fiction

Laddered


You stare out the window from your mattress on the floor. You have been living on this mattress, with this window, for three months. You feel the freezing wind coming through the crack between the window and the floor every day as you wake up and still, you haven’t plugged it up with a towel or a t-shirt. Even that much effort feels like a statement of ownership, of permanence. You haven’t put all your books away yet, and you won’t. You refuse to believe that this is home now.

Across the street, through the grimy glass – the place was filthy when you got here and you barely cleaned it – you can see a face peering out of another window. There is a fire-escape ladder beside their window, not the old New York kind of wrought-iron staircase but an actual ladder. You assume it just leads up to the same boring old roof as the one outside your window does. But wouldn’t it be something – you think this as you finally begin to make yourself vertical – wouldn’t it be just something if that ladder went up to her apartment?

Satin

You don’t know what satin feels like. You never have. It’s a word you’ve always loved, since you were too young to know what it was, whether it was a Disney princess or a kind of washing-up liquid. It could have been either. You heard your babysitter talking about it, when she was using your grandmother’s phone to call her friends. It was long before cellphones.
When you were old enough to babysit the little boys down the block, you learned why your own babysitter had spent her time on the phone. Watching little kids was a pain. You didn’t like it. But you needed the money, your grandmother’s purse strings being as tight as her small mouth. When she went out to her fancy meetings, dressed to the nines, strung up with pearls and too much lipstick, you thought she was a rich lady. You learned when you got older that she was a penny-pincher, stingy with every coin, and that all those fancy meetings she went to were for your own sake. So she could keep you. Not for herself, but from others.
Your babysitter talked about satin. You weren’t listening very hard, so you only caught the word because of the way she said it, and you didn’t get any of the context around it. She was a fast talker usually, but she snaked the word “satin” through her tongue like it was three times that length. You try to replicate it with your own mouth but you catch the person next to you in your cubicle looking at you and you put your head down and get back to work.
It’s dull work. You’re dialling numbers and waiting for people to pick up the phone. You’re not selling them things. You’re trying to get them to answer questions. It’s two pm and no one is picking up. Everyone is at work, just like you, or out doing errands. Or napping. You wish you could put your head right down and nap. You don’t know why your babysitter’s face is so strong in your head until you realize that her name is the last one on the page you’ve been crossing names and numbers off from. You must have seen it right at the beginning, but your brain didn’t take it in. You read an article about that once. How people think something is a coincidence when it actually isn’t.
You skip down and call her number first, before the rest of the list. You wait. No one picks up. No answering machine. You don’t cross her off. You’ll try again later.

PHOTO / jovike

Relinquishment [Flash Fiction]

I abandoned my baby on the coast, the day the skies rained with fire and brimstone and God called the mighty wrath of hell upon me. I had the puling thing alone in the woods where only the birds and beasts could hear my screams of rage. I lose track of the hours that I lay there on rocks that I had coated with leaves. The leaves disintegrated beneath me because of my sweating and shivering. When it came out I didn’t clean it much, just gave it a rap or two on the back until it started crying and waiting for the next part that I’d been warned about. I didn’t feed it. It was my baby, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. It did not belong to me and I had to give it back.
I left my baby on the beach where I had stolen the things to make it with. Back when I thought that it was the answer. But I learned differently. I learned with every rust specked nail that scaled me and turned me fish skinned. I made the baby out of curse words and spittle and the dust of murdered friends. I did all that. I did.
It is too late to repent. Either way I will die now and I long for the release with every bone that abandons my body in fatigue. But the baby which is not mine was to live a life. I despise it for what it has done to me. It disgusted me from the moment it stirred within me. I could not look upon its weak face and I will never know it if it ends up in Hell with me. But I know this – it was my responsibility and my mistake and I relinquish its life to another. I have done it enough harm. Let someone else choose to be cruel or kind.

An In-Flight Message

Attention, all Galactica Air Customers. We’d like to welcome you on board this Twelve-K Shuttle to the L4 Asteroid Belt. Before our Certified-Sleep-Process is induced, we would like to ask that you pay attention to our few rules and regulations.
First, for those of your traveling with us for the first time, the Certified-Sleep-Process is induced by a minuscule spinal shot administered through the back of your seat. It is guaranteed not to damage clothing. Please contact our customer service if you believe any damage has been done.
In the highly unlikely event of your Sleep wearing off, you may press the blue button on your seat arm to introduce a second shot. Please do so immediately upon waking up. Our cabin crew will be patrolling throughout the flight and will ensure your health and safety during the flight. However, since passengers on this Shuttle are not zero-G certified, you are required to maintain Sleep and Seating conditions at all times.
In the case of an emergency, our crew will attempt to fix the problem and may attempt a quick landing if extreme measures are called for. If this happens, the Certified-Sleep-Process will be automatically induced a second and third time in quick succession in order to create a stable and safe, panic-free environment upon the Shuttle.
Finally, our in-flight Dream-system is up and running now, and for the next thirty minutes you are free to decide on your entertainment for the remainder of this flight. For our customers in Titanium-Star, there are several more channels to choose from, which our Chromium passengers may purchase for a fee as well.
Please sit back, enjoy the Real-Water! bottles provided free of charge in your armrests, and enjoy the flight ahead.

The Nonbeliever

The nonbeliever stared out at the broken bodies, dressed in running shorts and t-shirts. He sighed. He shut his window, but the sirens kept wailing and he couldn’t keep their sound out. He had seen events unfold through the thick, double-glazing, and he wondered why he wasn’t more moved. He was left cold. He felt like he was watching a movie. Just another movie.

He turned to his computer and opened up his social media websites. There were many of them. It was where his life took place, his real life, the one divorced from the lumbering, uncomfortable, needy flesh that was his body. He didn’t like physical necessities. He found them embarrassing and ungainly. Words were what moved him.

Online, he found that he was already late to the party. Everyone knew about what was happening right outside his window. He realized he could be a valuable asset and positioned himself again so he could see out while typing. He began feeding live reports and found himself with a dozen new followers, almost immediately.

When he uploaded a picture, he was shocked to find even more hanging onto his words. He described what he was seeing and hearing and even opened the window again, just for a moment, to try to get a whiff of the smoke. It smelled like smoke.

There were others like him, sending out messages of hope and love. He stuck to the facts. He was a nonbeliever, after all. He knew communication was essential, but didn’t believe in the power of prayers. He knew that help was possible, but didn’t believe in the fluffy notion of good thoughts. He was seen as a good source of information and valued for these qualities.

Over time, however, the news he could glean from his window grew scarce and the online world turned to grieving. It nursed its wounds and condoled the bereft. He recoiled. He was a nonbeliever. It wasn’t possible to believe in the goodness of people after he’d witnessed himself standing and staring motionless, emotionless, at the carnage unfolding itself below in the tortuously slow way of nightmares.

Homeless

You love your work. You’re thankful every day that you get paid, even though the donations trickle in slowly and the funding gets cut year after year. You still have a salary and you’re still doing something important. Something you care about. Something that moves people. You are in the very kernel of life, eighty-thousand leagues below the sea and down deep to the center of the earth. You have two children and a partner and you love them all. There are good days and bad days, because life isn’t perfect. But when your fortieth birthday rolled around, you were happier than you’d ever been in and you wondered whether people could see it on you, on your lined face and in your tired eyes. Happiness, joy, you’ve come to realize, are quiet things for you, and you experience them in the pit of your belly and the tips of your fingers and in the peace that falls on you when your head hits the pillow and you smell the familiar body of the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with stirring beside you.

Two weeks after you turn forty, you get the assignment. You accept it, because you’ve never turned one down before. You will do your best, but you’re not sure how to begin. You make the usual phone calls. You do the necessary research. You watch the episodes of the better TV shows that involve these people whose lives you’re supposed to start showcasing. You get lots of help. But when you walk to the metro that whole first week you’re more aware than you’ve ever been before. Your eyes have been opened. You see them everywhere, lurking, smoking, talking, even laughing. You see them going into stores and buying things. You notice that they have cellphones. You see them near churches. You see them rummaging in their bags and baskets.

You don’t approach them on your own. You’re too scared. Too nervous. You feel superstitious about them. They are your black cats and ladders and umbrellas inside the house. They threaten to shake you out of your joy. They’ve already begun, without knowing it.

The couple you speak to, the pair of them, have been handed to you on a silver plate by a charity who wanted to help you. You’re grateful to the charity, to their contribution, which feels strange since normally it is the other way around with charities. They’re grateful to you, usually. The couple they’ve supplied are perfect for your story. They’re around your age but look like your parents, they have health problems, they are coherent and can be recorded. You go with them everywhere, that first day. You took with you a wad of five dollar bills in your pocket, anticipating the need to get them to cooperate with you. You’re surprised. They talk to you as if you’re a tourist to their world. They’re eager to show you around, share their complaints, explain their situation, but they don’t ask for a thing in return. It’s another upside-down situation – you’re the tourist, but they’re asking you to take the sound-bite photograph of them. They trust you with their lives. The man lets you hear him begin to cry in the soup kitchen as he worries about his partner’s health, and you wonder if you would feel the same responsibility in his place, caring for this woman with no teeth. The woman looks at the man, concerned at his expression of emotions, so rare and untried, and you wonder whether you would worry about another man’s feelings if your legs hurt all the time as much as hers do.

You are brought into reality by them, and it is painful, a red-hot poker to your guts. When you fall into bed that night, your partner rolls away from you and mutters that you smell of smoke. You sniff. You showered, but didn’t bother washing your hair. You were too tired. You imagine the couple, stretched out on the sofa bed in your living room, piled under duvets and heads resting on clean pillows. They aren’t there, of course. They’re in their tent underneath the highway overpass, where you left them earlier. You left them where you left the job, somewhere else, to be resumed and returned to tomorrow, when you’re ready to leave your home again.

________________
This story was inspired by this news story on NPR’s All Things Considered. It is entirely invented and bears no real relation (besides that imagined) to the reporter or the subjects of the story.

Some Instincts

Shivering through space, Daley tiptoed across the library in her overcoat, gloves and woolen hat. Every cough ripped through her throat like ice chips going up rather than down, the reverse of her favorite summertime treat, crunching posicles in the yard before they melted.
Her body was a nesting place for germs and it made her uncomfortable to be around people who could catch her diseases but she had no choice. The world hadn’t stopped when her fever had risen to 102. The shelf she was searching for was being elusive, skipping around the library and purposefully evading her.
Terry’s blue and black coat flashed in her peripheral vision and warring instincts kicked in. She didn’t want him to see her like this but she wanted him to see her, to remember she existed outside the universe of beer pong and lax boys sucking on helium balloons for a laugh. Terry wasn’t above that sort of thing – Daley liked to think she was – but he had something to him that was more than that as well.
She couldn’t decide what to do quickly enough, and so he was gone, slamming out of the library like everyone seemed to do, as loudly and disruptively as possible. The sound reverberated in her head and she still couldn’t find the shelf mark she was looking for. She wished she could ask for help but her voice was reduced to a crow’s scratchy caw and whispering hurt even worse.
It was time to give up, she realized, surprised that her body had already figured this out and that she was falling to the floor, knees buckling, hands pulling some books off the shelf with her just to make sure that someone would hear and come running.
At least, she thought before everything went black, some instincts are still working.

The Sky

“Mama. Mama. Help me, Mama. I’m alone. I’m afraid. Mama.”

He is blonde. Dyed. He is black. Self-identified as. Father unknown, discounted. Skin’s dark enough, mother’s is too.

He is drunk.

He is standing on top of a table in the middle of a room. The table is ornate, but not old. It is expensive. The legs are carved with animals that cannot anatomically exist in this world. There is a tablecloth beneath his boots. Its red and white checks are stained with mud, stained brown and green and mauve from the flowers littering the grass outside that have fallen off the trees and get onto everyone’s shoes.

The music is loud. Louder than him. His lips move with his confession and his arms are stretched, pointing up, fingers touching the sky, he thinks, but it isn’t the sky. It is the ceiling. His nail catches on a splinter of paint and he pauses. He is shocked. The sky is falling.

The sky is falling.

He is bawling.

Discarded [Flash Fiction]

Discarding his jumper, Professor Bradley P. Lawrence did a few push-ups in his office. He remembered the exercise classes he used to go to with friends, back in the 80s, when it was all the rage to “feel the burn”. He missed those days, not because he particularly liked exercising (he didn’t) but because he had been fit and it hadn’t seemed to take so much effort. Now his lifestyle was too sedentary, his doctor said he needed to cut down on the red meat, and his body didn’t seem to belong to him. Those weren’t his white hairs on his chest, those weren’t his fingers that were so puffy and red every time he came in from the cold, and it definitely wasn’t his stomach that was jutting over his pants. Somebody else, some alien being, had performed on operation on him (he was sometimes almost certain of this, in his worst moments at the corner pub) over the years, replacing his body parts with those of his uncle’s.
He had a picture of his uncle that he kept in his desk drawer and took out whenever he was expecting distinguished visitors. He had smashed the glass against the wall once, in a fit of rage, and had never replaced it. He hoped it wasn’t too noticeable. Nobody had yet remarked on it yet, anyway. It was the kind of thing most visitors, if they were indeed distinguished, wouldn’t do.
After five vigorous push-ups, he felt he’d done quite enough exercise. He lay on the floor of his office, resting, and looked around. It was a marvelous view, one that he hadn’t seen since he’d slept with one of his students many years ago, and then he’d been far to absorbed in impressing her while simultaneously trying to enjoy the experience, and hadn’t particularly taken notice of his surroundings. He did so now. The light fell very nicely on the little rug he kept in front of his easy chair. There was a lot of dust beneath his desk that he ought to clean up.
A glint beneath a bookcase caught his attention and he shimmied forward and stretched his arm out to reach under it and see what it was. Pulling it out, he saw that it was a piece of glass. It must have been there since he’d broken his uncle’s picture. He turned the glass fragment over and over between his fingers, until it cut him and he had to get up to find a plaster to put on his hand.

Stone Folly

Forgotten by generation after generation of men and women, the old stone building sat in the middle of the grassy meadow. Time, however, had not forgotten it, but had caressed it, each year adding to its predecessor. The stone turned browner in the summer and grayer when the rain and snow washed away the accumulating dust of summer. Vines grew and shriveled and grew again on the building’s walls, wrapping it like a comforting green blanket as the seasons and years passed.

The stone building had no doors. It had no windows. It had no chimney. It was entirely closed, impossible to get in. Eventually, when it was rediscovered by humanity, it was seen as a curiosity. When architects and historians tried to discover who had built it, they couldn’t find records of it. An old manor house had burnt down some miles from the site of the stone building, but there was no record of the wealthy family to whom the manor house belonged having ever built the structure. Farmers in the vicinity all said that they didn’t use the meadow because their cattle didn’t like grazing in it. They said they trusted the animals’ instincts and stayed away.

When it was written about in guidebooks, it was called a folly – a building constructed for decoration, for aesthetic purposes only, that had absolutely no useful value. The name commonly given to it was “The Stone Hut in the Meadow”, as if it was impossible to think up a more imaginative title that wasn’t strictly descriptive. The truth was that it didn’t really matter. Even now that the place was marked, mapped, written about and remarked upon, it didn’t draw many tourists to it. One or two hopeful tourists would stop by every couple weeks, hoping to find a picturesque spot to take photographs in, but they were usually disappointed by the simplicity of the house. There were teenagers who sometimes trekked to the stone building on a dare, hoping to be the ones to find a secret way into it, but they were always let down as well.

So it was that even though the stone hut was recognized, it was largely an empty, desolate spot.

**

Ruvy Ben-Shalom, a dark and grizzled man, walked along the highway and wondered whether he was going to reach a Denny’s or Dunkin Donuts at any point in the near future. At the last intersection, he’d managed to flag down a car. The woman had two small boys sleeping peacefully in the back seat, and she’d opened her window only a crack, to ask if he needed her to call anybody for him. She’d refused to give him a ride, but pointed him down this route as the best way to find the nearest rest-stop.

He knew he looked like a hobo. He wore black gloves that were two large for his small, delicate hands, and his eyes must look large, hungry and sleep deprived. Probably, he mused, because he was hungry and sleep deprived. Sleeping out in the open during the cold nights was no picnic, especially along these apparently endless highways that went from one nowhere town to another nothing town. He always arrived at inhabited places too late, when everything was already closed. Rest stops, though, had diners and McDonalds and bathrooms that were open all the time, and he yearned to sit town on a toilet and wash his face at a sink. He couldn’t wait to get a cup of coffee into his aching stomach, even though he was exhausted.

On his right, through the gloom of dusk, he saw a stone building. It was smallish, about the size of a two room house – he couldn’t help but compare it to the home he’d left two weeks ago – but it seemed to be pleasant enough. He wanted to go and see what was there, because it was beautiful. Something about it called to him. There was a great deal of grassy meadow to get through, first, and he walked into the grass rather unwillingly, getting his pants wet almost at once. He cursed softly, under his breath. The dew was collecting on the long stocks of overgrown weeds, and his cargo pants, which were already cold and too thin, got soaked, immediately. At least his boots were waterproof.

The little stone building’s walls were covered with ivy, except for a perfect square where the doorway was. Someone had very neatly pushed and tidied the ivy away from it, and it looked far newer than the rest of the house. The door was bright red and looked freshly painted and shiny.

Ruvy knocked three times, before thinking about it for long. The door opened, and he began to sob.