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Tag: health
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Waiting Period – flash fiction by Sarah McKinnis
The five of us drive four hours back from the clinic in Sioux Falls, switching the music from Hozier to Tracy Chapman to the Avett Brothers and pretending we’re on a road trip. We stop finally at the gas station outside of Gettysburg, the one next to Bob’s Motel, and I take a lap with Bre around the pumps, our sneakers kicking up thin trails of sandy brown dirt behind us. The air is hot and so dry that I feel the moisture on my face and still-sweaty palms evaporate. She doesn’t ask about the appointment and so I don’t bring it up and let my thoughts churn inside me instead, wondering if I’ll go back in seventy-two hours. Hunter comes out of the c-store and hands me an ice cream sandwich and says eat this, and Kayson finishes filling the tank and pays and motions for us to get back in the van, so we do.
I want to say thank you to them, for coming with me on this long trip on a Friday when they could all be working, but my throat is dry and the words stick in my mouth. We drive over the skinny truss bridge and then to the riverbank where we walk across the concrete slab and sit on the gravel on towels that Kayson tosses us from the trunk, and look at the white-hot sky around the sun, which won’t set for another hour and a half now, and the flat surface of the river in front of us and the rolling prairie hills on the other side. And we talk about things that don’t matter and pass around a bag of chips, until Marina asks me if I believe in God and I say I don’t know and think of the quote that Mr. Jay wrote on the board in high school from Life of Pi, to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation, and I think that if I had to stay here forever, immobilized by my doubt, it wouldn’t be so bad.
Sarah McKinnis is a recent Yale graduate working in the nonprofit world and pursuing a career in law and policy.
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Exo and Endo
flash fiction by Patrick W. Gibson
A substance may exist as a solid, a liquid, or gas–each state governed by the laws of chemistry. But rules have exceptions, are temperature dependent, and may not cooperate, allowing form B to revert to form A without notice. Heat or cold applied chemically or electrically alter motion, powerful tools for stopping and resuming life.
The 10 oz. form lies motionless, its regular and animated motion halted via electrical current in the form of heat. Quickly the prostrate form is uprooted from its long-term lodging and placed into a refrigerated plastic container. Immediately, cold envelopes the mass, and exothermic cooling begins. Gases within the grey ovoid shape become liquid, and existing fluids slow, viscosity rising as ambient temperatures fall. Soon all flow stops and molecular structure changes, liquid transitioning into solid. A digital readout counts down, minus one, minus two, minus three. Each glowing LED monitored with care. The cooling rate slows and the plastic container is sealed. Engines rumble to life, rotors turn, and actions commence.
Two hours later, the mass is reseated in a new but foreign housing, and endothermic heating is initiated to reverse the cold.
The following day I open my eyes for the first time in twenty-six hours. The mass, no longer motionless, beats in my chest, its rhythm regular and strong. Once, it had resided with a twenty-one-year-old nursing student with good grades and a steady boyfriend, who’d made the mistake of riding home from a party with an impaired friend. Now her gift has settled in a middle-aged dentist with a small but loyal practice, me. Although we never met, the two of us have become one. Chemistry halts life, preserves being, and awards living.
Patrick W. Gibson is a Metro Detroit based writer. His short stories and flash fiction pieces favor an urban and working class feel. His work has been published online and in print by The Flexible Persona, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Wraparound South, and Dark Ink Press. Patrick is currently at work on his first novel.
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash