. She arrived at the grocery a few minutes before the 9:00 close.
She swept through the doors of the brightly lit market, the place as strangely cold as the outside but in a different way. She wheeled the cart to the front of the store where the boxes of candy hearts and stuffed bears had been that morning. They weren’t there. They were tucked off to the side, out of the way, by the wine. A big sign over the table said “40% off our everyday low prices.” Still, it wasn’t enough of a discount. She couldn’t buy each of her girls her own heart of chocolates and her own bear.
There were a couple of boys standing nearby gawking at the table of extravagant after-thoughts.
This, Vicky said to herself, was an opportunity. The only one, short of shoplifting.
“Yeah, my girlfriend would kill me if she knew I was buying her Valentine’s stuff on sale,” one of them was saying, the tall one with a protruding Adam’s apple and light fuzz on his lip.
And at that point, Vicky enacted her plan.
“But what would your girlfriend think if you brought her sparkling wine?” she said brightly. She knew of some cheap stuff she could let on that she was going to buy for them, wine they could not buy for themselves, being so obviously under age. She could let on she was going to buy it for them and they would think they owed her.
“I’ve always had a fantasy,” she said, getting between the boys, threading her arms through theirs. “I want a double valentine. Do you know what it is I’m saying?”
The boys nodded and laughed with their newly minted voices.
“I think I would like that,” she said, “very much.” She gazed steadily into the eyes of the one with the fuzzy lip. He looked older, like he could be the leader of the two of them though not the leader of many more.
“Why don’t we all meet in the bathroom?” she said. “I’ll bring something to drink. How about that?”
They started quaking and laughing nervously.
“But first, you have to do something for me.” She pressed herself up against the leader. “I want both of you to ask me to be your valentine. I want a bear and a heart and a balloon from each of you. Do you think your girlfriends would mind?”
“I think we’re not going to tell ‘em, lady,” said the fuzzy peach lip and they both laughed some more, with a skittery, tremulous quality to their voices.
“Leave my valentines with the cashier. I’ll get wine and I’ll see you in the bathroom.” She kissed the one to seal it.
As soon as the boys made the purchases and disappeared into the men’s room, she grabbed the hearts, animals, and balloons from the cashier and took off in the Corolla.
At home, the smell of spaghetti sauce still sweet and cloying in the air, she found Jim sitting at the table.
“You were out,” he said.
“The store was having a sale on valentines.” She didn’t care what he knew or how he felt. She had hoped he would be asleep and that the girls could have an evening with their gifts but she had left the purchases in the car just in case.
“How come you have money for something like that?” he said. He slammed his whiskey glass down. “Let me see this bullshit.”
He went out to the car and tore open the door. He pulled out the balloons, candy, and bears. He ripped at them, flinging them about the yard, the chocolates flying, one of the bears falling into a ditch, the balloons drifting down in tatters.
“Why do you always like to make me feel like a monster?” he said. “But you know, you’ve never been nothing but a whore since the day I met you.”
She would leave in the morning when he was still getting over what he’d done to himself. And when her girls saw the chocolates, the punctured balloons, and bears drowning in the snow, they would go and not make a fuss.
14 Thursday Feb 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
Bright side by Ben Raynal, flickr
There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.
— Raymond Carver
Moments of literature do not have to be actual moments of a writer’s life, but moments that could be a part of anyone’s daily life. Raymond Carver is one of my favorite writers of short fiction and he makes profound use of realistic elements. Here is a tiny story for your Valentine’s Day told in the style of realism. Love to you, and happiness.
Amy
He stood at the foot of her son’s bunkbed. She had slept there the night before, her son being grown and in college. He had been dating her for about six months, but had not succeeded in getting her to sleep the entire night with him. She slept alone.
She reached out and touched the name stitched on his shirt. He kissed her lips. She wore only gloss. He liked that.
“I want to make you some coffee,” she said.
Her hair was mussed up. He wanted to forget his scruples, drop his pants, and climb right into her child’s bed, but he was running late.
“I don’t have time.” It was cold outside. He had to get the truck started. “OK, make me coffee, would ya? And chop, chop.” He patted her bottom.
She would pour him a steaming pint in his big thermos with cream and sugar and he would drink from it slowly to make it last. He would make sure everyone noticed its presence too, clinking it down here or there.
When he came back into the house, she was on the kitchen counter, kneeling, stretching for a bag of sugar.
“Watch it now, baby,” he said, trying to scold her, though he had caught a glimpse of her dimpled thigh under her nightshirt. He knew he would remember it all day. He pulled her down and retrieved the sugar. She took it from him with her icy, thin fingers.
“Let’s get married,” he said.
She didn’t look up to meet his gaze. She held the bag over the mouth of the thermos. As he watched a seemingly endless white stream fall into his coffee, he felt a pressure on his chest.
“Yes,” she said. When he looked up, he saw that she was watching his face, was not watching the sugar, was smiling in that way she saved for things that secretly pleased her.
13 Wednesday Feb 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
A Bird in a Gilded Cage by Jeanne, flickr
Oh lady, how is it you are caged again despite the tatters of your plumage, evidence of former loves’ ravishing and broken promises, cheeping meekly your protest and your cause fading as it is among desert blooms in a noonday heat under a new lover’s burning interest. The gilding on the wires, the prettiness of the perch were the wild proclamations of love you accepted despite yourself. And you tasted without wisdom the pink sugar water in the little bowl, delicious but without nutrients.
Are you no different from the old text’s version of you blaming you for lust of the eyes and desire for possession, the taker of the fruit, the ruination of the world? If so you have been tricked by becoming a possession yourself, a possession of the man who only proclaims but does not understand, the worn out troubadour intent on his fame but not married to the idea of actual love.
Dear Lady: How is it you never remember that the ones who declare their greatest love early, a morning mist disappearing in the late morning sun, convince themselves and maybe some small part of you that this time it is life and not death? No matter that you said you would never be trapped by anyone who did not care to know your treasured secrets, tender details, beating heart.
Take heart. You know you are finding your strength when, after the bloom falls from the rose, your thoughts and feelings rise up, those old girlhood bones, causing your suitor to blink, stumbling in your blinding light. How he had not anticipated the murder of the scrim of the false lover’s reality. How he underestimated the individual he has enslaved behind it.
She has a will and a conscience and a mind and needs! How awful these stabs to his eyes! How cruel the world of women he thinks, how cruel and ungrateful this one! he says. No appreciation of the gilded cage, the golden perch! The thing has escaped, is flying outside, around and around, wild and uncivil, its leg uncuffed and the sugar water left behind in the bowl.
02 Saturday Feb 2019
Posted in original flash fiction, Original Microfiction
girl, brush, ocean and window by Jacopo Ramei, flickr
The tide pushes through the bottom of the door where we sleep on our mattresses. The water fingers our hair. It rises to the level of our windows and pulls us to sea where we rock upon the mournful waves, the seagulls distant and crying, our nightgowns soaked and sticking to us, our bedclothes heavy. We roll over, pressing our faces into saturated pillows.
We sleep through the day, the sun burning our throats, our foreheads, our lips. At low tide, the water leaves us on the beach. The crabs fashion the tresses of our hair and pinch our ears, but we dream of overprotective aunts and punishments. Our mother is crying but we can barely move or open our eyes.
It is dark again and a cool black wave, gently and firmly as a father, moves us into our room. We hear the gentle heaving sighings of waves, of giants, rumbling over, making us feel small and when we open our eyes, finally, to the night, we are not in water at all but are wakeful, dry, and blind.
First appeared in Corium Magazine
18 Friday Jan 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
Experiment by Oliver Henze, flickr
Notes: In a writing workshop with Laura Lee Bahr at the Kerouac House in College Park, Florida, participants brought written accounts of their most vivid dreams in order to work them into stories. The workshop was entitled “In the Language of Dreams.” One of my favorite exercises involved using the phenomenon of synesthesia to depict a dream narrative. Synesthesia is an unusual connection of the senses, such as seeing colors when one hears a sound, hearing sounds when one sees an inanimate object or colors, smelling colors or sounds, etc. I have already written one such example in a previous post entitled r.e.m. 1. Here I have written r.e.m. 2. I hope to write more as I remember my dreams from my present life and from my past. Maybe you would like to write the contents of your dream using synesthesia. I challenge you to try it and let me know what you think.
When you awake in the reverberating silence of the dead night you remember the deep crimson anger of your ex, the burnt meat hunger for your life. He is on his way to get you in his gray silent stealth. When you step out into the hall, there is his silhouette framed in the door to the living room, his limbs hot tar menacing, shimmering in the light behind and to the side.
You must by half measures approach, first grabbing a figurine friendly as pink on your lonely days. It is on the hall table and you think it could serve as your ally with which to bludgeon the void at the end of the hall intent on nullifying you, then you think better of it, recognizing the power of long knives rubbed together for the effect of the silver invasion of the body white heat through the belly. And so you grab them instead.
The red arrow intent to kill is no part of your soft purple disposition, your mother soft purple, a little blue, a little indecisive, Blue in Green pensive. You must press a bone corset to your back. With the kid gone it is now only you, only you to save what you have this little harmonious honey smelling house shedding past lives, your income dependent existence, contingent mother purple life, Mozart’s Lacrimosa days with Jesus who is plum peaches proud of you.
But Jesus doesn’t want you to die, not because of your ex’s resentment heavy, death certain as millstone drowning, torture by crushing, him and you.
But your ex has left your home by the time you enter the living room, shotgun style shape, backdoor directly facing front, knickknacks from lifetimes past standing at attention like disarrayed soldiers in cabinets and curios against the embrace of walls.
There is a line of elderly women, silent question marks, filing through, back door to front, taking a short cut from church. Should you shut your doors and force this line of gray green stream of hobbling but certain pebbles, bent knees and hunched frames, to walk around the outside of your house?
Surely this stream has found its most natural least resistant route. Would you want the question marks to break over the unevenness of your lawn, thrown off by the syncopated rhythm of roots, uneven resistant sod, hidden wells the deep voices of male voices chanting brown and merciless? You have nothing against the raisin wizened feet yearning for the concreteness of blue even.
When the stream dies, a young woman, a bright pink cotton candy bird, flies in, intent on taking something precious from your depleted honey house which is shedding its skins of former lifetimes. You tighten your bone corset as she flies from object to object, sending puffs of light candy scent from her wings, her attention the disappearing melt of candy floss.
And yet you, by comparison, are a wide open midlife ancient sea whose value had become diluted, whose salty tidal undulations are nonplussed regarding the bright and shiny, the new and fresh. Soon these things too will be overtaken, rusted and sighing.
She spirits into your house, ultravioletly jagged, picking up the few shells of your belongings, a crystal biscuit barrel, a milk glass pitcher, a silver cake stand, a china tea cup. You do not recognize her chocolate hair or robin’s eggs eyes, her spirit a puppy’s, not unkind but aggressive.
Teletype incessant she fires at you as she picks up your belongings: Can I have this? What about this? Would it be alright if I took this? Until most dissonant of all, yellow white clashing, one note off of each other: A Spanish sword demand she take your cream colored porcelain vase inscribed with a bright blue double happiness.
You, the ocean, spit up onto your shore an alternative: a smooth piece of driftwood, an immense antique book containing a story with a pink red happy ending, a chocolate cherry love tale suitable for her age, the double happiness beyond her wisdom, but the book offering the ideal for her, the cosmetic appeal of pages with script regular as a ticking clock, the pictures dancing from the flat white.
Candy floss girl settles into smooth salt taffy and signs your notebook – A guest book? A list of contacts? A signature book? She forms her large loopy Beethoven’s Eroica letters, pulling and pulling and pulling notes from the orchestra, the strings, woodwinds, brass, drums, larger and larger and larger.
When she finishes forming her letters, you see the marks that signify your identity, the soft purple mother love of your nature, the chaotic strands drawn together like a neat package tied with a bow, a package hidden and mysterious, secret. “Margaret” it says, your own self blowing against your face, the breeze against your face gentle and mild, your morning at last blossoming into your pale summer.
07 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in original flash fiction
Turkish Delight Baklava by Jeremy Brooks, flickr
The Florida sun is setting across the parking lot and blinding the eyes of the customers along the western facing stand up bar in the grocery eat in restaurant. Amir and Nada are replenishing the chickpea patties, hummus, tabbouli salad, tzatziki sauce, and fresh baked breads in the display case to be ready for the evening shoppers.
The bell clings against the door. In walks Ms. Dashel. Amir had always felt guilty since Ms. Dashel had become a customer. Her first visit to the Mediterranean market had been with Ulysses Sallas, a notoriously demanding man, a local chef in town who shopped there for specialty ingredients. Amir felt in some way that the store had become a trap to hold Ms. Dashel to something against her will.
She sits in her usual spot in one of the free floating tables, plunking down her satchel and grocery bag on an adjacent chair. She orders a Turkish coffee.
She hardly makes eye contact but she has the dark wild gaze Amir has noticed since the woman starting visiting the store on her own.
Though her eyes that first visit had been a soft, twinkling brown as she floated around on the arm of her new boyfriend, Mr. Sallas, Amir would have sworn her eyes had turned color. He had noticed in recent times they are black with flashes of white shards, as if her eyes were now the obsidian of his homeland.
As in times before he wants to reach out to her and physically reassure her but of course his faith prevented it. He retreats to the counter with her order and begs his wife to speak to her.
Nada is a kind a woman but more reserved than her husband. She believes people’s business should be their own. But Amir was kind to everyone and out of respect for his heart she would do what she could.
“There is a huge bruise on her arm,” says Amir, in whispered tones behind the counter while Nada grinds the coffee. “It looks like that brute has grabbed her.”
Only last week Mr. Sallas had come in and yelled at Nada for poor technique in the preparation of his coffee.
Amir always suspected Ms. Dashel believed herself to be Mr. Sallas’ one and only. Amir had noticed she filled her bag up with things normally stocked by the offensive orospu çocuğu. She was probably running his errands while he was sleeping with someone else.
The delicate Nada carefully sets the ornate demitasse cup and saucer down in front of Ms. Dashel so as not to startle her. Ms. Dashel stares at the blank table at nothing in particular. Nada notices on her exposed upper arm, bare because of her light pink sleeveless sundress, a deep purple bruise the length and width of a thick long finger.
“May I sit with you, Ms. Dashel? I am so tired,” she says, hoping Ms. Dashel will understand her intrusion as a request for a favor rather than a display of pity.
“Yes, dear,” Ms. Dashel replies in an abstracted tone. “Please make yourself comfortable,” but she stares at the table as if her beloved coffee had not been set before her.
“Ms. Dashel,” says Nada, “do you mind me observing that pink favors you. It is a lovely dress you are wearing.”
Ms. Dashel makes eye contact with the lovely Nada whose deep brown eyes gaze at her steadily and compassionately as the eyes of Umay. She bends to bring the tiny demitasse cup up to her mouth. Nada notices a little quiver in her left eye, a faint tick along the outer crease.
“Will you be buying groceries from us today, Ms. Dashel? We are so happy to have you here,” says Nada.
Ms. Dashel applies a tiny gold spoon full of sugar to the dark offering and take another sip.
“When we have coffee at the diner,” says Ms. Dashel, “I don’t stir my cream. He always says it is stupid,” says Ms. Dashel, finally. “He believes I am stupid, even in the little ways.”
“Who says this?” says Nada, knowing the answer but not wanting to appear presumptuous.
“Ulysses Sallas.”
Ms. Dashel applies the rim of the deep blue demitasse cup to her fading painted lips. “He laughs at me.”
Nada can only imagine. She remembers vividly Ulysses, a large man, a rope of a ponytail down his back, demanding she start over with his Turkish coffee. She had felt the back of her neck burn as she stood at the stove with the ibrik, willing it to build more foam as demanded of her.
“I want to tell you a secret about stirring,” says Nada, gently, carefully covering her hand over Ms. Dashel’s frail bird claw.
“There is a certain pleasure to be had in not stirring. Let me tell you about those pleasures. First of all, it is beautiful to watch the cream enter the coffee and swirl around, isn’t it, yes? Also, you never know what each sip will taste like. Will it be creamy? Will it be dark? Life is a mystery, and there are some of us who enjoy mysteries and beauty.”
Ms. Dashel’s hand had warmed under Nada’s touch. She retrieved it and put it into her lap. She pushed her spine up against the back of her chair. “You are right,” she said.
That afternoon Ms. Dashel used Mr. Sallas’ credit card to buy Turkish delights for the market employees and their families. She had Nada wrap special boxes for the children and tie them up elaborately with bows. Then she had Amir cut the card in half with the shears he kept behind the counter.
At closing time, she and Nadir and Nada devise a plan:
She would leave town for the beach, using cash only. When she speaks to Ulysses for the last time, she would pretend she didn’t know how the rampant credit card charges occurred. She would be having her last cell phone conversation with him – which she would have by airplane mode to avoid him tracking her.
She would stay at the beach for a month or longer. She would start her life elsewhere to avoid Ulysses’ anger, she would sell everything she had, Nada would help her. It didn’t matter anymore, she would be safe. The night she would say good bye to him, she would be looking out on the ocean from her campsite with her dog, a box of Turkish delights beside her, her favorite kind, large pink chunks of rosewater.
*The inspiration for Nada’s thoughts come from a wonderful little lifehacker article called Why You Shouldn’t Stir Your Coffee.
29 Saturday Dec 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Messy, Sodanie Chea, flickr
Starbucks chocolate mint coffee for breakfast, the last of the bag in the freezer since the Christmas before. She was now going on $15 dollars in the account since Christmas week when she forked over the promised last one hundred for the concert ticket promised her son. She was praying to some god her Plenty of Fish date tonight was the paying kind. She was counting on it. It was dinner.
Once she had dated a man who had used a coupon their first date and then expected her to split the cost. Mean little life. There were times she felt she was hanging on like a tick on life’s back. Not at all like the genteel mannered life of her upbringing, her white rich mama having adopted her from Cambodia and trained her in the way of proper southern ladies. Her mama had assumed after the divorce she was being wined and dined, that rich men were courting her. Let her assume, thought Chanthou.
She had changed her name back to Chanthou Seng. Her son retained his father’s surname, Rouse. She had been Georgia Abernathy as a child, heaven forbid, then Georgia Rouse, married.
She touched the picture she recently taped to the refrigerator, a picture of a Cambodian woman handing over her baby to an American soldier in a helicopter. The copter was on the roof of a hospital and the mother was saving her child from horrors and likely death under the Khmer Rouge. Chanthou had ripped it from the page of an old magazine at the library. She had no pictures of her family.
The coffee grinds in the Mr. Coffee filter inside the basket still smelled a little like mint chocolate, like some old forgotten dream. She retrieved a china mug from her long ago Christmas wedding shower. She wanted to smash it. But she had an affinity for beauty and could adopt a cold objectivity for sentimental objects when it served her.
The wedding ring quilt she had given to her dog. It was some cheap mass produced western looking thing they probably made in her country or some other place with no unions, ten hour days, women fainting and falling out. It was a delicious feeling when the small white pet began to tear at it with her teeth and paws.
Her son was up finally, on his way to work a double. He was tall, dark, the skin and facial features of home. He was so much taller the top of her head fit under his chin. He would never know she had only $15 dollars to her name until the month’s alimony came through.
She received a text from a man she hadn’t met yet who would meet her out for tea, and, she hoped, some of the restaurant’s Thai offerings, like the Satay Satay Salad or the Thaiger is Crying Sandwhich. Yum. Are you ok with beards? he said in his text. Cause right now I look like Santa. Something about that completely cracked her up. She smiled. She told him so.
When she received a text from her ex the day before, something having to do with their son, he had said something hilarious, and she cried. She would not have confessed this to him of course. But despite her bitterness, she found the old laughter both poignant and painful and no less a kind of miracle. The icy slim blond who was her replacement wouldn’t tolerate much of a rapport between the two of them so she keeps it brief. She needs her monthly aid and would not cause trouble.
How much fun when she was young. In college, climbing in the campus fountain, dancing with her friends. I don’t give a fuck she had shouted for the whole quad to hear and her friends had repeated after her, laughing, all of them soaked and twirling around, three a.m., no campus security. She remembered what she felt like when she said that, something she would never have said before when she was a foreign daughter with white rich Christian parents.
That’s what she felt now at the prospect of meeting Santa. And he had joked with her that she should sit in his lap.
She had a feeling he would pay.
And if he didn’t, she would make her escape.
22 Saturday Dec 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
Christmas Cake from Cornwall by Ramones Karaoke, flickr
He liked the feel of her in his hands, like risen dough he mashes down and forms again when he is on the job as a pastry chef. She is large, so much larger than most women he has seen, and so fair.
Secretly, to his family and friends she was his big cinnamon, that is what he called her, using a synechdoche in which a part represents a whole, in this case, the sweet smell of her and kindness representing her oversized sweet yeast bun type body. He was no small creature himself and when he met her and slept with her, he felt a kind of echoing satisfaction in his bones, through his blood and flesh.
He brought to her sweet confectionary: chocolate covered strawberries, cheese cake, chocolate ganache, banana bread, baklava, cream cheese iced red velvet. He loved to watch her consume his offerings with abandon, to observe her big red glossed lips, her cheeks smooth and creamy, her plump, baby like fingers shoveling in bites of his creations.
And yet. There were times when he felt it might be more appropriate for her to wait. Why did she always have to eat a piece of what he brought her on the selfsame day? What was wrong with her that she didn’t have the restraint to put something in the freezer, to wait for an occasion to bring out and share it later at an event?
He wasn’t sure what event he had in mind exactly. She was clearly on her own, divorced, hanging out in coffee shops while he worked all night, jabbering with musicians and reading her poetry and sending him pictures on her phone. She had her little white dog and her adult son at times. She was no longer a socialite but a burnt out star.
Still, she could have used some restraint.
But she clearly loved him: “Dear Charles, you are the best, the most brilliant! The night we spent was beyond compare. Remember that waiter? hahaha! You made short work of him, my beautiful god!” This is the kind of thing she would text to him by phone and he would erase it with one click of his generous strong finger, preferring instead to talk to her the next day on his way home from work.
For the holidays, he made her a huge Christmas cheesecake, topped with a strawberry swirl glaze, red and green candies, a yellow chiffon cake side dyed with a green checkerboard pattern of tiny green trees. He had to work on Christmas Eve but stopped by to give her the cake and wish her well.
Her face was tear stained when she opened the door, he could see that. Her son had preferred to stay with his father for the night. And she was alone.
She took the cake from him and set it on the counter. She embraced him in thanks. She insisted he sit down for a moment. She had made coffee.
She took the cake from the box and placed it on a silver stand and exclaimed over it and kissed him again.
He sipped her coffee, she knew how to make it just the way he liked, straight, smooth, and dark.
And yet, she took a silver cake cutter, a holdover from a different life, and sliced right through the heart of his cake, the artfully swirled puree, the tenderly created trees.
That plump, baby hand on the silver server, the lifting of a piece right from the Christmas heart of it all and the ungracious plopping of it onto a plate, the insertion of a large bite right into her fat face.
He couldn’t take it anymore.
He told her he had to leave.
In the crisp and biting air, alone on the front step, he knew: On the morrow, he would be free.
*
You may also enjoy my Christmas story “Santa Baby” published in the UK journal Use Your Words: here.
You may also enjoy reading my story “Cocoa Beach Christmas,” here.
“Santa Baby” is racier, while “Cocoa Beach Christmas” is most definitely rated G.
Thank you for reading and Merry Christmas!
28 Wednesday Nov 2018
Posted in Flash-Nano, original flash fiction
Photo by Emily Austin, unsplash
Misha had thought to kill herself only hours before, lying in the deep bath of what a wealthy friend derisively called a “tract home.” She had been preparing for the well heeled event, a cocktail party with her husband’s colleagues, partners in the medical practice. Every year, around the time of her birthday, she felt herself slipping below the rim of reality as if she had slipped beneath the skin of the surface of a warm bath and was looking up at the world and its players, distorted and menacing. She thought she was screaming, but no one could hear anything. In a moment she would have to relinquish her soaking when the water turned cold. Then there would be the fixing of her hair, the straightening of her dress, the application of makeup, and the selection of jewelry.
What would she talk to these people about? And the women were all so stark and regal, proper doctor’s wives. She never lost the baby weight. That feeling of her self consciousness oppressed her. Planning on ways to kill herself did not help either, as if she were her own judge and jury, and sided with the sophisticated medical crowd regarding her value as a human.
At the party, things were as anticipated. But she found her solace in the locked bathroom where she let the water run from the faucet long and in a soothing little torrent. She used the brass stopper to close the drain and watched as the sink filled and the excess water spilled into the overflow holes. When she turned off the sink, she played with the water with little twirls of her hands. Maybe she should die in the bathtub, slashes deep and long in her flesh, the blood red and warming her as her body cooled. What if her child found her though. No, maybe there was something not so jarring in appearance.
What she didn’t realize was that there was someone in the toilet stall. A young yellow haired woman emerged, thin, a before pregnancy body, a black spaghetti strap halter dress hanging off of her like a dress hanging on a hangar. Her eyes were blotched with errant mascara and her hair mussed a bit as if she had been sitting on the toilet holding her head in her hands.
Misha remembered the night of her marriage. It had not been quite what she had anticipated. All the build up, the move from Minsk, the ceremony arranged by Rob’s parents in the United States. Misha so concerned to be beautiful, according to her advertisement on the Russian bride site, her parents and brothers and sisters and whole family crying before her trip overseas but wishing her well. The vodka, wine, cranberry juice, black bread, the gift of salt, the old sad songs for the loss of a daughter to her groom. After the ceremony in an empty white church devoid of the embellishments of her country’s faith, she remembered the lightweight veil on her head and realized what she had always wanted as a girl: To feel the orthodox bridal crown. She sat in the hotel bathroom, the first night of her married life and felt the sting of tears. What was wrong with her? She chastised herself. She thought of her parents, how happy they were, she tried to be happy too.
“How can I help you?” Misha said to the sniffling young woman, but the girl ignored her and dabbed at her eyes with a linen napkin from the stack provided by the sink. “Here, dear one, let me give you a hug.” The girl acquiesced and Misha felt the racking of her sniffles against her chest and her birdlike shoulders in the folds of her motherly arms. Where had she come from? She hadn’t even noticed anyone slightly under the age of thirty. The youngest couples were not that young, all of them having survived medical school and residencies and made it into partnership.
“I have to go,” said the girl, and twisted out of her grasp and slipped through the door.
Misha, who herself had only, hours before, been crying silently as she lay in the deep water of the tub, could not find the child among the mix of people when she emerged from the bathroom. At least she had been given the chance to be of comfort and she did feel a little lighter.
That night, she slipped out of her dress, took off her jewelry and lit candles around her tub.
Rob kidded her she would turn into a prune. She kissed him on the mouth. His eyes registered surprise. She had been withdrawn from him some weeks.
She slipped into the warm water all encompassing and primordial. How beautiful to hold herself in this way, suspended, and know she would come up for air.
02 Friday Nov 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
marty hadding, flickr
Put the tiny cup to my lips, father, and I will drink the grape juice, the blood of our Lord. I am too weak to grasp it myself and cannot lift my head from the pillow.
Your kindly, knobby fingers I know so well, and the freckle by your ring finger. The bells of your church in Arkansas years ago when I was a child, the bright green lawn, the white of the walls beyond the gold cross suspended from the ceiling with taut wire. At the front of the church I sing with my friends “So My Sheep May Safely Graze,” our voices reverberating, mother on the second row where she always sits. You in your red velvet chair behind the pulpit. I know where you keep a glass of water, on a shelf just below the Bible, a secret shelf.
Do you remember when I went with you to give a last communion to an invalid lady? You served her from a velvet lined burgundy kit containing the juice and wafers, Jesus’ body. When we were sitting in the car later in front of her house, I stared hard out of the window, afraid to look at your face because you said I was strong. Tears stung my eyes. When you asked me what was wrong I said will that lady be alright? You said nothing. Our experience became a sermon illustration.
I try to speak to you but my words cannot make it into my mouth my body has become slowed and lazy with the sedatives, the morphine.
I love you, father.
You hold my hand, you tell me where to go, you tell me where I will meet you. You ask me to reserve a place.
25 Thursday Oct 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
woman wearing eye covers by Amadeo Muslimovic, unsplash
She had a date, Ms. Myska. A miracle, really, considering it had only been a month ago that she lay on the operating table awaiting anesthesia, uncertain if cancer would take her down with her uterus.
And here she was, healthy as a new chick, sitting across the table from a smiling man with retro looking glasses, a man who knew how to choose a restaurant, to order, to talk. It hardly felt deserved, actually, Ms. Myska being somewhat shy, somewhat of a scurrying mouse, somewhat worried about her problems though she put on her best face.
Still, her face was betraying her. Sangria was the culprit. Sulfites, likely, in the wine. She began to feel her bottom lip plump out into a perfect rectangle and she wondered if the man saw, though thankfully the lights were dim.
She hoped she didn’t seem awkward talking to him because she was trying to talk while worrying. But to Ms. Myska worrying and doing something else at the same time was like walking and chewing gum.
The hysterectomy, the next phase in her fight against cancer, a fight to stay one step ahead of the reaper, saw her experience with a new drug. And it plumped out her lips and caused them to be red and chapped. This had been an unexpected. Though the swelling seemed to come and go – some days she felt she was over it, and some days her lips seemed to be stretching the boundaries of her skin – she was resigned to the permanence of the situation and sometimes observed the phenomenon with curiosity, like a scientist, or sometimes with horror, like a Japanese citizen in a monster flick, shaken to the core by a walking lizard exploded beyond all reason in size and ferocity.
As she watched her date order their tapas she hoped her lips did not cause her to blurt out any of her presently closely guarded feelings and thoughts. Here were a few: “Hey, you are even cuter than I imagined.” Or: “What would it be like to kiss you?” Or: “I think it’s really sexy when a guy knows how to order. Total hotness.”
Her lips had a serious side too. They wanted to say things like: “How come your other relationships didn’t work out?” Or: “Tell me how you feel about being a widower.” Or: “Do you snore loudly? Do you have flatulence? Would you mind if I did on occasion? Or minded if I enjoyed burping very loudly? Would you mind if I occasionally struggle with insomnia? I talk to my dog constantly, is that a problem? I sometimes cry, unprovoked, is that a big deal? Messy house? Financial messes?”
Instead she said: “I love making coconut shrimp. Yum.” He was a cook too and they compared notes.
When they were off to their cars at the top of the garage under the inky sky, they hugged goodnight.
It was only later, in her car, driving home, that she realized he had turned his head sideways to kiss her.
She was glad her lips had not picked up on this. Her lips only realized it later, with her brain.
She liked him.
But she was glad.
04 Thursday Oct 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Let death find you alive by Kara Harms, flickr
There is something wrong with Nettie, who lives at the edge of town. There is something wrong with Nettie who walks beside the trees. There is something wrong with Nettie whose dress once pure is coated with a dark liver colored stain. There is something wrong with Nettie, no one has seen her little dog in weeks. There is something wrong with Nettie, her hair has ratted. There is something wrong with Nettie, they say she walks in the woods naked at night. There is something wrong with Nettie, kids hear her scratching at their windows. There is something wrong with Nettie, someone found her in a tree, gripping the trunk of it in her thighs. There is something wrong with Nettie, when the moon is full, she walks beside the highway. There is something wrong with Nettie, some say she ate a man, homeless, her teeth, sharp and ruthless. There is something wrong with Nettie though she was once one of us. There is something wrong with Nettie, but her former husband and children turn as if embarrassed, aggrieved. There is something wrong with Nettie, and no one will say what, exactly, and no one will do anything. There is something wrong with Nettie, she climbs the sky every night riding a rough stick and wearing a red cap over hair matted with sticks and rocks she collects sleeping on the ground. There is something wrong with Nettie, and maybe, one day, she’ll die.
23 Thursday Aug 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Kintsugi by Abigail Moses, etsy store, JoStarrCo, link below the story
Ms. Myska’s upcoming operation had altered the course of her daily thoughts and interaction with the world. The surgeon told her he would use robotic arms to go into her womb and extract her cancerous uterus. Always before learning of such she had a mousy nervous way, an odd way, that people noticed and remarked upon, albeit through veiled observant glances and uncomfortable laughter. And now, Ms. Myska’s nerves had sent her over the edge. In fact, she had come to believe she could interact with the insensate world, something she kept a secret but something she felt nonetheless.
It started with her fear of death. Mrs. Malvoline, at the weekly Bible study luncheon, had told her when learning of the upcoming procedure: “Well you know Mitzy Bowzer had that done, all fancy Dan, the surgery modern as a toaster, and she lost her bowels from between her legs. Slipped right through.”
This during the chicken salad salad sandwiches at a table mounded with fruit in the center around which the ladies chattered about their families and their diets.
Ms. Myska laid her croissant sandwich down on her plastic plate and held a napkin to her lips.
Greta Malvoline had not known of or could not have guessed Ms. Myska’s feverish sweats in the middle of night, her nightmares of being chased through the town by robotic arms that could move in 360 degree rotation, arms that played with her hair, put things in her grocery basket, made her meals – gourmet style – far superior to her humble culinary efforts. And now, in waking life, arms would take the organ that had once held her baby.
The room where twelve ladies sat around the luncheon table in the church, twelve ladies strong, good as the twelve apostles, was too close for Ms. Myska, the now cloying odor of fresh baked bread and fruit overwhelming. She grabbed her purse and scurried to the door. Outside the church at the memorial garden where the cremated remains of former parishioners sat in jars. She felt sick but she wanted to show respect for the dead.
“Oh earth,” she said, “If I die, will you hold me?”
Even Ms. Myska knew she was being a bit dramatic. The surgeon had reassured her he had performed thousands of robotic surgeries without mishap. And the upside was a quick recovery.
She felt a breeze then, a caress. The leaves rattled “yes.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. She had her answer, then. She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like this was a reassurance.
She must think of something pretty to be buried in, she thought, looking around at the colorful urns where others’ ashes were stored. Were specific burial urns standard or could she choose a favorite container, something personal?
She thought of her great grandmother’s ginger jar. When she was a girl she had brushed against the pie crust table where it was displayed. The jar broke into many pieces. Rather than scold her, her great grandmother had gathered the pieces and glued them back together, teaching her about the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi. “The Japanese believe, my little one, that a repaired vessel is even more beautiful because it is the scars that show uniqueness and beauty. Artists often highlight the cracks in a repaired piece of pottery using gold. It is a lesson in resilience. A repaired vessel is a sign of soul.” And her great grandmother gently brushed her cheek with a crooked and withered finger.
One of the items Ms. Myska procured for herself after her great grandmother’s death was the repaired old ginger jar. Ms. Myska’s mother, a practical woman, was in the process of tossing out her deceased grandmother’s odds and ends. The jar was sitting on top of a pile of old books and newspapers. Nula spirited it away. “That’s useless, you know,” said her mother. Nula ignored her. She kept her magic jar in her room beside her pet rock Harry and her matryoshka doll collection.
The afternoon of the earth’s reassurance in the memorial garden, she was happy to not return to the ladies who by now were commencing a study and discussion of the Messianic prefigurings of Jesus. It had nothing to do with her. The irrelevance of this arcane type of scholasticism coupled with a stomach heavy with a rich lunch inspired her departure. To stay might have brought about drowsing during the lecture, adding yet another incidence of eccentricity to her reputation.
At home, she retrieved her great grandmother’s blue and white ginger jar from the china cabinet. She kept it in the place where the little interior light of the cabinet could highlight it. If she looked carefully, she could see the places where her grandmother had lovingly glued the pieces back together. She placed it on her dining room table and sat before it.
“Little jar,” she said, “Will you hold the ashes of my bones when I am dead?”
She couldn’t be completely sure, not when she thought of it later, but she could have sworn she heard the lid of the jar rattle lightly against the lip. Maybe it was just her nervous agitation upsetting the table slightly and disturbing the jar, but it seemed perhaps she had her answer.
Ms. Myska buzzed about the kitchen making her dinner of chili beans and cornbread and feeding her dog. It took a great deal of time for the beans to cook and though it was early afternoon she anticipated a late night dinner.
On the porch she sat with her needlework. The sky was busily forming and reforming clouds as she followed the pattern for the large splashy peonies on the printed canvas. It was pleasurable to push the colored yarn through and know that this was her only chore for the afternoon. Years ago she had entertained her husband’s – now ex husband’s – clients with elaborate parties. Years ago she had raised a teenage son. Years ago she had scurried around a library large as a city block looking for patron’s requests. Now all that was required was the simple tent stich. Her tiny white dog sat beside her on the small porch swing.
She had a sudden worry for her. Who would care for the little thing were something to happen?
“Sky,” she said, “Will you watch over my dog Belle when I’m dead? Watch over her to protect her? Protect her as a mother?”
The clouds bowed up then forming a perfect circle like a mother’s arms. Miraculous! Ms. Myska had never felt so close to the sky and she stayed outside on her porch until the summer storm blew her indoors.
That evening, the whole of her house bathed in gold while Ms. Myska ate her supper. It was as if it were a crack in an artisan’s pot that had been repaired with gold. The whole of her life was a history of her scarring and repair and for the first time in weeks Ms. Myska lay in her soft bed with her dog at her feet and slept without nightmares.
Go here to acquire Abigail Moses’ wonderful work of art above “Kintsugi.”
10 Friday Aug 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
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BW faces by E.
A woman walked into the salon. Mateo, a new hairdresser, observed what appeared to be separately dyed chunks of hair, each strand moving independently so that the whole had an effect of a dark crazy nimbus around her face. For some reason, no one seemed to notice, but he was working on the rougher side of town now, having struggled to find an opening. Maybe a lot happened without notice or comment.
No doubt he would be assigned to the striped headed woman being that he had more of the walk in clients. As he finished with the client in his chair he briefly mused on the challenge of his afternoon: This once trendy way of dying large swaths of hair in contrasting colors to jarring effect was going by the wayside, and thank God. He had seen it work for a few regal beauties. But for the average person: Quel dommage!
He tried to honor the customers who wanted extreme hair dyes, but he always found himself secretly compromising with expressed wishes when it came to actually applying color. He always told himself they would be amazed at how becoming his magic would be and they wouldn’t mind he altered their plans ever so slightly. And usually, he was correct. A few light streaks in strategically located places around the face and crown and they looked ten years younger, brighter, smarter. And no walking around town with a Ringling circus tent for hair, not on his watch.
At last he had the wild haired woman – whose name he learned was Willa – on his chair, hair bouncing on her head long after she sat still. He grabbed for his readers on the dresser of his station. He needed them to do the detailed work he expected of himself. Having situated them on his nose he saw something most unexpected: Willa’s hair was full of life because her hair was indeed alive. The chunks of hair weren’t individually dyed, they were each an independently writhing and hissing snake! Mateo jumped in alarm as if bitten. His heart was racing. And he almost fell to the floor. But he maintained enough composure to hold up a finger indicating “just a moment” as he raced to the bathroom.
He threw up his lunch, the leftovers from the dinner his partner, Ray, had made him the night before. His throat and nose burned and he washed out his mouth and splashed water on his face. He gazed at himself intently in the mirror. Often when he did this he could imagine Ray’s soft brown eyes looking back at him. And he saw them now, encouraging him, believing in him. He needed this job. Desperately. The whole of their lives hinged on his resourcefulness.
He stole out of the back door of the shop and drove to the bait and tackle to fetch a container of crickets. From years of fishing with his dad, he knew where to buy them and he knew from Ray, who kept their garden, this is one thing many of the nonpoisonous ones liked to eat. Ray kept for them a beautiful garden full of plants they used every day, roses, citrus. But Mateo’s father had cut off all contact.
In the back room at the salon, he managed to get all the crickets into a hair dryer cap, having sealed off the tube that attached to the dryer. And then he worked the cap over Willa’s head, trying not to think of anything but Ray’s soft brown eyes, even as the snakes were whipping his hands and arms. And at last, there was less and less movement under the cap as the snakes sated themselves. Willa seemed happier and more satisfied too. Now he could talk to her in peace.
“How did you come to have snakes for hair?” he said, watching her face, trying to determine what was going on.
But Willa didn’t speak, or she was unable to tell him. She looked at the floor.
He brought her the lemonade Ray made for him every day specially with lemons from their garden. He was right in guessing this would help. When she seemed open to talking, he arranged to make special visits to her home for what he jokingly told her was “the cricket cure.” He saw her smile, just a little, and he knew he had a client.
He and Ray began visiting every Saturday, bringing their little dog Matt Junior.
Until one weekend, they arrived at her home to discover her head was full of hair instead of writhing serpents. And at last Mateo found out the cause of the poor woman’s affliction: She had been attacked on a Sunday as she was coming back from church. The attacker must have been watching her for some time and knew her schedule and when she would be most vulnerable. He dragged her out into the garden, and her house, being remote from neighbors, meant no one could hear her or see what was going on. She was raped in her garden. And her grief in the months following resulted in an unruly head.
It had been a year since the tragedy and Mateo and Jay were helping her to feel like herself again.
The first day of Willa’s normal hair, Mateo smiled in the good lady’s sunny kitchen, a glass of wine in one hand and a handful of Willa’s healthy hair in the other. “It’s time to get back to gorgeous,” he said, and he put down his wine and began to section off her hair for his signature radiant style.
09 Thursday Aug 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
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Cristinella by vitto, flickr
Just before Julie’s morning break, the security monitor flashed on a girl with black hair and kohl lined eyes. Julie zoomed in on her to get a better look.
The customer stood at the ladies’ jewelry counter, perusing a turnstile of watches. She then summoned Rosemary to unlock the clear plastic case. A few minutes later, she slipped a watch into her jacket pocket.
Julie was just about to alert her undercover shopper when the girl stopped and looked up at the camera. It was Chloe. Behind the dark hair and goth makeup was the face of Julie’s own child. Julie stroked the monitor with her fingers. Chloe hadn’t been home in a long time.
As if in response to Julie’s touch, Chloe shot her the bird. She then stormed off to the womens’ hosiery department. She slid the watch into a ladies’ pantyhose sleeve, holding it up so her mother could see what she was doing.
“Do you want me to go down there and handle it?” This was Julie’s boyfriend, having watched the events from the security room. He had been a witness to many such scenes between his girlfriend and her daughter, but nothing was ever stolen. Things were merely rearranged.
“Leave it,” she said.
The divorce had created a new child, someone Julie didn’t recognize. To make matters worse, her ex rarely called, and when he spent time with Chloe, it was to let her know her mother was a whore.
By the time Julie arrived on the floor, Chloe had gone. She tipped the watch out of the sleeve and held it in her hand until it was warm. It was deceptively heavy.
First appeared in decomP magazine.
06 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
A woman was feeling lonely, desperate. In fact, that’s what a former, much younger lover had told her: She was lonely and desperate. That was a year ago. And no dating since. And since then the gynecologist had showed her a picture of something in her uterus, the scope light making it appear as a large shining globe like the top of an alien’s head, half of a crystal ball. She was old enough to have given birth to her young friend, and she did give birth to a man only a bit younger than he. And now she would have to give birth to her uterus to be rid of the foreign body growing inside her.
She remembers telling the young man when they broke up: When you are alone paying your own bills and worrying about fixing your own house and taking care of your health, feelings are a bit different, life is harder. You’ll see. Asshole. Well, she didn’t call him that, but she wanted to. He still lived with his parents, to her shame, among piles of books and hoards of cats.
Brother Lawrence Bible Verses 4 You promised to deliver daily Bible verses by text, every day for 40 days. Part of the course was to write in a journal and by the end of it track spiritual growth. Before this scheme, she had thought she might start writing letters to herself or composing texts to herself, some which might be Bible verses. In her letters, she would say the things she wanted to hear from others but didn’t – reassurances, promises of love, apologies. She would pretend to be others and sign their names. She needed to feel better, somehow. And she would do anything.
But the Brother Lawrence thing seemed so much more direct. Sure, Bible verses were connected in some ways to dark memories of her upbringing, but she wouldn’t have to put forth as much effort to think of them and send them to herself. It was a service she could receive for once and perhaps it could feel more like a gift. Now that she was divorced and without prospects, she wasn’t beyond sending flowers to herself at Valentine’s, for example, but at what cost. She had grown tired. And now she was sick. And in need of an operation.
The site did not send her any texts.
She called Brother Lawrence, the customer service line listed on the site. There was some music on the hold line, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” How many times had she been to church and listened to the organ arrangement. She had even sung it in a church choir. And now it was coming through static on the Brother Lawrence help line.
“Hello?” said a wavering voice, finally, picking up the call. It sounded like an older woman.
There were no formalities to help the situation and so she proceeded. “Look I signed up to receive your Bible verse texts, which I think is a wonderful service. But I haven’t received a verse yet.”
“We are just a nonprofit aiming to do our best,” said the woman and there was the sound of a chiming clock behind her.
“Isn’t it automated so that once I sign up I begin to receive verses?”
“I don’t know.”
There was some silence between them.
What more could be said.
“Thank you,” said the woman and hung up.
Maybe the older woman on the helpline had been hinting that they needed a donation to activate the verses.
The money required to get her uterus out, alien head and all, mitigated against charitable donations.
Yet another nothing is for free moment. And so she rejoined the dog eat dog world, got over her depression, got rid of her uterus, went back to the gym, took her life back, went back to school and eventually got a job.
A few months later she received a text from Brother Lawrence: “God loves you.”
28 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Some experiments by Gisella Klein, flickr
After a housewife spends hours before a glowing box pressing buttons, her hands sweating, her legs and arms weakening, her pupils dilating and contracting, fluids streaming from every orifice, she goes about her tasks which do not involve punching buttons or looking at a glowing box. These tasks, by comparison, cause little reaction. She goes back to her occupation before the box as if returning to an essential fire. Her life crashes down around her, her family leaves, her house disintegrates and is taken away, and eventually someone takes the box away. She spends the rest of her life dreaming about the times she sat before the box. She dies and is put into a box. The box that had been her glowing box becomes a black box piled on top of other boxes nourishing the soil with mercury, chromium, cadmium, and lead.
First appeared in The New Absurdist
13 Friday Jul 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
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Untitled XXIII by Julia Ortiz, flickr
She had long since forgotten what it felt like to have a man’s eyes on her. She was forty-two, still passable for her late thirties, but had grown used to the fact that men weren’t going to look at her when she walked into a room, that she would be ignored no matter her capabilities, her joie de vivre, her “soul.” How she laughed to herself to remember her past reassurances of older female friends when they mourned their changing looks. These reassurances, she knew now, would have seemed as specious to them as her beliefs about the “soul” itself. How could she have known that so much of happiness was tied to what she had once thought was superficial?
One morning a year after her baby was born, she took the metro to the D.C. Mall. She wanted to spend a quiet day in the National Gallery looking at paintings, letting the silence and the beauty change her or refresh her in some way. She and her husband had lived in Gaithersburg for a few years but she had rarely followed through with her plan to get away from the house, to entertain herself with this rare private indulgence.
She closed her eyes as the train sped away from the station. She settled into the jostling car as it whirred along the rails. She was grateful that even the small decisions involved with driving a car were not hers to make, that at least for a while, there was little reason for vigilance. As the stops rolled by one after another she had to rouse herself to pay attention.
And that’s when she saw him standing by the door opposite. She hadn’t been sure what made her look at him, of all the men standing in the car, with their identical suits, grasping their briefcases and newspapers. He was watching her. She met his gaze. He did not look away.
Was he really looking at her? she wondered. Maybe she was mistaken. She turned, saw the car was filled with people reading, dozing, talking on phones. She resumed watching his blue, almost gray eyes. He smiled at her then, just a small turning up of his lips. He knew what she was thinking. It made her uncomfortable to think he knew something about her just from this one gesture and yet she felt something in his gaze that was innocent, that was merely curious, intensely curious.
She had to think about her breath and to make herself focus on her metro stop. When it arrived, she pushed herself up from her chair. She lurched forward. How very unattractive, she thought. She felt her face burning. She looked at his face once more before stepping out of the car. He was still watching her. He was still smiling. She stood on the platform while the doors closed and he did not let his eyes move from her face.
She wanted to cry. She liked him. Or she liked the idea of him, that’s what she realized later when she thought about wanting to cry as she stood there watching some stranger being pulled away from her. He was curious and he was handsome and there was something shy in his gaze too, something that made it safe for her to like him, and she wished she had stayed in the car and hadn’t been so true to her plans.
Years later, when she thought of the day the man had looked at her, she realized a part of her feelings of loss about becoming invisible had been about a lost identity but also a great deal had been about something else, that something that would never return to her in the shape of her yearning, in the empty space that is left when she finally became no one and everyone, both at once.
first published in Atticus Review
04 Wednesday Jul 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
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preparing for our fourth of July barbeque, Jenn Vargas, Flickr
Driving back from dropping off her son at camp outside Hampton, Tennessee, she turned off onto the road leading to the cabin. It was the week of the 4th and frankly the time had been less than hoped for.
The cabin was tucked back in dark woods, remote, still. The inside paneling was dark. The cabin was equipped with a wood burning stove and an upstairs loft with a bed. There was limited wifi and not much in the way of cable.
Since her divorce she and her son had developed nocturnal habits with their electronic equipment – he with his video games, she her social media and movies – but in the dead of night here there wasn’t much to do and not much to entertain him. She knew she had contributed to this way of being, this spoiled way, and she had spoiled herself too in constant escapism. It had been the guilt that had perhaps entered in between them and made her a different kind of parent than she might have been.
She hadn’t noticed the gas gauge. She was almost on empty. It was growing dark and before long the car’s GPS fell off of radar. There had been flooding and she had to gun it across a flooded run running as rapidly as a small creek. She was scared and shaken. And alone. Her son had helped her find the cabin initially by using the map system on his phone. Luckily she started to recognize landmarks and used her memory to help guide her choices.
At the cabin, the leaves of the wood were the kind that becomes their most intense green right before darkness. There was a porch around the cabin. Along the front it was tiny and screened in, an airless room. Along the side it was open and big enough to house a small jacuzzi tub, the one compensation. She suited up and took the cover off of the tub and stepped in and was lulled for a moment. And then she worried about what may be watching her, what she couldn’t see – animal, human.
She went inside, locked the door, drew the curtains, and started a fire in the wood burning stove even though it was a warm night. She would sit on her towel in her wet suit and dry out. She was able to contact the dating site she just couldn’t stay on it forever. Only a couple of people had sent her messages but only the bare minimum of what had become the usual. Hi. or Hey. or sometimes Hey gorgeous. or worse Hey sexy. Would she ever get to the point of responding to Hey sexy. She hoped not.
She had planned to write her fiction. She wasn’t feeling imaginative. She was feeling dull and useless. In a little bit she would need to scrounge up dinner.
She took a few pictures with her camera phone for the site. Why not. Her hair was brown and short now because of the chemo. Only a few years ago she had what seemed like a more photogenic quality. Now she looked more her age. She wore heavy black framed glasses that even looked a bit stylish with their heaviness. She had done a series of black and white photos wearing her glasses and a necklace set she had bought when she was married, one from Talbots, a silver mother of pearl set. She was selling herself online now as Ugly Betty which sometimes netted her responses like You’re not ugly! and You’re hot why are you saying you’re ugly! Sometimes people were funny which made her feel better. Sometimes she wondered if that was her only goal.
She had even gone so far as to see if anyone living in the area would want to meet out, something she’d seen guys do. So many guys came to Orlando on business and wanted only a one time or short term dating situation. Or who knows maybe they said that and were actually married. These were the sort of behaviors she had become accustomed to.
A log fell. She propped it back up with the poker and put in a fresh one from the iron basket beside the stove.
There wasn’t anyone in proximity to where she was it seemed. With the difficulty of getting through the woods it was best. And as far as staying put, the cabin was not as comfortable as she’d hoped either with hard wooden chairs in the kitchen where she’d have to sit if she wanted to write at a table. She missed her padded high back chair in front of her narrow and cheap but elegant rustic Queen Anne writing table at home, hardwood and only stained. It was ironic to be away from home on vacation and miss the things you had.
As she had many times she reminded herself since divorcing she was here for her son, this had been the main goal. She had successfully dropped him at camp, though in a fashion typical for his age he hadn’t wanted her to hang around. She sensed this at least. She had brought the dog as an excuse, to save face for them both, so she could leave. She had not become one of those hot cool moms. She was chubs at this point and she felt he might be ashamed of her but she didn’t pursue it with him. Ugly Betty was an apt name. She could have done some things about her state. She couldn’t get motivated.
Really, all she wanted as an Ugly Betty was to meet a man who wasn’t so overly dependent on his ego that he could be a companion. She pictured him smiling at her and giving her a side hug when they were out. He would be proud of her even though she wasn’t perfect. He wouldn’t be perfect either – average looking too, average build or even chubs like her, it was ok, even desirable in some ways. She wanted to have the sense he protected her, or could if she needed this. He would have a bit of a personality combined with a kind of sober realism. He wouldn’t flirt too much with other women when they were out or stare because he understood her feelings and wanted to value them, wanted to be the man she wanted. He wouldn’t see her as a short term opportunity because she had been sick.
Had she had a man like that maybe he would want to help her with things. The day before, the day of the fireworks, she wasn’t sure how to use the celebratory explosives and her son wasn’t sure either. They had tried shooting them off in a tiny side yard that was barely a clearing apart from the trees and underbrush. She had registered her son’s disappointment. Some of the fireworks were faulty, the rest just simply lackluster. She had bought them somewhere. A discount store which is where she buys everything now, even clothes, canned foods, dishes, and towels.
Ugly Betty’s man would have rounded the fireworks up in Georgia on the way up, big, loud explosives that would take off the tips of fingers if you didn’t know what you were doing. The silence and stillness of the woods would be penetrated with their force. He would show her son how to do everything, letting him take over and feel like a man.
It made her feel good to imagine her man with her now. In fact she got up to make him dinner. When her son wasn’t with her she had to fight with herself to find reason to make the effort. In her imagination her man was sitting there, on the couch now, having fiddled with the television antenna. He was watching her backside appreciatively. He liked the way she looked, he had often told her. He liked her Rubenesque figure, her dark eyes, her full lips.
She stirred the garlic and anchovy paste into the olive oil warming in the pan. She had come with plenty of food in the cooler, plenty to feed her son, who ate huge amounts. This would be something her man would appreciate, be grateful for, her resourcefulness. She would make spaghetti and hot crusty bread.
She put the spaghetti pot on full of water. “You know you have to bring it to a boil first before adding the salt,” she said to her dog because her man was engrossed in something he was reading in the paper they had picked up on the way in. “That way you don’t get pock marks on the bottom.”
Never again had she thought she would meet anyone else who might be able to benefit from what she had accumulated over the years, an intimate knowledge of the kitchen’s secrets.
She felt invigorated now, enough to open a bottle of wine she had indulged in to celebrate the successful drop off of her child. She put it on the table covered with the red checked tablecloth she had brought from home, along with other festive décor for the holiday.
She fed the dog who was wearing her Fourth of July bandana.
Her man would hug her appreciatively when she was finished cooking, would smile at her with his twinkling blue eyes, and after dinner they would enjoy themselves in the hot tub under the inky night sky, listening to the few remaining fireworks, smelling the gun powder drifting through the trees.
She wouldn’t think about what was looking at her through the trees.
She would think about what she sees.
06 Wednesday Jun 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
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water ripple by nullality, flickr
They all want to see the gators tucked back in the brackish waters she navigates in the tour kayak through the glades. Take me to them they say but then they hunker down when eyes, snout, jaws, emerge from the murky water where armor like bodies search for sustenance, prey. Or they are a bit more relaxed when the gators, spotted up on the shore, bask in the sun, seemingly content for the day, or afternoon. They take pictures of their massive bodies, along with creatures hovering above them in trees – owls, a nest of baby birds. Sometimes if they are quiet and still, which she encourages on her tour, for the best chances to see wildlife, they may spot a bobcat, or even sometimes a panther, through the dense mangroves.
There are all assortment of creatures she points out to them – possums, pelicans, egrets, cormorants, raccoons, heron, sea turtles, snakes, osprey. She tells them of the fishing tour they can take for snook, snapper, red drum, sheepshead, and more, tours which can include the cleaning of the fish and a meal with either cooking provided or cooking instruction. She doesn’t tell them she could also provide them with instruction on catching and cleaning possum, for example, and a lesson on her granny’s recipe handed down since early settlers, possum n’ taters. It was safer to stick with a conversation about cooking fish. Though to loosen the mood when they saw a gator, she joked that she had the recipe for fried gator tale bites with mango chutney. She could get a little chatty sometimes, but mostly when she was trying to make her passenger comfortable.
She doesn’t talk about the time she lost her balance when she was alone in the kayak and a gator clamped down on her arm with its massive jaws. The beast rolled her and the salt water invaded her nose and mouth and her screams mixed with his deep and primitive grunting. In her anger and panic she thought of the dens of rotting meat gators keep just below the outcroppings of shore. She managed to stab it in the eye with the hand not under control of its grip and extract herself from the bloody water. She nearly lost her arm and required three surgeries, but it was repaired, not without nerve damage and scarring. But she didn’t talk about it, unless compelled to by a curious tourist, though sometimes she lied. The truth was bad for business though she always coached her clients on how to behave in this wilderness.
She covered half her body with a tattoo, a gator stretched out, his tail along her back, his body over her shoulder and his head on the arm that had been crushed. She had him decorated with flowers and butterflies. She didn’t allow herself much time to worry or think, just went back to work as soon as she could. She was learning what it was like to support herself without a husband, not in the way she had been raised, but in the way she was learning to survive.
03 Sunday Jun 2018
I am listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman. She analyzes myth and stories showing what they can teach us about ourselves. In her analysis of Snow White, she points out that each character is an aspect of the self. I wrote this particular piece when I first became interested in retelling fairy tales. I had just read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and wanted to try my hand. In this piece, I do not go into a detailed retelling but this is the idea behind this voice piece which explores a bit of modern day jealousy in the literary world. Let’s say it takes the saying “murder your darlings” in a different kind of direction. Flash fiction writer Kathy Fish posted a flash fiction exercise this past week having to do with voice which you can find here and I thought….oh, so that is what I was trying to do. What would the voice of each of your favorite characters sound like if you retold a fairy or folktale through their perspective?
woman in the studio by Craig Cloutier, flickr
There was never a time I knew Anoushka when she was not in some sleepy-eyed phase of a delayed bloom. Yes, she was much younger than I was and much more beautiful and far more talented. I felt some inexplicable responsibility to protect her though at the same time, I wanted her to wake up and not rely on me. It was becoming so that I was constantly reminding her of her talents just to keep her going. Yet she remained untried in the real world and I grew weary. I wanted her to ply our trade, to finish her stories, to submit them for publication, to suffer.
And while I haven’t wanted this mother’s role of reassuring her and encouraging her in her writing, I have found myself taking up this mantel. Maybe there has been something to gain by my being her friend, OK, call me creepy if you want, call me a sycophant, call me a desperate, middle aged lady who’s flattered that this twenty-something would want to be friends with me, someone who is – what – not hip to the scene or whatever it is they’re saying these days.
And no, I’m not a lesbian. I’m happily married to a man, thank you very much. I’m happy most of the time, that is. OK, let’s just say I’m happy enough to get by, alright. But one can still have beautiful, young friends, can they not? Yet I grew weary of the dewy youth on this one as I waited for her to break out of her writing virginity, to publish the product of her labors. She secretly gloated that she was much better than I, better than most. So out with it, I said. If she demanded so much from me by way of reassurances to her ego, do I not have a right to insist she pop the publication cherry?
It was her lethargy I craved to kill, but as my weariness grew, other aspects to her personhood and our relationship became vulnerable to my vicious fantasies. I wanted to be rid of the very idea of her and of our friendship. I could not afford the ambition she siphoned off with her need, her expectations that I love her for her looks and her humor and her youth and as if that weren’t enough, her cracker-jack ability with the words which came rolling off of her, spinning out as a beautiful vine of roses from fertile soil, as if there were never a phenomenon more natural.
The market supports and encourages those of her ilk, who take beautiful cover photos, who will not make waves, whose writing, above all free of what may disturb or unsettle, or at least not to an inordinate degree. You can see how, my readers, this may be a problem for me, admitting already as I have that I am: a) jealous, b) covetous, c) ambitious, and d) of the murdering persuasion as it applies to the murdering of one’s literary “child.”
You can only imagine my narratives. You can only imagine my look behind the podium given what you can guess of my age, given what I covet enough to abolish. Other writers would not be as forthright as I. I have seen many a female writer who will swear they have never felt competition with any other female writer and yet they cut and undercut other women like a scythe mowing a hayfield. It happens. Men don’t know it. They are the compassionate hunters who can’t believe some woman has sent them out to cut out a heart.
So here was how I murdered her, so to speak, my gorgeous literary darling:
1) The corset binding. I forced her to gaze upon what was inconsequential to the writing itself: Her looks. I emphasized over and over how beautiful she was while she drew herself to the mirror and away from her desk. I cinched in her waist and she was mesmerized by her own proportions. By my manipulation of her waist size, she almost ran out of breath as she was overcome by a sense of the futility of self-expression in light of her growing dedication to her physical form.
2) The poisoned comb. I infected her thinking with faint praise, going in deep to kill the root that would poison the bloom, once and for all. If this had been successful, she would be like the women who yearn to write but who finally give up because of self-doubt.
3) The poisoned apple. At this point, she had found others who were wise to me, clever girl, so this step was the trickiest of all. I was determined that she must see me eating from the same fruit, as it were, and so I told her: “You can be a writer and have it all. Don’t listen to what people say about giving up the life of wife and mother to dedicate oneself to one’s art. Choose as I have chosen. See, I have done so, and it hasn’t killed me!”
These are only half-truths because my children are estranged, my husband sleeps on the other end of the house, my career consists of shredding up budding artists at the women’s college to whom I feed poisoned apples. My creative output consists in enumerating these tales of my passions, my crimes, but I’ve found the market responds, for grist and the gristle can be literature as long as it’s beautifully spun. The market eats almost anything in a pretty package, and Anoushka does too, chomping down on the succulent flesh of my tempting suggestions, taking the bait, wedding a man who loves only her beauty. After a while, he can’t even stand the sound of her voice.
24 Thursday May 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
A tiny shoe sat beside the white line of the road. It sat breathless as the cars whooshed past. Will someone stop to pick it up? Is the lady standing at the bus stop waiting for her opportunity to cradle it in her hands, to kiss its soft tongue?
– My life has not begun said the shoe to no one in particular. I am not ready to die. He thought of his troubles as he lay beside the painted white line.
– I have it worse, said the line. I have never been in contact with a living being.
What a ridiculous white line, thought the shoe at the same time recognizing his dependence. No one would run over him since he was close.
– Why would you need what I have? said the shoe. You never die. You are renewed with white paint. You help the cars, the beasts.
– You have held a place of privilege, said the line. Now you will see what it’s like to be the rest of us.
– What are you talking about, the rest of us?
– The anonymous. The merely dutiful. Or worse, the forgotten. You’ve thought yourself special, I can tell.
– I have not.
– You’ve thought yourself indispensable. Now you’re like trash. You think that woman over there wants you because some other woman has? The first woman in your life only wanted you because you helped her son. That other woman over there is old. You probably remind her of something painful, like a child who has grown and gone astray or a child she has lost.
– How do you know so much? You’re a line.
– I’ve seen enough.
– You’ve seen the bottoms of tires.
– I’ve seen people die.
– Then that makes you the font.
– Of what?
– Wisdom, you idiot. It’s a cliché. When you’re out among people, you hear these things.
– See the specialness creeping in again.
– I have no such pretentions. I’m about to be squashed, besides.
– And then you’ll only experience what the rest of us feel, the random nature of life. How some are chosen to be one thing and some another. How some live on, some die.
– You make me feel so much better.
At that moment, the lady from the bus stop rescued the shoe. There had been a break in traffic. She sat on the bench and cradled it in her palm.
The line looked on. He was jealous of the shoe, but he would not admit it. To admit his jealousy would not change his duty to be a line. Some thrive on admiration for simply being what they are.
– Special boy, he muttered to himself, but his whisper was drowned by shushing of tires.
First appeared in The New Absurdist
20 Sunday May 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Glowing Octopus by ccarlstead, flickr
Book passage to the South Pacific where Jacques Cousteau made his mark. When you charter your boat to find your octopus you will discover, in fact, that they use the same tanks, much of the same equipment, designed by the inventor of the Aqua-Lung. His name and methods are sacrosanct. He has shown you this way to love. Watch and listen. Ask questions. Pay attention. Be aware. This is the mark of the lover.
While you wait for passage discover what it’s like to be an octopus by learning to breathe underwater. Enroll in a scuba class. Begin to learn now that to prepare to meet an octopus you will have to learn a way that is the opposite way of being terrestrial. Your feet are crazy long, you have no peripheral vision, and your breathing makes you sound like a monster. To enter a portal requires transformation and patience. You will also learn of possible injury from the process of the dive and even death, and yet, you do it for love.
Sit on the edge of the chartered Opunohu boat in the blue crystalline waters off the coast of Moorea. Hold your mask as you flip backwards off the edge into rolling waves. At last, you have entered your own sweet blue planet, the tropical reefs of French Polynesia, in search of your love, the Giant Pacific Octopus. At last you will have an encounter with an alternate reality, another form of consciousness. At last you will reach across the vertebrate divide to know and be known.
Like all who are pursued and truly desired, your octopus will be illusive. Know that and be patient. She is the master of disguise and changing skin. She is invisible though right before you. She is silent, immobile, watching you as you move over the reef looking for her. You may find evidence of her dinner of scallops and if you are so lucky, an arm full of suckers protruding from her den. If you are polite, and move away, she may come out to greet you the next time you visit. Your acceptance of her need for privacy strengthens her to be brave. If you are slow in your motions and patient on your subsequent visits, she may even take your arm and show you around. She may even introduce you to her friends.
A lover bears gifts. Do not visit bereft of certain tokens of affection. Toys are gifts for an octopus, for the intelligent creature loves a challenge. Do not bore your octopus! Several examples of good toys are as follows: screwtop jars, bottles, plastic screw apart Easter eggs or balls, various video cameras she will enjoy dismantling and dragging into her den. Do not arrive without a crab in a jar or a piece of shrimp in a Mister Potato Head or a lobster in a trap. Watch her with admiration as she springs her food from the trap and devours it, tasting it as it passes from sucker to sucker and into her mouth in the center of her warped star figure.
When you have formed a bond of trust with the object of your love, submit yourself to her curiosity. Do not shudder as those naturalists and artists of the past. Surely this is not in the lover’s nature, to be repulsed. Instead consider the light suctioning kisses a sweet tasting of your skin, her silken tendril arms moving over your arms and shoulders the gentle exploration of new love, the rapid changes in skin color pleasurable blushes, the pulse of ink and exit a flirtation, the regard of the dark slit eyes the all knowing all loving gaze of the divine.
You could keep a lover if you wish. Some do. In a large fish tank emulating the ocean. She will want to be by the television. And if she can, she will get out and eat the leftovers on the counter and sink. She will crawl onto your shoulder and head and watch tv. She will cheer on your team. She will watch your favorite shows. If you feed her, if you entertain her, if you love her, she will never leave.
This loosely references the work of Sy Montgomery, and in particular, The Soul of an Octopus. The documentary Aliens of the Deep was also a helpful source.
11 Friday May 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Unknown by Edward Zulawski, flickr
At five in the afternoon in December the dark skin of night closes in over day. Across the street from Sabina’s townhouse the last glimmer of gold, the fire sky, simmers through the pines, the scrub oak, the palms, and she wishes to hold onto that moment of the final sun forever, a diamond in her hand, its flash, its promise. But of course there is no stopping the night. It shuts down a liveliness in her as if it were the coming of age itself, as if it were death itself come unbidden.
He would have called her melodramatic, “he” being her ex, of course. She would have said she was merely acknowledging her reality, this sense of being subject.
And so she plowed through on this Monday, with her experience, in this melodramatic frame, wondering this: What to provide her son for his dinner when he begins his week with her. When the earth shuts down, this is no small task. The weeks her child is with his father she eats only leftovers, scours the crisper and cabinets for anything that would serve as a food source. She is juggling bills and doctors and medicine and a crumbling house and car. She eats things past their due date, sometimes way past. One time she got sick.
When it is time for her son to spend Christmas week with her she knows if she appears desperate or unorganized, she risks losing contact. She must address her responsibilities as dark skies threaten to sap her and so she takes a risk: She texts her son asking him for to pick up carryout on his way home from soccer practice.
“Does your ex think you unfit to parent?” This from her therapist months ago when Sabina was ordered to come off of a controlled substance for anxiety. She was strung out and barely able to carry a thought from one sentence to the next. She sometimes forgot words altogether. And yet this one word rammed through her: unfit. The word reverberated in her skull with no pill to protect her. This seemed unfair, outrageous, even, that she is both required to be free of a substance and then criticized for her withdrawal. After all, she and her eighteen year old had been through worse – the threat of her death and chemo treatments – and come out together, it seemed.
She left her therapist, sent her a text and asked her about that word – “unfit” – but then didn’t really try to understand her therapist’s return text, just told her she wasn’t going to see her anymore. Sufficiently vague. And when the sky fell early the following winter, there was no pill to guard against the effects of that hour of darkness.
Though she could speak this December, “unfit” would never leave her. And it unnerved her that her ex might see the text to her son to help her secure food. Would he see this as “unfit?” It is amazing how many things come out in a divorce, over a conference table, a smooth blond wood surface in a room across the street from the fountain Sabina described in her first published piece which her then husband proudly framed for her and hung on their wall. And yet, years later, at the mediation: All the small slights, the things told in confidence, trotted out, the hurts.
But there is also this: Had she not bought real maple syrup for her husband and son when she was married? And after the divorce, when she bought an imitation brand to save money so she could buy pancake mix too, and health insurance, her son spoke of his friend’s house, where he ate “real syrup.” This became for her a secret symbol of families who had not been broken, and almost all families in her son’s conservative Christian school were still intact, a school where Sabina now felt like a pariah though she had once felt close to many of the women, where she had even been involved.
Somehow Sabina knew the Jesus of the Christian school would have actually been eating imitation syrup with the tax collectors and sinners, the broken, the unwashed people scrounging to eat in the face of powerful ruling religious classes.
And at the outset of her son’s soccer season this year, coinciding with early darkness and regrets, her son greets her after a game on the sidelines and calls another woman his mom. Why do all the dramas of our lives get enacted on fields? Is there so much intensity there, invisible, that we slip into it whether the field be in the shape of a rectangle or diamond? And though there are things that are redeemed, there are also things lost on fields never to be found again.
Still, Sabina’s contest has always been with the sky, not a person nor a disappointment related to a person, not a field nor a disappointment related to a field. And so, she faces the murdering night on this Monday of Christmas week, waiting for her son to bring sustenance, determined to serve pancakes with syrup even if she must boil brown sugar and water over a meager stove for want of money, the little bit of money having been transferred to the carryout and the stores for the gifts under the tree.
First published in Writing in a Woman’s Voice
04 Friday May 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
Little Girl by Lynette Zozette, flickr
She laid a dime next to the tiny white snail eggs, laid it right there in the dirt at the bottom of the terrarium. She and her brother had named their snails Harold and Maude, with prompting from their mother who now watches with wonder her daughter’s delicate fringe of lashes, the fall of auburn hair, the small fingers once smaller but still delicate.
“Shall we take a picture?” says the mother, which had been the plan all along, but in the quiet morning with the sun streaming through the window and the tank with the beta fish, the golden pathos stems gracing the water, the stick insect clinging to a shelf beside the cat, it is nice to say the words, to recognize the steps of recording and observation and perspective for others and as a reminder to the self: This is what once was.
The daughter nods and takes the camera from her mother. She looks through the viewer and aims, clicking to capture an image of the tiny eggs in the soil. A butterfly dances by, a tortoiseshell they were housing in the cool of the old fashioned larder. “Quick,” says the daughter, “let’s open a window!” And the mother cranks the window over the fish bowl and they gently coax it to fly through. It flies out over the spring grass peaking through wet dead leaves. It flies through trees, their branches pushing out green buds.
for my friend Jen
29 Sunday Apr 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
the enemy within unleashed by Arne Halverson, flickr
This must be the least favorite part of your body,” said the manicurist, rubbing a rose scented cream into the woman’s hand. The manicurist’s eyes traveled up to the woman’s neck and rested on her face. “In fact, your neck and whole right side is damaged.” The manicurist gave her some cream to take home.
The manicurist was not exaggerating. On the back of her wrist was a long purple scar where she had surgery to remove a ganglion cyst. It looked like some kind of upside down suicide attempt. There was a puckered white patch on a knuckle where she burned her hand ironing her husband’s shirt on his first day of work. Her pinkie had suffered third degree burns from the hot glue gun when she was helping her son make Gandalf for a Tolkien diorama. There was a slash on her neck where her thyroid had been removed. There was a sprinkling of hypopigmentation on the right side of her face, a result of pregnancy that no amount of makeup could hide.
She used the cream. It worked. She looked nothing like herself. She freaked out. She slashed the back of her wrist and the base of her neck. She burned her knuckle with an iron. She covered her pinkie with hot glue. She dotted her check with household bleach. She took herself to the emergency room and said she had been tortured, and no, she did not know her assailant.
First appeared in 52/250
22 Sunday Apr 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
Notes of ink, Cheryl Brind, flickr
In the grey green woods at dusk, the smell of smoke and crackling of fire, we all make our way silently through the trees their dark musky bark, the brown smell of the humus undergrowth. There is a choir singing green notes and purple, round and droll, heavy, singing hymns I know from childhood, yellow girlhood, people dressed in white their clean smell dull as a communion wafer. At last we arrive at a large man seated at a long table, a man pressed from a jello mold. He accepts the bowls of soup we bring him each of us offering a deep brown fragrant bowl we have filled from a moaning cauldron. This man we have come to worship and serve.
Pick up the hymnal I am told, the red ones with a musical staff the long line of a funeral procession, the notes like mourners marching. I don’t want to sing the songs I once loved in yellow pink girlhood for now the songs have gone grey and dank as wet stone.
There is a car on the edge of the woods whose engine makes a sound like red, like let’s go, but there’s nowhere for me to sit. My happy parents, their laughter orange and dancing, their clothes sweet and tart as lemonade, and cool as an orangesicle, look at me while I beg them in black frantic panic tones jagged as razor wire to take me with them. The car speeds away, dirt rising in its wake like miniscule dust fairies ascending and falling to the ground again, silent as rain, quieter even, a dry feeling like white.
13 Friday Apr 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Window by John Akuppa Wigham, flickr
Say your prayers at the banishment window. Whisper your secrets to me at the banishment window. I will wait for you mornings, at dawn, at evenings, dusk, at the banishment window. I will hear your pleadings to join us, your proof of your reform, but the extent of your involvement will take place at the banishment window. On my side of the banishment window, there is a place for me to sit, but on your side, only rough wall, where you stand, where you will always stand when you see me until we bury you in the potter’s field.
You might wear our clothes, but the extent of our talk will be at the banishment window. You might secure our degrees but don’t think you can fancy talk your way past the banishment window. Have children if you like but they will stay with you out there at the banishment window. Your spouse too: banishment window. In fact, let us know if you’re bringing a whole family and friends, and we’ll have more listeners at the banishment window. But just because there might be more people out there than in here, don’t think you can outnumber your way past the banishment window. When we speak Christ into your life we will meet you at the banishment window. When we curl our lip at your choices or the color of your skin, for sure it will take place at the banishment window.
Sometimes creatures, sometimes fire, sometimes winds, sometimes floods, sometimes people off of their heads out there might take you down whole on the other side of the banishment window. Could you just keep it down, please. Just keep it down ok? We’re trying to pray in here. How do you think our prayers will be made effectual if you keep interrupting us? Chillax and we’ll meet you at the banishment window in the morning.
28 Wednesday Mar 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
It has been well known for quite some time that on the outskirts of Munir, a city that could well be considered a test city for its heretofore untapped source of fuel, the bodies of the useless women currently are housed. We use the term “bodies” to denote that for all intents and purposes, such women as these are barely alive by today’s standard of living and for all intents and purposes will soon be dead, either through despair or other natural causes induced by such. And we say “useless women” to mean that such unfortunates have no use in our mainstream consumer society and must therefore be removed in order to fulfill their highest potentialities: The usage of their bodies as an alternative fuel source, their heroic sacrificial contribution to our community.
We have found marginalized groups have the highest wattage output per kilogram and though findings remain uncertain, we surmise this must have something to do with the epic operation of the soul that is crushed and aggrieved. Having observed the transfer of energies of suffering beings into ghost forms upon death, we are determined to tap into this energy surplus and use it to the good use of the operation of our fair city.
Our future alternative fuel source are the bodies of women who die naturally in our community center designed to house them, women who have lived well past their prime, those women who, in life, have been neglected by husbands, who, by sheer neglect or harsher means, express their displeasure as well as women considered burdens by their offspring where once they were considered vital sources of nurture. These women have cadavers that will burn most efficiently and we will see to their disposal as we honor them for such, giving flags and medals and ceremonies for families, large mass punch and cake gatherings with balloons.
Unless such women have managed to overcome the barriers against them and build a world for themselves based on talents apart from chasing male providers’ affections and the nurturance of children, midlife women often find themselves at a place we provide: A death house we call Sunny Meadows to signify heaven though we do not by any means indulge in the practice of euthanasia. In addition, we attempt to meet the essential needs of our residents of Sunny Meadows while practicing restraint in the spiritual fulfillment mandates for housing a human being, realizing the energy potentials would be compromised should happiness be complete.
We are not beyond taking women or any beings for that matter who, lost to despair, are searching for a place to exist, beings who have lost functionality in our free market including but not limited to politicians and activists labeled “nasty,” beauty queens labeled “pigs,” actresses labeled “overrated,” pre-menopausal women who bleed, violated women labeled “liars.” We anticipate the bodies of all such marginalized women and others whose psyches are crushed by the current oligarchy will make excellent sources of fuel in our alternative energy program and we anticipate in fact an uptick in fuel reserves to get us through times of famine, that is, more benevolent future regimes, should that eventuality become realized.
When evil flourishes, either privately on the personal level in homes – between family members, a husband and wife, children and parents – or when it flourishes in our public sociopolitical machine, we are operating in the black and so we say, unofficially, of course, may evil reign, yet it always does. It is simply a matter of degree and so this method of securing this previously untapped fuel source is flawless.
Published in S/tick
For Kimberly Townsend Palmer
26 Monday Mar 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
A person should know she was she was driving over the train tracks, should be able to feel it under the wheels, Monique told Carl as she packed her white hat back into its box. Carl was sitting in her bedroom watching her as she changed her clothes.
“Three deaths, baby,” she said to him about recent train related incidents. The city had installed rubber casings on the tracks so drivers hardly registered the feel of the rails. The point was to make it easier on everyone’s suspension. Trains had been silenced too. No more trains blowing at the crossroads. And now people had died or been hurt because they didn’t know they were on the tracks. There had been no warning, no communication from the train.
She remembered with a shiver having barely escaped an oncoming train when she was with Aimee one afternoon. They were taking their sons and their classmates on a field trip. They had not known they were crossing a track, had not heard a train, until they were just past. Looking back on that day, she realized someone must have driven through the gates and broken them. Probably some drunk rich white kids because it was only in wealthy neighborhoods that “quiet zones” were established.
She had not told Carl about that day with Aimee. And now the silence with which Aimee eventually accepted her death from cancer seemed like that smooth ride over the tracks. She cried hot tears and Carl nuzzled her hair. She talked through things with Carl again, things she had said before, that Aimee hadn’t wanted any of them beside her when she was at the end of her illness, not even her husband and children. She wanted no one to see that last husk of what she had become. She had wanted to go quietly, without a fuss. Monique had not been allowed to be with her either. Aimee’s body had been cremated and put into a box.
Aimee was the only white woman Monique had ever been close to. She had been a pistol right after the diagnosis, had believed God would heal her because she wanted it that way, had come to her son’s baseball games hobbling on feet blistered by chemo. But when it was clear she would not live she instructed Monique to wear her Easter hat to the funeral. Aimee had always told her there were doves on Monique’s Easter hat, but they were simply high peaks of white chiffon. Monique had honored Aimee’s wishes and had worn the hat but she vowed to herself, while she sat in the white people’s church, not to make any more white friends.
First appeared in Trainwrite
17 Saturday Mar 2018
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
temporalata, witch hut 1, flickr
On Saturdays, Mama set me down in front of the churn. On summer days, she set me on the porch to look out upon the woods, to look for fairies and woodsprite, to keep the woodland green at bay, she said, lest it overtake the house and we be lost. On winter days, I set inside not far from the stove but far enough that a witch’s spell that come down through the flue would not frustrate my efforts. The spell would come on account of Ms. Maybre, Mama would say, the spinster, who casts spells such as that of the butter witch. On account of that happening, we gotta stick the poker from the fire in the butter and break the witch’s back and get the butter going again.
I always wondered if she meant Ms. Maybre would have a broken back. But Ms. Maybre did seem to be the type of lady to be a witch and because of that, the Dempsey kids loved to play some tricks, just to get her ire going. Which is probably why we got butter spells going on us. We pulled tricks like stringing up a can of water over her door, dressing her cats up in the rags mama kept for washing down the house, hanging ghosts up in her yard from torn sheets, tying a scarecrow around the broom she kept by the door like it was flying it like a witch.
Mama said the inside of her house smells like a musty smoke house from the solid pig fat she buns as candles. She had been there once to check on her, witch or no witch she told us at the dinner table. She hadn’t seen Ms. Maybre for weeks. It was her Christian duty to visit and there had been Ms. Maybre, half naked from the waist up, drinking from a mason jar in front of the fire. Mama says she was drinking the moonshine she made from the pressure cooker on the stove with the copper wire run through, she was drinking the devil’s drink.
“Ms. Maybre,” said Mama to the old witch, “I worried about you when I haven’t seen you none, at all, not even to see you get your mail at the end of the road.”
“I drank the potion and went up the chimney. I flew over Grandfather on my corn broom with my red cap.” (Grandfather was a mountain not far from where we lived.)
She talked like the devil, said Mama. She was frothy with spirits. Mama put a shawl around her and laid her out on a cot she kept beside her stove. She set beside her and put a cold cloth on her head but hours later, Mama had fallen asleep for when she woke, there was no Ms. Maybre, only a cat, black as midnight, staring at her with white eyes, white as the yarrow she kept in a jar on the table in summer.
What Mama had concluded was that the cat was Ms. Maybre. “I swanee, I never seen nothing like this cat. It knew me inside out, like a person would.
One Saturday, I gave baby Emma the handle for the churn. She was the youngest but in grade school. I say to her: “On St. Patty’s, an old witch sends a butter spell down the flue and breaks up the churning. You let me know if the fat won’t come together and we’ll break a witch’s back.”
I left because I wanted to meet my friends at Sliding Rock.
When I come home, Emma was setting in the rocker next to the fire, her blond hair black, her brown eyes white. She looked old as Ms. Maybre. Mama and Daddy had gone into town and everyone else had gone away. The butter wouldn’t churn.
My heart was racing, I stoked a fire in the dying wood stove. What had happened to Emma? I jammed a poker into the coals. I pulled the paddle out of the churn and thrust the poker inside. It hissed and a whippoorwill lapsed into its nighttime song.
Emma’s hair returned back to its soft blond and her lovely eyes the deep brown of a pond in moonlight. Relieved, I made her toast with honey.
That night, sleeping under the eaves, something woke me. A crooked old woman stood in the door frame.
Was that Ms. Maybre? She made no sound, but glided to the head of my bed. She reached a claw down to my mouth and put her other claw to her pursed lips, instructing me to be quiet. Her finger smelled like the burning embers from the fire. She lifted her finger then and swiped it through the air. I felt a whoosh and closed my eyes.
When I could open them again I saw the roof was no more and I gazed up at black sky full of stars. She put her finger back down on my lips and gave the shushing sign with the other hand. She then pressed her charred fingers down on my eyelids until I knew nothing but black.
The next morning at the mail boxes down the road, Ms. Maybre gave me a knowing look. I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t the same woman as the night before. I kept to myself like the good girl I had read about in a book as a child. I never knew that girl to be me but I certainly wasn’t a no-count neither.
13 Tuesday Mar 2018
Posted in original flash fiction, stories
Tags
Feathers, braids, and beads by Nic McPhee, flickr
In the Lakota legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, a beautiful apparition wearing a white buckskin dress decorated with porcupine quills approaches two men. She carries a pipe bag embroidered with the symbol of the four directions. One man, upon seeing her, expresses a desire to lay with her but the other man advises care and respect due to her sacred nature. However, the greedy man gets exactly what he wants until there was nothing left of him but a pile of bones in the grass. The White Buffalo Calf Woman explains to the remaining man that what his lustful companion had yearned for was only her beauty. His demise lay in his unwillingness to know her spirit.
My grandmother would sit before the fire in our house which backed up to the Wekiwa state park in Apopka Florida and tell me and my twin sister this story over and over. The purpose of this story has not always remained clear. When we asked her, finally, why she was telling us this story once more she explained: There are many interpretations and uses of the story, she said, but you should learn that a man should show respect for a woman’s spirit. The Buffalo Calf Woman gives us strength even though she came to the Lakota.
And then my grandmother laid down upon the couch because she liked to be near the stove where she makes little corn cakes for us, cakes she feeds us with squash juice and honey when we come home from school. Often my grandmother reminds us of our heritage: We are descended from a relative of Georgia Rose, a full Cherokee, who married a Seminole.
In our room at night, we talk about this story Grandma tells us and try to discern what it must be saying. No man seems to care about us. There are many men who have said they want to lay with us and we are only fifteen. There are many guys our age who want this and older guys too and when they admit it to themselves they want not just one of us but both at the same time. A couple of men have tried to pimp us out. They are greedy, like the lustful man in the story, and they do not know what is inside, our spirit. They want what they want.
Still our grandmother has taught us a lot and we try to listen to her. My mother married a white man much to her disappointment and now that my mother has cancer, Father is gone, gone, off to Texas without a penny left to give his dying squaw, to save her life.
We have crosses and dreamcatchers, Native American dances and hip hop, prom and religious ceremonies, native costumes and Juicy Couture. Grandmother holds it all together and yet she grows weaker. “You girls are going to have to handle the guns and take care of this place. You are going to have to drive and share the car and take care of your mother. As for your father, girls, I will have to say: It is expected.” She lay her head down at last as if that final confession had taken her last breath.
That night, my sister and I built a fire in the fire pit. We put on our ceremonial dresses and braided our hair and interwove feathers. We put paint on our faces and burnt bundles of sage. We had done this many times, when we were bored, lonely, when grandmother had to go to the hospital, when our mother was diagnosed, when our father left us alone and our mother wouldn’t get off the couch for days. It was what we knew, this turning slow circles in the way we had been taught, but slower. We danced a man’s dance but in a woman’s way. We were turning and we were thinking through our plan. Here was the story of the hunt, the way the weapons were prepared, the way we were to feed our family, this is how it would happen, how the buck would be approached, how it would die and we would live. We had talked over it in the moonlight shining through our bedroom window, the feathers in our dream catchers caught lightly by air blowing through the vent.
“Come to Wekiwa State Park,” we said to the men in online exchanges. “Walk to Sand Lake and sit there and wait until the park closes. We will meet you at midnight. We will build a fire and make you feel good.”
That was all we said. Well, we made arrangements for letting them know what they were getting and for how much. We found the men to be pliant, but not all of them followed through, and some of them, when they followed through, would not drink with us and so it wasn’t safe to continue and we disappeared into the woods, leaving them stranded. But somehow, we would make them pay, pay for what they are doing to us, what they are doing to my mother through my father and his white man Porsche while my mother is left with the cost of radiation, chemo, surgery.
We got better at it. Drinking became part of the deal. No man liked being called a woman and so we goaded them: Drink, drink, we said. And then we slipped Mama’s oxy, powdered, into their beers. And then we danced, turning, slowly around the fire, circling, ever closer, putting the buck in our sites. We kissed each other and he began to drink. We touched each other and started taking off each other’s clothes. Drink, drink, we said. Yet when these men stood to touch us, they would lurch back and collapse. It was the drug, taking effect. We would wait until they were immobile and then we dressed. The fallen man would keep long enough for us to raid his wallet and run away, through the moonlight, through the woods once inhabited by natives who fed on alligator, through the fields now deserted.
On these nights, a woman rose up out of the grasses. Her hair was white and adorned with feathers and she wore a white calf skin dress. She was mother to us every night and we made our escape.
12 Monday Mar 2018
Posted in horror, original flash fiction
Valerie Everett, flickr
He was at it again, thought Sylvie, her husband talking of Her, the alien, the dream alien, and this of all times, with dinner guests to witness it, this being Thanksgiving no less, the table set the day before, the house cleaned last Sunday, the afternoon light bending in perfect golden shafts over their cleared place settings, the room smelling of warmth, mellowed perfumes, buttered dishes, wine, coffee. A pale pink rose petal had fallen from a low bunch of flowers gathered in a centerpiece and was tinged a slight brown against the cream fabric. Almost nothing was amiss.
Their guests were young, coiffed, and beautiful, supremely educated, their clutches firmly settling into the world. When they were at Abbie and Jake’s house this past summer, Sylvie had overheard her young handsome husband Brad speak of an alien having visited him in a dream to extract his semen. It was such a brief conversation sliver that folded back into the larger noise of the party that it did not hit her, the cut of it, until she turned the lock to Abbie’s tiny half bath, and then she felt her head turn heavy and she sat upon the commode, gripping the sink. Had he really said that? She asked him about it on their way home. He just shook his head, his eyes glazed over, but for Brad that could mean he just didn’t want to talk about it.
And now here it was again.
“She was there, beside me, last night. Sylvie was asleep and I tried to wake her.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure man, I’m sure you tried to wake your wife to tell her about the sexy alien babe,” said Jake. “You must be a baby daddy by now. They got your semen last summer.”
“What? What is this?” This from Rakesh who taught at the college. He and his fiancé were holding hands under the table but let go at this unexpected turn. They were newly arrived from India.
“We grow ’em rare over here,” said Jake.
“There are gods, there are other beings,” said Rakesh, trying to be helpful. “Perhaps this is what is happening to you.”
“I don’t know,” said Brad. “I’m just saying, this woman was with me last night, an alien. This was the same one from before.”
“Why I never heard – ” said Abbie. “Sylvie, is everything all right?”
The room was starting to shift a bit, Sylvie could feel it, they leaned in, their elbows pressed hard against her table, the floor length curtains sentries, the chandelier oppressive.
Sylvie tilted a dinner knife, unused and abandoned, so that it reflected Brad’s image. His head appeared football shaped, his neck bulbous.
“This feeling I have, it is like a unification,” he went on. “It is beautiful. I feel whole. I have a second life in that place. It is my real life, my actual life, my soul.”
“For fuck’s sake, man,” said Jake. He had known Brad since they were children. They ran an accounting firm together.
Sylvie retreated to the kitchen. Abbie followed. She held Sylvie for a while. She then poured her friend a glass of water. She asked Sylvie some questions, none of which Sylvie could answer. The dinner guests trickled away and Sylvie managed not to cry, not even for Abbie. Sylvie prevented Jake from calling the hospital. Abbie and Jake finally went home.
Sylvie sat up in bed that night while Brad drifted off. The shifting shadows from the trees outside created dark spaces and light. “Be gone,” she said, touching Brad’s forehead while she spoke, for she loved him no matter the alterations of his attractions, adventures, grotesqueries. “Be gone,” she said. “Mine.” And there was not a sound but the shifting leaves.
01 Friday Dec 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
slow moves by gregorfischer.photography on flickr
There were lots of people she used to sing for but now with the thyroid surgery, her voice had changed. She could talk, and whistle, but she couldn’t sing which was why the song of the caged parrot down the street inspired a sense of loss she would not have been able to describe had someone cared to ask. Whenever she walked her dog she would hear it. She had always wanted birds – finches, or even a parrot or cockatoo, – but now it looked likely, because of the cancer invading her body, any bird she may adopt now might outlive her.
A man in town sold pet health insurance and she was beginning to make her plans. She wanted her son to have her little white dog and knew he would need money to take care of her. He was not old enough to pay these expenses on his own. And a parrot was out of the question at this point. They could live to be 100 or more and she would be dead at 46.
She felt it, no matter what people said, no matter how much they told her to have a positive mindset. Buying a parrot now was an act of faith bordering on the ridiculous.
Every morning the parrot chirped from the third floor balcony down the street where she walked her dog. The bird was a part of how the real estate company was staging the property, he was part of their plan to sell the new orange painted homes.
Not far away, a woman was mauled by a black bear as she walked her dog. The cancer was about the same thing. What difference did it make, she would be gone, taken by something – whether it emerged from the forest – a madman or bear – or a malignancy in her body that grew until she succumbed. She hoped, at least, in the case of the woman confronting the bear, the dog managed to get away.
Which was why she sat across from the desk of the pet insurance agent. She signed every paper. She paid. She set up a plan for payments. The agent had no ring. She asked him to lunch. They ate nicoise salad in a restaurant where unlit chandeliers and stained glass panels hung from the ceiling. He said he had old movies on reels at home they could watch. He said they could dance to music on his jukebox.
A shaft of light poured in through the basement window where they were dancing. She was not expecting this. She considered asking him to draw up a separate policy for a parrot. The agent had nice leather shoes, smelled of bergamot oil, had a curl against his ear.
first published in beakful
27 Friday Oct 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
Sky D.’s “Into the Woods” (a tribute to The Call), flickr
A coolish Friday late October days before children would traipse down our streets in costume, knocking on doors for candy, a Florida black bear scratched its back on a palm tree in front of the townhome adjacent to the townhome I share with my mother. As I sat by the window reading my morning paper I observed its black mass emerging from the green curtain of woods, stopping by the palm presumably before going on to look for unsecured garbage.
“Ma, come look,” I said as the bear bumped the tree first with its rear, then stood to full height, about a third of the height of the street light beside the palm. At this time of day, neighbors would begin to emerge with their dogs or get into their cars parked alongside the street and down the block to go to work, take their children to school, pursue morning workouts at the Y.
Ma was shuffling around in my kitchen, that reassuring sound of her slippers grazing the tile while she fixed a pot of oatmeal and fed the dog.
“Remember I told you, Ma, they should have left that magnolia tree and lamppost that at night looked like the meeting place of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus. And now, here we have a scratching post for wild creatures who would just as soon eat our children and dogs.” I hated the palms they used to replace the magnolias, the branches of the latter scattered down the street the day after they mowed them all down. The palms didn’t fit, were too stocky and awkward and obscured the light from the lampposts with their long finger-like fronds. And yet, I didn’t attend HOA meetings in which these things are most likely discussed. I paid my fees only to be unbored and unbothered.
“I will go and talk to the thing,” my mother said, standing over me as I sat at the window. In her fragile hands, she cupped a steaming mug of hazelnut cream coffee, her favorite in the morning.
“You will do no such thing, mother,” I said, using the fuller “mother” to express my firmness and authority. I know she was referencing her skill with animals but this was over the top, ridiculous.
“A bear is not a dog,” I sad.
She had once soothed a loose Rottweiler intent on attack on one of our morning walks. She grabbed my arm when she saw the dog coming and pulled me down to the ground with a strength that defied her diminutive stature. “Down!” she said “Roll up!” she said and I followed her orders and example and there we were, two women curled up on someone’s lawn, a dark creature licking our faces. Ma slowly uncurled, offering as she did so, a treat she always kept in her pocket, offering it underhanded with eyes averted singing a very low and tuneless song about the majesty of dogs and their protectiveness and power and love.
“What was that?” I had asked her afterwards.
“What?” she said.
“That song? Where did it come from?”
“The poor thing seemed happy with my treat,” she said, not answering my question. “We sure got out of a little pinch there didn’t we honey, the Lord be blessed.”
“I can go talk to this bear, so lost and turned around, you’ll see, the dear thing” she said, setting her hazelnut coffee carefully down on a coaster at the dining room table where I sat, a table we had arranged by the window with a light and a pair of comfortable chairs, perfectly suited for a spinster daughter and her aged mother.
“It will go away,” I sad.
But it didn’t. My mother sat for a while, but the thing didn’t move. It sat too, as a matter of fact, squashing the expensive groundcover under its enormous rear. I had only recently secured the phone numbers of my neighbors and started calling them, telling them what was happening. Someone said they would call animal control.
Until Mom moved in, I knew no one, life being what it is with computers and livestreaming movies and air conditioned environments and all of my excuses. Ma had met people hand delivering homemade butterscotch bars and introducing herself and inquiring about the inhabitants within and hence everyone loved her and by proxy, me too, but only because my mother was the one true human.
“I will sing to it now,” she said and brushed past me and opened the door to our second story living room, high up from the bear, and so, safe still. She began to sing a croaky tuneless melody about the sleepiness of bears under the stars of black Florida nights, the soft undergrowth of pine needles and loamy earth where the bear can nestle down and sleep, the nuts and seeds and ants and possums the bear can find for its meals which nourish its coat and fill its belly, the current unavailability of people food due to the new locked trash cans provided to the residents by Seminole County, the glory of a bear in the wild vs. its trapped status in civilization, the family of bears under the trees away from roads and men and their cars – a place to belong, a place to call home, a place to protect its offspring and see they are cared for. And then began song in an operative bent, tuneless still but somehow modern, a song about the treachery of mankind, the evil men do, the noble savage that has been abandoned for Machiavellian schemes, how mankind out of bitterness for itself has devised its own traps and aims that nothing should be truly free, not a blade of grass, or a bee in its comb, or a bear on an adventure.
This went on now for what felt like hours but it must have only lasted minutes for still we waited for animal control. Meanwhile, the bear occasionally reared up to its full height and sauntered over to our balcony, its balustrade just out of reach of its paws which didn’t swipe, only slow undulated as if the bear were stirring honey on a lazy, hot day, as Ma sang her truth, the bear’s truth, the neighborhood on lockdown. Every now and then it gave a little roar accompanying the solo.
I could only imagine what my neighbors thought, but I couldn’t at the same time. By now, they loved her unconditionally and she was the elder among them who cared for them and their children and parents. I pretended to look at my paper but in a way that afforded me a view of the street.
And then finally, my mother sang to a it a lullaby, a bear sleeping song of how wonderful the bear will feel after its delicious meal from the forest. With that, the bear sauntered off into the trees, a final bellow as if to say “You are a wise and good old woman.”
My mother stepped in from off the balcony and closed the door. She shuffled past me where I sat with my paper, pretending I hadn’t listened to her, and witnessed what happened, and been embarrassed among the neighbors whom I had not taken the time to know or care about.
“Now what’s your pleasure for your oatmeal, dear, the cinnamon, butter, and walnuts as always?”
I laid the paper on my lap and merely nodded.
26 Tuesday Sep 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
Illustration by Martin Shongauer, 15th century painter and engraver
My quirky story “Dirty Bird” is up at A Thousand and One Stories. Give it a read! Happy Tuesday.
14 Thursday Sep 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
Misha Sokolnikov, flickr
We are what is left when everything from the accident is carried away – the driver, the smashed car, the branches from the bush that crumpled thin metal. We are the detritus, the pieces, the bits – the piece of reflector, the broken glass of the windshield, the broken cross dangling from the rearview. The bush the car crashed into was as crushed as the frame. The conclusion of the police was that the young man was drunk. But we know it was a deer. He swerved to avoid a deer. But he died. The deer lived.
The mother who came to collect pieces of us the day after had it right. This is what she told the police, that her son had swerved to hit an animal, but his intoxication level had been a more solid forensic indicator. It was a deer, or a cat, or a squirrel. The boy loved animals, she said. She told it to the ground, she told it to the bits of debris.
We are a reflection of stars and lost dreams and yet should we be able to tell the story of that lonely boy riding through the night in the city of lakes at Christmas we would tell the truth only a mother’s heart knows: The purity of her son’s heart, that, drunk though he was, was responsive to the natural world even in a city like ours where people careen around lakes without their licenses because of last year’s DUI, believing they can save the world despite themselves. The law does not allow for the best of what someone could possibly be but more often what is the worst.
A mother’s heart is not law. We are testament.
For my brother
24 Thursday Aug 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
before the struggle to exist, there is presence: liquid painting by scott Richard; flickr – torbakhopper
Florida Fall Ball was Ms. Myska’s favorite Little League baseball season. Her son used to play in the neighborhood league. He had long since graduated and moved to another city and yet there she was, working the concession stand, having kept a key. Not only that, she tidied the field and toilet, picked up the trash, wiped down the metal bleachers. The city janitor assigned to the park had been shooed away by a smiling Ms. Myska and the young mothers were also summarily dismissed when they tried to insist that she should be sitting outside, enjoying the weather. She merely smiled and turned the oil on for the fries, made the coffee. For all they knew, she kept a cot in there, they said to themselves.
By the end of each season the players and their parents had always developed a strange fondness for the rodent-like woman who scurried from task to task, never speaking much, never making much eye contact. They would have been surprised to know she remembered their concession preferences, knew their faces and voices, knew whether they were confident, shy, slow, smart, funny, knew who their friends were, knew their family members, beloved and otherwise. At Halloween, she gave each of them a candy she knew to be their favorite.
Little did they know that each summer, when they were vacationing, she was scurrying to the store for the secret ingredients to her chili. Making the chili every year made fall her favorite season for baseball. Who could resist a good chili on a cool evening? No one, and certainly no one who had tasted her version, contained as it was in a tiny bag of corn chips, the corn chips serving in lieu of pasta, the small bag a portable meal, ready to eat with a spork.
Nor did they know of her harvest moon night when she turned cartwheels in the field and tilted her head back and sang her full-throated songs. Other mysterious women, bodies worn from giving life and sustaining it, joined her, dancing, singing, drinking wine, running the bases and laughing until they ran up into the night sky and they transformed into other beings entirely, birds and butterflies and delicate moths. At daybreak, they became human again.
The season after she died, a young mother found a chili recipe in the cash box. “Make it with love,” the instructions said, “and you will be blessed.”
20 Sunday Aug 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
Sven Van Echelpoel “Nadia,” flickr
He stood at the foot of her son’s bunkbed. She had slept there the night before, her son being grown and in college. He had been dating her for about six months, but had not succeeded in getting her to sleep the entire night with him. She slept alone.
She reached out and touched the name stitched on his shirt. He kissed her lips. She wore only gloss. He liked that.
“I want to make you some coffee,” she said.
Her hair was mussed up. He wanted to forget his scruples, drop his pants, and climb right into her child’s bed, but he was running late.
“I don’t have time.” It was cold outside. He had to get the truck started. “OK, make me coffee, would ya? And chop, chop.” He patted her bottom.
She would pour him a steaming pint in his big thermos with cream and sugar and he would drink from it slowly to make it last. He would make sure everyone noticed its presence too, clinking it down here or there.
When he came back into the house, she was on the kitchen counter, kneeling, stretching for a bag of sugar.
“Watch it now, baby,” he said, trying to scold her, though he had caught a glimpse of her dimpled thigh under her nightshirt. He knew he would remember it all day. He pulled her down and retrieved the sugar. She took it from him with her icy, thin fingers.
“Let’s get married,” he said.
She didn’t look up to meet his gaze. She held the bag over the mouth of the thermos. As he watched a seemingly endless white stream fall into his coffee, he felt a pressure on his chest.
“Yes,” she said. When he looked up, he saw that she was watching his face, was not watching the sugar, was smiling in that way she saved for things that secretly pleased her.
18 Friday Aug 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
Leann Arthur, flickr
A couple of months ago, my son noticed a change in me. He said, “Hey Mom, what’s wrong with your eyes?”
I was no longer able to hide it from him, the full throttle visitation of my manic depressive illness, the illness I secretly called my black bitch, a nod to Winston Churchill’s “black dog.” This time, my bitch was frustrating my concentration and numbing my senses. The last time she pounced on me this hard my son was a baby.
I didn’t answer him but he knew. He was a smart boy and knew about me taking the medications, knew how much the illness had cost me and his father, knew it was the kind of thing that could become dangerous.
When I got up from the sofa, he followed me into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and poured him a Coke. He was staring at the knife block. When I first told him why I was on meds, he started asking me and his dad about all the ways a person could kill himself.
I knew it was vital I get ahold of myself right away, that I send that slathering hound back to a dark corner with a bone. So I took his chin in my fingers and moved his face gently to mine. “Hey,” I said. His eyes slild away. He didn’t want me to read him. “Hey,” I repeated softly and when I caught his gaze, I looked at him as steadily as I could manage, right into those light blue eyes and said, “I would never do that, son. Never.” And then I took him in my arms and I held him for a minute.
And then he went off to play.
“Bitch,” I said, under my breath. And for a moment, I was free.
First appeared in A-Minor Magazine under the title “Needful Words”
02 Sunday Jul 2017
Posted in horror, original flash fiction, Writing to a theme
House engulfed by flames near Tallahassee, FL, flickr
Back when the sky stayed the blood red all day, when the beasts in the undergrowth ate gardeners and sunbathers, when workers came to hotels rising up from the scrub from which they had always lain and slit the throats of sleeping tourists, when the rumbling of the hurricanes did not stop but shook the earth in constant tremors, when we held our infants tight for fear, when we cried in the dark and ran from falling trees, when live wires threatened our walk to stores bereft of goods, when our computers were good for nothing but as paperweights and a place to drape our soaked clothes, when rumor had it our president was in an underground facility at his vacation address, when gas generators poisoned families because people didn’t know how to use them and there was no one to take them to hospitals, when it hailed afternoons in summer, when our children went to bed crying and woke up in terror, when there were no more leaders, when there were skirmishes and death among us over food, candles, matches, the dead walked out of the sea and dwelt among us and made it their course to banish the divide.
11 Sunday Jun 2017
Posted in horror, original flash fiction
Tags
A Study in Contrasts by Nic McPhee, flickr
He jumped off the train and went into the station, the conductor in the gray cap. He was shriveled and hunched, like a shrimp. It didn’t seem to Julie he’d be capable of doing much more than riding up and down the rails, taking tickets, but he always had a coin for Buddy, a penny the train had squashed between Mt. Dora and Winter Park. Buddy fingered the oblong copper and put it to his lips as if it were a thick shaving of chocolate. Julie slapped his hand. The heat rising up from the pavement made her short.
On Wednesdays, she and Buddy came down to the station. They stood on the tracks and waited for the rails to vibrate with the motion of the oncoming train. It made Buddy coo to feel the shimmying metal tickle the soles of his feet and he put his face next to the track, his baby flesh on the forged steel. Julie tested herself to see how long she could wait before she pulled him off, how long she could stand it. She knew it was wrong to tempt fate this way but it felt as if the palm trees and the bushes and the sun itself held her. And then one time she saw the light of the train and she quickly, with a pounding chest, snatched him by the waist.
After the train stopped, the shrimp man came to where they were standing. He had eyes with uneven patches and he seemed to be watching her through a pool of opaque pebbles. She thought he was going to say something, but then he gave Buddy a coin and brushed his cheek with a curved finger.
Julie liked wearing clothes from the thirties and forties. She shopped online and found dresses with flouncy sleeves and slingback shoes with open toes and platforms. She liked vintage hats and wore them to the station when she brought Buddy. It was not a place she was likely to see anyone from the Country Club or anyone her husband Frank knew. Frank asked her why she didn’t go to Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdale’s. She liked looking like ladies from old movies, she told him. Her mother died when she was thirteen. Though sometimes her husband Frank wished she were like other women, he liked the way she wore things only dead people had worn. People didn’t invite them to many parties and if they did, they kept their distance and talked about them behind their highball glasses. Her mother died in a boating accident. Her father had been driving the boat. This was what happened and this was what people knew. That and the fact that her mother was from money and had lots of it. Now her father drove all over town in a restored Model T.
Julie took Buddy to the roses when the train wasn’t due. He pricked his baby fingers on the thorns. She read the signs which told them their names: Louis Philippe, Belinda’s Dream, Old Blush, China Doll, Clotilde. Sometimes he grabbed a fistful of petals and she slapped his knuckles. An old man usually watched her from the bench. He watched the seam on the back of her hose and he smiled when she bent to slap the baby and her rear jiggled. He wanted to reach out and grab her but he knew she was too fine for him, too fine, that much he knew, though he wore his Agua Brava and a linen suit, crumpled as a napkin. She knew he watched her. She didn’t care. It was better than the college boys who whistled at her under their breath and told her what they’d like to do with her right there in front of Buddy, his pie face intent on the pink petals in his sweaty palm. She watched the boys, her eyes following them while her body stayed still. She stood in the rose garden until they were well past.
Last Wednesday Julie wore her hat that was open at the top. It showed the hair she had dyed a bright auburn. Buddy wore the coveralls with the choo choo. The suitcase was hidden in the bushes. It was vintage with straps like belt buckles. After the train pulled up, Julie scooped something into the suitcase. At that time of day, Julie had the privacy to do whatever she wanted. There was no one at the station. The train ran by the provision of the federal government. When the pebble-eyed man died, someone else would replace him, someone equally infirm. It didn’t matter who took the tickets. No one was there to buy them. There were no bags to lift or arrange in the rack over the seat, no ladies to hoist up the stairs.
Julie expected to ride that day. She had come from a different time, before Buddy, before Frank even, before modern clothes made women look like men, like whores. She wanted to take the train to Hollywood. She wanted to be in the movies. She wanted to be a star.
The shrimp man tore her ticket. “Where’s the boy?”
“Resting,” she said, as she lifted her bag into the overhead rack.
He gave her the pressed coin. She put it to her lips, blotting her lipstick. “You keep it,” she said. He turned. The back of his neck was a hollowed out place.
She closed her eyes and felt an ache in her belly. She drifted between the pain and her dreams. She was walking in a warm rain on a California beach. She stood in the shower. She would not think of the boy. She would not think of Frank.
They got her in Mt. Dora. The shrimp man had seen the first red drop fall from her bag onto her hat brim and blossom into a dark peony. He stood in the back and watched the incessant dripping of blood, like rain falling from trees. They would have to replace the seats. He called ahead to the next station to alert them as he slumped on his bench in the caboose. He felt for the paperwork for his retirement in his jacket. It was in there somewhere.
First published in Colored Chalk
04 Sunday Jun 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
Tags
French Finds, flickr
When they marry, they have a double. It is her box-spring and mattress. She bought it with her mother who taught her how to shop scratch and dent, to decorate with little.
They take it with them to Vermont where he teaches college and she works in the library. A river runs by their window. Birds perch in the tree outside. She makes stir fries and soufflés and stews. She writes thank you letters. She smoothes the wedding ring quilt over the small expanse of their mattress and straightens the dust ruffle. There is no money for paint but she hangs sheers on the windows. At night she lies in bed and wonders how she will sleep while – she finds out years later when she knows more about men, knows about her man – he dreams of other women. While his dreaming goes on unabated, she thinks of their next meal, how she will shop for it, and when she finally can’t sleep, she gets up, empties trash cans, has a beer. They are young; their bodies are thin, almost pubescent, though they are in their twenties. Their love is small. It is more on the surface. It has little depth. But in the double they make do. They are lithe.
Things are different in the next town. This is where it gets rough. She is not interested in a baby and they are very, very busy. He is getting his PhD. She is chasing an ambition to know God. She is getting a Master’s at the seminary. When he protests, she reminds him of their first date and what he said he liked about her: She had goals. They live in the seedier parts of Denver, in the only available apartment they can afford. She cries for the simple beauty of their place in Vermont, and maybe something else, but it seems the narrow bed accommodates only so much, either visions of beautiful girls and delicious meals or visions of beautiful girls and delicious texts she devours whole. At this stage, she is not much of a housekeeper or cook. As if in rebellion, the plumbing under the sink breaks several times, the halls stink with boiled cabbage, the twisted vine on the balcony yields only one flower. Yet they see Leadville, fly fish in the South Platte, make it over icy passes in their tiny Japanese cars, camp in the desolate Rockies under the stars, ride through mountains on bikes.
They are more tired and yet she makes sure they celebrate holidays, makes sure they have parties. They are around more people with children who don’t always understand the delay in what is supposed to come next and why she would sit in classrooms of men training for something most women don’t do. When she is not full of energy and stress, he finds her on the double, stretched out in an inexplicable bout of near catatonia. When he finds her there after a day’s work he is filled with fear and talks her out of it, away from it, whatever brink she’s on. Eventually she gets on meds, he takes care of her, and she gets moving again and she doesn’t need him as much. But he has no one either, not really, he’s on his own, but she doesn’t see that. Thin love and depression causes her to see him in only one way — how he can help her or how he can hinder.
In a wooded college town in Florida, he’s up for tenure. The women there are more beautiful than ever, than any other town in which they’ve lived, yet he feels a sense of peace about it somehow, as if he’s not so tempted, as if his dreams are not so wayward. He’s going to have a baby, a son, and he lives in a beautiful house, an old wrap around clapboard house with a yard big as a lake, a “piece of land”,” he brags. “Every man’s got to have his piece of land.” By now, she’s convinced she’s not a theologian, but she knows she’s something. How could she not be something? She makes peanut butter cookies with honey and vegetarian noodle dishes. She watches deer outside her window and a new flock of sheep down the road. Before the pregnancy, she drinks scotch on the porch, sometimes in her nightgown. No one is watching, there is so much land and that gives her freedom. When she knows she’s having a baby, she switches to iced tea. She watches the birds on the telephone wire. She walks to the pecan orchard across the street and down winding roads of broken down shacks and grocery stores. When she returns, she sees a black snake crawl out from the bushes beside the house and slither down to the foundation. It is mesmerizing, beautiful.
An interior designer helps her find a scratch and dent queen size that will follow them for years. She admits it fills a space with a presence, though it is too ostentatious for her husband’s taste, but now they are making separate decisions. She sees him almost never and she must do what she must.
He gets used to it, though, as a necessary evil, but also simply as a necessity. The bed is big enough for their baby and eventually, she buys the baby a little bed adjoining theirs and she can nurse him in the middle of the night. She spends hours on the bed, looking at their child. Their big bed is big enough for a big dog that loves to lounge and although it is not big enough for the four of them at once — dog, baby, father, mother — it’s big enough for failed plans and forgotten dreams, for tears and bitter fights, for cold refusals and private physical love, for family times in front of the television, for random naps during the day, for a scared child seeking the comfort of his parents, for a sick child seeking to watch cartoons and fall asleep. When the big dog must be put down, a smaller dog takes its place. It crawls on their backs while they sleep and on their pillows and there is not much worry or fuss about this. When there’s been a bad night of too little sleep or restlessness, they chalk it up to the needs of their child, and, later, when the child is grown and doesn’t wake them in the night, to the pressures of the day or to the pressures of the times in which they are living.
They are planning for a king size. The pool of worries and unmet desires and fears and depths of their prayers has widened. The unspoken desires and unmet needs pass between them. Their child, coming in to say goodnight, makes them forget for a while. So does an early nodding off so that the other must pull off their glasses, make them roll over, turn off the television and lights. They want one of those beds that will accommodate the late night movements of the other without disturbance of the sleeper’s sleep, the dreamer’s dream. They no longer have to dream the same dream, or fill the same space as in the early thin love days. There is no worry about this. Is this good or is this bad? There is no consensus.
First published in The Dos Passos Review
15 Monday May 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
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birdman by topinaris, flickr
My father is a birdman. By instinct the birds know him as a living man and not a statue and so they hover near his still, sitting frame, standing on their little bird legs, perching on his shoulders and knees, poking their heads into his pockets looking for seed.
My mother declared him petrified, useless. That was before she left him, she a bird herself flown from our little yellow kitchen of continuous spaghetti dinners and fried bologna sandwiches.
My father is quite an active man though as I grew I came to understand just not active in the direction desired by my mother. “Son,” he says to me, “Every bird in the city will be fed by sundown, he says, every bird will get their taste of my cones.” At night he coats pinecones with peanut butter and rolls them through birdseed.
He teaches me what to do so I can help him after school. Rather than show me how to play ball or take me fishing, my father teaches me the ways of his art.
“When you are with the birds their feathers become your wings,” he says, “their cooing the secret stirrings of your heart.”
His oddity never occurred to me though kids at school laugh at us saying my father shampoos himself in bird shit, my father would one day be taken up into space by a huge flock, my father was about to sprout wings and strut around like a pigeon, my father was CEO of birddom, my father was Bird Jesus and some birds were going to be saved from the birdpocalypse in which there would be a birdbath lake of fire and the 666 bird.
My father lost his job when he came back from the fighting. His eyes were torn away he said. His heart was in the gutter. At work he kept his jaws locked when he was supposed to speak and he kept getting lost and not able to find his way to meetings and conferences. That’s what he told me the first night we smeared the pinecones with peanut butter then rolled them through the seed spread out on the newspaper on the basement floor.
“A man is not meant to see another man’s bone, the skin torn from muscle, another man’s guts, his brains,” he says. “It is not meant for man to see man disassembled for at the sight, you lose yourself. Both you and the man so disassembled lose the dignity it is meant for a man to have. Without dignity many things are not possible.” As he says this, he slides one of mama’s silver knives over a pinecone. He doesn’t specify exactly what he means by this and I didn’t ask.
That first night we do a few practice pinecones for the backyard. We hang them from the trees with the yarn Mama left in her sewing basket. My father has me climb up among the branches and tie them around the limbs.
Then we sit on the porch and drink sun tea.
“When I got back,’ he says, ‘your Mama was the only one I wanted to see, well, besides you and your sister. I felt guilty because what have I done to earn her, Lord. That’s what I said to the Lord. Nothing, said the Lord. But she’s yours, love her.
“I did love her but I couldn’t love your Mama well enough. That’s a lot of pressure on a man, to love an angel. No matter, son, you have to try, when you have the chance, when God sees fit to bless.”
Nights we hang lanterns from the tree, lanterns we make ourselves with mason jars and candles. They were the jars Ma had collected over the years for canning and since she hadn’t come back to can strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, corn, okra, beans, by fall it seemed she was not coming back. On these nights we take our pinecone operation to the picnic table out back and work by the light of our homemade lanterns.
“We’re gonna roll these pinecones for peace right out there to those birds.”
I thought what use my classmates could make of such a line.
“Once I rolled grenades into enemy zones,” he said. “I saw what no man should see if he expects to stand come judgment. I am paying for grenades with eyes that don’t stay shut at night.”
“It’s ok, Dad. You are doing better now. You take care of things.”
“Don’t hurt another man, son. Let them lock you up before you take another life. Promise.”
“Ok, I promise,” I said and put my hand out to shake and he hugs me with what I recognized as a man’s dignity.
First published in Still Crazy: A Literary Magazine
01 Wednesday Mar 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
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Outing p. 676, 1885, flickr
At the posh Mexican restaurant where her writer friend would be lecturing Ms. Myska ordered a margarita but in “not too crazy a glass, please.” The other women in attendance thought that amusing. Ms. Myska thought the likelihood of accidents quite strong especially since attendees were sitting in rows of chairs and not around tables and she only imagined herself tipping a top heavy vessel. Besides, she had grown, she suspected, somewhat queer in her manners, having sequestered herself for so long, and probably rather queer in speech too, hence the laughter.
And yet, there was the long lost friend, acquaintance really, that despite Ms. Myska’s hesitation to get out again and risk embarrassment, she was determined to see and show support for her friend’s literary efforts. Ms. Myska felt, after the sickness that nearly took her life, she had become a bit of an animal, a rodent, really. She had also grown depressed. She had also developed deep worries for her son. Many days she was speeding to catch up after all that had felled her. She was amazed someone could come out with a book, was a bit jealous perhaps, her own efforts having spun into tiny stories of which she was proud, but her attention on more meditative projects had proved itself to be as brief as a turn of the second hand.
A powerful woman stood as master of ceremonies, someone Ms. Myska had known in what felt a former life, a woman who, having been exposed to a Ms. Myska story, let her have it when asked for a critique. “There is so much static in your story,” the woman had said, “that when you read it out loud, I just want to plug up my ears with my fingers like this,” and she demonstrated what she meant by plugging up her ears and squishing her eyes together. It made Ms. Myska sorry and yet she revised the story and gave it to a small journal who quietly published it, having found it acceptable to the eyes at least. Still, the rift was beginning to form between Ms. Myska and her city, and that was one of the points of contention. Of course she wanted to belong and was moved very deeply in a way that negatively affected her mood after that point. Was she fooling herself? Ms. Myska would always ask that question. And yet she wrote anyway and rarely asked anyone what they thought after she read her work out loud.
“Energy vampires” the lady master of ceremonies, the representative of establishment literature, was saying at the front of the room while the audience settled, “are people we want to avoid. People who complain, people who are passive aggressive, people who drag us down.” The margarita was just the right balance of sweet and tart and salt, which Ms. Myska didn’t mind flicking her tongue to the edge of the glass to taste. She didn’t even mind if someone saw. The lady was thin and wiry, a fairly attractive person for about seventy whereas middle aged Ms. Myska had become a bit more plump and matronly, something the MC hinted at when Ms. Myska re-introduced herself to her secret long lasting nemesis: “You look so different,” the wiry lady had said, “I hardly recognized you.”
The MC woman had apparently moved on from teaching writing to some kind of coaching which taught every moment was a chance to live up to one’s fullest potential. As part of the introduction she was giving a snapshot of how she could help everyone move to the light, which was what, apparently, Ms. Myska’s novelist friend had done under the tutelage of the grand MC.
It would always be thus, thought Ms. Myska, thinking of the chips and salsa she had seen someone order at the bar. It had looked so delicious she had wanted to place her own order for the conference room but then she would have to juggle too many things without a table and then people would really look.
The sweet face of her friend made her happy she had come. At last her friend spoke of her twenty five year effort to produce her successful work.
After the event, when Ms. Myska arrived home she found she had forgotten to take the dog out and so she had had an accident and so she took her out and gave her a snack. The sink was full of dirty dishes and her son had called from his father’s, wondering if he could speak to her on the phone before he went to bed. Clothes were strewn everywhere, old projects still waiting.
Still, she was home. It was all her own.
14 Tuesday Feb 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
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jojo nicdao, flickr
Along the shore of his lake in the city of lakes, he fashions boats from waxed paper, affixes huge tissue heats to the corners, sets candles inside and lights them so that the miniature craft are drawn along on the dark water. Lovers pay fifty cents to see their hearts set on fire and set adrift only to witness their incineration somewhere near the opposite bank, the cinder and ash ascending into the grey twilight, the smell of burnt paper, like kindling that flames and is quickly gone, filling the air, an acrid, comforting smell of home fires and warmth.
No one asks him any questions about the meaning of all of this or how or why he started, nor does he think of it too much. He thinks only of the delicate feel of the tissue, the lightness of the string, the slippery paper smoothed and sealed by wax, the fire on the water, the lovers’ faces as they stare at what they have paid for, prompted by who knows what, fascinated to see what becomes of their boat though they all must know what will be so why do they stay to watch? It is a mystery. Are they sad or satisfied somehow in the justification about their beliefs about tissue and hearts and fire, or had they hoped to see their boat, of all others, land on the other side?
Every night a woman who brings him a snack of rice and vegetables wrapped in a tortilla pays him fifty cents to place something small in her boat – tiny babies from Mardi Gras cakes, bodkins she wore in her hair when she was a girl, pieces of wool from her sewing basket in which she kept materials to make socks for soldiers, crosses she buys in packets of ten, pieces of kibble. She always has a prayer and dedication which she asks the man to recite though every night he protests he does not have his glasses and every night she gives him her late husband’s readers from the nightstand, and as the boat floats out, he says her prayers for the soldiers, the young life, the married couple, the single women, the woman herself and her cat and her grandchildren.
He found himself saying a prayer for himself one night as he set a boat in the water containing a gold heart. He snatched the boat back, soaking his trousers. He retrieved the heart. This is my gig, he said gruffly, as if she had affronted him with something. She asked for his blessing upon the heart. She asked him to kiss it. Instead, he chucked it out into the lake with all of his force where it plunked into the dark center and disappeared. They stood for a moment, the frogs screeching in judgment. It’s time to get a move on, he said. People are waiting. Indeed, a line had formed and that was the last night he saw her.
Every night he was hungry for the food she gave him and every night he had nothing to wonder about, what she would put into her boat, how she would ask him to pray, the feel of her late husband’s glasses upon his nose. How he missed that feel, strangely enough, and the strange prayers she had written, not like the coherent prayers he knew, but her erratic thoughts upon a subject, not a petition, but a statement as if she were telling someone how things were. He missed it.
And so he collected things for her, things he thought she would like, things he liked too, things forgotten and dusty in closets, things from childhood and a career and family from another life, and he put them in boats and watched the hearts burn and the boats sink with prayers on his lips uttered in a strange tongue, her way of speaking and thinking that had infused him and he believed himself capable of finding that gold heart had only there been money for proper equipment and younger lungs. In its depths the dark lake held his gift and he did not mourn but for the first time understood why couples waited until they saw what they knew would come to pass, and that in the waiting they anticipated what was most beautiful, a beginning and an end, all at once.
19 Thursday Jan 2017
Posted in original flash fiction
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Existing Behind Us by Derrick Tyson, flickr
Now Ms. Myska lives on the edge of her city, her townhome overlooking a small forest, more like a stand of trees, where once she had found an old dollhouse, where once she had found a muddy salsa CD without a case, where once she had seen a Florida black bear wandering through the scrub oak and pine. It was the place of meeting between Ms. Myska and people who also lived on these outskirts or who dumped their things here, people she had never met but got to know through the objects they discarded. It was also the place of meeting between her and animals, her and trees, her and the moon which peeped first through the trees on inky nights and then rose overhead, attended by a smattering of stars still visible in her relatively undeveloped part of town. Her home extended out onto the woods and she welcomed whatever came to her through her doors and windows.
The son of Ms. Myska had made it clear to her he did not want doors and windows open when they had any of their noisy electronics on and this out of respect for their neighbors. Though she was normally compliant with this line of thinking, when he left for school on the morning of the eve of the inauguration, she opened her door and let the forest and the bears and the folk who may be sleeping among the trees hear her winter music: pieces by Liszt, Vivaldi, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, thoughtful pieces, pieces reminiscent of snow, pieces reminiscent of the holiday just passed, pieces reminiscent of the silence of space on a cool evening, pieces reminiscent of the majesty of the Florida black bear, pieces reminiscent of the hope of trees. On this eve, she played for trees that they may have what they need through a cold winter, or longer, through a holocaust of trees. She played that their seeds would burrow deep into the earth to be kept for a time not quite possible to imagine but the fulfillment of which was the fervent desire of Ms. Myska.
25 Sunday Sep 2016
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One of my favorite forms of the short story is “flash fiction.” This is variously interpreted, length being one defining element. Though I prefer working in the longer end of this, it is a challenge to see if I can convey something of a shapely story in 250 words, a word limit of some flash fiction journals and slam competitions. Though I leave the competition to the competitors, it is still satisfying when something feels finished. I don’t always know why, something clicks inside and says: “Done!” And then I am just pleased I somehow pulled it off. Alex Pruteanu, prolific writer and this month’s co-editor of Flash Frontier says this of flash fiction and the rationale behind his editorial choices:
“Something I always look for in flash fiction is urgency: the urgency of the writer, but also the situation that I, as a reader, am being presented with. I want to be thrown into a scene and left there for me to figure out how to get out. I like that. And so I made sure that a complete story wasn’t being spoon-fed to me, even severely compressed as it must be when the word limit is 250 words. I also enjoy controlled chaos and have a visceral reaction when I read well-constructed flash that seems out of control and about to explode in my face. And finally, I just like things that come at me from obtuse angles. It’s hard to somehow verbalize this but…flash fiction for me reads like Thelonious Monk’s piano playing. Something hits you from a never-before-seen angle. And you think: holy moly, this actually works.”
The theme for this month’s Flash Frontier is “Motels.” It is interesting to note the variety a well chosen, concrete theme can inspire, especially one that makes us think of travel, or even waywardness, an on-the-fringes existence. It doesn’t always have to suggest these things but a built-in opportunity exists for the writer who will grasp it: Tension. This is the torque of any story. The best stories employ multiple layers of human anguish and difficulty, not a melodramatic presentation of course, but a visceral one so that by the end we are so close to what is happening as to feel we are inside a world that is not our own. Good stories humanize us by letting us experience the lives of more people we can ever know in a lifetime. In this sentence about the function of stories, I am roughly paraphrasing Harold Bloom, one of our most erudite literary critics.
The Old Woman from Ipanema
Coastal processes assessment, Brevard County, Florida
The night we met at The Red Fox Lounge at the Mount Vernon Inn, I started to lose my vision. Lorna Lombey was singing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and handing out tambourines and maracas and castanets and suddenly there were two Lornas and two of you and two of everything else. After that weekend, the historic Florida inn would be destroyed by land developers and Lorna would no longer play where she and her late husband of thirty years had a Vegas lounge act.
I held your hand, tears in my eyes, and watched the room double.
“Let’s get a drink,” you said, knowing nothing. I had not been open about my health. Dating at fifty was one long sales pitch.
We checked into a room. You laid me onto the bed and hovered over me in twos. “I’ll never leave you,” you said. When I was twenty-five and newly married my husband said the same thing though I left him first.
In the morning, I woke to a note: Goodbye Angeline. My double vision had fled, long enough for me to drive home and watch the news that night, including news of the destruction of a Winter Park landmark, yet another link to our past, this David Lynchian concatenation.
My dog rolled over and I thought: This is the one true thing.
I scratched her belly.
“Our city will be lonelier without strange things such as these,” I said.
First published in Flash Frontier, September 2016
26 Thursday May 2016
Posted in original flash fiction
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fiction, flash fiction, Icehotel, Lapland, short story, Sweden
Jukkasjärvi: ICEHOTEL by azedkae, flickr
There is a murderer staying in the ice hotel. He sleeps on his ice bed which is covered in reindeer fur. He drinks Absolut vodka from a frozen shot glass. He cries to the walls made of the clear, pure, bubble-free ice harvested from the nearby Torne River. The snow cementing the ice block muffles his grief. It absorbs what he cannot bring himself to say: He killed his girlfriend when he caught her with another man.
The ice in his room shifts, sighs, drips. It is April 6, the end of the season. A dripping snow column beside his bed pulses with multi-colored LED lights. He is calmed by this, this lifelike column a beating heart, a gentle mother watching over him as he lies upon his bed. He finally falls asleep in a room that is twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit.
The next morning, the murderer goes on a tour to meet the indigenous people, the Sami or “reindeer people.” A group of men taking the tour are hung over and worried about getting to Heathrow. They make fun of the guide who fries reindeer meet before the fire in his ancestral tent. The guide tells them about his culture and the men ask him where he gets his clothes and the guide says his mother sews them. “Oh,” says one of them. “I would have said Saks.”
There is a woman with them too but she watches the fire intently. After they have eaten, they ride in sledges behind reindeer. The men are thrilled with the bull who is so fast, pulling each of them, they are tossed into the snow. The woman quietly rides in her sledge behind a cow. The murderer takes over her sledge when she is finished and doesn’t mind the pace.
He wonders if he could escape to this place, ingratiate himself among the people, learn the language, tend the herds. He wants to live among the reindeer with their large brown, wet eyes. Could he escape into the wilds of Lapland, where in winter the temperatures hover around zero and snow would not be shared with another for miles? He could change his name, adopt their belief in an animated world, exact his own punishment or wait for it to come.
As it stands, the ice hotel is melting. Soon it will no longer be structurally sound. He buys equipment in Jukkasjärvi and a pack of dogs using the remaining money in his account. The trees stand around him like thickly frosted decorations on a thickly frosted cake. He sets out on his sled, making his mark upon the snow, a mark that will be gone when the snow falls again that night, a wet spring snow but a blanketing one. Even the hotel will melt into the Torne River and be resurrected the next winter with no traces of anyone having slept there before.
* Some of the details regarding the hotel and tour are loosely based on Barbara Sjholm’s beautifully written travelogue, The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland.
First published in Blue Fifth Review: Blue Five Notebook Series under the title “Melting”
20 Thursday Feb 2014
My mother is a wolf. She is with me at the campsite. There is a sign that specifically says: “Do not make food accessible to animals.” My mother sits at the table and has tea with me. She is sitting on her haunches.
My mother is crying. She says there are things she never taught me: how to sew from a pattern, how to manage my accounts, how to plan for a week’s worth of shopping. Her paw is on my hand. It is warm from scrambling over the sun-kissed rock. And though I know her blood runs warm, like mine, there is something new in her gaze, some coldness, something reptilian.
“I have no feeling any more, mother,” I say, “no regrets.” I am serving the cinnamon tea. I am serving it in delicate white china.
In the sun, my mother is beautiful. In the sun, the blue of her eyes like the sky penetrate my defenses.
“I did not raise you to take the hardships of your life this way,” she says. “I never told you it would always be the same. There are things you must do now to become who you must become.”
The smoke of the fire curls up into the air. I wonder if my mother will return that evening with the other wolves, to threaten me for my meager fare — a bird shot in midflight, a rabbit caught in a snare. I wonder if she will return for me.
She had come to see me during the day at other times, and not for tea, and not for any reason. I have felt the presence of the others hovering about the trees. So far, it has not resulted in anything, only a mild abrasion on the cheek when we kissed, an unintentional scraping, drawing a faint line of blood.
I am disappointing her, I feel, and yet I cannot move on. My old life is behind me, in ruins. I mourn it as for an ancient city, burning. My beginning has no map. My mother is not the woman in the yellow dress cooking dinner for my father and my brother and sister. All histories have melted away and these old regrets live on top of the mountain. And yet, except for a few tears, my mother runs in packs at night. I know she protects me, for in the morning, there is a drop of blood in the corner of her mouth or in the web of her paws that she does not explain but wipes away on a napkin.
And yet I continue to straighten the napkins and check the egg timer for steeping.
Published in Apocrypha and Abstractions, February 20, 2014
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