Late Lunch; Early Dinner

by Pamela Painter | Sep 22, 2023 | flash fiction

We’re having a late lunch, five women, widows now, who have been meeting once a month for forty years. “Dress-up time” we call it because when you are our ages—86, 87, 91, and 93– few events encourage one to don a cape, drape a rope of pearls around a neck, or apply eye shadow if the 2 X mirror cooperates.  Of course, there are concerts, plays, the opera– and the ballet, though only Lillian appreciates that silly art.  For funerals, our “little black dresses” have long since acquired little black sweaters.  Grace calls them our cremation wardrobe.  In truth, she only said this once, but it caused such dismay that we left a far smaller tip than usual. 

Years ago, after our husbands died in person, and died again in tedious conversations describing their various illnesses, we unanimously agreed to never talk about medical concerns, prognoses, medications, or. The exception –if one of us is in the hospital where such a stricture would be burying our heads in the sandbox.

But there’s always much to talk about: deliciously snarky reviews of undeserving prize-winning books, TV series watched or slept through, the trials, tribulations and rare successes of our children, the trivial exploits of grandchildren.  Their occasional weddings and frequent divorces.  The absence of men.  This last from Olive, though always soon dropped when someone says, “What men.” 

Tonight, I am trying to decide which Roads Scholars Cruise to take– the smaller ship perusing the stunning Alaska coast, or the elegant barge that traverses the peaceful Seine.  I would welcome any of the assembled friends as a roommate but when I leave to use the Ladies, I suspect that for sure someone will recall sotto voce my propensity for snoring. 

Toward dessert, we catch up on recent unpleasantnesses.  We insist on this gentle word.  Today Olive laments that in a moment of weakness, she gave her meddlesome daughter-in-law her rope of heirloom pearls.  Her hand flutters above the plateau of her ample empty chest. “I thought there was something missing,” Kelsey says, causing Grace–of the cremation wardrobe remark– to remark that, given the predictability of the future, at some point, we will all be missing.  Oh, that Grace. 

Surely one at a time, I offer.  A weak offering.  After a pregnant silence, we summon the waiter and order a third bottle of vintage wine. 

At My Job I Work the Robotic Arms

by Kati Fargo Ahern | Sep 18, 2023 | flash fiction

On the line, I run a double-forklift. It’s a lot like a regular forklift, but the forks both spread out on either side and when they fan out, you have to catch the grooves of both pallets just so at the same time. And you have to do it FAST. Also, the balance point is trickier, especially if your pallet is stacked high with empty plastic disks that won’t get blown out from forms into bottles till later down the line. The disks weigh nothing, and it is a lot harder than it sounds. Also, on line 5, I work the robotic arms until they stop working, and I call the engineer.

When we are at work, Eugene talks about fantasy sports and the gun he has tucked away in his car. Anthony talks about superhero comics. Greg got so high he ran a forklift off the loading dock and needed a drug test and a lawyer. Anthony died last week at age 43.

At home, my daughter screams in the middle of the night if she has to cough or needs to pee. She plays with He-Man figures and My Little Ponies that we saved in a box for her. My wife gets drunk on boxed wine that saves for 30 days, but she has a hard time making it stretch for three.

At night, when my wife takes a shower, she meticulously swipes the edge of her razor blade against the bar soap because sometimes she gets mad and cuts herself. One time, the bleeding on her wrist didn’t stop for four days. But she doesn’t want to get flesh-eating bacteria from a warm, wet razor blade, so she cleans the blade against the soap. It creates deep, angry, soft grooves. The news says flesh-eating bacteria may be in all 50 states. Sometimes, she just showers, opens the door, and watches the paint peel on the ceiling because the fan doesn’t work. Other times she shampoos and washes and then flicks four, quick strokes against her skin so they look like bloody-beaded, five-lined music. Beyond a doubt, but full of hesitation.

When I am at work, I need to take a 15 minute break that my partner will cover. But my partner is so slow that I need to get him set up for my break so we don’t get behind. I sit in my car and watch videos on my phone and eat a sandwich light on the lunchmeat, heavy on the mayonnaise. When it’s hot, I need to turn the car on to run the AC. I dip my barbeque chips into the edge of my sandwich mayonnaise. I close my eyes and see the afterimage of line 5.

I have a friend who calls me when he’s driving across town to pick his family up Chinese takeout. We get 15 minutes or so of catchup on the kids, our wives, or some shows. Sometimes he tells me about some basketball or the latest fight. My wife says, “How’s Scott? How’s Joan?” and I don’t like to say because when our breaths are counted, we haven’t said that much.   

My daughter has a hard time at school. She writes her name in a kind of cursive she made up with a snake coming off the “t” like a sort of balloon. The snake is smiling. She calls it “snakeish.” Her teachers tell us to let her do it. When she writes thank you notes or cards to my dad or my wife’s mom, we include a parenthetical. We neatly print her message or her name. We explain what she means.

When the robotic arms stop working, there are a few things I do before I call over the engineer. I can punch a few buttons in a sequence, and sometimes, he doesn’t have to come. When he comes over, he comes over like he thinks he’s a god. His steel-toed boots are specially made because one of his legs is noticeably shorter. He walks with a limp. He smirks like a turtle. His teeth are braces-straight where each tooth looks a little too blunted, a little too uniform. His breath smells like mustard.

North Carolina is a “right to work state,” which is the same as saying you have no rights to work at all. It’s steamy-hot in the summer, and the winter is a surprising mess of grey sleet and icy rain. There’s good music and good shopping. The people drive on I-40 like they’d never like to get home. Like they are driving 90 mph for their lives or just finding out. My wife and I would like to move away someday, but we can’t decide on where we’d go. Our dog is so old he wears diapers inside. Our daughter watches the same movie on repeat.

One of my wife’s friends holds a book club every month at her house. She makes themed food, and sixteen ladies act like they have read the book. When I come home, my wife is always holding a book but never reading it. She either grips things too tight or touches so gently it’s like bathwater. You’d wonder how she ever picks anything up. One time, her friend asked about me.

“Does Jake like to go out after work and share a beer with his friends on the line?”

My wife said she just blinked.

“I don’t think he has any friends on the line.”

If I’d been there when her friend asked, I’d have also said no. When I get home, I go to sleep. I touch my daughter’s toes to say goodnight. I count her breaths and wonder. The next day is almost ready to begin.

Unfinished Equations

by Reneé Bibby | Sep 14, 2023 | flash fiction

I stand at the kitchen window, calculating the parabolic arc a murmuration of birds makes against the ridge of conifers. He coalesces at my elbow, tipping his moon-face up to me, to the scratch of blue sky beyond the box of this house. No longer a boy-shaped smudge or a specter.

You’re supposed to find children charming—I’d learned that lesson early. Oh, other mothers would say, looking fondly at their boys, don’t you hate to send them off to school? I’m a blade that cuts—sharp, and kids are tender things, better that my boys were in classrooms or sports practices or running wild through the neighborhood with a pack of others.

It’s an unkindness now, some cosmic karma that in this new house I’d bought precisely because it suited just me, that I should have to put up with someone else’s kid. His little pit-pats sound as he moves around the place at all hours, energetic as a Tasmanian Devil, flicking on lights and devices, chattering, and peeping around corners as if I were more entertaining to watch than any nature program.

A hundred mental orreries of our orbits, but none of my calculations can predict when or for how long our worlds would pull far enough apart for there to be only pure and creamy quiet, only to spin into conjunction again so that we are shadows to each other. There is no calculus to solve the gravity that crashes us together, clear, solid souls in the same space.

I could say something now about the mechanics of how birds fly, and he’d hear me. He’d drink it, gulp it down like ice on a hot day. His eyes are their own creatures. They are alive in his face. They tremble. They are braced for a boo! The whole of him is braced.

His mother had called from the kitchen, “What’s that goddamn song you’re humming?”

I’d glimpsed his mother, too. Late at night alone at the kitchen table, hunched-back and hair loosening from a ponytail, or tying on aprons early morning as someone outside honks for her to hurry up. She is spilled gasoline. She is the slick-black of his life, the lung-searing choke, and the shimmer of fumes that begs for the tiniest sparkle to ignite.

I do not understand the physics that binds me here. What purpose do I serve if I cannot snatch his words from the air to stop her from hearing his reply, “It’s the song the lady in my room sings.”

She is at his doorway, a scribbled face of rage, “Don’t you fucking talk about her. She’s not real!” 

She’s looked right at me in the hall, she’s locked eyes with me entering the bedroom that used to be mine, she’s heard my humming, too.

“You’re humming, again,” he says, at my elbow. “What is that song?”

The impulse to maintain the charade of distance rises up in me, a tsunami. But we are not separate. I cannot save him from his mother—worse, I was the reason for her conflagration. So, I say, “I am contemplating elliptic curves, L-series, infinite numbers, and fixed points. I am thinking the art of solving the unsolved and dedicating your life to that which only exists in theory. Is the unfished work what keeps me here?”

He’s not like either of my boys, who would not have stood still for my philosophizing. He’s careful to be neutral and quiet, but the animals of his eyes have softened, delighted to finally hear me.

His joy at something so simple is unbearable to witness. I look away.   

“What difference it would make if I solved anything unsolvable. Who would even know? Nobody but a little boy. I am watching birds and trees through glass because I can no longer be amongst them. And I am humming Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Because it is beautiful. But I don’t think you should hum it anymore where your mother can hear.”

He absorbs all of that with a tiny nod and turns closer to the window, strains to stand at the same eyeline as me, seeking the birds who have already fled, as I am the shadow bound to this house. Or is to the boy? A tender, trembling thing, who makes me wish for a body and warmth and presence again so that he might feel my hand brush the top of his head, down his shoulder to soothe every part of him that is burned and trembling and alive.

Odds and Ends

by Brett Biebel | Sep 11, 2023 | flash fiction

It was supposed to be chess club, but instead, it was Gambler’s Anonymous, and that’s what you get in Moline. That’s what you get in church basements. It might be fried chicken, or it might be stale donuts, and I should have left right then, but I didn’t. I stayed. I don’t know why I stayed. I wrote “Reg” on my nametag, which was maybe the first lie, and some guy was talking about basketball. He said that CBS music made him feel whole and complete and ready to bust through a wall, and he was going to listen to it tomorrow. He was going to watch every minute of every game he could. Every TV in his house was plugged in in the living room. He’d already called in sick. His heart rate was going to rise, and he would cry and scream ecstatically by himself, and it was going to be okay because he was a goddamn force of titanium will, and he swore. Swore to Christ. There weren’t going to be any bets.

It’s hard to describe exactly how the room reacted to this. You’re not supposed to judge, I guess. You could tell, though, people thought it was a real shit idea, and I sat there, trying to hide my face. Trying to hide it without putting anything in its way, and I smoked a cigarette with this guy, after the meeting. He called himself Bigby. He said, “You don’t look right,” and the air smelled all cold and refreshing and dead, and I thought about all kinds of possible responses. “Who does, though,” or “Fuck off, asshole,” or maybe just kind of walk off like that. Like a goddamn scene from Chinatown or whatever, and all this must’ve taken forever because Bigby dropped some ash on my boot. I looked up.

“Seriously, man, you look like shit.”

“Drowned rats,” I said.

“What?”

“I used to walk in the door after practice, and my mom would say that. ‘You look like a drowned rat.’ I never really think about stuff like that.”

“I don’t think about much of anything.”

“Because thinking is overrated, I bet.”

“Don’t bet.”

“All bets are off,” I said, and I also think I fucking winked.

Bigby shook his head a couple of times, and then he left like I should’ve, and I followed him, followed him all the way home. Safe distance. Laying back and letting these pickups tuck in between. His house was in that part of town by the interstate, and there was a lot of brick and lawns trying as hard as they could, and he had a big front window. You could see practically the whole first floor. There was a picture of Jesus and an Old Style sign, and the real obvious thing was there was not one fucking TV. A bookshelf. Christmas tree lingering. I thought about how maybe the screens were all in the basement or all under lock and key or some shit, and I don’t know, man. Something about March. Something about snowmelt. It asks some pretty fucked-up questions, and I drove home thinking about all of them. Lies upon lies, and all I remember is the lights of the Burger King. Maybe that French fry smell is the only thing true.

The Cloud Lab

by Megan Callahan | Sep 7, 2023 | flash fiction

In science class, Margot teaches them about the magic of snow. “Evaporation, condensation, deposition,” she says. On the whiteboard she draws shapes connected by wiggly arrows. She’s tall and wiry, spine curved from decades of bending over small desks. Her face crumples like paper when she smiles or laughs. The kids like her white hair, her billowy floral dresses.

Margot peels open a cardboard box and distributes the musty contents: boots and wool socks; fleece-lined ski masks; colourful snowsuits with drawstrings at the waist. She leads them down the hall in a bumbling single file. Her own coat seems to swallow her; she hasn’t worn it in decades. “Gloves on,” she beckons. “Let’s go, zippity-zip.” At the end of the corridor is a plain white door. Cloud Lab, the sign says. Caution – Extreme cold.

The lab has milky walls and a high, vaulted ceiling. A digital thermometer reads -40℃. The children squeal and marvel at their misty dragon breaths. They race across the room, cheeks red as hibiscus petals. At the control panel, Margot twists a dial and punches in a code. A humidifier hums beyond the walls, pumping in air saturated with water vapour. Soon the domed ceiling is foggy with clouds.

“When I was little, we had blizzards.” Margot stamps her boots for warmth. “Clumps of snowflakes you could catch on your tongue.” Her students stare and blink. The word flake confuses them.

“Like cereal?” a girl asks

 “No,” she laughs. “No.”

She talks of snow piling on rooftops. Burying cars. Three feet, five feet. Up to your waist! “We could swim in it,” she insists. They groan and roll their eyes. She reverse-twists the dial and the humidifier quiets. “We’d pack snow in our fists and build forts in the yard. Barrel down hills on flimsy plastic sleds.” Above them, the clouds grow like swirling cotton candy. “And the cold,” she exclaims, throwing up her hands. “It prickled like needles. Chilled you to the bone.”

One boy laughs, another pelts questions: Was it dangerous, the snow? Could you be smothered or drowned? They’ve never felt anything like the Cloud Lab before. Cold is for ice cream; AC in peak summer; lakes when you cannonball from sun-drenched docks. None of them know winter. None of them know bone-chilled. Margot bites her lip. She gropes for clear answers. Every year, she runs the experiment and tries to explain. Something is missing, something has been lost, but she can never find the words to describe why it matters.

And suddenly it’s snowing: a sprinkling, like confetti. The children fall silent. They squish shoulders and look up, captivated by the magic trick. Arms above their heads, mouths open, tongues out. Margot folds her hands and presses them over her heart. She remembers frost on windows, darkness in the street. And the rhythmic crunch-crunch of her father, shovelling.

“Touch it,” she encourages. “Each snowflake is different.” Her students catch flakes and slip-slide in their boots. They scoop up mounds and try to eat them before they melt. “More!” one girl chants, but Margot shakes her head no. The school has water restrictions: a strict weekly limit. But already they’ve lost interest. They complain about cold toes. Margot ushers them into the hall, where they immediately shed their layers. Snow puddles from their soles onto the speckled linoleum. Margot gathers their snowsuits. She unbuttons her coat. Somewhere deep inside is an ache that feels like homesickness, except she’s lived here her whole life.

Back in the classroom, the windows are open. The air is sweet and heavy with the scent of lemon trees. Along the road, the cacti bloom. Aeoniums reach for the sun.