by Annabel LI | Dec 18, 2023 | flash fiction
Ma has a third thumb. It hangs from her pocket when she thinks no one’s looking, drags behind her as she bruises across the hardwood floor. When we were younger, meimei and I used to take turns unhooking it from her hand while she slept, then butterflying its joints over our cheeks. We’d press ourselves against the end of the couch so her feet dangled above our heads and timed our movements with her snores, so we wouldn’t get caught. Then her feet would twitch ever so slightly, or she’d choke on her saliva, and we’d screw the third thumb on and skitter back to our bed, flattening our bodies beneath the covers.
No one knows where that third thumb came from, not even Ma. It goes in the same category of stories about Ba – the drunk, sordid kind. Once, she fragmented her wineglass onto the table, and when I leaned over, I saw a million versions of myself, fish-bowled and googly-eyed. “That’s what he did to me,” Ma moaned, before staggering to her room, third thumb straying along the walls. That’s when we learned Ma’s first lesson: the dead are dead for a reason.
Meimei and I still had our suspicions, though. In the afternoons, we clandestined in our shared bed, undressing our favourite legends. Perhaps Ma had been born in rice paddies at midnight, the thumb an inheritance of waipo’s cleaved stomach. Or perhaps she’d been one of those thousand-limbed goddesses, defending her village from things that roared like men. Or maybe she’d hidden it from Ba, and that was why he left.
That last one was mine. When I told meimei, she smacked my knee hard enough to shine it into a coin, growling: say sorry, right now. I’d forgotten that this was after Ba became a bad word; I was still thinking of the romcoms Ma always watched, the kind where the girl was white as a fishbone, and the guy was tall and muscular, and they looked like they could be cousins if you squinted.
I had no words for meimei, so I just grabbed my feet, roly-polying between my head shakes until her mouth stopped resembling a powerline. Even now, we could hear the TV echoing through the crack of the bedroom door. I knew if I went out, I’d see Ma perched on the couch, legs fused together like Buddha, and the screen bright enough to backlight bone.
Sometimes, if she were at a particularly good part of the movie, she would ask us to massage the thumb. We’d kneel beside her, hands grasping the joint as she closed her eyes. Then her mouth would either grasp into ahhs and ohhhs, or she’d stay silent. If it was the latter, we knew we’d done a good enough job, and that she’d bring us goodies from work. She’d been a janitor at a nearby school since Ba graduated from our lives, and after the bell, she would scuttle under the desks, using her third thumb to pluck the abandoned wads of gum and granola bars and candies. Then she’d tuck them into her bag, her armpits, or wherever things went to disappear so that when she scampered out, her janitorial uniform thick as a cigarette, no one checked her for prizes.
Another one of Ma’s lessons was that all things tasted better half-gone. So we mythologized our half-eaten bags of chips, half candies, half-lives. For dinner, meimei and I split the noodles she cooked, convinced we could make it last forever. We spooned each other one noodle at a time, swishing it in our mouths and pretending we were baby birds. When Ma came home, she found our bodies bent over the bowl, heads searching for those doves from the magic tricks. Then she chased us with the slipper until we vanished ourselves into the closet, our limbs mimicking clothes hangers until the slipper thudded to the floor and her footsteps trickled back to the couch.
Ma’s favourite part of any rom-com was when the guy takes three flights, two hitch-hiked car rides, not including the stop at the roadside supermarket to buy a bouquet before biking to the next closest town, and steals a motorcycle to arrive at the girl’s house for her birthday. See, she explained once, she’d flown across the country to get away from him because she thought he loved another girl, but that was a lie made up by the guy’s jealous brother because he’d inherited the family business and left him with nothing, but that’s because he’s a big gambler, and if it weren’t for the girl the business would’ve gone down, like bam, because when the guy, not the brother, met the girl, she helped him win the business, even though their fathers were rivals. I wasn’t sure where the rivalry came from– maybe some mistake in a will, because maybe they really were cousins – but now the girl was standing in her pyjamas at the door with a full face of makeup and perfectly mussed-up hair. When they kissed, Ma looked at me, a single tear bobbling out of her eye. “Find yourself boy like that,” she said fiercely.
I excused myself and went to bed. Later, when I took meimei to pee, she was still on the couch, except with her hand flossing between her thighs. The floorboards creaked as we backpedaled, and Ma sprung up and chased after us, her third thumb waving like a battle cry, and beat us until we were round and purple as grapes.
The morning after, we awoke to the stovetop popping. We tip-toed out of our room, braided together like flowers to see Ma in the kitchen, hunched over a simmering pan of eggs and tomatoes. “Try some,” she beckoned, and when we got close enough, dipped her third thumb into the red. “Here, and here,” she said, swabbing her thumb over our cheeks, our mouths, so we could taste the salt and tomato and everything else she’d left behind.
by Jan Stinchcomb | Dec 14, 2023 | flash fiction
I get to relive one day. That’s all. For me, a crash ended everything, but the full range of trauma runs through our circle. Every form of loss. An assault stole one woman’s child. For another, it was a cult. Disease. Suicide. Accidents. Plain old bad luck. There are endless ways to lose your baby.
We sit in the basement of the witch’s house, where we form an uneasy circle in our metal chairs. It looks like AA or some support group, but there is an unholy purpose lodged in our hearts. We are transgressing, going against God and nature.
It’s for a whole day, Becca would remind me whenever I got cold feet. One tender day.
Becca has been a devotee for years, but she has never been chosen. There is one meeting a year, and the witch picks only one mother at a time. If she looks you in the eye, you are the winner. You get to have your child back for the day of your choice. Most women choose birthdays. Smart women remember quiet days so they can have hours of delicious, uninterrupted time. I dream of seaside vacations, storytime, inside jokes.
You have to state the complete date, Becca told me the first time she invited me to join the circle. Day, month, year. Be careful. Memorize it.
And it will be an exact duplicate of that day? Every detail will be the same?
Down to the frosting on the cake. Down to the towels at the hotel.
You’ve spoken to past winners? I ask her.
Only one, she whispers. We’re not supposed to talk about this.
Did they say what happened? Is it like a dream? Will the other family members remember it later?
Calm down. They won’t remember anything. You, the mother, are the only one who will retain the experience. And that’s as it should be.
I don’t know if I can lie to my husband.
Don’t you think he lies to you?
I bristle but promise to come with her to the witch’s house on the next full moon.
Now I must choose the date. I look through all my pictures, something I haven’t been able to do since the day everything changed. Do I even have a favorite age, a favorite memory? I settle on the day we got on the plane to move out here. Many women choose a day from toddlerhood, when they could still carry their child in their arms, but I am drawn to the one day I always blame. We should never have boarded that plane. We should have stayed where we were, and then we would have been able to keep our little family intact.
Remember, Becca warns me as we approach the witch’s house, don’t even think of pulling a fast one. You can’t go back and change events. You must go through the day as it was. This is a chance to see your child again, nothing more.
What happens if you don’t follow the rules?
Why would you ask that?
Just tell me.
You’ll make things worse than they already are.
Do you know anybody this has happened to?
Becca purses her lips and refuses to answer. She shakes her head.
In my mind, I have relived the airport scene a million times, how I grab my daughter’s hand and march her out of there. Don’t worry about the luggage. It doesn’t matter. Our clothes can be replaced. Sometimes, I change my airplane behavior. I don’t let her leave my side. She isn’t out of her seat when it happens.
Or I join her in the aisle.
It’s okay if we die together. I’m easy to please.
You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you? Becca asks when we are seated and waiting.
The doorknob turns, and a tremor passes through our crowd of hopefuls.
The witch enters on one of the icy clouds I saw from the plane window that day.
Are you? Becca hisses. Promise me!
I don’t say a word. The witch glides right up to me; her feet never touch the floor. She looks me in the eye, but it’s her cruel sneer that surprises me.
She knows what I am planning before I name the date.
And I can taste the sweetness before the harrowing plunge.
*Originally published in And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative
by Melissa Ragsly | Dec 11, 2023 | flash fiction
Character and Expression class. Monday.
A black box theater. The teacher clutches her cross pendant, “We must be looking above the characters. We must see things others can’t.”
She paces the perimeter of the circle.
“Come to class with a meaningful object and place it at your feet.”
Bez swallows her gum and hopes a tree takes root inside, one big enough to clear out all the duff that has built up. She is the first to leave.
Tuesday.
“Tell us about the object’s meaning. Tell us how it motivates you.”
A student presents an old Hess truck, the final Christmas present from the Grandmother who raised him.
“Many of us harbor the fear that we are all so boring that only the character has something to offer. But you are the only source of life for anyone you play.”
A dog collar from a deceased pet.
“What’s hidden inside you is a wellspring.”
Bez thinks a wellspring would make a big old mess. It will be her turn tomorrow. She has no idea what to bring.
Wednesday.
Bez buys a bug zapper like the one that hung in her parent’s Vermont kitchen and plans on returning it after class.
She kicks the zapper box forward towards the center of the circle.
Do you know the first time you see a parent in a state of physical weakness?
She stops her monologue. With a balletic sweep of her toes, the box is back under her chair. During the break, she heads to the restroom. A tampon in her hand. On the bathroom mirror, someone had swatted a fly and not cleaned it up.
Thursday.
The fly is still caked on the mirror, hardened in a streak of its own blood.
“Every new day is a revision of the last,” the teacher says when Bez returns to the circle.
Friday.
The teacher gushes over Stanislavski, the Muscovite father of acting. Bez exits. In her bag is the bug zapper she hasn’t returned. And a tampon. She greets the fly, an audience.
My dad was allergic to hay, so he became a farmer. Fevers and cold sweats. His mouth watered so much, he couldn’t swallow all of his saliva.
She swallows her gum.
That’s what poison does to you.
The zapper is wrapped in plastic like an amniotic sack.
This person who has cared for you, lifted you up over puddles, is depleted. Pesticide’s a bitch.
An outlet near the sink against the fire code. She pauses, forgetting for a moment, the next line. Is it any wonder that all these objects have to do with a need to pretend finality can be defeated by memory?
There were lots of tricks. Hanging Irish Spring Soap from twine. Soaking hot peppers in water and spraying the juice on leaves. We hung a bug zapper in the kitchen.
Bez drips water down the mirror, hitting the fly. An uncrushed wing catches a bead and blooms.
The sound of a zapper is like dropping something in the deep fry. My father is in bed, losing his strength while I’m gaining mine. I felt guilty about that. I would take over. At twelve, I was riding a backhoe.
Whatever it is that Bez feels in her stomach, growing, like the swallowed gum was a sprouted seed, she wonders if her dad felt the same thing. Something uncontrollable and wild.
It was my fault he was weakening because I was getting stronger, and it felt good.
When did he know that what was growing inside him would take him over? The fly falls from the mirror, glides down to the sink, and floats on a current down the drain. Bez believes she has all the words memorized.
by Hannah Zhang | Dec 7, 2023 | micro
The town scalper says he lost his eyes at the supermarket. Left them on a shelf in the toothpaste aisle, and when he came back, they were gone. I say maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough, and neither of us laugh.
My sister keeps a jar of two brown eyes on a shelf in the garage, bloodshot with pupils like smears of wet dirt. A cloud of bacteria drifts in the stale water, foggy like a daydream. She found these at the supermarket six days before the town scalper lost his. Whenever I ask where she found her jar eyes, my sister just giggles. She’s thirty years old, she shouldn’t be giggling anymore.
By August, half the townsfolk had lost their eyes. They leave them at the corner store, the fire station, the post office, and when they come back, their eyes are gone. Why do they take them out in the first place? Do they even know how to put them back in?
My sister’s collection hasn’t grown, but she giggled so much and said so little that they sent her to the home with the other giggling young women in town. They’re giving young women a bad look; my dad says I should join her before I’m burned at the stake. The hospitals are filled with people with empty sockets, lined up against the dingy walls like red-pocked ghosts. A week before September, I ask my mom to drive me out to college while she can still see the road. Neither of us laugh.
A few months in, they stop sending letters—they probably can’t see their papers anymore—so I work hard to stop wondering, too. I make some friends who have eyes and don’t giggle. When winter break comes, one of their families offers to drive me home when no one comes for me. I say they probably shouldn’t do that if they want to keep their eyes in their heads. They laugh, hauling my suitcase into the trunk.
by Ola W. Halim | Dec 4, 2023 | micro
—finally, it is night and you wrench the bulb from the porch ceiling and all the moths plop to the floor and you traverse the rug of ripped wings and squashed thoraxes and the sounds of your boots pierce my chest but this time there is no blood and the pain I’m supposed to feel is quiet and docile and so, instead of a rivulet of fresh-harvest tears, I tuck my lips in and rise from the splintered chinas and spilled Marocchino you left behind and proceed to gather the ripped wings and squashed thoraxes, dry them over the hearth where we branded our initials onto each other’s chest, where we kissed and I said your lips tasted like frozen Vin Santo and not congealed blood, and then, with the glue I bought for your splintered body-parts, I paste the ripped wings and squashed thoraxes one by one to the wall of the bathroom, just below the black blot that was once you gripping a hilt, teasing your wrist, reciting the Bible verses your mother burned into your head, plunging your fingers into your ears because my voice was something like your mother’s, and my hand on your back was a Leviticus that stung and stung, long, long, long after Jesus died for love and salvation, and you were screaming into things that couldn’t carry your voice, like the bathroom walls and the stained windows and the bunched-up curtains and the barbed cacti outside, and I was waiting for your return the hundredth time, but finally, it is night and you wrench the bulb from the porch ceiling and all the moths plop to the floor and you traverse the rug of ripped wings and squashed thoraxes and the sounds of your boots pierce my chest but this time there is no blood and the pain I’m supposed to feel is quiet and docile and so—
by Sara Hills | Nov 30, 2023 | flash fiction
We bury Lil Fucker facing north in the frozen yard, halfway between the dogwood tree and the rusted tin shed, in the spot where he liked to shit. Daddy Lin tamps the dirt with the back of the shovel and hocks a pink gob onto the snow next to Lil Fucker’s fresh grave. Were he a gambling man, Daddy Lin says, he would’ve gambled on Lil Fucker having a couple more years of bark left in him if the air hadn’t been so thick this winter.
Daddy Lin waves his hands at the polluted fog like he’s trying to move the toxic molecules out of the way and rants about Big Oil, how it’s the shit we can’t see that’ll kill us—pieces of crap thirty times smaller than a human hair—and do I reckon if my mother fucked off to Reno or is she somewhere up there with God, laughing?
I shrug, knowing Daddy Lin’s not really expecting an answer, he just needs to talk. Lil Fucker was the last link either of us had to my mother. And in those long whimpering nights after she left, the dog earned his new name clawing at the door, gouging the dark wood until it splintered.
Daddy Lin hocks and spits pink again, tinting the snow the color of old bubblegum and the setting plaster on Jordan Kowalski’s bedroom wall, the same pukey color of the poison sky that spreads over the city, from the Wasatch Front in the east to the Oquirrh Mountains in the west, cloaking even the Angel Moroni perched on the highest spire at Temple Square.
There’s no point in explaining to Daddy Lin that it’s warm weather pressing in on the cold ground that traps the bad air. That it was likely a similar pressure that caged my mother and caused her to fuck off without saying goodbye, and that if I had been the gambling sort, I would’ve put money on her leaving sooner than she did. I would have bet on her bringing me along, not abandoning me in the Great Basin, a soup bowl of emphysema and runaway third wives—a place which is only great if you’re into skiing, gambling, and God.
I breathe through my scarf so I don’t have to taste the air while Daddy Lin coughs clouds that mist between us. He gulps and wheezes, recovering enough to raise his empty fist and toast Lil Fucker for being the third-best dog we ever knew.
Afterward, he heads back inside to sink into the warm, human-sized dent in his recliner, and I head over to Jordan Kowalski’s and sink into the warm, human-sized dent in his mattress.
Jordan asks if I want to watch a movie, and I shrug because I’m trying not to think about Big Oil or Lil Fucker freezing under the ground or the pink gob freezing onto the snow. And maybe because my skin prickles like it holds the scar of every groove Lil Fucker scratched into the wooden door, or maybe because I know Jordan’s mom will be back from Temple soon and it’ll be a cold walk home, I ask Jordan if he ever had a mind to leave the church and fuck off to somewhere warmer, brighter.
We consider our options and listen to The Smiths and kiss and kiss, the pinks of our bellies grazing, until the only thing I want to feel is the warm weight of Jordan’s body pressing me down and down and down until some small part of me finally rises up.
by Fractured Lit | Nov 27, 2023 | contests
judged by Aimee Bender
December 1 to February 04, 2024
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This contest is now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted! We can’t wait to send our shortlist to Judge Aimee Bender!
2023-24 Winners:
1st Place: To the Tower by Skyler Melnick
2nd Place: The Desert Sound by Mikhaela Woodward
2nd Place: The Pebble and the Witch by Emma Li
3rd Place: Our Lady of Clean Kitchens by Joseph Hernandez
We invite writers to submit to the Fractured Lit Ghost, Fable, and Fractured Fairy Tales Prize from December 01, 2023, to February 04, 2024. Guest Judge Aimee Bender will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Fractured Lit is looking for stories of ghosts, fables, and fractured fairy tales in 1,000 words or fewer. Whichever tradition you choose, make sure you find a new way to approach it, to twist and discombobulate it, so it pushes us away from the mundane and into the strange or uncanny. Transport us from the here and now to a new land of discovery, a fresh way of being entertained that embraces all of the ways we show our humanness.
Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), which was an NY Times Notable Book; An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), which was an LA Times pick of the year; Willful Creatures (2005), which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year; The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010), which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award; The Color Master (2013), a NY Times Notable Book for the year; and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade (July 2020), which was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s “This American Life” and “Selected Shorts.” She lives in Los Angeles with her family, and teaches creative writing at USC.
We hope you’re inspired to write that story that has been gnawing at your subconscious, that’s ready to arrive into the world, whole and thrilling. These are some of our favorite stories to read each year!
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by Kathryn Kulpa | Nov 27, 2023 | flash fiction
But not really. It’s a nickname, something my sister used to call me. You wouldn’t know my real name. He never did.
I wasn’t the first one he killed. I wasn’t the last. Not quite. I was part of the long fade but not the final coda. He was shooting for 100. I was #94.
He liked to brag about how smart he was, how dumb the cops were. Of course, he started in the seventies, before DNA evidence. He told me about #21, found in a hastily scooped-out roadside ditch. Pants pulled down to her ankles, like a candy wrapper ripped by an excited kid who can’t wait for the first bite.
Struck by lightning, police decided. He laughed for days.
He told me this while his hands were around my neck.
I got an eye for them, he said. The girls nobody misses.
* * *
When we were kids, my sister and I fell through ice in a February pond. We were skating—pretend skating, because we couldn’t afford real skates.
That might have saved our lives. Ice skates are heavy. They can’t be kicked off the way-too-big sneakers can. I kicked my feet free, grabbed my sister’s hood, and swam to the edge of the pond, where a tree root poked through feathery snow.
One hand holding that tree root. One holding my sister’s hood, a quilted white parka with fake fur trim like a half-drowned squirrel.
In so many nightmares after that, I felt the fabric slide from my hands, saw my sister’s face sink under black water.
But that didn’t happen. Hold on tight, she said. And I held on.
It was my fault the ice broke. We were playing Olympics, and I had to try the triple axel. My little sister watching me like she was taking notes on who to be. I jumped and twisted and saw her face fly by once, twice, saw her eyes get wide, and just for one moment, before the ice cracked, I was flying.
* * *
I could fill a book with them, he said. All my Jane Does.
His arms were around my neck and I grabbed his collar and he laughed and said it was cute that I fought back, but he had no idea who I was, no idea I could fly, no idea I was the one who’d finally take him down, the hair I pinched from his head held in my hand, my fist squeezed tight around it. He had no idea how hard I could hold on.
by Jiksun Cheung | Nov 20, 2023 | flash fiction
In the time that my mother has been missing, the skies have turned a gray, roiling mass. The radio is calling it the most violent typhoon to make landfall in thirty-two years.
We’ve looked everywhere, and there’s nowhere else left except here, in the ruins of the abandoned Wah Fung housing estate, where my mother and I once lived in a tiny room on the sixth floor.
In the clearing outside, a squall tears at my flimsy raincoat and drags an old banyan tree snapping and splintering to the ground. A battered No Trespassing sign flits overhead and ricochets off the crumbling façade. I find an embroidered shoe near the entrance, swirling in the ankle-deep floodwater like a goldfish in the murk.
“Ma! Is that you in there?”
In response, there is only the whistling of the wind.
What on earth could she be doing here—and why now?
I try to recall the last time we were all together: Maggie, the boys, me, my mother, sitting around our dining table. The food getting cold. The nursing-home pamphlet opened to the page where an elderly couple beams at the camera, surrounded by family.
“If that is what you have decided,” she says. And then, after a pause, she adds: “You always choose what is best for your family.”
She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t pat my hand to reassure me that she understands. She doesn’t touch the fish cheek I place in her bowl. But her words slide between my ribs so that even after Maggie, and I clear the dishes and the boys are fast asleep, even after my mother quietly shuts the door to her room and turns off the light, all I can hear is: “You always choose what is best for you.”
* * *
I stumble through the flooded corridors, flashlight in hand, until I see the old provisions store, tucked beneath the stairwell, where my mother used to work.
The shutters on one side have collapsed, revealing a row of empty shelves. I think of my mother stacking tins of oily fried dace, her thick, black hair in a knot, the radio behind the counter crackling a Teresa Teng love song. She pauses in front of the radio before changing the channel and then tells me to finish my homework before she locks up.
I find the other shoe on a landing about halfway up, waterlogged and torn at the sole. The whistling continues unabated.
* * *
I step into my childhood home at the end of a long corridor on the sixth floor. The room is empty, save for the candle on the floor, painting the peeling walls a flickering orange, and the figure by the window struggling with the handle.
“Ma—are you hurt?” I say. “What are you doing?”
She is surprised to see me, but then her expression hardens. “It’s rusted shut,” she says. “Can’t get it open.”
“Come on, Ma.” I put an arm around her shoulder, but she pulls away.
“Just let me do this,” she says.
“Come on—we shouldn’t even be here.”
I take her by the wrist, but even now, I’m surprised by her strength. She wrenches free and bangs a bony fist onto the rusty handle. A cry of frustration escapes her lips.
“Ma—have you lost your mind?” I shine the flashlight on her hand, where an ugly purple blotch is already pooling beneath the skin. “We can talk at home.”
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
This is what happens when we talk: words fly out of our mouths, but we never seem to understand each other. “What do you want, then, Ma?”
“Just—help me,” she says. “Please.”
Outside, the rain surges like waves on rock. The whistling is louder, too, coming from all directions, rising and falling, as if seeking harmony but never quite finding it. I realize she’ll never leave this place until she does whatever she’s here to do.
“Fine,” I say.
I raise the heavy flashlight and bring it down sharply on the handle. Once, twice. A crack, and then something gives way. The window explodes, ejected by a mighty pressure. The candle goes out. And I remember.
The day of the big typhoon, thirty-two years ago.
Ma says the store will be flooded, so I wait for her under the dinner table, wrapped in a thick blanket. The wind whistling all around. Suddenly, the window bursts open, and I’m engulfed by a sound that I can feel in the pit of my stomach, a deep thunderous drone: beautiful, like the long, solitary call of a blue whale, but also infinitely terrifying, like the howl of some unfathomable beast, so loud that even the floor shakes.
I curl up into a ball under the blanket and call for her, not realizing that she is already beside me.
“I’m here,” she says, pulling me deep into her arms. “It’s all right. I’m here.”
* * *
My mother listens now, silvery-white hair plastered to her face, enraptured by the haunting harmony of the typhoon barreling as it did a lifetime ago, along winding corridors, between cracks in the walls, and through the room on the sixth floor with the open window.
She finds my hand and clutches it, now and in the past. We listen for a while.
“I’m here, too,” I say.
“I know.”
*Originally published in And If That Mocking Bird don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative
by Deesha Philyaw | Nov 16, 2023 | flash fiction
Does Love exist?
Is fat meat greasy? Cuz ain’t no way I could’ve fallen so hard, so fast, so far, by myself.
Rewind that.
I didn’t fall in love. Like Toni Morrison said, I rose in it. If only for one night. I levitated for that brother with the high-top fade, tired eyes, and pretty smile. That first night, we worked it out, strangers on the club floor. Some Bobby Brown, some Chubb Rock, a little Jody Watley, the chaos and black steel of Public Enemy, and then Miss Jackson (cuz I’m nasty and he is too). We grinded, we Reeboked, and we Cabbage Patched until sweat plastered my hair to my face, plastered his shirt to his back. When he pulled me close and murmured, “Can you stand the rain, ma?” in my ear, I didn’t even mind his wet cheek on mine. My panties went damp, too. It was a wrap. You know how it is. And then back to life, back to reality. Lights up. You ain’t gotta go home, but you got to get the hell outta here.
Where shall we worship?
In his car, in the park, in his room when his mama was at work, on the stoop, always, always, in the shadows.
And when shall we worship?
Night and day. After the dance.
And how shall we worship?
However do you want me, however, do you need me, how…
How is Love manifest?
The way it always does: with a Running Man. Storms did come, and I became a Fly Girl. Chasing him, forgetting my mama’s wisdom that what’s for me will be for me.
Rewind that.
I didn’t forget a damn thing. That man’s honeyed tongue brought me to my knees, had me acting like I didn’t have the sense god (my mama) gave me.
Lisa, Angela, Pamela, Renee…he loved us all and not at all. His only consistency was looking at the front door.
Don’t walk away, boy….
So I cold bum rushed Lisa. I sliced Angela. Me and my girls jumped Renee. As if his was a love worth fighting for. As if.
(Pamela was pregnant––yeah, he had a baby on me.)
How can we speak about Love?
Besides calling his mama’s house and cussin’ him out? It took me a while before I could talk about it. Because really, what was there to say? Could I chalk it up to a teenage love if we were nineteen and knew better? Well, I knew better.
Who does Love love?
Nobody.
And what has changed since back in the day?
Not a damn thing. Love is like a bus you been waiting for. Feet tired, ankles swole after working all day. A few buses pass by, but they’re not yours. So you wait some more. Then your bus comes, and finally, you can sit down. Rest your weary. Relax your mental. Exhale. Drop your shoulders. Close your eyes and go anywhere your mind’s music takes you. But it seem like as soon as you settle down good, it’s your stop. Time to go, back to walking.
I ran into him the other day outside the grocery store. He still look good, about the same but with salt and pepper in what’s left of that fade––a b-boy with a round middle in middle age, eyes still heavy like he’s seen too much. Both a survivor and someone you’re lucky to survive. Smile still pretty. He hugged me, his fingers tap-dancing on the small of my back, like old times. Asked me if I got a man, grabbed my phone before I could answer and put his number in it. I ain’t deleted it yet.
And when shall we Love?
On and on til the break of dawn.
*after “The Petoskey Catechism, 1958” by Elizabeth Kerlikowske, and Mahogany Browne’s “A Hip-Hop Story in Lyrics”
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