Month: October 2019

On those days that neither of us felt like living, we bought candy cigarettes and Twinkies, drank soda until our eyes swam rheumy, feet dangling over the wooden bridge edge, promising each other we’d be the first to jump, that the one left high above would watch the other until we no longer struggled against the mild current. “Look for the air bubbles,” you said, hands pulling out your ponytail for the eighth time that morning. Thirteen, but so small, I knew you’d never even make a splash, a dragonfly finally landing, coasting down the river, the fallen queen of a Coors light box. I played along because I’d let you get away with anything, even death.

I promised I wouldn’t follow, that I’d have to stay alive, because the people would demand a witness. Sure, they’d blame me, but you thought I was strong enough to take it. The accusations, the threats, the whispers and the stares, the way adults would look at me sideways, wondering. “You’ll be famous, Gavin. Famous is always better than dead.”

I promised I wouldn’t love you either, that I wouldn’t keep the strings of hair I cut away the time we got lost in the woods, the ratty strands caught on a gasping tree limb, the one we thought had come alive for those frightful five seconds. You hugging yourself, elbows rubbed raw from cutting our own trail, you swearing the river road was just around the next hill. The little dot of blood on your cheek, a dollop of frosting I couldn’t resist.

“If you’re gonna kiss me, you better do it now. I can’t escape or nothing.”

“Let me just get my knife,” I said, because even though your words said yes, I knew you really meant no.

“We agreed it had to be the river.”

“I’m just cutting you loose, Candy,” I said. Maybe even then I knew, goosebumps and that waving in and out feeling creeping over my back, the way you feel when a VCR tape ended and the screen went all scrambly like you were the last person on Earth.

The day it happened, the day you didn’t float, the day you didn’t wait for me, the sheriff showed up at my door. I’ll admit, for once, I wasn’t thinking about you. Your crooked smile with those bucky rabbit teeth, the way your knees turned in toward one another, how your breath always smelled like a Jolly Rancher baking in the sun. No, I was playing Sonic, battling my way into the Metropolis level, thumbs aching from pressing so hard on the controller, caught up in the blur of colors, collecting rings.

They sat me down in the living room, my mother wadding up her robe in her hands, not even apologizing for the state of our house, the fact that she hadn’t gotten dressed yet, the bowls of half-eaten cereal, the milk gray and warming.

After the sheriff cleared his throat for about the tenth time, I said, “I was supposed to be there.”

“Where, son?”

“At the river. That’s what this is about, right? Tell me Candy sent you. Tell me it’s a joke.” My voice cracked, and I remembered the way she used to mock me, her own voice going higher and higher until I laughed, pushing her shoulder away, because I couldn’t handle being so close.

“Honey, there’s been an accident,” my mother said.

“You can do better than that, Mom,” I said, bouncing up, feet pointed toward the kitchen.

“Gavin,” the man said, chewing on my name like a popcorn kernel stuck in his teeth. “We need to talk about Candy.”

“If you’d just go get her,” I started, but my mom’s hand was on the back of my neck, and the sheriff looked away.

“I should hit you,” I whispered, but the man didn’t move, didn’t reach for his gun, wouldn’t even look at my face.

If it had been a joke, you would have begged him for more flair. He would have waved you away, citing regulations about unholstering his gun. His resolve though wouldn’t have lasted more than a minute. Your tilted eyebrows would have said it all. I know you’ve already fallen in love with me, so do this one thing for me.

But love never guaranteed breathing or floating or safety or pride in being alive or the last second remembrance of your voice, all gone like the last drop of water circling the rim of a drain. Your name mentioned every night after supper, my children innocently asking for a little reward for eating a third of their food. Candy, they whisper, or laugh or rage, or shout. And a little of your fame flames up in a story my wife has forbidden me to tell.

Tommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. He is the Flash Fiction Section Editor at Craft Literary. He has been previously published in BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. His story “You’ve Stopped” was chosen by Dan Chaon to be included in Best Microfiction 2019. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.

Her caseworker has decided Gran needs to be in a potato-free zone. No potatoes, no tomatoes, no eggplant. Gran was never mad for eggplant, and tomatoes she only liked if they were the big drippy summer ones, not the bloodless things they put in salads here, but how can you keep an Irish girl from her potatoes?

They’re all nightshades, the caseworker says. Cause inflammation. You watch, she’ll be walking again.

I looked up nightshades and something came up saying deadly nightshade, so who knows? Then I fell into a Google hole of tomatoes being love apples and how people thought one bite would kill you, like Snow White, and how strange that they would mix love with poison, but then I thought about Josh and it didn’t seem strange after all.

But I don’t think Gran’s arthritic because she likes potatoes, nightshades or no. She’s 97 years old. She outlived two sons. She’s Gran to everyone, me and Mom and Nana, but she’s my great-grandmother and she’ll have a great-great grandchild soon, if my brother’s girlfriend doesn’t change her mind. Gran lived on her own until her fall, still cooking on her old double oven. Now she’s in this bland, eggshell-colored room, fragile as an egg herself.

We’ve tried to cheer it up with cushy pillows and flowers. There’s an old photo of Gran we keep on the particle-board dresser so the aides know she was a woman to be reckoned with once. It’s my favorite picture of her. She lies in tall grass, her face holding every mystery. Bedroom eyes. She’s looking up at someone. Is it Grandpa? Or her dog, watching over her? A good man is hard to find, but a good dog is everything. The field she’s in is spiky, unmowed, but there she is in a skirt, not a bit itchy or bothered. Her stripes lay flat, as mine never do. She lived in a time when people ironed. My surprise when I opened the fridge to find her skirt in it, damp and smelling like pie crust. Skirts were sprinkled. Shirts starched. Nana had given her an iron that did all that, but Gran said gadgets couldn’t make proper pleats. Grandpa was a sharp dresser, she told me once, approvingly. As if that was all I needed to know about him. His plane was lost in the war, so that really is all I know. Gran was good in a crisis: two in diapers and a bun in the oven but she carried on as postmistress, air raid warden, all the things that people needed desperately once. Can she remember any of it?

She forgets my name sometimes. Calls me Gertie, one of those names no one has anymore, and I can’t think of any aunt or cousin with that name, so maybe she was a friend. Someone Gran shared secrets with, before she was Gran. Maybe Gertie was a mess of a girl like me, stripes never lying flat, lipstick too red, no better than she ought to be, as they said in the day. Whoever Gertie was, she’s the kind of friend who never forgets the potatoes. When I visit, Gran’s already reaching for the insulated bag.

“Baked tonight?”

“Mash. Extra butter and cream.”

“Ah, you’re a good egg, Gert.”

And if that caseworker gives me the stink eye, I just stare right back in her face. There’s a certain point at which people shouldn’t have anything else taken away from them. When Josh blocked my number I cried and Gran said, Don’t be an idiot, girl: I’ve lost more than you ever will.

Kathryn Kulpa is a flash fiction editor at Cleaver magazine. She was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash collection Girls on Film. Her work is published or forthcoming in Pidgeonholes, Smokelong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, and Milk Candy Review.

Requiem

My father and I dream in sync one night. A woman in a black cloak, hooded, is chasing each of us down a dirt hill. There are crows and a full moon in the dream. The crows fly out of the cloaked woman’s mouth and scatter. The next morning over oatmeal, we talk over each other, each trying to tell my mother about the dream. My father says he doesn’t remember the crows and the moon. I tell him he must not have been paying attention, because they were there.

Gun Shy

My husband pulls up one day with a black dog leaning against him in the cab. That’s the spot where I normally sit, one hand resting on my husband’s leg, ticking off the stops we have to make—Orscheln’s for chicken feed, Dr. Grismann’s to get my stitches out (another story for another day), Country Mart for milk and shoulder pork on sale for $1.99/pound. This big black dog looks like she’s always sat next to my husband. She is sweet, gentle, eager to please. He says he’s going to take her out, test her, see if she’s gun shy. She sleeps between us every night, kicking out in her dreams, retrieving felled pheasants and doves.

8mm Home Movie From The Eighties

Fade in: Another girl’s red and gold cowboy boots. What she looks like doesn’t matter, so keep that camera on her feet. Cut to Scene: I tackle her after school, pinning her to the gravel with my knees. Unzip those boots thisfast and zip them up over my own chubby calves thisfast.  Take off into the bean field behind the school licketysplit. Maybe then she’ll want to be my friend and invite me for sleep-overs. Dissolve to Scene: We’ll make Totino’s Pizza Rolls. Pretend we don’t listen at the door as we each use the bathroom at bedtime. Pinky swear we’ll walk those high school halls together every day until we either graduate or one of us gets a boyfriend. Zoom! Fade out. Cue credits.

Look Me In The Eye

My father tells me I need to toughen up, that we’re going deer hunting. We follow a creek bed that opens up into a small field of bluestem. We are downwind from a doe he spots. I have already been warned the shot will be loud. I am ready for it, braced to the dirt, toilet paper stuffed in my ears earlier when he wasn’t looking. The doe looks up. We lock eyes. I don’t want her to leave me. I scream, still rooted to the dirt. My father startles, firing into the air. I scream louder. The doe pivots and disappears up and over a hill. He looks down at me, hand half raised in the November cold. “Jesus Christ, you’re worthless.”

Little Bear, Fierce Bear

My mother draws the curtains closed. “Stay away from that window. Bad storm’s comin’.” I throw a blanket over my head, clutching it under my chin, and tell myself stories. I am a frontier woman. A grieving widow in black lace. A flushed-cheek baby, face tucked under my hoodie, squinting against the gales. The house creaks on its foundation. The cottonwood beyond the front porch sways, throwing tentacles across the walls. The tentacles grow faces, growling, grabbing at my arms and legs, grasping at my blanket. I will myself into a bear, a huge bear, a fierce and snarling grizzly, and rip that tree limb by limb.

Genesis

Blue. Blue buildings, blue sidewalks, blue potted trees on each street corner. A blue giraffe with a paisley scarf wrapped around and around and around its neck waits next to me at a crosswalk. It stares straight ahead, waiting for the light to change. I’m already guessing the light will be blue, but maybe a softer shade, like a pale cornflower or a duck egg. Once, I dreamed a shadowy figure was chasing me down a hill. A human, though. Not this giraffe. This giraffe seems like it would be jovial, doing shots off its own belly, if we were at a party together. A doctor tells me my headaches are from the boy growing inside of me.

L Mari Harris lives in Nebraska, where she works as a copywriter. Follow her on Twitter @LMariHarris and read more of her work at http://www.lmariharris.wordpress.com.