Your cart is currently empty!
Tag: flash fiction
-
Landfill
flash fiction by Stephen Ausherman
Delores lived in a split-level ranch home set upon a landfill. She stored peach preserves in her storm cellar, but they didn’t taste right. Her husband, before he died, took good care of her. He built a shed on the property, a place where she could keep all the animals she liked to make out of corncobs and gumdrops, life-sized antelopes and ocelots with cellophane eyes and sugary hides. And he erected a satellite dish that pulled in a variety of shows on art, nature, and troubles in the world she could never have imagined on her own.
It stood out in the yard, an enormous unblinking eye that stared at the heavens and shared its visions on a 15-inch screen. It revealed a multitude of ministries from Florida to California, each in desperate need of prayer, forgiveness, contributions, whatever you can afford. Earth is so crowded, they said, and yet so empty. We need your help to fill the void.
Delores could afford little more than hunger, and so focused on the new forms of worship she learned from the TV. She meditated. She danced in circles with her hands in the air. She took a vow of silence and broke it by speaking in tongues. She tried fasting, only to end up with a vitamin deficiency that nearly blinded her. Light from the screen took on an unbearable glare. Soon even the softest glow seemed to sear her eyes.
She sought refuge in the storm cellar, moving in with the spiders and paint cans and peaches in mason jars. Her eyes remained shut, yet cracks of daylight crept in and spread like crimson webs pulsing in her eyelids. She spent days with her face pressed into her knees, just waiting for the night.
Six months of experimental rehabilitation at St. Luke’s inBirmingham restored her sight and relieved her pain. It also afforded her a detailed knowledge of the hospital, its prayer halls, operating rooms, and most of all, its disposal units and incinerators. She soon amassed an impressive collection of surgical leftovers: exhausted organs and severed limbs. She pickled them in formaldehyde and placed the amber jars on the bookcase in her bedroom to keep her ever mindful of the suffering of others.
As her collection grew, she made room in the shed, setting her gumdrop animals loose in the yard, where they blanched in the sun and decomposed in the rain. The satellite remained fixed upon heaven. The needful people on TV grew insatiable.
She retreated once more to the cellar, this time with her jars of humanity. There, in the darkness, her heart beat out its subterranean percussion, talking drums she swore would wake the world. Through the thundering rhythm, she spoke to the jars, whispered to the ears and bones, hands and hearts. She had all the pieces she needed feel whole again. She told them all, one by one, welcome to the family.
Stephen Ausherman’s first novel, Typical Pigs, was nominated for the Peter Taylor Prize and won the Llumina American Writers Contest. He is also the author of a collection of travel essays, Restless Tribes. View his profile on Psychology Today.
This story was originally published on Fiction Attic Press in 2005.
-
More Lies–flash fiction by Gloria Frym
Rumor has it, this woman goes through dogs. Some women go through husbands, some men go through women, some kids go through clothes, ballerinas go through toe shoes, spendthrifts go through money, overeaters go through cookies. And so forth. But this woman, this is her sixth dog in a short time. Longer, of course if you count it in dog years.
The porch gossips say, and who knows if they can be trusted, who really knows what’s what, that she might have a disease. You know the kind they feature on a 60 Minutes or “ER.” The kind that glues people to the TV because they’re horrified and compelled like they’d be at a bloody accident or a building on fire. So long as it’s not them or theirs.
Dog #1 died suddenly.
Dog #2 died suddenly after a brief illness.
Dog #3 died slowly after a slow illness and many vet visits.
Dog #4 died some way, no one remembers.
Dog #5 rolled over and died.
Dog #6 is okay now but was sick as a small puppy.The gossips are crossing their fingers. After all they live in the same vicinity. The woman says the veterinarian says that there’s something toxic in the soil in her backyard. What if there’s something toxic in all their backyards? What if her house and their houses were built over old gas stations or car repair shops? It’s hard to believe that this woman would ever let her dogs out in her backyard. Dog #6 she carries in a baby front pack because he is very little. He’s not going to get much bigger, either. But now, she says, he’s better, and she lets him move around on a leash. In fact, she walks him. So, say the gossips, and she probably never puts him outside alone. That’s why they’re suspicious.
It could be that this woman simply has bad luck with pets.
It could be that this woman makes her pets ill so she can nurse them, right up to their death.
She has no children and no husband.
The gossips say, Thank God for that.
It is very hard, given the circumstantial evidence, when one is told of such events, not to believe them. They sound so plausible, even if there is no proof. Why do they appeal to one’s instincts rather than one’s reason? Juicy bits of information about a woman who is rather nervous and neurotic, who strolls down the street with a different dog every year or so.
Goes to great lengths, far away places to buy the dogs, after long email conversations with their breeders. Always a pure-bred dog. Always from out of state. The facts start to pile up, right? Something, if one had nothing else to do, one could take to a private investigator. He’d solve it, all right.
Can you go to jail for murdering a dog? It’s a misdemeanor. The law considers dogs “chattel.” But you remember that guy who threw a dog off the freeway? That was cruelty. That got him jail time. How about murdering someone else’s dog? That would also get you jail time.
Somewhere there is something called an Animal Patrol. Not like they take animals to the pound, but they remove abused pets from homes. Kind of like Child Protective Custody Services.
Yesterday, I lied.
A good lie, told spontaneously, is a piece of art, though it makes person like me guilty. It could be addictive. It worked that well.
It all started after I’d heard about the woman with the succession of dogs.
The car wouldn’t start. The battery dead, again.The operator at triple A says, 45 minutes.
Forty five minutes, I say, oh no! I have to pick up a child!
From school or from daycare? the operator asks.
From daycare. If you’re late, they just take the kid to Child Protective Custody Services.
Oh my God, the operator says, greatly alarmed. Is that what they do these days?
Oh yes, I say, they just don’t want to wait.
In two minutes, a tow truck arrived.
So your little car won’t start, hon?
Yeah, it’s always the battery.
He did his jumping magic with great dispatch.
When I thanked him for arriving on the scene so quickly, he said, Oh, you deserve even faster service.
How could it be faster, I thought?
Of course, he said, What you deserve and what you get are two different things in this world.
Yeah, I know I said. I mean I was just laid off, I lied again.
You in the tech biz?
No, I’m a school teacher.
A teacher! For Christ’s sake, the bastards. It will come back to them. Some kid will kill a dog because nobody taught him the right way to behave.
This piece was originally published in 2005.
Gloria Frym is the author of How Proust Ruined My Life and Other Essays (2020), The True Patriot (2015), How I Learned (1992), Distance No Object (2001), and several other volumes of poetry and prose, including By Ear, Back to Forth, Impossible Affection, and Homeless at Home. She is also the author of a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists. Since 1987, she has been a member of the core faculty of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco. She also teaches in the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts.
Subscribe to get new flash fictions in twice a month in your inbox.
Submit your flash fiction or personal essays to Fiction Attic.