Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories Page 4

  After he has mailed the poem to her, written out in his interesting hand, he types up a copy for his own files. He decides to send a copy to one of the more prestigious literary magazines, one into which he has not yet been admitted. He hesitates about the dedication, which could lead to embarrassment, among other things, with his wife. In the end he omits the dedication. In the end he decides to give a copy also to his wife. In the end he sends a copy also to a woman he knows in England, a poet who really understands his work. He writes out a copy for her, dedicated to her initials. It will reach her a few days late, she will think of him thinking of her a few days before St. Valentine’s Day.

  NIGHT

  He woke up. He thought he could hear their child’s breathing in the next room, the near-silent, smooth sound of air in and out.

  He touched his wife. The room was too dark to let him see her, but he felt her movement, the shift of blanket and sheet.

  “Listen,” he whispered.

  “Yesterday,” she mumbled. “Why not yesterday,” and she moved back into sleep.

  He listened harder, though he could hear his wife’s breath, thick and heavy next to him, there was beneath this the thin frost of his child’s breathing.

  The hardwood floor was cold beneath his feet. He held out a hand in front of him, and when he touched the doorjamb, he paused, listened again, heard the life in his child.

  His fingertips led him along the hall and to the next room. Then he was in the doorway of a room as dark, as hollow as his own. He cut on the light.

  The room, of course, was empty. They had left the bed just as their child had made it, the spread merely thrown over bunched and wrinkled sheets, the pillow crooked at the head. The small blue desk was littered with colored pencils and scraps of construction paper, a bottle of white glue.

  He turned off the light and listened. He heard nothing, then backed out of the room and moved down the hall, back to his room, his hands at his sides, his fingertips helpless.

  This happened each night, like a dream, but not.

  MANDY SHUPE

  I’m thinking about you today, Mandy Shupe. Thinking about you dancing on a picnic table at Crystal Beach. Wondering about the true story and how that image often comes to mind when things are bad for me.

  My mother told me about you when I was a little girl. Why, I don’t know. Something to do with self-control?

  What sank in was that Mandy Shupe, a Mennonite, left the church and danced naked on a picnic table at Crystal Beach. Crystal Beach, longest roller coaster in the world, so the sign said. Bright pink castle fun house and a crowded beach. Blacks from Buffalo, Negroes we called them then. Flashy clothes and an aura of perfume, though Mother said they were poor, lived in slums, weren’t treated well. Didn’t look poor to me. And the gangs of teenagers, slicked back, duck-tailed hair (duck’s ass the less polite kids at school called it). The girls in short shorts or tight skirts showing off all they had as Mother would say. The smells of popcorn, dust, and sweat mixing with the screams from the roller coaster and loop-de-loop. The dance hall with its chandeliers, dance band, laughing couples.

  I pictured you in your long gray clothes leaving the Mennonite church, walking the three miles to Crystal Beach with a man. Even then I knew somehow a man was involved. I saw you climbing up on the bench of the picnic table, the man giving you his hand.

  You take off the big gray bonnet and the small white organdy underbonnet. Lay them neatly on the bench. With a shake of your head, uncoiling your dark hair. Removing the long gray dress, the chemise, and the heavy flannel petticoat. Unlacing the corset. Slipping down the hand-sewn cotton bloomers. Folding each garment neatly there on the bench. Stepping from bench to table.

  The dancing. Slowly at first, then faster and faster as the people cheer.

  When I grew up I knew this story was preposterous and asked my mother what she had told me as a child.

  The updated version was you had left the church several years before and had become a loose woman. You were drunk out at Crystal Beach, with a man, and you did dance naked on a picnic table.

  Well, I had the “with a man” part right, but I’m disappointed it took several years after you left the church. Though by now I can understand why it did. Disappointed by the drunk part, too, though I wonder about that. The people telling the story were teetotalers. If you’d had a drink, you’d be drunk.

  I still see you, Mandy, in full control, with a little smile on your face as you take off your clothes, which maybe weren’t really Mennonite clothes, but in your head I bet they were. I see you dancing, dancing through the warm, brightly lit night.

  WEDDING NIGHT

  I have worked at this bus station magazine stand since nineteen fifty three, waiting for the right girl to come along. When I took this job, the paint on that wall over there was new; it was a light green color then. The servicemen from the Korean War would stop and buy cigarettes, and I learned the insignia from the Army, Coast Guard, Navy, and Marines.

  Once I was held up by a stocky white man in a brown jacket. Showed me the two teeth he had left in his head and the barrel of a little tape-wrapped automatic pointed at my heart. I gave him all the dough but never felt scared. Way I saw it, he was just like me, and I could die behind that counter and just walk away inside his skin, with a few dollars to spend. We were all one thing. So I handed him the money, feeling richer right away—three hundred twenty-three dollars—and let him get away before I called the cops.

  I heard they never caught him, then I heard they caught him in another state—Utah I think—and then I heard they found him dead in an airport parking lot in Kansas. I don’t know. He may be out there yet. He may be back. May hold me up tonight, or just shoot me dead, or both.

  Anything can happen in the bus station. In the nineteen-sixties, we had what we called the hippies, young people in ragged get-ups. They used to sleep all over the furniture in sleeping bags, with packs and rolled-up tents.

  That’s when I began to think that the right girl might come along after all, some girl who’d grown tired of the long-haired boys, and tired of the road, and walk home with me and hold my hand, and curl up with me in my bed and on my squeaky springs. I kept an eye out. One day I saw a young lady: she looked so long-tired and in need of a friend. I bought her a sandwich and coffee and a peanut-butter cup. I bought her some aspirin and a pint of milk, fingernail clippers and a souvenir shirt.

  I told her I had a place where she could come to rest and stay, as long as she might want. I told her it wasn’t fancy and wasn’t but one room, but what was mine was hers. I knew it was clean. I’d cleaned it up the day before when I saw this girl hanging around.

  She stroked my hair and said my heart was full of love. She said she had to sleep about twelve hours and then she’d go away. I took her home. She slumped down on the bed and cried—told me I was “so very kind.” And then she slept like the dead. I lay down on the floor beside her, where I said I’d stay. In the middle of the night I woke up on fire, and the room was turning. I couldn’t think. The air turned furry, where I crept up and slid in bed beside her, that girl still completely dressed. She breathed like the sea. I touched her skin, just her skin inside her clothes. She really never woke, just sighed and turned. In the morning when I woke up in the bed, she was gone.

  I’ve worked here since nineteen fifty three, waiting for the right girl to come along. I guess she did. Some good marriages don’t last long.

  THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL

  Today she tells me that it is her ambition to walk the Appalachian Trail, from Maine to Georgia. I ask how far it is. She says, “Some two thousand miles.”

  “No, no,” I reply, “you must mean two hundred, not two thousand.”

  “I mean two thousand,” she says, “more or less, two thousand miles long. I’ve done some reading too, about people who’ve completed the journey. It’s amazing.”

  “Well, you’ve read the wrong stuff,” I say. “You should’ve read about the ones that didn�
��t make it. Those stories are more important. Why they gave up is probably why you shouldn’t be going.”

  “I don’t care about that, I’m going,” she says with a determined look. “My mind is made up.”

  “Listen,” I say, reaching for words to crush her dream. “Figure it out, figure out the time. How long will it take to walk two thousand miles?” I leap up to get a pen and paper. Her eyes follow me, like a cat that is ready to pounce.

  “Here now,” I say, pen working, setting numbers deep into the paper. “Let’s say you walk, on average, some twenty miles a day. That’s twenty into two thousand, right? It goes one hundred times. And so, one hundred equals exactly one hundred years. It’ll take you one hundred years!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she says. “One hundred days, not years.”

  “Oh, yeah, okay, days,” I mumble. I was never good at math. I feel as if someone has suddenly twisted an elastic band around my forehead. I crumple the paper, turn to her and say, “So if it’s one hundred days, what is that? How many months?”

  “A little over three.” She calculates so fast that I agree without thinking. “Fine, but call it four months,” I say, “because there’s bound to be some delay: weather, shopping for supplies, maybe first-aid treatments. You never know, you have to make allowances.”

  “All right, I make allowances, four months.”

  What have I done? It sounds as if all of this nonsense is still in full swing. Say more about the time. “Okay,” I say, “so where do we get the time to go? What about my job? What about my responsibilities, your responsibilities too? What about—?”

  “What about I send you a postcard when I finish the trip,” she says, leaving the room.

  I sit there mouthing my pen. I hear her going down the basement steps. Pouting now, I think. Sulking. She knows she’s wrong about this one.

  “Seen my backpack?” she calls from below. God, she’s really going to do it. “Next to mine,” I say. “On the shelf beside the freezer.”

  I am angry with myself. She has had her way, won without even trying. “Take mine down too,” I blurt out. “You can’t expect to walk the Appalachian Trail all alone.” I stare at my feet. “Sorry,” I say to them both, “I’m really sorry about all of this.”

  DINNER TIME

  An old man sitting at a table was waiting for his wife to serve dinner. He heard her beating a pot that had burned her. He hated the sound of a pot when it was beaten, for it advertised its pain in such a way that made him wish to inflict more of same. And he began to punch at his own face, and his knuckles were red. How he hated red knuckles, that blaring color, more self-important than the wound.

  He heard his wife drop the entire dinner on the kitchen floor with a curse. For as she was carrying it in it had burned her thumb. He heard the forks and spoons, the cups and platters all cry at once as they landed on the kitchen floor. How he hated a dinner that, once prepared, begins to burn one to death, and as if that weren’t enough, screeches and roars as it lands on the floor, where it belongs anyway.

  He punched himself again and fell on the floor.

  When he came awake again he was quite angry, and so he punched himself again and felt dizzy. Dizziness made him angry, and so he began to hit his head against the wall, saying, now get real dizzy if you want to get dizzy. He slumped to the floor.

  Oh, the legs won’t work, eh? . . . He began to punch his legs. He had taught his head a lesson and now he would teach his legs a lesson.

  Meanwhile he heard his wife smashing the remaining dinner-ware and the dinnerware roaring and shrieking.

  He saw himself in the mirror on the wall. Oh, mock me, will you. And so he smashed the mirror with a chair, which broke. Oh, don’t want to be a chair no more, too good to be sat on, eh? He began to beat the pieces of the chair.

  He heard his wife beating the stove with an ax. He called, when’re we going to eat? as he stuffed a candle into his mouth.

  When I’m good and ready, she screamed.

  Want me to punch your bun? he screamed.

  Come near me and I’ll kick an eye out of your head.

  I’ll cut your ears off.

  I’ll give you a slap right in the face.

  I’ll kick you right in the breadbasket.

  I’ll break you in half.

  The old man finally ate one of his hands. The old woman said, damn fool, whyn’t you cook it first? You go on like a beast—you know I have to subdue the kitchen every night, otherwise it’ll cook me and serve me to the mice on my best china. And you know what small eaters they are; next would come the flies, and how I hate flies in my kitchen.

  The old man swallowed a spoon. Okay, said the old woman, now were short one spoon.

  The old man, growing angry, swallowed himself.

  Okay, said the woman, now you’ve done it.

  VISION OUT OF THE

  CORNER OF ONE EYE

  It’s true, he put his hand on my ass and I was about to scream bloody murder when the bus passed by a church and he crossed himself. He’s a good sort after all, I said to myself. Maybe he didn’t do it on purpose or maybe his right hand didn’t know what his left hand was up to. I tried to move farther back in the bus—searching for explanations is one thing and letting yourself be pawed is another—but more passengers got on and there was no way I could do it. My wiggling to get out of his reach only let him get a better hold on me and even fondle me. I was nervous and finally moved over. He moved over, too. We passed by another church but he didn’t notice it and when he raised his hand to his face it was to wipe the sweat off his forehead. I watched him out of the corner of one eye, pretending that nothing was happening, or at any rate not making him think I liked it. It was impossible to move a step farther and he began jiggling me. I decided to get even and put my hand on his behind. A few blocks later I got separated from him. Then I was swept along by the passengers getting off the bus and now I’m sorry I lost him so suddenly because there were only 7,400 pesos in his wallet and I’d have gotten more out of him if we’d been alone. He seemed affectionate. And very generous.

  Translated by Helen Lane

  I GET SMART

  I tell him I’m thinking about getting a new cat.

  “No way,” he says, like this is not negotiable. As if I haven’t paid half the rent since grad school, and all the cat costs, including the spiffy new cat door installed next to the fridge.

  I say I’ve been to the Animal Rescue League and they have seventeen adorable kittens—all colors. “You get to pick the color,” I say.

  “Hold it,” he says. He lines up his sharp accountant’s pencil across the top of his crossword, cracks the knuckles of his right hand. “I do not want another cat. What’s wrong with the three we’ve got?”

  The three we’ve got hear our voices rising and pad into the kitchen to see what’s going on. The Persian, Jeanette, threads back and forth through my legs, her long hair flying, while gray-striped Fitzhugh leaps onto the fridge and blinks down at us. Sweetpeach, the calico, jumps into my lap and kneads my chenille stomach. Not a cat goes near Roy.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the three we’ve got,” I say.

  “So forget a new cat,” he says, and turns back to his crossword.

  I scratch behind Sweetpeach’s ears to make her purr, and finish my Sunday morning pot of real coffee. I’ve already finished a Xerox of Roy’s crossword and I know just which word will hang him up.

  Next Sunday during crosswords and coffee I make the introductions. I say, “Well, we now have three new cats.”

  Roy gets macho, points his pencil at me. “Where the hell—I told you . . .”

  I tell him, calm down, don’t get all riled up before you meet them. But his voice rises in spite of my attempts to keep the peace. So my voice rises, too, as in any proper duet, and sure enough the cats come by.

  “This is Savannah,” I say as Sweetpeach appears, her tail whipping the air, weighing my distress.

  Roy snorts and I try to remembe
r if he ever called the cats by name.

  “And that is Joe Namath.” I point to Fitzhugh eyeing us from the top of the fridge where he is poised in a three-point stance. “He never acted like a Fitzhugh,” I say. “Parents should change their kids’ names every few years for just that reason. Or give them nicknames.”

  “It’s the other way around,” Roy says. “Kids named Moonbeam, Taj Mahal, and Free are now calling themselves Susie, Pat, and Jim.”

  “You see,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t.” His eyes refuse to focus on me or the cats. He lets his coffee get cold.

  Jeanette springs onto the counter and highsteps over the stove to the window where she watches the action at our veggie neighbor’s high-tech cat-proof birdfeeder. I tell Roy he’ll be sure to remember her name. “You’re always saying ‘what a pill.’ So that’s Pillow.”

  “Don’t do this,” he says.

  “So we have not one but three new cats,” I say, burying my nose in Savannah’s spotted fur. She’s as limp as her new name and warm. Her cat’s eyes seem to remember hot African grasslands and prey ten times larger than she is.

  “We have three cats—period,” Roy says. He has a way of making syntax dull.

  “Three new cats,” I say.

  “Bull!” Roy’s pencil bounces high like a cat toy.

  Joe Namath jumps from the fridge onto the table and skids into Roy’s crossword. Roy’s tackle is rough and Joe Namath spits as Roy tosses him into the dining room. Pillow, the bird-watcher, cantilevers one ear around to hear when to abandon her post. Roy scoops his pencil from the floor and taps it on his crossword in disgust. Three words earlier he went wrong, but he won’t know this until I tell him. I shiver Savannah off my lap and leave to shower.