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Tag: flash fiction
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River Bottom – flash fiction by Misty Urban
She sat on the deep wooden porch in the chair her grandfather had made, and she rocked. The evening clouds, dark in their underbellies, clumped and hurried toward the line of beech trees lining the creek. The insects hummed and the birds chittered and the frogs croaked nervously, and once in a while the big garrulous ga-THUMP of the bullfrog belched through the other noise.
From the bedroom inside the house she heard the same sporadic hacking, the guttural expulsion and then the dry wretched scratching for air. Behind it was the rattle she’d heard before, when the grandfather who’d shaped this chair had lain, years ago, in that very bed, choking up lungs tarred black by a life in the coal mines. When she heard that rattle, she came out on the porch to wait.
No one worked in the coal mines anymore; now they blew up mountains and scraped the top flat as an angel cake, pushed the blasted rubble and the twisted roots of the great oaks and spruces into the valleys, suffocating rivers, towns, a whole way of life. Fast, maybe. But not clean. Death never was.
Some time ago, before the belly of the sun had reached the far blue hill, he’d stopped calling her name, ceased the faint, desperate cackle for “Ell – Ell—Ell.” Soon it would all cease, all of it. The spitting up of his saliva and the stomach lining poisoned by lead, nicotine, the many strange compounds with their haunting names that he had breathed by choice and by lack of choice all his life. The querulous “Nell! Get in here, you good-for-nothin!” The curses, the hand flat and hot against her ass or the back of her head, or pointed, as it had once or twice, toward the shotgun leaning behind the door. The hands that had been so eager and fumbling in their cold meaty softness on her wedding night, when she was bought and unwrapped like a slab of meat. All the times that heavy imprint had come with a “Dammit, it’s for your own good!” or “Why you make me do these things?” or “Wipe that look off your face, or you’ll get it agin.” You could hardly blame a man for doing what he’d seen other men do all his life, for doing what he was driven to do. But you could hardly blame a woman, could you, if the bruises went deep and lodged there, waiting.
She wasn’t unchristian; she’d left a glass of water by the bed. He couldn’t reach it. It wouldn’t help. Tomorrow she would look on a new sunrise, a new land, the land that had belonged to her family for a hundred years and would now belong only to her, the fields, the creek bottom, the ancient trees that had not yet been gutted by disease or rot or bulldozers dowsing for coal. She listened to the dry scratching voice and the way it blended with the frogs, like a chorus of nature, no sentient thought behind it but the desperate wish to survive. She listened the bullfrog bellow and stop. She rocked. In a little while the faint, damp, muddy river smell would come drifting up on the fog.
Misty Urban’s work has appeared in Karawane, Talking River, New Letters, Indiana Review, and Quarterly West, among other places. Her short story collection A LESSON IN MANNERS won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award and was published by Snake Nation Press. I teach writing and coordinate the Writing Center at Muscatine Community College in Muscatine, IA. Visit the author online at MistyUrban.net.
Image courtesy of Giles Lambert
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Bloodwork at 341
Flash Fiction by Ric HoebenHere, it reeked something sulphurous of an election day, and none of the big political names meant anything of significance to me. All I craved after was getting back to the resort and out of the steamy haze of summer sidewalk.
My wife, she’d had me call down to the liquor store to see if they were open—she wanted that blueberry vodka stuff again, we’d been tearing through the bottles going on four day straight, we’d been put up for her week’s vacation at the Pampas Inn, and all of it smacked of something she and I were not greatly accustomed to in our normal days of bluejean living. I’d been laid off from General Electric for a thinking problem, wifey had slaved as a paralegal back home in Sellars, slaved so damn hard her boss gave her this fat relax week at his condo. And so, we had lobster, we had impolite sex, we had jacuzzi, we had the sticky linger of blueberry in the mouth each morning, waiting to greet us with its great, morning punish.
I got myself down to the familiar brick store, sniffed it, licked its walls. Inside, they knew my name now, they smiled at my face now, they said hello to my liquor eyes now—I was their boy, the new daddy on the streets. They probably thought I’d become a regular, a man they’d see on and on for years, a man from just over on the South Causeway. But I was far, far from home. I paid for the Smirnoff half gallon and nodded and left out the ever-bell-clanking door.
It had occurred to me that I was a dying animal. I’d been living it, day in/day out, dehydrated, depressed, head in a fog, and testosterone at a record low, had given up smoking, even did a few push-ups here and there, none of it built me back up. I thought the present resort trip would help. It had not.
Cloudy, cloudy, cloudy, I ran square into a bum. A Mexican one, and the precious vodka shattered as he whistled tunes unknown.
“What the hell?” I screamed. “As if I am not feeling bad enough, as if I am not thinking about suicide some nights!”
He scooped down to pick up the shards of glass. Why, I wondered, did a bum pass by these affluent paths anyhow, who was he in his Latino skin and why here?
“Go to church?” he said from his kneel. He had no sweat about him, even in flannels and beard.
“Look, daddy, you really shat on my parade here, and I’m thinking you better give ‘em to me.”
“Give what?” he fired back.
“Whatever money you’ve cadged for today, you give it all on over to me. You rained on it, you rained on my parade. My wife’s, too, daddy.”
“For years I’ve come down this way. For years I’ve been looking for a cross. Plenty of churches, but not a damn cross on any one of ‘em.”
He put out his hand as if he wanted to shake mine, as if he were a gentleman golfer, as if his Jaguar were parked just in earshot.
I snarled and walked back in the direction of the high throne of the wife, empty, desolate. I’d have to conjure up some story, get another Andrew Jackson out of her mauve purse and march right back down the same, stupid street. My ears rang and the haze of my head pounded—I would have done sloppy murder for a thick cheeseburger and a Mountain Dew, but nothing like that existed in the Gehenna as I knew it.
Each step hurt, and I wanted to vomit all of the anxieties of my life out across the glimmer of the flagstones underneath me. What had bitten me, what had come up in me? My tongue tried to escape my body, my fingers did not move as commanded, my brain could not control even my bladder, and I gave over to peeing, draining it all down my Walmart khakis. I’d done this before, but it had been a while. Now here it had happened again, here in public with cars passing and crisp mailmen walking, and four irons a-hitting. Here I stood drenched in my dying.
He was right. He was damned right.
I saw a church, something straight out of a Clint Eastwood, and then another one, taller, like a standard out of South Beach, and a small pink one, immaculate was its garden, its awning, its arbor, but it had no cross to speak of—none of them churches had a cross. And this fact, for reasons unknown, was one enormous, hard pill to swallow.
I began to run, my piss-wet, sloshing legs somehow finding an energy, past the identical condos and mailboxes and seashell prints and oyster decorations and garden gnomes, but never a cross, never a cross, never a cross. The very word got stuck in my higher functioning: cross, cross, cross. Shitless, I could not stop running and looking as quick as my eyeballs would work for me. I flew down Addison Avenue and saw flamingoes and highschoolers tanning their round buns, but no old ruggeds thereat. Sprinted up Victory Lane and saw the Import Cars place and a woman and her dalmatian and her husband pumping iron as he walked alongside her, but what I wanted to find would not come out and be shown.
I ran myself ragged, as they say. Ran myself to the point of thick exhaustion, sat down on a corner and tried to summon something new. My wife? Could I call her? Could she come get me? Could she leave that damn king size and that damn watermelon and that damn ocean breeze smacking her pale thighs and come straight down to real life and fetch me? But I did not even know where to tell her I was. The streets had become something unfamiliar. The election signs were long gone, that eternal striking of Titleists, absent.
***
Looking to my port and then to my starboard, I found the drizzle. I knew the storm would press on, I’d seen the weatherman dance and ramble on about it, back in the morning, when she and I were sharing cantaloupes and coffees and working off the vise of the hangover and there being nothing much more to do than fish-stare at the goofy weatherman and the soaps, like our parents always did, like our grandparents always did, like some things never change. But under the graying drip of rain, I hunkered down and realized that all nature of things did change, that cells die and nations war and people get fired in America and babies are born with or without you and leaders fall and money not only talks but shouts sometimes and, and, churches and yards and businesses exist in motion without Jesus crosses to them. My testosterone was low, and I had no job, and my only friend anymore was my wife and her big thighs and her lackadaisicalness. The tranquil drizzle turned into regular and, then, after that, supreme. The drops came on with a mean sting to them, and I caught sight of a fine canopy of live oaks to sit myself under and wait out things. I crawled after that spot, my nails in the soft earth, my useless body going along with their small gains, and finally, painstakingly, I reached the shelter of love, that abode of power, the endless castle of home.
Ric Hoeben, M.F.A. from The University of Florida, lives in Georgetown, South Carolina, by the coast. His most recent work has been found in Tampa Review, storySouth, Glimmer Train, James Dickey Review, Clapboard House, The Monarch Review, Spork, Atticus Review, Hobart, Connotation Press, Burrow Press Review, Pithead Chapel, Umbrella Factory, the Newer York, and Waccamaw.
image courtesy of Tomo Sodoge via unsplash
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Delilah’s Skull – Flash Fiction by Nan Wigington
When my dad died, I wanted to sell everything, but my brothers said no, take something, so I took Delilah’s Skull.
My dad kept cabinets. Mostly at the hospital. Patient parts, he said. For research. Some cabinets contained bones – the odd compressed spine, tibias, broken ulnas. He had organs, too, slices of cirrhotic livers, a cadre of cancerous lungs, eyes in jars of viscous liquid. They rolled upward when you shook them. The only part he didn’t keep locked away was Delilah’s skull. That stayed at the corner of his desk at home.
It was hardly a skull, though. No attached mandible, occipital. Just the hard cap of parietal and frontal bone. I used to like to run my finger along the coronal suture.
Until he stopped smoking, my dad used Delilah as an ashtray. Butterscotch candies lived there for awhile, too. But I remember it best empty. When you could see the trace of blood vessels. They ran down the yellow sides, dried tributaries of ancient rivers.
Delilah was my dad’s cadaver. He grew up in this profession when bodies were easy. No one donated, so you just took. Still the act of taking unhinges most of us a little. Even my dad.
My dad used to pretend he went a little crazy because of the formaldehyde and phenol, but he admitted later that it was the act of unzipping the bag and seeing her face – its walnut gleam, its perfect symmetry – half-lidded eyes, a crown of red hair.
Like all of us, he tried to justify his act, looked for proof of her bad life…tattoos, needle marks, wounds. But, over and over again, the only violence he could find were the strikes of his own scalpel. And his thievery. The hunger of it. Taking the heart and lungs first. Then the ovaries. My dad said his partner tore into her abdomen, cracked her pelvis like a hungry drunk, and ripped her perineum.
My dad hated most when he cut her throat, removed the larynx. Gone the curtain of speech and song. He said he touched the ossicles of her middle ear and whispered, “Sorry, sorry.”
What happened when they cut into Delilah’s skull? How many coils and folds did they find in her brain? What decisions and indecisions, what forgetting, what remembering? My dad said that back then, they were in the habit of throwing all that away.
I am my father’s daughter. I save what I have not destroyed. Delilah’s skull remains in plain sight on my desk at the hospital. Sometimes a patient picks her up and holds her in the palm of a hand.
Once a nurse put condoms in Delilah. Another time someone dumped in chocolate hearts. As if she were a stain to be covered. Both offerings were cast out. No one understands. Nothing can appease the long dead.
Nan Wigington‘s work has appeared in Gravel, The Airgonaut, Sicklitmagazine.com, and No Extra Words. She has worked as an unclaimed property clerk, an accounting analyst, an ensemble actress, and a paraprofessional in an K-2 Autism center classroom.
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Gathering up the Bones of the Deceased
Flash Fiction by Hilary Wilson
Still hot from the flames, my father’s bones lie on a silver metal table. The bones are made brittle by the fire. They’re easier to crush that way.
All of the attendees take turns picking a piece of bone with their chopsticks, passing them down the line. Because me and my two sisters are our father’s daughters, it’s our duty to do most of the bone picking. Even though the sight of her husband’s skeleton renders her unable to stand, our mother watches intently from a nearby chair as we work from toe to scalp.
My sisters and I do this for our father.
Not only because this is Japanese tradition, but because it’s something that we want to do.
For him.
For our father.
My father.
Wails of the living fill the air.
The Buddhist priest chants The Heart Sutra to help drive away our father’s spirit from the place where he died.
Silently, my younger sister passes me a piece of bone with a pair of long chopsticks. I pass that piece to my older sister, who puts the piece in a wooden funeral box. Our father’s death name is written on the box in delicate handwriting. The characters in his death name are very old and very rare. Only a few people will know how to read it. Now he can’t be called back to earth.
My older sister grinds down the bones with a wooden pestle. The powder mixes together and soon our father is simply dust.
Blown away on the wind, he will find a new home among the stars.
Hilary Wilson is a Canadian writer.
Image courtesy of NASA via unsplash.
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Billy, Elvis, & Jesus
Flash Fiction by Christopher Woods
Every morning, the same ritual. You dust both photographs. Turn Billy’s face up again for another day while the coffee brews. You look at Billy, then at Elvis. Outside the sun is coming up.
You never give up. Not you. Yes, it has been eighteen years since Billy walked out the door. That door. And ever since the door has grown smaller and the world beyond it vast and mysterious. A cruel kind of secret, maybe.
Billy, he never said boo. He left without a word. A light sleeper, you would have heard him if he had a last word or two. You don’t know where he went. He’s never called, never even dropped a postcard.
Mama, when she was still alive, always explained it to you this way. That Billy went to sow some wild oats. That you must have let him down somehow, him being a man and all, and you a woman. She said you could read all about it in the Bible. But you never bothered to read about it. That Bible reminded you too much of Mama and her runaway mouth.
Mama never knew the truth, that Billy didn’t have any wild oats to sow. Billy wasn’t so hot in the tame oats department either. But you got along with him fine. Oats or not, a warm body next to you on a cold night was a comfort.
Billy was no Casanova, not by a long shot. You always figured he would come home once he figured this out. Maybe when some woman told him so, and not so sweetly. You loved him because he was Billy, for his sturdy frame and strong jaw. That was enough. Still is, sad to say. And this is why it won’t surprise you if he comes back. That will mean he has learned his lesson, that no one loves him the way you do.
It’s strange, though. Elvis has been gone a long time too, but somehow it’s not the same. Oh, you know all about the sadness of Elvis being gone. Who doesn’t? You believe that Elvis was a giant among men when he was alive.
Now that he’s gone, he’s still about ten times bigger than the best of them. You think about this a lot, how a dead god is better than a cold man.
At the Visualize God In Grits Café, you work the lunch counter. You watch men coming and going, all day long. Some are nice. Others flirt. A few of them give you the creeps. Older now, you know better than to get involved. Besides, what would Billy say?
There was a time when you didn’t know who Elvis was. Mama changed all that. You must have been seven years old when she took you to see him in concert. Mama said the two of you had come along too late to see Jesus in person, but you were right on schedule for Elvis.
On her deathbed, Mama confessed something. She said that when Daddy climbed atop her on Saturday nights, she would close her eyes and imagine it was Elvis instead. Those were almost her last words, as if she was sharing the secret of the universe.
Seeing Elvis changed you. What your mother said when her death rattle was tuning up changed you too.
Tonight, when the sun goes down, you’ll be back here again, sitting on your lonely side of the bed. You’ll look at Billy and Elvis. You’ll turn Billy’s photograph face down for the night. Good night sweet Billy, wherever you are, you’ll say.
That will leave you and Elvis alone together. And you won’t feel the slightest tinge of shame when you reach for Elvis and hold him close. It’s one of those lonesome kinds of nights, you’ll tell him. You know, when the darkness sneaks inside and puts its arms around you? You know Elvis will give the darkness it marching papers. He knows all about it.
You will try to stay awake, hoping that Billy is coming home. If he does come home, this is how you picture it. It will be at dusk. Him coming up the road, the sun all fiery red through the trees. Lost people need to get home before dark. At night it’s too hard for them to find their way, especially after so many years.
But your eyes will close on their own in their weary way. You know that, wherever Billy is, he’s probably rubbing shoulders with the darkness that Elvis sent packing. And before you place Elvis back on the bedside table, you will kiss him like you would Jesus if he ever came back. Some say it’s just a matter of time.
Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Houston and Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published a novel, THE DREAM PATCH, a prose collection, UNDER A RIVERBED SKY, and a book of stage monologues for actors, HEART SPEAK. His work has appeared in THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, NEW ORLEANS REVIEW, COLUMBIA and GLIMMER TRAIN, among others. His photographs can be seen in his gallery –http://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/
Image: Bed, Shelbourne, by Christopher Woods
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Forgotten Flyers – Flash Fiction by Bobby Sauro
The Chief Inspector prints a flyer each time another woman is murdered. The woman is referred to by name; the unknown assailants are referred to as Citizen “10,” Citizen “11,” and so on. This serves the dual purpose of honoring the victims and letting the public know how many killers are out there. Some outsiders have suggested there is only one, but that would necessitate an individual ego and self-centeredness our society does not possess.
Katrina’s admirer was sweet; he doted on her from afar. She had become His Trina. The Station Master in her hamlet had introduced them through correspondence. Her admirer was looking for someone full of hope, unlike the jaded girls in his district. That she could belly dance was an unexpected bonus. He would put her in one of his little shows.
Our Chief Inspector will not rest until the killers are brought to justice, and what an exacting justice it will be! These foreign marauders will feel the hammer of the State.
For Katrina, this was also a way out of her province. Life had not been miserable but that wasn’t good enough. She would travel; be adventurous; her spirit would spread open.
We hang flyers at the train station to warn women not to travel by train (and also to advertise the holiday schedule because that must come out whether or not there are killers on the loose and we only have so much 80 lb. stock paper).
Her uncle warned Katrina. The city will swallow you whole. That would be fine, as long as it didn’t take her apart, piece by piece, over decades.
Our train station is a very windy place. The flyers become torn on their sides; their bottoms are shredded. Eventually, the pieces scatter in the woods. That is a fact of life here. Nevertheless, due to public outcry, we have hired a well-respected local to tend to the flyers. He is quite famous for his Top Hat, which will present a major challenge, given the wind.
In Katrina’s province, there had been a rumor of killers of women, but improving her station in life required bold action. Besides, there was no reason to fear; her gentleman would be waiting for her. What a team they will make! This man from her dreams, who brought all the places he had traveled alive in her mind, like only The Great Poet had done before.
By mistake, the former Commandant built the depot at the edge of town instead of in the center. This was outside of our control and so no apology is necessary but, as a result, the station has become a gathering spot for our fringe element: vagrants, drunks, the mentally challenged and the deviant (we are too polite to go into further detail). In lieu of an apology, we did make an announcement which apologized for any inconvenience the misplacing of the station had caused our fine citizens.
Katrina was surprised they let her bring her dog on the train but that is the province for you; not much concern about anything, nothing really matters. She will go somewhere that matters. Her name will be known. Her dog will run freely in the woods. She has never had him on a leash and the city will not change her.
Great news! At a symposium, our Chief Inspector heard of a new machine which will allow us to print the flyers more cheaply. This improvement will be available sometime within the next ten years. We will keep you posted on this exciting development but in all events expect the flyers to become more like a commodity.
Katrina is surprised there are not more people at the station when her train arrives. This will make it easier to spot her new lover. She will recognize him by his Top Hat.
Thanks to the efforts of our man in the Top Hat more than ten deviants have been arrested near the station. This has exceeded our expectations.
The station in the city looks worse than the one in her hamlet. Katrina pulls her stockings up over her knees. Because her province is frigid, she wears stockings on her arms as well. Missing feet, they run up her lean limbs, which were called gangly when she was young but which had become two of her greatest assets. An imposing man in a Top Hat waits impatiently by the tracks. Two stacks of flyers, each wrapped in a leather strap with large metal buckles, dangle from his hands.
Another one has been found, near the train station, in the woods. Choked. And also, sliced. We will no longer print new flyers every time, however, because it’s getting too expensive. Besides, this one was not from here, but from a faraway province we suspect (her stockings were ripped and, subpar). If we knew her name, we would tell you, but not print it because, well, you already know, the flyers.
On an unrelated note, due to our Chief Inspector’s razor sharp eye, a dog has been rescued in the woods near the station. Such a magnificent mane and a hunting dog nonetheless! Leather straps found tied to a tree nearby were too thick for the dog’s neck so the Chief Inspector left them to be retrieved at a later date. Out of the goodness of his heart, he brought the dog home. There is no need to describe the animal; you will see him in the photos we distribute with our special holiday flyers. As always, they will be posted at the station in time for the annual celebration, which this year will include carnival rides and be hosted by our newly-appointed Station Master (Our Chief Inspector is too busy with his growing family). There’s no need to print the Station Master’s name because, well, you already know him; he’s the man with the Top Hat in whom we have now vested total authority to tend to the flyers.
Bobby Sauro’s short fiction has appeared in Connotation Press, Fiction Southeast, elimae, Burnt Bridge, Corium, Dew on the Kudzu, and Red Fez. He resides in Atlanta but can often be found at www.sauromotel.com, a literary motel that houses short stories and articles about Kafka, Springsteen, sweet potato vendors and the occasional 1980’s vending machine. He once worked for a Chinese professor who knew Stalin and in a nail polish factory, but not at the same time.
Image courtesy of Paul Garaizar via unsplash.
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Buried – Flash Fiction by Nathan Alling Long
You dropped it in the ocean so as hide it. But no, that’s not quite the right word—for hiding implies from someone, and no one was looking for it or would think to find it here. Hiding also suggests a temporariness. One hides something only later to reveal it. To hide something for good, one buries it.
Yet it seemed wrong to think of drawing the small parcel from your coat pocket as you leaned over the rail of the whale watching boat that afternoon, letting it slip out of your fingers into the water, to think of that as burying. You looked around, worried about being seen. But everyone else on deck was looking off in the distance for a tail or a spout of water.
You watched as the parcel floated a moment, then sank unceremoniously. As the boat pressed on, you could imagine the small wooden box swaying downward until it rested on the ocean floor. Yet all that water did not exactly bury the thing. Not made of earth, the ocean could not truly put it to rest.
As a child, you had been unsettled by the phrase ‘a man buried at sea’; you couldn’t understand how anyone could dig a grave at the bottom of the ocean, how they could pull the casket down, then cover it up. Wouldn’t the currents wash the dirt away and reveal the body? When you learned that it meant they simply let the body slip off the ship into the ocean, you were repulsed by the thought, the slothfulness and incompleteness of the act.
But you now have done the act yourself, buried but not buried, let the parcel fall into the immense anonymity of the sea. And since then, you have not spent a day without thinking about it. Sometimes you imagined the parcel jostled by the waves or the tail of a large fish. Other times you pictured it catching the hook of a fishing line or the net of a trawler. Or you imagined it scuttling across the ocean floor, incrementally, pushed by the currents so that it seemed almost a living thing again.
They told you before he was out of the womb that he would not live long. The arrhythmic pulse, a tell-tale heart. You said no matter, you would care for until it stopped. Then return it to a watery place, where it might feel comfort.
But now you find yourself going to the shore each day, as though the thing might wash up on the beach. You believe it is not comfortable, alone on the ocean floor. It is trying to come back to you, even though it is only ash in a box. You imagine that if you do not find it, it will be discovered by a fisherman or an early morning collector of shells. Then, years later, you will see it in someone’s living room or alone out on the curb.
When you are not at the shore, you find yourself watching what flows from faucets, as if your box might come through the small metal opening. You come to believe that all water is part of the same body, one endless being, like a grove of aspens connected by the roots. You believe it might return to you from any source. You look at the sky when it rains, wondering if it might fall from a cloud. You look for it in a glass of water at a restaurant, in a street puddle, in your own tears.
Soon it feels certain that you will find it, that you alone will find it, for you have buried it from everyone but yourself.
One day you wake from a frightening dream. In it, your tiny wooden box is still lying on the ocean floor, still as a stone, wedded to the floor like a shipwreck. It has not gone anywhere at all. You see then how well the sea, with its thick salty water, preserves the things it collects. Your box will never disappear. It will always wait for you.
That morning, you return to the shore, certain that it will never wash up at your feet. Still you feel the thread that tethers it to you. You place a hand in the salt water, feeling the tug. Without taking off your clothes, you step in the water, feeling you are a mother all over again, the cold sacrifice of everything. You start walking, then swimming. By effort or current, you will return to it. You know eventually you will be pulled under and sink down until the two of you are rejoined, there on the ocean floor, your body beside your tiny box, almost as if buried at sea.
Nathan Alling Long’s has appeared in over a hundred journals and anthologies, including Story Quarterly, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and Crab Orchard Review. He lives in Philadelphia, and teaches at Stockton Univeristy. “Buried” is part of a fifty story collection of flash fiction seeking publication. More can be found at https://blogs.stockton.edu/longn/.
Image by Tobias van Schneider via unsplash. -
Flight – Flash Fiction by Gypsy Martin
The first time it happened, it had been a shock. Ray’s head rested heavy on the small oval window of the airplane. His eyes had just closed when a gentle ding sounded and the fasten seatbelt light was extinguished. Ray started with a little snort at the noise and lifted his head, noting with relief the vacant seat beside him. A flutter of white outside the window caught the corner of his eye. There was something on the wing.
Squinting into the setting sun, he saw a woman sitting on a stool. She was knitting. A strand of yellow yarn extended from her needles to a worn canvas bag slumped at her feet. Her long white hair stirred in what looked to be a gentle breeze. The woman was his wife, Dorothy.
Or, rather, the woman was his wife, Dorothy. When she had been alive.
Ray and Dorothy had worked hard and loved each other and raised two good kids, which they figured made them better off than most. Their life together had been simple and sweet, and Ray’s only regret was that his big-minded wife had never set foot out of Iowa. She had never seen the ocean. That didn’t seem right, so Ray made a plan. He saved a little bit of every paycheck from the meatpacking plant, and for Dorothy’s 60th birthday he bought them two airplane tickets to Portland, Oregon. From there they’d drive to the coast.
Of course he’d suggested California first. It was the obvious west coast destination. But she’d demurred, saying California wasn’t really her kind of place, even if it was warmer. There would be no sojourn among the blonde and tan for Dorothy; she wanted to go somewhere wilder, lonelier. They would take Highway 26 from Portland to the coast, and drive north to Cape Disappointment.
To Ray, vacationing at a spot called Cape Disappointment was just asking for it. But they never made the trip anyway. A week before they were to fly to Portland, Dorothy collapsed on the kitchen floor. She died right there of a ruptured brain aneurysm. After that Ray didn’t care if he ever went anywhere again.
But his daughter worried about him, and, one year after the trip he didn’t take, Ray flew to Seattle to visit her. That’s when Ray saw Dorothy on the wing of the airplane. He’d gasped, then waved his hand madly to get her attention. Dorothy looked just past him, her lips turned up in almost a smile, her head tipped as though she were listening for something or someone.
Ray waved a few more times to no effect, and only then began to wonder just how crazy he was going. He watched her out the window until it grew dark and he fell asleep. When he woke up, she was gone.
The following year, on a hunch, Ray flew on the same date to visit a friend in Salt Lake City. He chose a window seat next to the wing. Dorothy was there again, knitting, with the same inscrutable expression on her face.
Ray flew somewhere every year after that, whether he could afford to or not. A phantom Dorothy on an airplane wing was better than no Dorothy at all, even if she never noticed him. She never changed, even when all the hair he lost from his head seemed to sprout from his eyebrows, and he began to walk with a stoop, and his fingers became gnarled and knobby. Nothing changed but the growing pile of knitting, which began to spill off her lap as the years went by.
On Ray’s twenty-sixth annual flight, he was alone, as usual. He had never remarried. He would never want anyone but Dorothy. His Dorothy could splint a broken arm, field dress a deer, and brew coffee for a hundred people at a church potluck. Good coffee. Ray had never been much of a reader, but Dorothy would check out stacks of books from the library and tell him the things they made her think. He’d never find another Dorothy and he didn’t want to.
Ray ducked to take his seat at the window, fastened his seatbelt, and pulled a pillow onto his lap to rest his arms on. He was going to Seattle, as he had the first year after Dorothy’s death, to see his daughter and her family. The grandchildren would hug him and ask a few perfunctory questions before easing their phones out of their pockets. They would settle into the overstuffed chairs in the family room, taking furtive peeks at their laps while pretending to talk to him. He did not think they should have phones, and he was not looking forward to the visit. But he had reserved a rental car, a Lincoln. After a just-long-enough stay, he would drive down to Cape Disappointment at last.
The cabin lights dimmed. Ray looked out into the dusk. Dorothy was there, as he knew she would be. But today she looked as she had when he met her, and she was most definitely not knitting. Dorothy wore a cream-colored sundress. Her hair fell in chestnut waves around her shoulders. She pulled an enormous blanket from her knitting bag, and Ray saw that he had been mistaken about the color of the yarn. It was not yellow, but gold. Dorothy set a wicker picnic basket down on the blanket. Kneeling, she opened the basket, took out a lemon meringue pie, and placed it front of her.
Dorothy picked up a fork and scooted closer to the pie. In the fading light she held up a second fork, raised an eyebrow, and smiled right at Ray. He smiled back. Then Ray Miller, age 86, reclined his seat as far as it would go, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
A resident of Camas, Washington, Gypsy Martin is mom to two boys and has achieved minor fame as a lunch lady at their elementary school. Her short fiction has been published online in the Journal of Microliterature. Her work has also appeared in print anthologies, including the forthcoming Flash in the Attic: 44 Very Short Stories from Fiction Attic Press. She also won a prize in the memoir category of the 2012 Writer’s Digest Writing Competition for a story about the indignities of homemade underwear.
Image courtesy of Andrej Chudy via unsplash
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Eggs
Flash Fiction by Patricia Cosgrove
At the end of the lane, beyond the scrags of gorse and fuchsia and the fields dipping to the sea, the spring tide surged and broke on the shingle. The woman sat on an upturned fish crate in the shelter of the gable wall, eyes closed, counting the wet suck of each ebbing wave on the shore.
‘Mammy, can I have an egg?’ The child had snuck out barefoot, still in his pyjamas.
‘In a minute. Get back inside – you’ll catch your death.’
She slopped the dregs of her coffee under the crab apple tree, its branches gnarled and stunted from the salt winds. The April gusts had felled the blossom, drifting white petals through the cropped grass. She followed her son into the sagging lean-to at the back of the house, pressing her weight against the warped door, and wedged it shut behind her with a breeze block.
The child splashed his feet through the puddle in the middle of the cement floor.
‘Don’t do that!’
He cowered when she picked him up.
‘Please, Sean, don’t do that again,’ she said, stripping him of his sodden pyjama bottoms. She held him on her hip and stroked the small of his back. ‘Mammy doesn’t like that.’
She perched him bare-bottomed on a kitchen chair and scuttled through the pots on the draining board, found the blue saucepan. A greasy scum rimmed the inside and she scoured it. The water spluttered then gushed from the tap. It pooled in the plughole and wouldn’t drain. She took the rubber plunger from under the sink and siphoned out broken strands of spaghetti, chunks of tomato. She’d reminded her husband to scrape the plates before he washed them last night, but he’d forgotten. Cathal always forgot what she asked.
She chewed her lip and stared out at the washing sagging and jerking on the line. The wind snapped the sleeves of Cathal’s shirts into mock salutes and she thought of the tedium later; collar, cuffs, arms, yoke, the hissing tip of the iron nosing smooth between the nub of buttons.
Sean dragged his chair over to the shelf beside the fridge, stretching to reach the purple carton. He opened the lid, did eeny-meeny-miny-mo over the six brown eggs.
‘This one,’ he said. ‘And one for you.’
A small grey feather clung to a shell and he lifted it between his thumb and forefinger and blew it like a kiss at his mother.
‘Get off that chair before you fall!’
He clambered down and sucked in his cheeks as she sparked the blue flame on the stove.
‘I suppose you want dippy soldiers with that?’
He nodded and rummaged through the bottom drawer for the egg timer, stood beside her as she slotted bread into the toaster, peeled back foil from a half block of butter.
‘Move, Sean! You’re always under my feet!’
His thumb went into his mouth before he could help himself. His mother smacked his hand away.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Mammy doesn’t like that.’
A squall passed over the sun, darkening the kitchen and a sudden shrapnel of rain drummed the slates, gobbed melts of ice against the windows. The washing, she thought, all the morning’s work undone.
She hurried into the garden, the wet grass soaking through her slippers. The line pole pitched to and fro and she grappled it with both hands, the rusted iron streaking her palms orange. She tugged at a shirt hem, felt it spinnaker away as the fraying rope unsnarled itself free from the branch in the apple tree. The washing trailed in the ground, muck-spattered. She put her fists to her eyes and counted the waves beyond the wall.
The eggs rattled in the pot. The child held the timer up to his face, watching the pink trickle of sand until the last grain fell.
‘Mammy,’ he called. ‘Maameee.’ The door of the lean-to banged in the wind.
He went towards the stove, looked up at the steaming pot and reached for the handle. His scream, the pure clear hurt of it, spliced the wind.
Patricia Cosgrove comes from a small coastal town in North Dublin, where she still lives. As a child, Patricia was told that her constant tale-telling would turn her tongue black. Undeterred, she continues to make things up. This is her first published piece of fiction.
Image courtesy of Helena Bjork
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The Mourning of the Russian
Flash Fiction by Agustín Cadena, translated by Patricia Dubrava
He wasn’t Russian, of course, but that’s what they called him because he had nearly white blond hair and looked like Ivan Drago, the Russian giant who fought Rocky in the movie. A dozen years of lifting weights had given him an impressive physique.
He liked the nickname. Actually, he thought any nickname was preferable to his own name. Florentino. And the problem wasn’t the name itself, but its diminutive, which certainly wasn’t masculine. In school he’d had to beat to a pulp the few who dared call him “Flor.” That’s how he got used to fighting. Flower. He hated that name, even for women. So he always introduced himself: “They call me El Ruso.”
In the neighborhood everyone knew he worked for the secret police. That’s how things are in a small community: the secrets of one are the secrets of all. No one had a reason to betray him: he was a silent and solitary neighbor, but agreeable. He’d been seen helping some woman carry her groceries or scolding children who played on the block without watching for cars. The girl at the store found it endearing when he came to make his purchases, because, since he didn’t even have a girlfriend (only a cat, and who knows if it even had a name) he took one of each: a bread roll, a tomato, one beer, one apple. And of course, milk and a little bag of kibble for his cat. A wonder it didn’t occur to him to buy in bulk, which would be cheaper and more efficient. He always paid and thanked the girl without smiling. Perhaps he wanted to hide that he liked her, because with the other neighbors he became a little more expressive.
In his work he was different: there he couldn’t be nice. He knew that it was because of his physique, more than any other reason, that the other officers had made him a dark legend. They used him to terrify those they arrested, often without even needing his presence. “Leave him alone,” they would say, tired of beating some suspect. “If he doesn’t sing, we’ll let the Russian interrogate him.”
So it was. But this story is about when his cat died, not about any of that. No one knew what happened. Perhaps the cat was very old, that’s all. The fact is, one day the Russian appeared in the store with the face of a chastised child and didn’t buy one of each thing, but several of each, as if making provisions. Except kibble.
“And you’re not getting anything for the cat?” the girl asked him.
“The cat died,” he responded. He put money on the counter and left without waiting for his change.
He didn’t go out all day. The girl told the story of the cat to all the neighbors who came to buy something, and by nightfall, the Russian’s solitary grief was the main topic of gossip. The nosiest busybodies loitered at the door of his apartment and watched the light of his window in the night. The Russian didn’t appear. Nor did he go out the following day. Who knew what he did with the cat’s body: perhaps he was mourning over it. The trash truck guys said it didn’t come to them.
On the third day, curiosity had become a vague, undeclared anguish. The neighborhood felt unprotected without its guardian. Someone said they should knock on his door to ask if he was O.K., but no one wanted to risk making him angry. They drew straws. The dry cleaner guy lost, the biggest coward of all. Arming himself with courage was a waste of effort: the Russian didn’t open the door. At last, a schoolboy had the brainstorm needed: he began to shout “Flor! Florecita!” from the street.
Only then did the Russian come out. He came out angry, ready to pound the insolent idiot, whoever it was. It seemed to him that many pairs of eyes were watching him, hidden behind curtains, but he didn’t find the person who dared disturb his mourning. And his mourning ended there.
The life of the neighborhood returned to normal.
Agustín Cadena was born in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, México. He taught at UNAM; at Austin College, Texas; and currently teaches at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. Essayist, fiction writer, poet and translator, Cadena has won numerous national prizes, including those for short fiction in 2004 and 2005, and for poetry in 2011. He has published twenty-six books, among them collections of short fiction, essays and poetry, three novels, and four young adult novels, most recently La Sed de la Mariposa, 2014, and Fieras adentro, 2015. His work has been translated into English, Italian and Hungarian. The three short short stories submitted here are from a manuscript called Dibujos a Lápiz, (Penicl Sketches) to be published in 2016. Cadena blogs at elvinoylahiel.blogspot.com
Patricia Dubrava chaired the creative writing program at Denver School of the Arts, where she also taught Spanish. She has two books of her own poems and one of stories translated from the Spanish. Recent translation publications include stories by Agustín Cadena in Aldus, Winter 2013, and Café Irreal, August 2013, 2014 and 2015. One of her translations of a Cadena story is in New Border Voices: An Anthology, 2014. Her translation of a Mónica Lavín flash fiction appeared in Norton’s Flash Fiction International, 2015. Dubrava blogs at www.patriciadubrava.com
image courtesy of Henry Lornzatto, via unspalsh