Category: Flash Fiction

Today I ordered towels. And I did a lot of worrying. It’s what I do best. Practice makes perfect, as my mother used to say.

I wasn’t worried about the towels. (That’s a lie – I was concerned that they were going to be rougher than described). I was concerned about the state of the world. But since there’s little I can do about that, and there’s a lot I can do about frayed bath towels, I ordered fresh ones. And it felt great to fix a problem.

I have a friend who likes to order candles. Not for lighting, but mood. To me this seems out of hand. But she says she finds it a consolation; and the endless choice of scents, a diversion. So who am I to judge?…

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In the infancy of humankind, during the age in which our ancestors struggled against not only each other, but other equally fearsome beasts, the most important discovery came from the hands of a woman. She was called Zar, and through much trial and error, she learned how to start and nurse a small flame into a healthy blaze with only sticks and her hands, which no one had ever seen. She was a proto-Prometheus, stealing from gods that had not yet been named. Her partner, Qoh, often entertained the group with his own accompanying talent: the singing of stories. As they felt the heat of Zar’s fire radiating through their bones and sinew amid the icy chill, the weary crowd would listen enraptured as Qoh sang tall tales like this:

“Long ago, before even our fathers walked the earth, there was a Man.…

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He doesn’t know it but I can hear him singing along to Backstreet Boys’ ‘Everybody’ with his friends from work, their voices screeching like fingers on a blackboard. That’s my go-to karaoke song and my friend and I were once kicked out of a bar on Admiralty way because we threw up on the microphone mid-performance. That’s an anecdote I’d share if he ever invited me up. I’m sure he’d find it hilarious but I guess he’ll never know.

‘You know what time it is?’ I hear him say.The others mimic a drum roll on the railings and someone must be holding a spliff because ash falls on my face, right into my eyes. I cannot make a sound lest they look down and see me so I take a few steps back, rubbing my eyes.…

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We made something almost beautiful in that ugly squealing way life tends to compound and burst forth, our commingled bodies oven-baked from the shitty space heater in my Daddy’s trailer, your teaspoon-of-sugar skin gone rhubarb in cloudbursts of blush, and I coulda stared at your smile forever, slackened  in sweat, and I swear I said it, that baby girl I could never love like I loved you then, window panes rattling ice dams from the thin tin roof, and in those moments the world was wiped clean, no poor-as-dirt in a mobile home park of concrete at the edge of a putrefying carcass they called a city, no walls smokestained chartreuse aside from the blank white imprint where Momma’s crucifix fell, and when my tongue touched your teeth I was sure I could see it, that blitzing ephemera of our lives as one spreadeagle across the pleasure-blanked synapses of my brain: you, drunk giggling in the bathtub, and you pregnant, your belly like ripened cantaloupe and perhaps you drunk and pregnant but Momma always told me one or two couldn’t do all that much hurt and we’d have a little tract house on the prairie out west subsected into some newborn development of skinny plaster and stock windows and it would be simply Hallmark, and in those days you would smile all the time, at little things and nothing at all and maybe it would always smell of a leak from the gas stove and maybe the neighborhood would be built at the edge of man’s intended lands, little boxes pictographed onto the floor of a front range hung against the moon like broken bones but Christ how happy would we be, even with all of the hooves humming against the earth, herds in migration, and when I became Daddy I could have the privilege of knowing things and teaching them and I’d tell our son about the Roosevelt elk that once called our home their own, and I’d tell him to be so very careful because their daddys have antlers tall as avalanches and strong as redwoods, and Christ how happy would we be, my Daddy and Momma tucked away in the soft earth where they could talk to their God all they wanted, interred alongside all those ghosts of cousins and uncles they couldn’t stand and couldn’t stand to be apart from, and I whispered all of these small fictions to you from beneath the tent of my polyester bedsheets and we looked up through the cigarette burn holes in them and imagined the star-speckled sky we’d lie beneath in our new home and you kissed me with your vodka and spearmint tongue and as my hand navigated the swell of your compact tummy I swore I could feel his breath against my palm and
and and and
when a month later I followed the blood trail from the bathroom out to the snow, where you wailed and filled your mouth with ice to numb away the screams, I looked up but couldn’t find any stars, blotted out by wheeze of smokestacks and muffled by outpouring of light pollution and I wouldn’t believe it, no no no, what good would it do for us and I knew sometimes that stomachs just ache, sometimes stomachs ache so bad you can’t walk for days, and I’d tell you women used to walk across the broken land bridges barefoot to carry their futures forward and you’d ask what about their coward lovers, were they as utterly fucking useless as me and your agony screams rattled the vanity mirror crooked and the bathtub water went lukewarm and old rose red and
and and and
most days you wept for the child I was and the man our child would never get to be and most days I drank Daddy’s whiskey and watched nature documentaries and home remodeling shows on the teevee, red dogs in the morning and shattered drywall in the evening and when that night I woke on the couch and followed the blood trail, I promise I could see it clear as I saw your face that first bonfire where I met you, shadow shaped by the framing of a light so honest and alluring it felt indisputable, and I promise you each droplet was not a pilot light of loss but a hoof mark pressed into the soft of the snowdrifts, and as you wept for what would never be, I could see him there along the treeline at the edge of our gravel yard where the trailers thin out, and baby girl, if you looked up, if you could rub the raw and red from your eyes perhaps you’d see him too, tall as prefabricated home, our little Roosevelt elk with antlers sharp as the way our own bodies intersected and maybe we can love hard enough to burn holes in the sky for him that look like stars if you squint just right.…

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I saw the Plague Doctor three times before she came for me. The first time I was only a girl of two or three, mortality a vague pressure lurking over the next horizon, and so my father passed the Doctor off as a fun animal friend. The long beak, glass goggles, and large hat the accoutrements of an imposing but ultimately caring character from a book he had read as a child and swore that he had shared with me. The look of horror that my grandfather gave to my father at my grandmother’s funeral when I asked him whether he too liked the book about the Plague Doctor surely is a false memory, my adult disgust at my father’s strategy displaced onto another authority figure.…

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Many years ago, my mother took me to a museum to see dinosaurs for the first time. It was a last-minute thing. She called it a mother and son day. We’d never had one before. I was nine years old. That morning her blue eyes were puffy and red. Her face pale, drawn, preoccupied.

I was glad to get out of our house, away from my father. He was a snoring heap on the living room sofa when we left. Still wearing the same faded black t-shirt and grungy jeans as the day before. Cradling an empty Skol bottle in his tattooed forearms. He’d had one of those kinds of nights again. Only worse.

My mother and I stood before the colossal bones of Tyrannosaurus rex.…

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I need to find a sex worker bad. It’s not for me, I promise you; it’s for a friend. My partner, Rupert. Mr. Fluffernutter, if you’re nasty, which in this case wouldn’t be a bad thing.

He’s been a little off lately, and I believe I know why. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. He just needs a little female… gaze? Perspective? Wait, I got it—audience—to get him out of his funk. We tend to perform for the rougher sex, and there’s little joy in Broville.

I’m finding that there’s a huge chasm between needing a sex worker and finding one. I miss the time when you could stroll Hollywood Boulevard and run into a Julia Roberts, Melanie Griffith, or Laura San Giacomo. Them were the good ole days when affordable, attractive prostitutes were on every corner.…

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