Month: May 2020

The wife is drying her hands on a yellow towel in the kitchen, some blood getting on it from her dry skin. The husband is watching television in the room over, loudly complaining about liberals. There’s darkness in the house that is not stopping. It’s always like this at home. This lack of light and everything else that goes on. It is unbearable, but they like to stay.

She’s still drying her hands. She’s staring through into the next room, watching him. Briefly, a fantasy is replayed in her head: how they lived earlier in life, in a better home. Where there were no yellow towels, especially. He used to be skinnier and they would fuck every day. Not anymore. She finally looked down at the towel and saw the blood, throws it lamely onto the counter. Her hands were pulsating a bit. Maybe this is why it’s different, she thought, because I’m not as soft and tender as I used to be. Perhaps she would go show him, remind him about tenderness and the previous world they had.

She walked into the living room slowly, him aglow in electronic static – on a throne, it seemed. Once open-minded, he is now obstinate and enjoys drinking too much. Very slowly, she comes up behind him.

“Honey,” she said slowly, rubbing his shoulders.

He doesn’t turn away from the program. “What’s up?”

She looks back to the kitchen. “Do you remember when we used to all sorts of things?”

“What?”

“All sorts of things,” she said, trailing off.

He doesn’t seem to understand the vague question, so he ignored it and focuses harder on the television. It may not be the right time, she thinks to herself. She sighs and turns to go, but notices that on the table next to him, his pint glass is almost empty. He burps absent-mindedly as if to confirm this.

“Let me get you another beer,” she said.

He starts going off about the Green New Deal, as if she was the one who wrote it.

What goes on at home isn’t anyone else’s business, but she wants to make it other people’s business. Friends wonder why they don’t come out. It’s because there’s this. This entire batch of nothing that goes on endlessly like water.

She comes back to the living room with a fresh beer. She leaves it on the table and walks past him to the stairwell, thinking it might be time to take a shower or read.

“What is this?”

She sees him inspecting the glass like he’s a restaurant manager.

“Why is there blood on this glass?”

She looked down at her hands. They still pulsated a bit. They were dry and they were a part of the darkness.

He looked up at her. “Can you get me another one, please? This is disgusting.”

This didn’t happen years ago. He got his own. She didn’t have bad hands. They lived in a better home. They had better everything, more light to use, less stress and way more chances to do incredible things. But now, it came down to things like this. They shared their bodies, spit and blood before, but this was too much for him, it seemed. She glanced – she saw some streaks and spots, blotches and symbols.

“I’m sorry,” she said, coming back down.

“What’s going on?” He said, putting the glass down on the table. “Are you hurt?”

“No, forget it,” she said, temporarily in the glow of the television like some alien being. “I’ll get another one.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just sits paralyzed. She walked past him and went back into the kitchen. Here was the same darkness, the same coating, where all of it mixed. She stood frozen for a bit, looking at the floor, the wall. Maybe this was a test or a new game, she thought. She gets another glass, transfers the beer. What goes on here at this home probably happens at other homes or doesn’t happen at other homes, she thinks. She sees the towel on the counter, yellow and red. 

He is still in the living room, yelling about liberals. It’s enough to wake up the whole room, the whole world of theirs.

She starts to wipe the glass off with the towel, but instead stops. She pours the beer from the new one back into the original one. She takes it back out to him and can feel an energy shooting through her, one that was akin to how she felt back when she was soft and tender, years ago.

“Drink up, honey,” she said.

He stared at her. “I don’t get what – ”

“This television is filthy and dusty,” she said in a weird lilt. “Let me clean it quick, okay?”

He doesn’t know what to say. She starts wiping the television screen with the bloody towel. Huge smeary arcs paste themselves onto the screen, red and pixelated. She wipes the corners and the base and the entertainment stand. A large swath of blood presents itself far and wide as the news cuts to a commercial. There’s people smiling and talking through it.

She takes a step back, proud of her work.

“Honey,” he said finally, unsure and frightened.

“I’ve never felt better,” she said. “This home just needed a good cleaning.”

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You know I’m allergic to legumes, my husband says every time I offer him a steaming bowl of soup. My seven-year old parrots her daddy’s words. She’s her daddy’s daughter just like I was my daddy’s girl.

Time stops every Friday at exactly 5:38 p.m. By now, I’ve realized that shaking the clocks or even changing their batteries won’t push forward the minutes or the seconds of the hour. In the kitchen I steal a look at the wall clock and feign indifference. Right now-I tell myself, I’m preoccupied with the aroma of my nicely simmering lentil soup—a childhood staple refused by everyone in this house.

Daddy liked his lentils hot hot hot. Tongue-biting hot. Chili powder, curry, and cumin did the trick, but too much or too little killed the magic of those rare Friday sit downs at the dinner table. Mother never liked daddy or his lentils. They’re like forest fires burning what’s left of me, she used to say.

The cat meows right outside the kitchen door, he’s like a fickle ghost, sometimes really there, sometimes not.  I pour some soup and go to the cat, but I’m not sure the ghost cat should have it. Maybe no one should have it. I make a detour and head to the living room. I tiptoe barefoot like a nervous dancer. The tiles are cold, cold, cold.

I blink a couple of times in the darkness lit by the glow of the 55 inch flat smart TV. I squint real hard to make out the face in the plaid orange and red pajamas. My girl’s sleepy frame sits in the nook of those arms belonging to the face in the plaid orange and red pajamas. The sofa they’re occupying is an inflamed shade of red I never approved of.

In my memories our sofa had a chronic dusty brown kind of color, facing a much smaller and not so smart television with the face in the pajamas slurping my mother’s hot soup.

I take a deep breath. Today is a good day, I tell myself.  TODAY IS A GOOD DAY. I insist.

“Dinner’s ready yet, Hon?”  The face asks.  I wonder if my little girl will forgive me if one day we all sit down in the kitchen with the dead clock and have lentil soup…If one day my fantasies come true and the face I see now that is her father and my husband is in love with my soup so much, he drinks it all in one go.

Mother said it was the damn lentils that killed him. She didn’t really say damn, and she’d never really dare mention the lentils, I did that. I forgive you, I wanted to say so many times when it was her time to go, but did I?

“Hon? Dinner? It’s about time.” Husband turns to me, eyes on the bowl of soup in my hands.

“Not yet.” I say.

The ghost cat should have the soup instead.

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Riham Adly is a fiction writer/ translator from Egypt. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review, Flash Back, Vestal Review, The Connotation Press, Bending Genres, New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Frontier, and Ellipsis zine among others. Her stories have received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her work was also chosen for inclusion in the Best Microfiction 2020.

The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents makes house calls. She will come to your mom and dad’s. They’ll be waiting for her on the other side of the front door like they used to wait for trick-or-treaters on Halloween. They will think she looks professional in her cardigan, so they’ll have no problem leading her up to your old bedroom. Your dad will offer tea or coffee, maybe water with a lemon slice, but she’ll decline. The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents won’t want to risk damage to the collection by bringing in unneeded liquids. This will make her seem even more professional. Your dad will smile at her, noticing how her sweater hangs like parentheses for her breasts. Your mom will smile at her, noticing she isn’t much older than you are now.

The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents told you it’s probably better if you’re not around when she comes to collect your materials. She said sometimes in the middle of a pack out—that’s what she called it, a pack out—the patron gets overwhelmed. She said the documents are already vulnerable. She treats them like they’re already damaged. She said she doesn’t want you to compromise the collection.

The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents will start with the lunch box under your bed. It’s full of notes from your best friend from middle school, notes passed in the hall between classes, under desks in Language Arts. You saved them even though you stopped being friends after she made the field hockey team in tenth grade. They’re written in sparkly purple gel ink and folded into footballs. The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents will unfold each one like she’s opening a present and wants to save the wrapping. She will check each one for damage then file them in acid-free folders, one for each year.

The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents will catalog every picture in your night table drawer. Ones of your high school boyfriend in a tux, in a car, in a pirate costume. Ones of you and your friend Deirdre, who slept over every Friday night and moved to Colorado the day after graduation. Ones you don’t remember taking of boys and girls you don’t remember kissing. She will slide each one into a Mylar sleeve. Stack each one in an archival box. Paste on a label in her neat all-caps: PHOTOS.

The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents will take down your posters and collages using a micro spatula. She will roll them into long cardboard tubes. She will enclose your teddy bear in an acrylic cube and catalog your school notebooks and papers. One box for each grade. She will box old gym shoes, stretched out hair ties with their matted nests of dead strands, the crumpled, half-unwrapped tampons from the bottom of your purse. Each item dutifully filed and labeled.

The Archivist of Vulnerable Documents will leave your parents’ house with a hand cart stacked higher than her head. She will shake their hands and drink a single glass of tap water. She will not ask for help.

When you see your room, you’ll be surprised by how empty it feels. You will trace your finger along the faded edges of the wallpaper where your posters hung. You will rub your palms inside the night table drawer, feeling for a shiny print. You will look under your bed and only find an orphaned sock. You will start to cry, sloppy and fast, then you will remember what the Archivist of Vulnerable Documents said about water.

In her email, the Archivist of Vulnerable Documents told you that papers and photos are the most vulnerable materials. The most in need of protection from disaster. When you asked her what kind of disaster she meant, she said: in the end, all disasters are water disasters.

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Meghan Phillips is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her flash fiction chapbook Abstinence Only is forthcoming from Barrelhouse Books. You can find her writing at meghan-phillips.com and her tweets @mcarphil.