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Category: 2020
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The Newcomer–by Kay Smith-Blum
image courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@chuttersnap No one really noticed the newcomer. Mrs. Haggerty arrived during the doxology. She covered her cough with her palm, wishing her bunions would quiet down. She extended a friendly handshake to Mrs. Lane in the foyer, before accompanying the newcomer down the aisle. She bent over to rub her right foot before entering the pew.
Mr. Brown leaned into the last phrase. “Praise Father, Son and Heavenly Ghost.” He breathed in, replenishing his spent air, issuing a hello as he pushed himself a bit closer to the youngest Galanos daughter to make way for Mrs. Haggerty and the newcomer. The youngest Galanos nudged her mom, opening her mouth at the same time as Mr. Brown exhaled. But Mrs. Galanos, somewhat preoccupied with thoughts of the elder son who hadn’t come home last night until well past midnight, didn’t abide chit-chat in church and put her finger to her daughter’s lips and then to her own signaling silence.
Mrs. Haggerty grasped the hymnal and turned to the worn page for Morning Has Broken, not that she needed it, the words memorized long ago when Cat Stevens covered it in the ’70s and she and Mr. Haggerty used to make love at midday which they never did anymore because he traveled so much or because their lovemaking had become stale. She sang the words and wished they could refresh somehow. Beside her, the newcomer was “springing fresh from the world” and could make change.
The newcomer’s head spiked in red-orange bits, outgrowth from a golden base that shed some. Mrs. Haggerty did not notice the strand that floated her way or the one that landed on Mr. Brown’s lower lip as he pursed it, leaning over the next pew to whisper to his fidgety nephews to settle down. Mr. Brown’s sister had a tendency to sleep in on Sundays and Mr. Brown would stop by to gather the empty liquor bottles for the trash and the boys for church. No one commented on the newcomer’s crown-like appearance but it may have been the source of the giggles from the boys, causing an exasperated exhale from their uncle into their ears that put their revelry to rest.
Mrs. Haggerty turned the hymnal page wondering about a new face cream advertisement she had seen, smoothing the page wide so the newcomer could find the entry along with her into the song. The congregation swelled in unison. Mrs. Haggerty sneezed, wondering if she was catching the same cold that her husband had brought home from his trip to California. His stuffed head kept him away from church this morning or so he said upon recounting how much he preferred west coast weather to the Midwest extremes. The youngest Galanos daughter licked her palm, sticky from morning pancake syrup, until her mother took her hand squelching the action, mashing their palms together. Mrs. Galanos ran her hand along the back of her neck studying her eldest and considering who the girl might be that had kept him out so late if in fact it was a girl. She tapped her fingers on her lips thinking Mr. Galanos might ascertain the truth and at least she didn’t have to worry about her oldest daughter all set for college and leaving home in the fall.
When the offering plate came around, Mr. Galanos made the usual family donation, a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill after which Mrs. Galanos handed the plate, a shallow dish really, to her daughter who popped open her pink patent purse and placed in a quarter before passing it to Mr. Brown who gave the plate to Mrs. Haggerty who handed it to Mr. Lane after the newcomer tossed in a contribution as well. Mr. Lane stepped to the next row, handing the plate off to Mr. Brown’s nephews, who mixed the coins and bills like a salad, before passing it off to Mrs. Young who leaned back, almost cheek to cheek with Mr. Brown, wishing he would say yes to her dinner invitation and to accept his apology for the rambunctious youngsters. The offering plate moved through two more rows before Mr. Lane returned it to the front table to be counted, sans the Galanos hundred which he pocketed in a magician’s flash to pay off his gambling debt in the next county. His losing streak had to end soon.
The youngest Galanos daughter whispered to her mom she couldn’t wait any longer to use the toilet and sifted by Mr. Brown, interrupting his daydream about his time last night with Melvin, who loved Mr. Brown, ran the local hardware and had a remote farmhouse where they could be alone. Mrs. Haggerty sneezed again just above the child’s head as she passed. The sermon, on spreading the gospel, was rich in meaning particularly with the newcomer in their midst who they would all make welcome.
The opportunity to be hosted by a variety of the church’s members was not lost. The newcomer eventually found a way into the hearts of the entire congregation, settling into the tissue of their lives, offering reason if not solace when Mr. Lane’s losing streak did in fact end. He was the first to die, followed by the youngest Galanos daughter and Mrs. Haggerty and shortly thereafter, her husband. The newcomer decided to stay for a while, for at least a year, if not two.
Kay Smith-Blum, a recovering retailer, was named Woman Business Owner (NWWA) of 2013. Smith-Blum co-authored the “Every Man” card series, published by Schurman Fine Papers. An author of historical fiction, she lives in Seattle WA. Her short stories can be found at CommuterLit.com, Minerva Rising (Winter 2021) Fiction Southeast (Winter 2021) and The Stray Branch (Spring 2022). Her humorous essays (nominated for Best of the Net) may be found at Pif Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, The Furious Gazelle (Winter 2021), Quail Bell Magazine, Bewildering Stories and Down in the Dirt Magazine.
Twitter @kaysmithblum Facebook/Linkedin Kay Smith-Blum Instagram @discerningKSB
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Abuela’s Hammer–by Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley
Fellita is on a mission to kill the man who violated her granddaughter. He put his hand so far up Elena’s nalgas that he managed to grab her holy hole too. Fellita only knows about the ass grab, she’ll take out his whole family if she knew the rest.
Elena is chunky, like me. We hide inside big jogging pants with the waistband rolled up so we can look fatter. We wear long T-shirts, me to cover my boobs and Elena, her bubble butt.
I am used to ignoring the hungry dog looks from men older than Papi. Our uptown Manhattan neighborhood is infested with sinverguenzas who undress young girls with their eyes. Watching my best friend get assaulted in broad daylight, right in front of our building while I was too chicken shit to protect her, trips me up with guilt. It should have been me. The minute he saw us, Nestor started telling his friends what he would do to me if he ever catches me alone. Elena put her arm around me and that’s when he came at her, and called her a fat, ugly dyke. I should have punched him, pulled his hair, kicked him, instead, I froze.
From behind, Fellita looks like a teenager. She bleaches her hair blonde to look like her idol but she is more Celia Cruz than Gwen Stefani. Her copper skin and curvy shape always gets men’s attention but her face always freaks them out. They are expecting Lolita and instead get a fifty-year-old grandma with braces and coke bottle glasses.
She walks slowly, the cowry bells on her silver anklet jingle all the way up the block. She’s in disguise, cat eyes sunglasses and a big floppy sun hat. The men on the corner of 170th and Broadway selling stolen True Religion jeans out of the back of an SUV have already spotted her. Fellita moves slowly like a mermaid luring them to their untimely demise. Elena and I follow her from the other side of the street.
Nestor whistles at Fellita.
She takes a hammer out of the Hello Kitty tote bag and smashes the windshield of the SUV. The crack in the glass spreads like a spider spinning its web at 100 miles an hour.
The men, caught off guard, freeze when she aims the hammer at Nestor’s head.
“Abue nooooo! he didn’t do it!” Elena screams, running across the street to stop her grandma from killing Nestor. I run after her.
“Este es el perverso?” Fellita asks Elena, then me as she crumbles Nestor the molestor’s balls into tiny specs of dust. I nod. One of the men grabs Fellita from the back. She kicks him like a pissed off mare, and bites the arm he tried to grab her with. Nestor’s high pitched screams reverberate, bringing everyone to their windows, their stoops and the corner. She finally lets go when he pees on her hand.
If one of my nosey neighbors tells Mami I am with Fellita and Elena after she told me not to hang out with them because they are chusma, I’ll be grounded for life.
When a police car pulls up to ticket the SUV for blocking the fire hydrant, the men scatter along Broadway like cockroaches running from a can of Raid.
Nestor leaves me alone for the rest of the summer and relocates his business to the corner of 173rd and Amsterdam.
170th and Broadway stays free of sinverguenzas and pervs. Fellita, and the neighborhood’s abuelas, tias and mamis, including mine, patrol the block armed with hammers, rolling pins, and screwdrivers they are not afraid to use.
Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley was born in the Dominican Republic, raised in New York, and has been living in Los Angeles for the past 16 years. In her work as a writer and filmmaker, she strives to make the identity of the bilingual, bicultural, brown girl/woman visible and to dispel some of the stereotypes that marginalize people who grow up immigrant, urban, and poor.
Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash
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We’re Sixteen and We’re Stupid, But You’re My Salvation
Memoir by Winnie Grey
We’re sixteen and we’re stupid, but we’re in love.
“I’m sorry,” she tells me. “They shouldn’t say things like that to you.”
We’re lying side by side on her zebra print bedding, the rainbow fairy lights she has strung up along her ceiling suspending us in a sort of dazed dream; I’ve always loved these lights. Over time, they’ve come to mean warmth. Safety. A place where I can be myself, be with her, and scream song lyrics until the latest lecture from my father fades from my mind.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m used to it. This is just my life, you know? One day it’ll be over; one day I’ll get to leave. And until then, I have you, and my books, and the hopes of a One Direction reunion, so I’ll be just fine.”
She laughs and leans into me. Her face settles into the crook of my neck, so warm, and I can feel her smile against my skin.
She has the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen.
“What time are they picking you up for church in the morning?” she asks.
I groan at the thought of another stifling service on those scratchy pews. Another two hours of my life lost to being told how awful of a person I am, how if I really was good, I’d beg and cry and fall face-down to the stiff green carpet and beg to be made into a soldier.
“I’ll have to get up at seven,” I say. “To shower.”
She breathes in, sweet and steady, hand sliding into mine and squeezing in a reassuring way. A promise. An affirmation that she isn’t going anywhere until the day she helps me move out of my house and we both fly as far from this town as possible.
But that’s still years away and even as I squeeze her hand back, I can’t help but think about the panic attacks and nightmares that have been seizing me with increasing frequency; images of “hellfire” and “damnation” that flicker like flames behind my eyelids, a voice in the back of my head that sounds exactly like my father’s, telling me that I’m going to rot in hell. That I have dark spirits inside of me. That’s what the last lecture had been about: my depression. Or, as they liked to phrase it, the demons inside of me.
It’s difficult to reconcile the darkness that they claim so often to see in me with the light I feel when I’m around her. It doesn’t make any sense; I only feel dark when I’m around them.
My father is a small man, physically, but his ego could move mountains. He was raised in the faith, his father and grandfather each pastors of the church that he now rules over. He has eyes like black beads and close-cropped hair that always looks as though it would be stiff to the touch. He’s quick to anger, and spends every spare dollar on expensive leather briefcases and special editions of Bibles. When I was just a little girl, before I understood what his religion really stood for, and before I realized that I was being raised to hate myself, I was quite certain that my father hung the moon every night; but then I grew up, grew away, and knew that if he did possess that power, he would sooner snatch it from the sky and force it to do his bidding.
He and my mother had met at a special church conference when she was only 15; they were married before she turned 21. A few years later, I came along: the miracle child. A gift from God himself to my parents, who were forced to adopt after discovering they couldn’t conceive children of their own. My childhood was a whirlwind of overwhelming affection, of church services and prayer meetings and Be Quiet’s and Occupy Yourself’s and Don’t Ask Question’s. I learned how to entertain myself, and how to hide my true emotions, just to keep them off my back. By the time I realized the depression and anxiety these behaviors would lead to, it was too late. So I began to live solely for the future–for my future.
I was 16 when I found myself falling for my best friend, a dark-skinned girl who Sharpied rainbows on her Converse high tops and had the prettiest blue-tipped hair, the warmest smile I’d ever seen.
She draws me out of my thought spiral now by beginning to sing softly. It’s a Spanish song, so I don’t understand the words, but her voice is light as air and smooth as honey. It calms me in a way the church hymns never have.
Every moment of my life is spent in this internal chaos: hacking away at the girl I was raised to be with an axe and building the girl I know I am in her place. It’s climbing uphill, it’s swimming upstream, and some days I am pushed back more than I can push forward. But no matter how dark the skies get, I can’t bring myself to give up. To let go.
“You okay?” she asks.
I miss her singing the moment she stops, but I nod. “Sorry. Just still thinking about last night, I guess.” Another lecture. Another night of Angry Father and Disappointed Mother, of tears and shaking heads and Where did we go wrong?s.
All because I wasn’t the happy hand-raising daughter they’d wanted. I know they’d deny it if I ever said it to their faces, but they don’t have to say anything anyway; I can read the disappointment in their eyes. They hate that I’m quiet, hate that I’m so sad, hate that I have no desire to sing on the praise team or compete in Bible quizzing. And I can’t fix any of that, because I can’t change who I am, and I’m unwilling to pretend any more than is absolutely necessary for my survival.
“They want to break me,” I whisper. “Change me. Force me to be something I’m not. I know who I am, but I’m afraid. I’ve seen the way they get in peoples’ heads. What if that happens to me?”
“It’ll be fine,” she reassures, and pulls me somehow even closer to her. She smells like vanilla and crisp spring air and the earth after the rain is over and the clouds have begun to part. I love her so much in this moment, I can barely breathe.
“You’ll be okay.” A parting of pretty pink lips, a rush of warm breath across my neck. “They can’t take you from me. I won’t let them.”
I nod, my cheek pushing against hers, and she starts to sing to me again. The sun has began to sink below the horizon outside, and golden light slants through the blinds on the window and bathes us both in a warm glow. She raises a hand and brushes a stray piece of long hair behind my ear. Her eyes are a kinder version of the moon.
You’re my salvation, I think. Not the one they’ve forced me into since I was a child, wet words that ached with fear. See, love, you’re salvation like rainfall. You’re salvation like looking up at the sky and connecting a new constellation for the first time.
They think they’re saving me, but you already did.
Winnie Grey is an undergraduate student in the B.A. English program at Indiana State University. Her work has been published in the poetry anthology Life (as it) Happens and is forthcoming in Allusions. She lives in Terre Haute, Indiana with family.Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
Photo by Olga DeLawrence on Unsplash
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Time. Lost Ears. Pain. Three micro-fictions by Sarah Alderfer
Time
Do you think time can disappear without a trace, with no explanation? You’d think it’d be spun on wheels, but I think it has a mind and dance of its own. I approached my seat on the small plane, it didn’t feel right. I wasn’t supposed to be here, not yet. I sat down next to a man with every hair and seam in place. He had a flashy watch, too. As the plane took off, I clung to the view of the old country, determined to watch until she disappeared, swallowed by sky, or sheer grief. It’s strange, leaving a home that’s not your own. Maybe the minutes escaped through my feet, that’s where I feel it first, cold, numb. Maybe it’s through my stomach, sinking like a black hole. It started ticking again when I picked my head up from between my knees. I looked up from my hands. Glancing out the window, I asked the man why we were landing already, we had just taken off. “We’re in Frankfurt” he said, looking at his watch with a flick of his wrist. Time: it takes, taunting you in circles.
Lost Ears
One morning, I woke up and realized that I had lost my ears. I looked under my bed, I couldn’t find them. I waited a day or two, they didn’t come back to me. I looked down often. I’d kick rocks or hide my tears. When I think of that time, I think of the color black, a heavy one. One day, my mom gave me a note. It was a yellow, folded piece of paper. She said to open it on the bus as she rushed me out the door. The red ink told me to keep my head up. So I tried. I looked at lips as they spoke to me. I even saw hands come alive. I saw smiles and I saw heartbreaks. I didn’t lose that morning, I found eyes.
Pain
One night, three years ago, I wrote a poem, almost by accident. I remember the sheer grief, how it took my breath away. Time passed so slowly, each second was painstaking. Each inhale, and then the exhale, was work. So much work. All I did was watch Forensic Files in my bed and occasionally eat cold leftovers. Sometimes, I went to work. Sometimes, I turned around on the way there, unable to see through my tears. Sometimes, I didn’t even get out of bed.
I’m sorry, by the way. Air was so heavy. Blades and fire were release, the grip on my chest, gone. Fix. I came to a point where I refused to be ruled by something so little. I’m not even sure what spurred that resolve, it had still hurt so much. I remember that night, the wave was coming. I lay in my bed, the next episode of Forensic Files was on. The wave crashed, and I laid there, bracing. I made myself feel everything, each sliver of glass. I let myself wash away instead of reaching out. It was then that something happened. Words came swirling. Gasping for air, I wrote them down. It was the first time I felt relief without hurting myself. I was never the same after that. I had something to say, a voice. It was just the beginning that night, basking in the light.
Sarah Alderfer is a 26-year-old nanny and nutrition student. This is her first published fiction.
Why we chose it: Sometimes a voice reaches out to you. It has less to do with story than with feeling, a sense of something rising up from the interior of the writing that transcends subject. When this submission came in, I was intrigued by the cover letter, which stated simply, “This is new to me. Thank you for your time and consideration.” A one-line bio followed the signature: “I am a 26-year-old nanny and nutrition student.“
I opened the file and read “Lost Ears.” It was strange and beguiling. Before I’d had time to wrap my head around it, I was moving on to “Pain.” The sense of intimacy deepened–the raw despair followed by the discovery of writing as a way out of the darkness. And then on to “Time,” the unusual assertion that “you’d think it’d be spun on wheels.” I loved reading “Time” because it places us with a character in a place and time, in motion, contemplating one of the great mysteries in a new way.
I am excited to see what Sarah Alderfer writes next. I expect we’ll be hearing more from her.
Michelle Richmond, Editor / Fiction Attic Press
SUBMIT your flash fiction, micro fiction, short story, or essay to Fiction Attic Press.
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Bulb-Shaped–by Jeffrey Bakkensen
Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash You took a stick and drew a circle in the leaves around us and the fire. “No one comes in or out.” We teased the dog until she learned the rules. When night came, we went inside the trailer.
We weren’t using our phones. That was another rule. There were no outlets, only softly glowing sconces powered by a panel on the roof. There was no shower. These weren’t rules, only facts. The toilet was this eco-friendly Space Age thing lined with something like aluminum foil that closed over your waste and twisted around and made a whirring noise, and opened up again fully clean. There was limited water.
When it was really dark, we switched off the sconces and watched the darkness until we were scared it was watching us back. I went outside and pissed on the fire while the dog pissed on the leaves. We opened a bag of chips and a six pack and played rummy on the fold-out table between the bed and the kitchenette. I said I didn’t remember beer being so sweet, and a few minutes later, you said the same thing. We both laughed because you must not have heard me.
Then we were quiet for a long time staring at our cards. I cracked another beer, cracked one for you even though yours wasn’t done, and waited. Eventually, you got up to use the bathroom. When you came back, you said you thought it had happened.
I’d filled the waiting minutes reading a magazine that was laid on the bed when we arrived. The magazine was about people renting their trailers all over the country. Nadine’s trailer was near Zion National Park. Brent’s was deep in Minnesota.
I’d meant to let myself get caught looking at your cards, but I was too busy reading about trailers, and you surprised me.
The aluminum bag whirred, and the bathroom door opened. The dog and I both looked up. You came outside and washed your hands in the kitchenette sink.
“I think that was it.”
We hugged, me crouching under the trailer’s low ceiling.
“That’s good,” I said, and I didn’t have anything else to say.
Later, I knelt at the toilet and with a finger palpated the eye of the aluminum bag, but I didn’t know what I should be looking for. Maybe a receipt I’d carried crumpled in my wallet for weeks, but couldn’t find when I finally needed it. After all, you said you thought, not that you knew.
I knew that even much later, I would remember the trailer, the toilet, you drawing a circle in the leaves. The trailer air fouled with memory-making.
The dog died. That was how we knew that time was passing. We measured it by the night in the trailer, and whether the dog was still alive or had already died. Frost heaves broke our flower bed into beds, and while I stamped them down, you slipped away. Long after the dog died, you came bulb-shaped with your separate success to tell me what I’d thought but not known to name, how wanting doesn’t stop just because the thing is gone for good.
I wanted to buy a trailer of my own and park it in the street out front. I wanted to fill my trailer with debris in layers so my back stooped and you’d climb to me up a ziggurat of cereal boxes and out-modeled phone chargers. I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom and push through the toilet’s aluminum eye and curl myself around the receipt I couldn’t find.
“You feel okay?” I asked.
“Just cramped.”
We played solitaire and then war. When the beer ran out, I took the dog on a long walk through the trees, lighting our way with my phone’s flashlight. By the time we got back, you were asleep.
For you, I thought, it was already morning. We were packing up and driving home.
Jeff Bakkensen lives in Boston. Recent work has appeared in A-Minor Magazine, Oblong Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review
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Read more flash fictions in Flash in the Attic: 44 Very Short Stories.