flash fiction

Weakdays

     You begin to understand why people have a favorite day of the week when she enters your life. You are sedate, a bearish den mother collecting your people and your things around you. You like your teapot to rest just so on the corner of the counter beside the fruit bowl. You prefer things to be in order and clean. Your nights of debaucherous drinking produce a heavy trip down to the recycling bins the next morning, not an acquaintance with strangers’ toilet bowls. 
        She is a migrant, a traveler, a pick-up-and-leave kind of girl. But she doesn’t, not quite, not too far. She is like a tiger on a nature reserve, loping up to the fence and turning her back coolly on it, pretending she doesn’t see the bridges and boats and planes that lead out of New York City. She’s the small-town girl of the Big Apple, bred to be a house-cat in confined spaces, the feral rippling beneath her skin. 
        She doesn’t understand you and you don’t want her to. She thinks you’re a mystery. She finds you charming, endearing. These adjectives aren’t generally applied to you and you welcome them, and her, with arms thrown wide, embracing the neon pink baggage she brings with her.
        When she rings your doorbell, her hair floating softly in your view through the peephole, you discover what butterflies must feel like when they burst out of their cocoons. She gives you wings when she walks over your threshold and places her hands firmly down the back of your pants, lifting you up enough to touch the low-hung ceiling of your apartment. She stays for tea after tasting you. If it is a Tuesday, that is your favorite day that week.
        If she comes on the weekends, you know she will arrive with others, sometimes kissing them in front of you, and you become acquainted with all the spots on your walls and the stains on your kitchen floor.  You bring around drinks and snacks and turn into a plastic model of your mother who does these things with grace and affection. Your bitterness, you’re sure, can be tasted in the cocktails, in the crackers, in the guacamole you tarry over for far too long.
        The weeks she doesn’t come at all are worse than the weeks she ignores you in your own house.
        This is how far you’ve fallen.
        This is how far you have to climb out.
        You wonder if you have any interest in finding a ladder, in making a rope of your hair and using it to climb out. If you do manage to scrape yourself out of the whole, what will you find out there? Won’t it be bleak? You’ve gotten used to this.
        You like having a favorite day of the week. 

Quickie #5 – Stop

Think, for a minute, about the graduation ceremony you will never be a part of. And the seashell necklace strung together with seaweed crumbling dry on a neck fully formed and ready to be kissed across the Mason Dixon lines. Think about doors that won’t open and the secrets that aren’t behind them, that are actually right in front of you wearing Ronald McDonald red and yellow, jumping up and down to get noticed.
Think about the rest of it. The chairs you sit in and the people who think you’re worth telling stories to. And the Aw Shucks goodbyes of office doors and the hip caps on coal black heads.
Your life, yours, not mine, is made of stop and breathe moments and I am watching, and waiting, for you to come alive to them.

ReMeMoRyIng

“What do you want to be remembered for?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“Not really. You know. Under the circumstances.”
“Sure, fucking whatever, but it’s not up to me, is it.”
“No, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask. God, you’ve gotten to be such a dick.”
“Yeah, well, you know, that also shouldn’t surprise you, ‘under the circumstances.'”
“Look, you said I should be normal. I’m being normal. You made me promise. Like, months ago. Remember?”
“Yeah. I didn’t say I’d be okay about it now.”
“Fine. Well. Just as long as you remember that you asked for it.”
“…”
“…”
“Fine.”
“So what do you want to be remembered-“
“Oh come on.”
“Seriously, just think about it for a second. Like if you were asking me-“
“Yeah? What would YOU want me to be remembered for?”
“Really? Did you really just do an ‘enough about me, what do you think of me’ line just now?”
“You love me.”
“Whatever. Look, if you’d asked me, what like I wanted to be remembered for, yeah, like, it’d be a hard question. It is a hard question. But I mean, I can think of a couple things.”
“Like…?”
“Like I want to be remembered for things I did while I was around, not for things people find out about me after. Or like, I don’t know, mushy things, like I want to be remembered for being a good person, I guess, or for at least trying.”
“But that’s so fucking general. Everyone wants that. Or everyone says they do. It’s stupid. What’s the point anyway? No one’s going to say you’re mean after. Like what, we’re gathered here today to commemorate this awful fucking bitch? Nobody would say that about you.”
“I feel like you’re not done.”
“Even though it’s exactly what you are.”
“Shut uuup.”
“Anyway, it’s easy for you. You have people. Like lots. And family and shit.”
“So do you.”
“Not really. You know what they’re like.”
“Well, yeah, but-“
“But nothing. They’ll care. They’ll make the right noises. But then poof. That’s it. They already bought a place in Miami, did I tell you? For when they don’t have to spend winters here anymore.”
“Are you kidding.”
“It’s fine. It makes sense. You know. It’ll be good for Zach, he hates the winter here. He gets all seasonal affective disorder and shit.”
“Fuck that, he can buy a fucking SAD lamp. They don’t have to buy a house already.”
“It’s a condo. Like in an apartment building.”
“Whatever.”
“Look, don’t worry about it, it’s just how they are.”
“Insensitive morons? Assholes?”
“…”
“Sorry.”
“Nah, that’s pretty accurate.”
“Well, still, it’s not my place to-“
“As if you ever cared about shit like that. Gimme a break.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“So anyway…”
“Yeah.”
“Want me to turn the TV on? See if Powerpuff Girls is on or something?”
“Yeah, sure, why not.”
“Cool. Want some water? I’ll go get some.”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Hey-“
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.”

Doing a Karenina

   Red wine goes wonderfully with steak, but Mimi is vegan now. This is her newest thing. Linda drinks the Cabernet in the kitchen, alone, facing the wallpaper she regrets getting now. It is tapestry-like, black and white threaded workers in rice-fields wearing round conical hats. What did she hear someone call it the other day? Coolie hats? She’s sure that’s not the right name. It was probably her husband. He sometimes comes up with racist shit that reminds her that he is, after all, the man who hid a coke habit from her for years, sinking them both into debt.
    Mimi doesn’t help. Her newest thing, gluten-free veganism, means that Linda and Greg are both starving all the time. They sneak out to get pizza in the middle of the night sometimes, giggling and pulling on jeans and baggy sweatshirts, like they’re having an affair.
    The phone’s ring is a pathetic approximation of Fur Elise. Linda’s shoulders tense. She hates the sound so much. Tinny and obnoxious, calls mean work or bad news, almost inevitably. No one calls the landline anymore anyway, except for some of the older people at the PR company she works at and Mimi’s therapists and psychiatrist.
    “It’s Allison!” Greg yells from the other room. Linda looks at the rice-field workers, at the waving bamboo patterns, at whatever nonsense it is on her wall that’s meant to look comfortingly exotic to her Western sensibilities. She picks up the portable out of its cradle and takes another sip of wine before screwing the top back and putting in the fridge. The phone is between her shoulder and her ear, the same spot it’s nestled since she was a teenager. Since she first met Allison.
    “Hey, Greg, you can hang up now.”
    “Okay. Bye, Alli!”
    “Bye! Hi Linda. You sound tired.”
    “I am. It’s been a day.”
    “Want to talk about it?”
    “No. Tell me how Noel is doing.”
    Linda regrets this immediately. As Allison begins telling her about her daughter, a senior in college who’s just returned from an academically rigorous year abroad and is doing great, wonderful, fantastic, all Linda can see is the image of Mimi lying on the subway tracks that time she jumped and survived.
    When your own kid has tried to commit suicide half a dozen times, Linda thinks, you don’t find 4.0 GPAs all that interesting anymore. She knows that if she told Alli that she’d rather not hear about her kids – Alli has two, and the other, the boy, is doing equally well, with a long-term girlfriend who lives with him and makes more money than him – if Linda told Alli she’d rather not hear about any of these fantastic things, Alli’d understand. That’s what friends are for, right? She’s asked before, and Alli’s accepted, keeping quiet about her kids until Linda asks.
            She always does, in the end. She wants to know. She wants to hear about college classes, about PhD programs, about how the daughter is getting published here and joining a singing group there, about how the son has finished his qualifying exams to get into his PhD program and how he’s house sitting for two cats. She needs to know these things. Otherwise she has no images to superimpose Mimi’s face into. And if she doesn’t try to cut-and-paste her daughter’s face into situations other than the thirty-and-home one she’s in, Linda will continue to see her lying in between the subway tracks, or inside her bed in the ward where she’s basically got a bed named after her by this point, or sitting behind the desk of Greg’s office, the only place she’s managed to hold down a job in years. Then again, Greg also employs his no-good, asshole brother, so Linda never knows how much work Mimi actually does there, despite the praise Greg lavishes on her.
    Linda listens, her right ear pressed to the phone, her left ear straining for sounds of an emergency. The worst part of her conversations with Alli is the resentment. Allison’s children had their moments, their years of therapy and fucked-upedness, but then they got over it. They got better. Mimi doesn’t get better. Mimi jumps from veganism to Buddhism to exercising everyday to playing the viola and deciding to join the circus as a trapezoid artist. Mimi stays a constant, unchanging. Allison’s kids get to change. Linda hears the change in Alli’s voice, too, and she knows that she, Linda, will have to remain a forever too. It’s almost worth the train having succeeded in its mission that day.
    Almost.

A Part

Spiraling light fixtures collapse the spectrum of the rainbow into single expressions of color. Mass. You are part of a moving mass. The snow in your veins is made up of each and every one of the lights flashing in front of your eyes. White is not the absence of color. Black is, like the holes in space that haunt your dreams on nights of dark sweats that crawl across the covers in teams of walkie-talkie communicating ants. Dance. Your body is one of a hundred thousand others in a stadium radiating with sweating sound. The screams are as distressed as any single body would be in the presence of such staged magnificence. Sorting out one scream from another is like seeing leaves on trees as individuals when you’re looking at the blotchy rendering three year olds make of the oaks in front of their suburban homes. It is an imaginary, purely self-serving process. Can you do it? Are you good enough? Can you see through the mediocrity into the art? Well. Can you? Hands tighten around your waist. Connection. Is that what it is? Skin on clothing woven by Taiwanese children lying on skin burned by yesterday’s oven mishap. All there is to it is to imagine that this contact is pure melding. The melting of whitened blood snow into your consciousness. Bodies bumping in the night. Carnality made spiritual. Spirituality made carnal. Does it matter which? You are an animal, your pulses tell you this, your sight tells you this. Each of your thoughts is rewarded when put into action, reinforcing the thought – your desire for contact pulses into your nether regions, pushing your back into the depth of a stranger behind you, bringing his arms around your waist. Thought. Action. Reward. Dionysus would be pleased. A spectacle of such end of the world beauty was rarely seen by his maenads.

Haytches

A list. This is what this piece of paper is called. You read it, carefully, before leaving the house. As you shop, you refer to it, often. You don’t get anything – anything – that isn’t on the list. The items on this list are the only ones you are supposed to, and allowed to, spend money on. This is the deal. This is what responsibility feels like. You asked for it. So here goes.
 
*Half-baked cookie-dough, found between the yogurts and the organic milk/yogurt/butter section. It’s in a little area of its own, because it’s a guilty pleasure that most people don’t allow themselves to eat. You’re not allowed to eat it either, so if I see the package open when you get home, or if I see you bought more of it than arrives on the kitchen table, adult privileges are over. 
*Herbal-mint-tea sheep’s yogurt. This is in the organic section, near the cookies. You are allowed to eat this, but not at the store. You wait until you get home. 
*Half-and-Half for your father, because he is spoiled and won’t drink his coffee any other way.
*Honey Bunches of Oats cereal, which you will find in the cereal aisle (you should also get milk, but wait until the end for that, because it’s heavy, and you know how your back gets when you carry something heavy for too long. Also, we, that is unspoiled people, drink 2% milk in this house, not whole, not skim, so look carefully.)
*Honey-nut cornflakes for your little sister, but make sure that it is the gluten free version. There should be a round button-shaped thing in red or blue or green or yellow that says GLUTEN FREE in big letters like that.
*Healthy granola bars – I’m trusting you here. Choose some kind of flavor you like that doesn’t have chocolate chips or drizzles of caramel all over it. You know what I mean. Something with fruit, or with almonds or apple or pear in it or something like that.
*Holly’s Oatmeal. You need to go to the organic section of the grocery store to find this if you don’t see it in the aisle where the rest of the cereals and granola bars are. It’s near the produce section, sort of near the meat section, but not near enough to the meat for you to be able to see anything. Don’t worry, I’m not sending you into anywhere dangerous for you.
 
Now that you have the list, you can go. Remember before you leave to bring: keys, cellphone, sunglasses, sunscreen, grocery list, pen (for crossing off items), wallet (for money), and the whistle your father and I gave you just in case. Also put on your necklace that lets people know you have an allergy to penicillin. If anything happens, I don’t want anyone injecting you with anything you’re not allowed to be injected with.
 
The minute you’re finished shopping, while you’re waiting in line at the registers, call me, and I’ll come in the car to pick you up. After you pay – ask them to bag everything in double bags because we need the plastic for the cat-box – head to the door to the left because that’s where they let cars stop. If you have to wait for me for a while, don’t worry, don’t freak out, it’ll be fine, I’ll be there in a jiffy.
 
Put your calming music on while you shop. Sometimes people are scary in the grocery store. They can be aggressive, or impatient. But if you take your time and do everything you need to do, you should be okay and nothing will happen to you. If anyone asks you to move, move. If anyone asks you about your stye, ignore them, because it’s none of their business. People are just rude sometimes, just like we talked about. Remember that if you get nervous, you can call me anytime, but also remember what doctor Ronaldo said about you taking some steps. You wanted to do this, so.
 
Love, xox, hugs and kisses,
Mom

Insurance

   Jarvis counts his fingers. He counts his toes. He gets to twenty-four and is pretty sure he’s made a mistake. He starts again. Mia is giggling in the corner. Her laughter makes him lose track. He forgot she was here. Now he remembers. She is pretty. So pretty. Grotesque. Noses are strange, bumptious organs, sticking out into the world, central to the face in that they can’t be ignored, can’t be gotten rid of. Jarvis has a sudden and itching desire to Google people without noses.
   “I need your computer.”
   Mia giggles at the wall.
   “Mia.”
   She lies on her back and giggles at the ceiling. 
   “Mia.”
   She turns her face and giggles at him.
   “I need your computer. Where is it?”
   “C’mere.” 
   Jarvis decides Google can wait. He crawls to Mia’s prone face, as it grows bigger in his sight, but the intensity of her separating features becomes too much to bear so he stops halfway across the complicatedly patterned rug. He flops on his stomach. Pancake-position, like the pandas in the Washington Zoo he read about. They don’t know how to have sex. Sex is very strange, if he tries to think about it. 
   “Let’s go to Washington and join the pandas, Mia.”
   “Okay.” She is serene now. Her voice is high and squeaky, Mickey Mouse in the old Disney cartoons when he looked creepy and long-legged, long-necked. Jarvis tries to remember what she normally sounds like, but there doesn’t seem to be a state other than this.
   Mia’s face is sharp-planed, her cheeks smooth runways, the line from her cleft chin up to the dip above her lip a perfect landing strip. Her eyes are luminous blue control towers, her forehead the arrivals hall of a thousand pock marks of adolescent zits, a once-chronic condition she hides with leafy bangs.
   Jarvis wants to fly away, somewhere. The yen for the journey hits him hardest in these moments, watching Mia. The only black girl in a small town, adopted by white-savior parents, she is beautifully innocent to him. He ruins her inch by inch, night after night, and she thanks him for it, making him feel more powerful than anything else could.
   He is an inner-city kid. He marched around, beat his chest, and proclaimed himself to be Trayvon just months ago. His father is in prison. His mother is on and off welfare. He is a stereotype he cannot stand. Going to college isn’t working. It isn’t escaping. His mom calls and makes him feel guilty. His father is no less in prison here than anywhere else. Mia is the one good thing.
   He sits up. It’s wearing off. He really wants to go see the pandas. Right now. “Mia, let’s go.”
   “Okay.” She’s still lying down. “But you have to get insurance. Travel insurance.” She rolls from her side onto her back and lifts her legs into the air. There is a scar on her left knee that was there when she was given to her folks. 
   “To get to Washington?” Jarvis starts to laugh and it honks out of him. So not entirely worn off. He can’t stop laughing. He can hear how silly he sounds, though. That’s something.
   “Mom always said to get travel insurance. Call-look-just-call.”
   Jarvis finds a number for a company on his smartphone – he realizes now he could have found people without noses right in his pocket but his phone is still new and he’s not used to it. He calls.
   “SmartFarm Insurance, this is Robbie speaking, how may I help you?”
   “Hi yeah, I want to go to Washington with my girlfriend to see the pandas and she says I need to call to get travel insurance? Like we’re going to just go in the car or something. Maybe take a train. A bus. A plane. A motherfucking canoe. I don’t know.”
   Robbie SmartFarm coughs. It’d been a long day. He knows that even with this kind of call, he is supposed to untangle what the customer wanted. But he doesn’t feel like it. His mother is ill, in the hospital, he doesn’t have a girlfriend to go to Washington with, and the vending machines are out of chocolate-covered pretzels. “Sorry, we can’t insure you for a journey like that.” He hangs up and waits for the next call to patch through.
   Jarvis looks at the red “call-terminated” bar on his phone’s screen. “The guy said we don’t need insurance,” he says. “Told you. Let’s go.”

Losing Her

To lose her is to actively admit that she is gone. To lose her is to fully understand that her cropped hair and blue jeans don’t dance around the kitchen table anymore. To lose her is to create a space that is still filled by her slamming door, her key in the lock, her shampoo bottle on the side of the wet bathtub – signs that she is there but not, a ghost made corporeal. To lose her is to push her beyond her comfort zone, it is to possess a vocabulary of words that she doesn’t wish to use when referring to the two of you. It is to say that you are there and she is not. It is to say that ‘busy’ is an excuse for ‘do not want’ and that ‘tired’ also means ‘bored.’ Losing her means connecting the dots between your collarbone and hers and seeing the height difference that used to be a comfort and is now an inconvenient bumpy road full of potholes in your ribcage where your heart has shrunken because she has taken away her part of it. Losing her means feeling your stomach roiling full of whiskey sours and late night sex with strangers, knowing she is held in the arms of one who loves her less than you do but who gives her what she wants, which is more valuable, in the end, than the abstract love that you express in emoticons and hugs. Losing her is accepting a fishing hook in your diaphragm that is more firmly lodged there than in any catch she makes on City Island. It is remembering the loping amble and seaside strut of her hips.
    Having lost her is a prospect yet unfathomed, a deep green sea unexplored. You take scuba diving lessons in preparation, consuming yourself in the hearty weekends of others and abandoning them to their pain, learning to punish your recruits as much as love allows and more. Stars align in the night as you ride out weepy-weary from your tent and gallop across a desert on four wheel drive. Having lost her you will be a series of little wrecks left on the road from where you will crash over and over again, each pile of rocks you choose bigger than the last, until there is no part of you that isn’t broken and bruised. You will never return to the ocean where she dwells with the sea creatures she has adopted, having lost her. You will become a cacti-eating desert dune of crumbled skin and sinew as she floats along the surface carried by the tides. You will grow your weeds in deep and keep the memory alive, the fairytale all deserts whisper after dark – that once upon a time, many aeons ago, the whole world was filled with the ocean, from end to end, and that one day in the future the seas will rise again and the desert will be reunited with the water and will drink deep, and you will drink deepest, deeper than ever before, even if it is only from the salty mix of your own once-shed tears.  

Quickie #4 – Don’t Nurture It

Don’t look at the lips. Focus on the eyes. Eyes are family and friendship as well as love. Eyes are ambiguous. Ignore the wedding ring, even when he twists it round and round his finger while he talks to you. It’s a nervous tic, it has nothing to do with you. Don’t overthink it. Don’t take the word “intimidation” as a flirtatious device. Don’t see it as anything other than fatherly admiration. Than belief in you.
Don’t look at his lips. Don’t think about his body beneath his clothing and how different it may look from the bodies of boys you’ve loved. Don’t compare it to your father’s ravaged body, shorn and torn by illness. Ask about his kids. Remind yourself of his kids.
Don’t think about your disbelief in morality. Don’t think about life being short. Don’t look at his lips.

30 Day Writing Challenge – 1

This month, I’ve been participating in a thirty day writing challenge with a friend of mine. The rules, for anyone who wants to take the challenge for any other time, are here. The first day’s challenge was: “Select a book at random in the room.  Find a novel or short story, copy down the last sentence and use this line as the first line of your new story.” I had one of my housemates pick a book for me, believing I’d be biased if I picked on my own. She picked The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The yield is below. 

   And once more all the boys joined in his exclamation. They lifted him onto their narrow shoulders, their voices and bodies ragged from disuse. His fist signaled triumph to the waiting masses beyond the walls, where faces turned up in adoration to catch a glimpse of him, to call out his name. 
    “Patrick! Patrick!”
    And once more all the boys joined in his ridicule. They laughed at his slack-jawed disbelief, seeing the ruler hit his hand twice more. His skin, almost entirely covered by freckles, didn’t retain a red mark like many of the pasty children around him.
    “Patrick! Look at me when I speak to you.”
    He tilted his chin, straining. His neck was stiff on cold days. He met Teacher’s eyes, which darted away to stare at his forehead. Patrick hated this trick. It made him need to strain even more to try to meet Teacher’s eyes, but to everyone else it looked like it was he who was avoiding the man’s gaze. It made him look like a chicken. A little girl. Bad enough that he was a cripple. 
    “Now. I want you to please tell me what it was I was just saying.”
    Teacher had stopped asking Patrick direct questions – nine times five, Latin verses – because Patrick would answer them correctly. Now he played this game. There was only one right answer.
    “I don’t know, sir.”
    “Exactly. I would tell you to go stand in the corner, but, well. Sitting in a corner just isn’t the same thing, I think.” Teacher turned the ruler end over end between his short, stubby fingers, the flat wood seeming incongruous with his fleshy hands. The boys didn’t laugh outright, not with Teacher twirling his weapon lovingly like that – he could snap at any moment – but they exchanged looks and smiles, on the edges of their seats. “Instead, why don’t you just wheel yourself around the room while we continue the lesson?” 
    Two boys winked at one another. This was what they’d been hoping for.
    Patrick allowed his head to fall. The tension in his neck, the ache that went down his twisted back, ebbed. He slowly wheeled back from his desk, a large one that had to be made specially for him. He sometimes wondered whether it was this desk, this bigger, lower and definitely out of place desk, that made Teacher decide to make an enemy out of him. He was a good student, after all. His arithmetic and Bible recitation were both better than any other boy in the class. He remembered the historical dates that Teacher taught the class, banging his ruler on the desk for emphasis when the boys would begin to nod off during particularly hot and mosquito-ridden summer days. It didn’t matter. 
    His mother had told him that he was different, that God had made him different, and that men who were afraid would always remind him of it. Afraid of what, his mother hadn’t said. Certainly not of him, Patrick was certain.
    His wheelchair squeaked as he turned it, that was the thing. That’s why Teacher made him do this, this in particular. The desks were close enough to the walls that he couldn’t turn gradually, so each corner involved the execution of a slow turn with a few back and forths of the old wheels. It was a loud business, the second-hand wheelchair.
    Patrick’s mother had sewn a cover for the old padding, but he’d worn a hole in it with his finger so that he could see the old brown stain on the left side of it, which he was certain was blood. A soldier’s blood, from the Great War. A brave man, Patrick could feel it. 
    And once more all the boys in the back row wedged things into his seat as he turned around the room. They repressed their giggles and took whatever scolding Teacher gave them because he also coughed loudly at every squeak of Patrick’s wheels. His freckled face burned red with embarrassment but he touched the blood stain and tried to remember that he had nothing to fear. 
    And once more all the boys joined him in his exclamation. They stood in awe of the man with the clean-shaven face and close-cut hair who swept into the schoolroom and took Patrick up in his arms. His hand seemed larger than it had ever been before as he waved a farewell to the saluting, trembling, Teacher.