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Assistant Costumer B [Flash Fiction]

Crowded with scenery, the storage rooms of the Opera House are never silent. The old cardboard and wood sets seem to breathe as they shifts, gravity slowly doing its work on the heavier cloth and paint and plastic glued all over them. A perpetual cool, musty smell permeates the space, and the air is full of dust.

Lena coughs and the magical quiet is broken. She is looking for a crown for Cleopatra. She tried to explain to the director that the Egyptians didn’t wear Western crowns, but he wants one anyway. He’s a dolt, a pompous man in his forties who knows quite a lot about the music but very little about theatrics. Opera, Lena knows, is the essential and rarely achievable mixture of the two; it is a gentle recipe, to be handled with the hands of a gourmet chef, not a meat grinder.

Some of the older costumes are shoved in here on old metal racks. The kind of crown that the director wants to try on his Cleo – as he calls her, familiarly, as if she’s his mistress – is here, Lena knows. She’s been working here for seven years. She sometimes sleeps in the storage room, when she and Alicia are having a fight. The guards don’t bother checking the storage room before locking up for the night, because it stays locked unless things are being removed from it or put back. Lena is one of the people who has the key. She’s trusted.

Fights with Alicia have become more frequent recently. Alicia is ten years older than Lena, and she’s growing tired of her younger partner’s lifestyle. She never says this openly. She fights with Lena about other things, the laundry, the garbage, the dishes, the mundane facts of life. When Lena tries to fight back, Alicia slams her against the wall, beads of sweat standing out in the dips of her collarbone, and then they kiss and end up in bed. This isn’t productive, and so Lena has been leaving the apartment instead of fighting back most of the time. She loves Alicia, but she’s stopped liking her. She’s pretty sure that it’s a bad idea to maintain a partnership with someone whose chatter about the day’s news has become irksome and grating.

The crown is exactly where Lena remembers seeing it, between a sequined plus-size black dress and a shawl of deep-red that she’s pretty sure belong to Carmen, star of her own opera. Lena tries the crown on, but it’s too big and it slips down over her eyes and stops at her ears, which bulge out of her small head. She smiles at herself, alone in the storage room, her refuge, and takes the thing off. She rubs at the fake red rubies with her sleeve but they don’t shine or gleam; they’ve been purposefully made not to glint, probably so they wouldn’t catch the strong stage lights and blind the audience. Whoever made it actually knew what they were doing, Lena thinks with appreciation.

Lena carries the crown back to the director who takes it and thanks her out of the side of his mouth. It’s a trick he has, speaking sideways like this. She thought only cartoon characters could do it. She asks him if he needs anything else and he shakes his head, already jumping onto the stage to hand the crown to his Cleo, who’s fanning herself with one of the prop palm leaves.

Back in the dressing rooms, Lena gets back to her real job, which is Assistant Costumer B. Assistant Costumer A is a nice, brisk man in his late thirties who’s married and has two young children who sometimes come to work with him and sit underneath the dressing tables, reverentially quiet, staring wide-eyed at the glamorous clothes. Lena wondered once whether it was quite normal for them to be so well-behaved, but when she leaned down to say hi to them she saw that they were both sucking on long-lasting lollipops that they always got as an incentive for staying silent. They whispered to her that they also got an extra dollar on their allowance if they didn’t make a mess. Their mother, apparently, was some political activist who sometimes needed to dash off to protest something, somewhere, which would be when she’d drop them off at the Opera House.

Lena sometimes wished she were part of Assistant Costumer A’s family rather than her own. She sometimes wished she could go home with him, maybe as a new cousin or a live-in nanny, and never go back to live with Alicia.

The Night City [To Be Continued…? Maybe?]

In the Night City, the children ruled. Most of them weren’t taken care of, and they ran the streets, gangs of them, skateboarding on starlight and sliding recklessly down moonbeams. Once in a while, the Council tried taking control, cracking down on the lawlessness that had settled into their city, but every effort ended in failure. The children adapted to the new rules and found one loophole after another until the system broke down and they had free reign once more.

The smallest, most exclusive gang was also the strongest. The Secreteers, they were called. The boys and girls who belonged to the Secreteers wore masks over their mouths, symbolizing their abilities to be silent, to keep and ferry secrets. It wasn’t a uniform, though, and each mask was different. One girl tied a pink bandanna around the lower half of her face. A boy, young enough not to worry about ripping out any tender whiskers that might grow on his upper lip, strapped his mouth shut with thick, black electrician’s tape. An androgynous little thing, with golden ringlets and overlarge ears, had a pacifier firmly placed between his or her plump lips.

“Those are the kids you want to join,” Sheila whispered, perched on a lamppost, watching a Secreteer zoom across the Night City air in bright pink roller-skates. Sheila scratched her shoulder where a stray feather was poking her. She shifted, fixing the costume wings she wore over her worn blue t-shirt.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would I want to join them? They work all the time, don’t they? Working isn’t fun.”

“You’re an idiot.”

Royal, a little kid who’d come into the Night City with a weird birth mark shaped like a crown on his forehead and no memory of what his name was, swung like a monkey underneath Sheila. He was still in the acrobat phase, getting used to the low gravity of the Night City.

“Look at me!” he shouted, and Sheila looked down in spite of herself. He was swinging on a rope he’d found somewhere, and he’d tied a sort of ring in it, which he was now using as a handhold to help him do somersaults in the air as he pushed off the post with his feet over and over again. “This is awesome!”

“You’ll get used to it.” Sheila kept watching the house across the street, waiting for her target to appear in the window. She wasn’t here to play games. Royal was a newbie, and she was his babysitter – doing her duty, like everyone had to – and that was fine, but she had to concentrate, too. It was also painful, being reminded of that dreaminess that she and everyone else had had at the beginning, the awe of what you could do in the Night City that you couldn’t do before.

“Can we go get food? I’m hungry.” Royal hung his legs up in front of her and swung upside down, his blue-black hair looking spiky and his face becoming full of unfamiliar shapes.

“Not yet. When I’m done here.”

“But what are you doing?” he whined.

“Wait and see.”

“But I’m bored!”

“Shh – here we go!” Sheila saw a woman in a purple dressing gown appear in the window. She looked outside, seeming to wait for something, and Sheila launched herself down from the lamppost, twisting the air around her on the way. By the time she’d arrived at the window, anyone not in the Night City would see her as a cat. She mowed, pawing at the window, and the woman smiled and opened it, letting her in.

The moment she slid inside, Sheila let the illusion around her unwind. Before the woman could scream, though, Sheila had already passed a hand over her eyes and pressed her cool lips on the woman’s cheek. She whispered in her ear, “Go back to bed. Everything is alright.” The woman blinked, her eyes heavy, and walked back to bed.

Sheila watched her go and went to the window to wave Royal inside after her.

“Don’t touch anything.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not good for us. Most of this isn’t in the Night City.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Because we’re looking for something that IS in the Night City, dumbo. Something that got in here when someone who lives here picked it up or bought it or I don’t know what. But it doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us. So we’re taking it back.”

“Oh.”

Insider [Flash Fiction]

In the spaces between my shallow breaths, I heard someone moving around the house. I knew, rationally, that my heartbeats weren’t audible to any ears besides my own, but I worried that my increasing panic would lead to hyperventilation and the kind of wheezing, huffing, gasping for air that would wrack my entire body with convulsive shudders, making me knock against the precariously stacked shelves of the storeroom I was hiding in; not only would the air passing through my constricting throat move my vocal cords, but, most likely, a whole slew of boxes, bottles and dusty bits of machinery would fall down on me, giving away my location.

I counted to myself, looking at the seconds moving on my digital watch, for once blessing my age-old habit of going to bed with it, a habit that my husband hated. I breathed in for two seconds, let the air out for three – the goal was to reach four seconds in and eight out, achieving maximum calm and minimal panic, but I was only human, after all, and someone was prowling around out there, looking for me.

Graham wasn’t home; he was on a rare business trip. He hated them and tried, whenever possible, to send our son, Graham Junior, in his stead. Junior actually liked the travel, the plane rides, the novelty of staying in hotels alone and getting to be the big boss among the small fry. Graham never really liked that stuff, and he still teases me sometimes that Junior isn’t really his son, because where did he get his outgoing streak? Maybe he got it from my side of the family, I tell him. Hiding in the closet, I was thinking about how convenient it was that Junior was spending the night with his new girlfriend and not at home. Junior isn’t nearly as outgoing as his father likes to think he is.

A tinkling sound, following by a soft rip made me lose track of my measured breaths and I felt the pins and needles begin to crawl up my fingers and toes as I started to hyperventilate. I opened my eyes wide and forced myself to track the seconds on my watch again – 00:03:26 – 00:03:27 – breathe in – 28, 29, 30 – breathe out. The intruder, whoever he was, was being careful. He was looking for something. The sounds I’d heard – I tried to figure them out. The first was probably my perfume bottles – my one concession to vanity; working in a hospital, I’ve come to appreciate being surrounded by a scent of something that isn’t death, pus, ooze, urine, feces or antibacterial hand wash. The second sound, the rip… That was harder to figure out and it made me very nervous.

A creak. A groan. That was the floor near my hiding place and a voice, the voice of someone who wasn’t aware of the loose floorboard and twisted an ankle in it. Even very rich people get lazy about house repairs, I thought sardonically, noticing with pride that my breathing was slowing and that I could afford to make it a smidgen shallower and thus quieter. The door I was behind was locked, of course, with the key inside it on my end. I had not even the tiniest bit of curiosity as to what the intruder looked like. I simply wanted him to think that the house was empty and to leave.

Graham and I have gotten death threats before. We both do work that’s controversial, in its own way, and there are many people who don’t like the wealthy in this day and age. I can’t blame them for it, though their discontent doesn’t excuse their bad behavior, nor does it allow them to ignore the fact that we are human beings with rights as well. We pay our taxes and perform our social and public duties and shouldn’t be attacked. But high powered couples are always seen as somewhat problematic and Graham and I have always been aware of it and have fought our battles together or alone, as need and our lawyers deemed fit. We are not sentimental about such things. But I know that this break-in is about me, because this is the first time that I have had a secret. My family knows nothing of it, nor does anyone else.

Except someone does, apparently, know. Someone, walking around my house that night, knew. He knew, and he was going to do something about it. I stood in my closet and counted breaths, quietly, determined not to be heard.

A Better View (Flash Fiction)

Esther Nussbaum sniffed her dentures and decided they could use a clean. She tottered to the bathroom in her embroidered blue-and-purple dressing gown, the cheap, easily replaceable grey slippers from Shuk-Hakarmel on her feet, and began running the water in the sink. She turned the old handle to the left, as far as it would go, where it only trickled very slowly. There was a problem with the pipes, but every time he came to unplug the toilet, the plumber told her that the only way he’d be able to fix it would be by tearing up all the tiles between the bathroom and the kitchen. It would cost too much and what would she do without a bathroom for a week while he worked there, stinking and dirtying up the house? And who’d clean up afterward, huh? No, Esther wasn’t going to let anybody fix anything, not till she was dead. Then her good-for-nothing kids and their beautiful-but-ungrateful, children could do whatever they wanted with the old apartment.

Leaving the faucet dripping the slowly heating water into the sink, Esther shuffled to the kitchen to get a glass to put her dentures in. There was a tablet she would add that would clean them well and get rid of the stench of her old mouth. If there was one thing she was meticulous about, it was her personal hygiene.

Someone pounded on the door. She almost dropped the glass, she was so surprised. Her family members all knocked in different staccato raps, little taps that sounded rude and impatient, barely bothering to graze their knuckles on the door before sticking their keys in and invading her privacy. This wasn’t them. There was a large, flat palm on the door, knocking again and again and again. It reminded her of barely remembered days, being very, very small, in her big sister’s arms, hidden away in a closet in Poland.

“Giveret Nussbaum? Please, it’s very important!”

She recognized the voice. It wasn’t a man, as she’d imagined, but her neighbor across the stairwell, a woman of about fifty who lived alone with a dog and a cat. They sometimes had coffee together. Esther shoved her dentures back in her mouth, left the glass on the counter and opened the door.

“Ruth?”

“Giveret Nussbaum, thank God you’re home! Oh, I was so worried. Come on, we have to go downstairs.”

Ruth’s hair, a brown so glossy and shiny that it was obviously dyed, was stuffed in a messy bun and her makeup, normally very neat and put together, was a little smeared. Convulsively, Esther’s hand shot out the doorway to clutch Ruth’s.

“Why? What’s happening? Downstairs?”

Ruth stared. “Giveret, didn’t you hear the alarm? ..oooooOOOOOoooo?”

“Wasn’t that just for Shabbat? Or is it not Friday yet…”

“Wednesday, Giveret, come on,” Ruth said, and she pulled Esther out of her apartment and began to tug her, bodily, towards the
flight of stairs that led down to the building’s small lobby.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy? Aia, you’re hurting me!”

“Slicha, Giveret, but I’m not leaving you up there. Haven’t you been reading the newspaper? Didn’t your kids call you? The war started last night and the scuds are on their way just like in 1991 and who knows, maybe even worse, some people say they have other things, chemicals, diseases, I don’t know.”

“War? Oy, and I left the water on upstairs, I need to go back up-”

“No, just leave it, come on.”

Ruth and Esther finally reached the building’s pathetic bomb shelter. It was little more than a storage space; the walls were as thin as the rest of the building, it was above ground, and there were two metal doors that led outside that nobody had the keys to anymore. The only good thing about it was that it had less debris in it that could fall on people than anyone had in their own homes – the kids of most of the building’s residents were grown-up and their bikes had been outgrown and thrown out. There were a couple old, rusting refrigerators in a corner of the shelter, a small and dirty faucet that might or might not work, and that was it. With Esther and Ruth, they were fifteen people. Everyone else had stayed in their homes, even after the siren. A young couple who’d moved into the building after one of them had inherited an apartment in it had gotten onto the roof to watch for falling bombs, if they came. Ruth told Esther about how she’d seen them going upstairs.

Esther laughed and looked around, holding a hand in front of her mouth, just in case anybody came near her. “They’ll have a nicer view than the rest of us.”

Confessional [Flash Fiction]

When I married my first fiancee, she and I were only nineteen. We were engaged for the twelve hours it took us to hitchhike from our town all the way to Vegas, where we got married in one of those cheesy wedding chapels. I don’t remember its name, but I’m sure it had the word “Love” in the title, which was apt. We were in love, all right. We were passionately, tremendously, glowingly in love, positive that everybody could see it on our faces. We knew we were going to be together for the rest of our life.

She was also pregnant.

When she first told me, I didn’t even have to think about it. I just asked her to marry me, right there, on the spot, with no ring, no nothing. We were in bed together, and it was dark because we’d shut the heavy curtains in her room so we could sleep late, and because my legs were entangled with hers and her back was to me, I couldn’t even kneel when I proposed. Not my finest moment. But she said “Yes,” anyway, very quietly, and I could hear her smiling.

It was only then, after she’d agreed, that I realized what it actually meant. I’ve heard other people talk about how having babies young means you can’t go to college, but neither of us were heading there, anyway, so I wasn’t worried about that. I actually heard from an old mutual friend a while back that she got a Masters degree in something or other a couple years ago, so maybe she did want to go to school and just never told me about it. When I think about it, there’s a lot I didn’t really know about her. We were nineteen. We didn’t really know how to talk to each other about the big things yet, I guess.

But I knew exactly where I was headed, and that was nowhere. I’d always worked at my parents’ diner, busing tables when I was kid, taking orders when I was in high school, learning how to do the cooking on the longer weekends when the staff had time to teach me. Now that high school was finished, I was working there full time, doing whatever needed doing. My mom was showing me how to do some of the bookkeeping, but I didn’t have the head for the math – “Just like your father,” she’d say, huffing and pushing me half-off my chair with her too-strong arms – so I learned from my father what it meant to be a manager. He taught me how to hire and fire people, how to order the supply we needed, and how to try not to get too cocky, because some days were so busy that he needed to be in the kitchen, peeling potatoes, or out there on he floor, taking orders, and he didn’t get paid any overtime for any of it. “Heck,” he used to say, “I don’t even get a salary, technically. My salary is the profits, and the profits come from good workers, and good workers like working for humble bosses.”

So what was I so afraid of, lying in bed, making plans with my girlfriend-turned-fiancee about how to lie to her folks into giving us the pickup truck for the day so we could go to Vegas and get married? I was afraid of missing out. I couldn’t tell you what I meant, exactly. I just knew, somewhere deep in my bones, that I shouldn’t be getting married when I was still getting pimples on my back that I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of. The thought of holding a baby in a few months threw me into a kind of panic, too. The future stopped for me there. Suddenly, I had no future seven months from that day when I married her. There was white, blank space after that day, space that I couldn’t even imagine.

Later, my second fiancee told me that maybe it was a sign. That maybe I knew what was going to happen, exactly seven months from that day, right on the nose. Then she laughed at herself and said she didn’t believe in things like that. I told her that I did, because I do, but that it wasn’t a sign. If it had been, I would have listened to it. I don’t ignore signs. This was no sign – it was just the terror of a teenager who barely knows what a baby looks like, let alone is ready to hold one and call it his own.

I’ve heard of plenty of people being happy when their baby was born. I’ve never heard anyone admit to feeling what I felt the day my baby was born dead.

X [Sci-Fi Flash Fiction]

Month: May.
Year: 2212.
Location: Undisclosed.
Subject: X.

Regarding X. It is hard to know where to begin. Discussing X has always been, in my line of work, a sensitive issue. They’ll hit you when you’re down, they told me in training. They’ll find your most vulnerable spot, and they’ll hit it, over and over again. I was trained to lock my mind – the only part of my body that is still entirely my own – away from them if I were ever caught. Each of my memories went into its own box, it’s own safe, where even I wouldn’t be able to access it until my own people injected me with the chemical that lowered my adrenaline levels enough to take me out of the state of fight-or-flight that would be induced by capture.

This is all a matter of public record now – I have no fear of this method being employed by the enemy, since the enemy has already discovered and made full and horrifying use of some of my fellows. There is rioting in the streets of the major cities. Husbands, wives and children stamp themselves with slogans, protesting the administration turning the nation’s finest fighters into different people, bereft of the memories they hold dearest, exactly when they might make use of those memories to hold on. Too many of our people have simply died in captivity – the layperson theory being that they had nothing beloved to think of and thus no hopeful thoughts of getting out.

The layperson understands nothing. First, there is always the camaraderie. Not one of us, if trained correctly, would have simply given up for lack of love or care, because we cared for one another. Like wolf-pups, we lost our milk teeth together, fought together, fed together.

Second, there is always X. X is the one person that is left to you and is accessible. The protesters, so willing to get angry at someone for the loss of their loved ones, forget that each of us chose to join this noblest of professions, noblest of causes. It’s easier for them, no doubt. That is why they hardly ever remember to mention X in their long-winded rants. The concept of X has probably ripped some families apart – since the files were turned over to the people, they have found out who each of the dead-in-action troop’s X was. They think it’s like picking favorites.

It’s not. It’s not picking favorites. If it were, there would be a whole lot of little kids in those rosters of Xes, the sons and daughters we leave at home when we go on active duty, those angelic faces we barely get to know and whose lives we miss so much of. We don’t get to see their first implants, their first plug-ins, their first time info-drinking at school. For people like me, still living in secret facilities, we can’t even signal them because we’re cut off for all intents and purposes from the main grid.

So why aren’t there many kids on those X rosters? Because Xes are supposed to be the most vivid, incredible, memorable people you’ve ever met. They’re supposed to be a person you knew enough to know well, but who hasn’t been in your life for at least two years, and who you wish you knew more about. Why? Think about it. You can access your memories of X in the worst situation of your life – but you don’t know where they are, so you can’t put them in danger; you can keep your mind busy fantasizing about them since you didn’t get as much time with them as you wanted to; and they’re interesting enough to keep your mind busy when the rest of your pre-troop life has slipped away from you.

My X – I don’t know where she is now. But when I knew her, for the four months we dated, she had bubble-gum pink hair. I never knew anyone else who went for something so old-fashioned as dyeing their hair like she did, with this vintage bottled stuff. She had mostly her own skin and it was the softest I’d ever touched. It glowed in the moonlight. She never danced and she got angry a hell of a lot. Whenever we went out, she would check to make sure no one was looking at us and then she would hold me tighter than anyone else ever had and would tell me “You’re so smart.” And then she went away to some commune where skin-people live and I never saw her again. And I hope I never will, cause I don’t know anyone else who could be as good an X as she is.

Jonah and the Cat [Short Story]

Jonah curled up in the closet, the smell of his father’s work clothes wrapped around him. It wasn’t as good as having his pacifier back, but it was the next best thing. Ima had said he was too old for the pacifier, the motzetz, but Jonah didn’t think so. If there were things he was going to get too old for, then he didn’t want to get any older.

He’d gotten the idea of curling up in here from the stray cat that sometimes wandered into their house. Where they lived, the cats always sat on everybody’s window sills, begging for food, and most people shooed them away – “Kishta!” they’d say, making ugly faces. “Go away! Get out of here!” – but some, like Jonah’s father, had a soft spot for the flea-bitten, scarred-up street warriors that had such pathetic sounding mewls. Once, Jonah’s father had let him feed the one-eyed tabby that sat on the shelf outside the kitchen window, where Ima’s plants were. “Aba,” Jonah had whispered, so the cat wouldn’t run away, “Aba, why does it come back after Ima says kishta?” Jonah’s father had said that cats had chutzpah, that’s why. After they’d fed it, and Jonah was pretending to read the newspaper with his father, he saw the cat slink in through the open window. It sat down, right in the middle of the living room floor, stuck out a leg, and started licking it. Jonah tried not to giggle because he didn’t want his father noticing. So he said that he had to go peepee and slid off the couch.

The cat led him to his parents bedroom. It looked at Jonah. It looked at the closet doors. It looked at Jonah. It opened its mouth and made a soundless meow, really as if it knew that Jonah was in on its secret and was trying to keep it from being discovered too. So Jonah opened the closet door and the cat slid right in and settled on his father’s work clothes – big, baggy cargo pants and long-sleeved light-cotton shirts. He was a construction worker, and his clothes all had lots of stains on them, so maybe, Jonah thought, he would never know that the cat had been there.

When his mother had taken his motzetz away, thrown it right in the trash – right in front of his eyes! – Jonah had screamed for as long as he could. His father wasn’t home, though, so this didn’t work. He should have thought of that, but he wasn’t thinking very straight, really, because he was so upset to see the little rubber nipple that calmed him down and helped him sleep when he didn’t want to go to sleep going into the trash with the leftover salad from lunch and the gross used containers of yogurt that his mother was always eating and everything else they’d thrown away since the last time the garbage bags were changed.

His mother didn’t seem to even hear him screaming. She just shrugged her shoulders and turned around and started washing the dishes in the sink. She always told Jonah’s father, even when Jonah was right there, that they paid too much attention to Jonah and that he could do things on his own because he was a big boy now. Jonah didn’t feel like a big boy, and now he knew he never wanted to be one either. Could a big boy fit inside the closet like this? He didn’t think so. The only big boys he knew were mean to him, and he didn’t like that either. If he did have to grow up, he wouldn’t be mean to people. He would be more like his father, nice and funny and smell good. His clothes, even though they were all clean, still smelled like a him and the construction sites he worked on. They smelled a little like sweat, dust, heat and sunlight.

“Jonah? Jonah? Where are you? Jonah! This isn’t funny, come out. Now. Now!” Jonah heard his mother calling him, and her voice kept changing tones, from angry to nice to angry again. It was very hard for him not to shout “Ima!” and run out of the closet and hug her. Because he loved his Ima, of course. She read him bedtime stories every night and she walked to kindergarten with him every morning. But he didn’t want to come out yet because he was angry at her. She’d been mean to him and had thrown away his pacifier and he wasn’t ready to forgive her for that yet.

Once, she got dangerously close to his hiding place in the closet, but she didn’t even think of looking in there. Jonah needed to be very careful not to giggle or meow or anything when she walked near him. As she walked away and he heard her start crying a little bit, he started counting backwards from ten – which he knew how to do – but slowly. Only when he got to zero would he come out. And he wouldn’t tell her where he’d been hiding. It would be his secret. Well, and the cat’s.

Outage [Flash Fiction]

The heat was really too unbearable. Everyone knew that there were going to be power outages during the summer, but that didn’t make them any less inconvenient when they did come. Nadia and her parents had read about the planned blackouts in the papers, back in June, but they thought it wouldn’t happen this far north in the country, where the houses weren’t as dense as down by the coast and the weather wasn’t as hot as in the desert.

Just an hour ago, Nadia had turned down an invitation from her friends, one of whom was rich and had both her driver’s licence and a brand new hybrid car that was much too big and awkward for her, to go and see a movie in the city. She didn’t really like her friends that summer. They struck her as dull, when she didn’t see them at school every day. They had nothing interesting to say, and she didn’t have anything interesting to tell them. Nothing ever happened to anyone here.

But now that the electricity was off and the air conditioning wasn’t blasting out its lovely spurts of cool air, now that the windows were thrown open wide to the summer insects, now that Nadia was lying on her bed and feeling her limbs fusing to the bed-sheets with the sticky sweat slowly seeping out of her pores, now she wished she’d gone with her friends. She could have been sitting in a dark, air conditioned movie theater now, watching either Spiderman or Batman – she couldn’t remember which film they’d gone to see – take on formidable enemies.

She lifted her arms experimentally, wondering whether they would feel better or worse when pried away from the bed. There was a moment of relief as the sweat cooled in the breath of wind caused by her arms’ own movement, but after that – nothing. The air was eerily still. Not for the first time, she tried to see the reasoning for her parents’ decision to move here, to this godforsaken and god-beloved country.

Staring at the ceiling, letting her arms thump down heavily beside her, Nadia marveled at her capacity for doing nothing. She was usually a pretty busy person – she was part of a girl’s basketball team during the school year, even though nobody really took it that seriously, and she had Scouts meetings twice a week with her friends, even though she hated how wide the uniform made her hips look. She usually went out drinking on the weekends, where her friends and classmates admired her for her constitution and strong stomach; she would always smile at them, pull at her hair and say modestly, “Genes.”

Over the long summer months, though, these activities dwindled and, finally, disappeared. Scouts ended after the big camping event in early July, basketball had finished a month before that, and everybody who drank together had gotten so bored with each other that they’d found pretenses for fighting with one another and creating Drama that would be smoothed over at the start of the school year, when they all had to get along again in the classroom.

At first, Nadia had tried to keep herself busy, meeting friends as often as she could. When she’d gotten sick of them, she tried rediscovering her parents, remembering how, when she was a little girl, she’d been content to spend hours doing what they were doing, following them around like a little duckling. That didn’t work anymore, though. For one thing, it drove her crazy how often they spoke Russian with one another.

They’d never bothered teaching it to her, thinking that it was no good for her to learn the language of the Old Country. She learned, haltingly from them and then fluidly in kindergarten, how to speak the language of their adoptive home. She toyed with the idea of learning Russian now and reading the fat classics by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that her father lovingly dusted off every week, but she gave it up when she realized how hard it would be and how vulnerable it would make her to her mother’s braying laughter.

Soon enough, she’d given up on being busy and took to her room, where she discovered her incredible powers for thinking, for hours at a time, about everything. She thought about her body – listened to the blood in her veins and her ears and learned to feel it pumping in between her toes. She thought about her soul and decided that if she had one, it was wound up tightly, like a ball of thick yarn, and that every time she fell in love it would unwind and give a bit of itself to the person she fell in love with. She thought about poor people and sick people and sad people and then stopped because it made tears leak out of her eyes unexpectedly. She thought about what would happen if she could walk on the ceiling or turn into liquid and crawl under doors.

A loud hum announced the power coming back and the printer in the other room made a loud sound as it turned itself on, creaking and groaning. Nadia didn’t move. She waited for the cold air to chill her sweat so that she could think about how that felt for a while.

My First Second

   I typed these words: “…vivid enough to be sure of.” I stared at my computer screen. The undersized keyboard on my too-small laptop sat beneath my fingers, silent. People tell me that I type extremely loudly, banging each key violently, even when I’m perfectly calm. I’ve tried blaming my computer – but then they hand over their own laptops or keyboards and I try typing and the banging sound resumes. Clearly, it’s me. I hammer out words with a fervor that doesn’t often suit my mood and that isn’t healthy for the machines I use or for my wallet. A wallet which, if I continue to pursue the path of my chosen profession, will probably not fatten with big bills or numerous credit cards. I should really give my poor keyboards a break.
   I digress. Those words, that are vivid enough in my mind to be quite certain of now, were the final words of the last sentence of Chapter Fifty. I didn’t plan it that way, but I ended on a nice, round number like that. Fifty. It’s satisfying, that number. It feels very complete.
   **
   I wrote the first draft starting at the end of January, 2011, and finished it almost exactly a year ago, at the end of August, 2011. I tried reading it about a week after I had written the last page, unsatisfied and knowing that there was so much more that needed to be changed, inserted, taken out and neatened. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t read it. It reeked of my own foul stench, as if I’d secreted my body odor into it.
   Worse than that, though – it was boring. I tried reading that draft more than once during the months that followed. Every time I picked the thing up, I was astonished at how basely dull it was. There was no there there. There was no essence, no feeling, no emotion – it was a string of words with periods and commas more or less where they should be, dashes and semicolons peppered in for variety. Sure, the sentences were well formed enough. They were understandable. No one would be confused as to the meaning of “Amanda felt” so and so or of “Dan said” thus to some other person.
   But beneath the disgust, beneath the boredom, there was a gut feeling that told me that I would be back. There was a knowledge that these characters and their story were too important to me, as small as their lives are, because ultimately I believe in the importance of small lives. I cannot contain the vastness of humanity – I often talk with disdain about how “all politicians” are like this, or how “people are so stupid” sometimes. But I know that these words are ways for me to deal with the everyday – ways for me to be able to live and breathe and put one foot in front of the other. Because if I gave in to one of my biggest wishes – to try and empathize with everybody, all the time – I would lose myself and I would go mad. Nobody can contain so much of the world. As George Eliot wisely wrote in Middlemarch:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

**
   I was right. At the end of the best school year I have ever had, having finished my sophomore year and said goodbye to my friends at my college in the US in preparation for spending the year abroad at Oxford University in England, I was finally ready. I read the first draft of the nameless novel, one of the four I have written, and dedicated my summer to writing my first second draft.
   And now, after two months and nine days, I have finished. I’ve eliminated a lot of expository information that I needed by a potential reader wouldn’t. I’ve gotten rid of my bad habit of overusing adverbs – although I also don’t believe that they’re anathema and allow them to remain here and there, when they’re useful and don’t sound glaringly obnoxious. I’ve changed the race of one character and the sexual orientation of another because they both told me to. I’ve changed the names of minor characters because there were too many similar names with the letter “M” in them.
   It may take another few months before I’m able to read the second draft. But meanwhile, hopefully, some of my friends and loved ones will be willing to read this draft – which is, I am positive, superior by far to the first – and will be able to give me some notes to guide me in my next draft.
   And meanwhile I will also be able to hang around this place again, sweep out the dust and cobwebs, and hopefully get some good, fun, flash fiction and experimental practice writing going.

Photo Oomph [Flash Fiction]

“Your voice makes me think of sex,” I told him right after he introduced himself as Thomas, the guy I was supposed to be meeting. It was the year that I’d decided being honest was the best thing to be under all circumstances.
“Oh no, I’m going to kill Vic’… I hate to break it to you, love, but I’m gay.”
“I know, don’t kill Vicky, she’s a sweetheart.”
“But you just-”
“I wasn’t coming onto you. You just have a good voice.”
That was how Thomas and I met. He still says that he’s never been so turned on by another woman as he was by me telling him that his voice made me think of sex. But it did, and it still does. It makes it difficult when he brings guys home and I’m in my room with the lights off and nothing but his dirty talk and my insomnia keeping me company. The walls are too thin in our apartment.
It’s a good thing that Vicky warned me before I met him to watch out for my heart. I would have fallen for him for sure. As it is, I’ve fallen for my boss round the pub, which isn’t a much better choice since he’s married and twenty years older than me. But he’s a flirt, and he’s told me more than once, when he’s had one too many with the lads – “It’s good for business, drinkin’ with the customers, but don’t you ever dare do it,” he always tells me – he’s told me that he’d fancy me in a second if he wasn’t wrapped around his wife’s little finger.
Just look at me. I sound like one of those sad cases on the telly, those girls who are all moaning about the men who don’t fancy them anymore. That’s not what I’m about. My life isn’t about the lads I fancy, nor about the ones I bring round from the pub when I’m feeling lonely and need someone to distract me from Thomas’s voice.
What’s my life about, then? I take pictures. That’s what I do when I’m not working or out having fun with Thomas and the rest of the gang. I photograph people around the city. Just people. Anyone, really. My mum thinks I’m crazy, and dad thinks that I’m wasting everything I learned in art school.
I used to paint, see. I still can do, I suppose, but it doesn’t give me that feeling, you know the one, that oomph down in the pit of your stomach where everything goes when you’re terrified or extra happy. Remember when you first went really high on the swings as a little kid? Your mum or dad or big brother were pushing you and you wanted them to stop, and maybe you even told them so, but they ignored you and kept pushing you higher and higher and your little hands were holding on so tight that later they stank of metal for hours. And then, when you were so high that you were getting dizzy just thinking about it, you came back down and your belly came right up into your heart. Even though you didn’t know anything about biology, you knew that shouldn’t be happening, your stomach shouldn’t be moving up to where it did, and it felt like it was being tugged with a bit of string, yanked really, and it was so weird but also felt good. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what taking pictures feels like.
Not always, obviously. But when I get one right, it feels just like that.
This morning I got one right, for instance. It was the best thing I photographed all month. It’s a woman feeding a bunch of squirrels in the park. She’s sitting there, not on a bench or anything, just on some of the grass that isn’t wet anymore now that the sun is finally making an appearance, and she’s got this vat of popcorn in her lap. There are squirrels all around her. It’s strange. I still don’t know if she was bonkers or homeless or both or neither because I stayed far away so that I wouldn’t scare the squirrels. They were around her in a circle and they kept running forward, right onto her lap sometimes, to take some popcorn. Then they’d run away and eat it with their back to her.
In the picture I took, though, she’s eating some of it herself. All these squirrels, some stealing the stuff right from that cardboard bucket she was holding, and she takes this fistful of white popcorn and stuffs it into her own mouth. Like she was starving or something. It made my stomach go oomph, all right.