Month: October 2022

When the man points the gun at Traci, she’s a saguaro. Not only in look, but in texture. She seems prickly, like if you touched her it would sting. And if Traci is a saguaro I am a succulent at her feet, small with smooth edges. He tells her to keep her hands up and give him all the money. He’s shaky. She’s not. Well which one is it? Do you want my hands up or do you want the money? I can’t get the money with my hands up. She sneers at his response before he gets the words out. Bitch, just give me the fucking money. Traci hits a button and the register pops open with mechanical violence and a ding. She grabs two fistfuls of crumpled bills and smacks them down on the counter. You happy now, genius? The man looks at me, standing next to Traci behind the register, and I almost shrug. We almost share a moment where I would’ve said, yeah I know, she’s out there, man. But when you’re frozen in fear you don’t shrug and you don’t share a moment with the man who’s seconds away from making you piss your pants. He crams the money in his pockets and runs.

After we finish describing the man to the police, Traci pulls a 40 from the fridge and we walk out. The police know we’re not 21, but they either don’t notice or don’t care. The asphalt is slick from the rain. It’s dark out and the siren lights look like bright alien fruit reflected in puddles.

In between swigs Traci says, fuck that job, I was going to quit anyway, fuck that place, fuck that nasty burnt gasoline smell. I kinda like that smell. And I kinda like that job. I wonder how much I’d still like it if Traci wasn’t there. If I had to clean out the slushee machine without Traci singing into a Twinkie in the background. Then Traci asks, do you wanna go to the lake? I know it’s not really a question.

I drive us past walls of trees and borders of shrubs fortifying the road. They repaved last year so now all the potholes are gone, but I still swerve to avoid them. Traci’s pushing buttons trying to find a station that isn’t static. Can you believe that asshole? She asks after giving up on the radio and turning her attention to the window. The guy with the gun? We’ve seen worse, I say. Remember that one tweaker that kept touching his balls? Traci laughs. I try not to sound desperate, but the question falls out of my mouth and my voice vibrates like a fridge on its last legs: Are you really going to quit? Traci’s still playing with the window. Maybe. You should quit too. We should quit together, that’ll show ‘em. She’s right, but it’s not like I have a choice. Mom can’t pay the bills without my help. And Traci’s even worse off. She’s got brothers. All I say in response is, stop that, you’ll break the window.

When we were kids I was afraid to go in the lake because I thought there’d be leeches in there. Tracey—back then she spelled it with an EY, just like me—held my hand the whole time. She didn’t make fun or try to freak me out. She held my hand and smiled. Our legs and arms worked extra hard below the murky water, churning bubbles to the surface, making up for our entwined limbs. My center was gooey and pliant, like mac and cheese straight from the oven.  Back then we both had daddies. I technically still do, but I haven’t seen him in a while.

We’re alone at the lake. I park the car as close to the edge as I can, leaving the headlights on. We throw our clothes in the backseat and Traci, bathed in ghostly glow, runs to the water. I walk over, sidestepping cigarette butts and shattered beer bottles. There’s red lipstick around one of the butts. The shattered glass glints in the sand and I think about the girls who stand outside the club across from the gas station. They shimmer in the dark too. They come in before their shifts to buy gum and cigarettes. They look Traci up and down and tell her she could make good money. They don’t talk to me.

Tracey became Traci with an i right about the time she stopped stuffing her bra. She was filling enough. I asked her why she didn’t like being Tracey with an EY anymore, and she said that things were different, which meant that her name should be different. At the end of her statement, as if for emphasis, one of the spaghetti straps on her black top slid down her shoulder. I was about to reach out to fix it, instead I nodded and pretended to understand what the hell she was talking about. Things didn’t feel different to me.

Traci and I float. The water is so warm we can’t tell where our bodies stop and it begins. When our fingers graze, that mac and cheese heat is in my belly, even though I’m not afraid of leeches anymore. I know there’s other darkness that can pull you under.

Veronica Klash loves living in Las Vegas and writing in her living room. You can read her work in Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, and Cheap Pop, among others. She is currently in hibernation, working on a short story collection. Find her tweets @veronicaklash.

As soon as the car stops, we tumble out like fish from a net, gasping in the salty air. I shake myself free of tension from missed turns and what do those parking signs say and dread that Mica’s about to be sick in the car again.

The shingle shifts under our feet, wedging small stones between flesh and the flip flops I’ve rescued from the back of the wardrobe. The twins are in lime green jelly shoes – an Asda special.

“Careful” I shout, but it’s too late. Mica and Jonah are squealing down to the water, two short, stout bodies in rainbow tie-dye short sets. I watch Mica’s hair whip in the sea breeze and wish I’d plaited it. It will be a nest of tangles by midday.

Jonah turns his head this way and that, as if to say – where did all the buildings go? As far as I know, it’s the first time they’ve seen the sea. But there’s only so much the adoption files can tell you.

Gillian and I are lounging in the sun, bellies full of fish and chips, debating the best route home when it happens. Amongst the roar of water on stone and screaming seagulls, I hear a thin cry. Scanning the beach, I see a grey-haired woman hobbling towards me with Mica in tow. Mica’s rubbing her eyes, mewing like a cat. Another legacy: neglected children learn quickly not to bother making too much noise.

“She toppled over and wanted her mummy.” The woman has smart hair, the kind that’s cut in a salon, and linen trousers with a neatly pressed crease. It’s a look that takes me back to my mother’s Tuesday Bridge: four sets of cardigans and pearls turning in perfect synchrony to scrutinize me and find me lacking.

Jonah bounces up to me. “She was running in the water and I said don’t do that, be careful like Mummy said, but she wasn’t listening Mummy, even though I told her.”

“I don’t think she’s hurt. Just a shock,” the woman says.

I scan Mica for injuries – she’s soaked through, her knee badly grazed – and embrace her. Mica plops down into my lap, dripping cold water into my sun-warmed legs. Her hair tickles my face as I kiss the top of her head while Gillian cleans Mica’s knee. I’m grateful we’re at the stage where she lets us. For the first three months, she’d scream every time we tried to put on a plaster. Imagine that on a public beach.

“Left Dad at home then? Girls’ day out?” the woman says.

I try to decipher whether she’s making conversation, being nosy, or deliberately stirring. Gillian rubs antiseptic lotion onto Mica’s knee.

Jonah pipes up. “We don’t have a daddy at home.”

I laugh at his puffed-up chest, his earnest face. Off he goes, a train chugging down the track. “We have a Mummy and a Gilly. And before that we were at Susannah’s. But I didn’t have my own bedroom there and now I do. I like firemen. Do you like firemen?”

Once the plaster is on Mica’s leg, Gillian and I stand to fold the blanket and stash our things in the beach bag. Some days you don’t mind being an ambassador; today I don’t feel like explaining a thing.

“Firemen are nice,” continues Jonah. “Really nice. If you come to our car, I can show you my firemen. I like firemen because-”

“Jonah.” I give him the look, the look that says don’t overshare. That we are family, but she is a stranger. She doesn’t need to hear about what happened with his birth family.

“It’s okay,” she says.

I want to say, it’s not okay. These kids need boundaries. They need to learn not to throw themselves at anyone who glances their way. That I hope we are teaching them to feel loved, to be safe, but there are no guarantees with the start they’ve had.

“You’re a stranger,” Mica says.

I feel a surge of pride. An odd thing to take pride in, perhaps, but I am on the verge of tears. It is sinking in. Although my mother used boundaries to keep me out, I’m using mine to keep strangers out.

“Well that’s not a very nice thing to say.” The woman bristles, looking at Mica the way the Bridge gang used to look at me.

“Time to go,” I say briskly. It’s too much to ask, understanding another’s intent. It’s enough to define your own boundaries, corral your own demons. “Now what do we say to nice strangers who help us?”

“Thank you,” the twins say in unison, heads bobbing.

The woman says “You’re welcome” but the smile on her face wavers. We’re an odd-shaped piece in her puzzle.

It doesn’t matter. We know who we are to each other. “Say goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” Mica and Jonah shout, on familiar territory now. They know about departures. They know how to say goodbye.

SEDIMENTARY

Blue marl, greensand, greywacke. At the blackboard, your teacher looks like he’s tasting the names. Jonno murmurs Grey Wacky! and all of you laugh because it’s true, the teacher’s old and a bit weird.

You’re inching along a high spine of rock, in battering wind. The teacher yells back that it’s tuff, formed 450 million years ago, carved out in the last Ice Age. Lin’s nearly blown into the storm-grey tarn below. Jonno puts out an arm to steady her. You’re in no danger of being blown away.

Lin is asked for every dance. The colour of her hair is pyrite, fool’s gold.

IGNEOUS

Dartmoor is a granite batholith, an extrusion of molten rock from deep in the crust. Extrude means push out. Like a turd, Jonno says, and everyone titters.

You’re all huddled beside the River Dart in the rain, with dripping clipboards and school-issue kagoules that smell of wet tent. When you slip down the bank, your already sodden jeans slimed with mud, Jonno leads a falsetto chorus of The Hippopotamus Song.

Pumice scrapes dead skin from footsoles. It’s spongey-light and feels fake, but it was born in a volcano.

COASTAL EROSION

Waves smash into cracks, split them wider. Hydraulic action and frost-shattering blast out caves. Bits of cliff plunge into the sea, leave pillars and arches, then nothing. The sea keeps on pounding till the whole coast is pulverized.

You’re by the wall in the lineup of rejects, again. Late in the the evening slow tracks play, the disco lights stop flashing, couples move close, Angie and Je t’aime pulse through the gym. Lin and Jonno sway, melt together in the dark. You can’t look away.

METAMORPHIC

Metamorphosis means changing into something else. White marble. Lapis-lazuli.

There’s another dance, punks and tarts this time. Most of the boys go as punks and the girls as tarts, but you hang safety pins round your neck and a razorblade from your belt. You outline your eyes in silver-green, your lips in black. You hold your nose and drink a soup of mushrooms you found growing on the football pitch. Jonno laughs and calls you a stoner. You pogo and swear, knock into other dancers on purpose. People have to look twice, to be sure it’s you. Later, the disco lights turn to fireworks, spell out secret messages on the sky.

A HOUSE BUILT ON SAND

The teacher takes a group of you to a country estate. Greensand lies beneath, but this isn’t a field trip. There’s singing, and lots of people fall to their knees in tears and are born again. You don’t fall down, though afterwards you wish you had, because Lin’s eyes are unfocused and dreamy, and she says her heart is full of Jesus. Jonno’s less mean afterwards, you don’t know if that’s because of Lin or Jesus.

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Exams are over, everyone’s waiting for results. You know yours will be bad. Lots of people have university places waiting, but you’re going backpacking in India.

People say, India alone, wow! Aren’t you scared?

You are, but you shrug.

People say, What will you do there?

You’ll see the mountains of the Sub-Himalayan Range. You’ll see the Ganges delta where three tectonic plates meet.

You’ll gather cannabis, growing wild on a hillside near Simla. You’ll lose weight, and your virginity. You’ll catch amoebic dysentery, buy an orange sari, sit at the feet of a man with a silky beard who smells like incense.

You’ll come home. People will look twice, to be sure it’s you.

Patience Mackarness lives and writes in Brittany, France. Her stories have been published by Brilliant Flash Fiction, Lunch Ticket, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, and elsewhere. Her work can be read at https://patiencemackarness.wordpress.com/

I
In the video, they look so serene circling the wood-fired flame: sparks skitter like fireflies; two brahmins drone mantras in Sanskrit; mothers and aunties look on. She wore diamond earrings shaped like jasmine buds. He painted a pointillist mural of pink flamingos and displayed it in the reception hall. “Blessings to the couple, blessings, blessings!” her tipsy father said, hoisting up a silver flute of Veuve Clicquot. He died of a stroke a few weeks later.

II
Early on, you knew something was amiss — dishes went undone almost every night and gifts from the wedding: a Le Creuset pan, gargoyle salt and pepper shakers, Waterford Crystal bowls, sat unopened on high, shadowed shelves.

III
He paints all day, mixing aquamarine, a touch of burnt umber and titanium white for his cotton clouds, and a ceaseless array of cloud paintings clutter up the apartment walls. At night, while she worked, he drinks rare tequila with lime and discusses fourth wave feminism with women on Twitter. She grew impatient one day and swiped the debit card from his wallet. Soon the wedding diamonds disappeared.

IV
Her grandmother had peered out from thick-lensed rhinestone glasses and said, “Don’t marry a dreamer.”

V
“You don’t respect him,” is what her doctor said when she asked, “How can I bring back the fire?” It was worse than all that. Secretly she wonders why she loathes so handsome a man’s odor, why she longs to sleep in a separate room.

VI
She strikes a match against her husband’s glass and sand head, igniting the white phosphorus, burning the sulfur, until he turns into a specter of crackling flame that diminishes in an instant to a smoky stump.

VII
She doesn’t actually do that, but dreams about that and is happy.

VII
It was the new man’s glance and his long, delicate fingers. How quickly, she thought: his fingers skating along the hot runnels made by her bra straps, the enchanting whiff of expensive cologne. This is the first time she’s spent a night away from the apartment; she insists on staying on top.

IX
How pathetic, she thought, seeing her husband next morning — his arms flecked with dragon’s blood and a rare Indian yellow (a paint made from the urine of cows fed mango leaves). He’s staring at the dull morning sun; he’s weeping.

X
They part uneventfully. Dust, paint rags, unopened coupon packs, empty bottles, and a single ladder left near where the unopened gifts were, on the high, shadowed shelves.

Vikram Masson writes at the intersection of faith, identity and culture. His poems have been featured or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Glass, Juked, Prometheus Dreaming, Rust + Moth, and Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith (NYQ Books).