romantic connecticut

by Dani Blackman | Jan 26, 2023 | flash fiction

there is no romantic connecticut the text says, but I don’t take this as rejection. I don’t blame autocorrect. I read her words again, but can only see Connecticut, cut with all beauty this time of year —clean snow over old hedges and children sliding streets in stiff jackets—how could it not be a contender? This must be how loneliness and yearning fell us, because in an instant we have a future, one that takes us to a winter under the covers, whispering romantic connecticut after exhausting all good language, spending our mouths on the thickest parts of our bodies. I want you to see it too—
my teeth taking her thighs until you’re pulled so close that I can only hum into your skin.

no, there is no romantic connection she writes, but that isn’t accurate either, as if shovel didn’t meet dirt to tend, as if she hadn’t spent her whole life planting one pretty word against the next. She can say I’m empty of what she desires, though what to desire? We don’t know.

Here the mountains sit as the hunched backs of women, still in the grey, storing light beneath their hard peaks. It goes this way, our confusion and complexity, so I keep no romantic connection as truth. She offers friendship. I thank her for honesty.

What I want to text her now, without exclamation points, is this: I’ve shared soft beds with women whose names I can’t remember. Some I only knew for hours before I gave: here –- here –- here –-

In the lightest part of a day, a girl dared me to look right in her eyes

and say something hot about her tits. Now I speak. And I speak. And

maybe every fifth one hears something unforgettable. Maybe I’ll

congratulate myself for urging women to such greatness, spooning a

food they’ve been told to taste, moving for the ones who learned for

men, and such construction should come with consolation. The best of

the exes didn’t believe in marriage, or longing, even when she felt it

build inside her. She ducked her head whenever I pointed a camera her

way, so I don’t have much in terms of reliving our time, but how do we

remember love now if it’s not recorded, then

rewound?

My mother never cried. But on long road trips, with me and my sister strapped into the back seat, she sang Linda Rondstadt’s “Love Has No Pride” with such conviction that I thought she might drive off the road. And she did sometimes swerve for dramatic effect. She sang with her hands off the wheel and implored me and my sister to listen, really listen, so that what survived from these coded life lessons is this: feel pain and pleasure equally, let experience top vulnerability, give and feel, give and feel, then pay for it later.

In Northampton, MA, lesbian capitol of the world, a lover said I might be the most passionate person they’d ever met, but we’d never be in love. I, too, sing out and raise my arms to the air. I can’t carry a tune, but passion can make a mother proud. I think of Mom now, how quickly married men snuck out of her bedroom on school mornings, how she worked my father into one last time, how her loves came so relentlessly and intermittently that I never learned to land between starvation and saturation. I think of how she stocked full this inheritance, what we transfer from one woman to the next, how

I once kissed/with uncertainty
my mouth tightened/hands
slid from the waist/loose
despite what I offered/I knew
if I stopped/ I’d have to see
in her/myself
searching

Tell me, then, how to watch fears take truth, how a teenager’s missteps return to beat fruition, how to just go and go, because that’s always been better than standing still.
I said, “You’re really beautiful.”

She said, “You’re really not that short.”

What I believe, still, is everything I give is the beginning of what I can do, that I can stand in the desired without having to call up the ones I’ve loved to listen to them say

you are good

20 years and one day, I’ll feel enough like a champion to stop counting. But now I still need one lover + the next + that naked blonde on her birthday + the way my girlfriend slept with fists on my back so I would always feel her weight + the weight + one who said I turned her straight + the fling who came back 4 years later + the best friend +

Simple math: time has never given one more minute, time has me now tired

But I go and go, with hope, with shame, with collections that stay like trinkets shoved in the bottom of a suitcase, carrying what has always remained

her possibility

and mine

Cheerleader

by John Haggerty | Jan 12, 2023 | flash fiction

Alison was a cheerleader, and the second-prettiest girl in our class. These qualities seemed extremely important to us at the time, at least until she accidentally killed one of the football players with her car.

It was a BMW, a red convertible. Her father, who did something mysterious but clearly important, had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday, one of the many gifts given to her throughout her life.

She had also been given glossy, shampoo-commercial chestnut hair, and resplendent sugar-white teeth. She had been given trim buttocks, and the type of breasts for which the cheerleader sweater was designed. She had been given her parents’ divorce, which applied a thin but gratifying veneer of tragedy to her life. She had been given a mother who had the good taste to relocate three states away, sparing Alison the humiliation of seeing her debasing herself with men possessing only a fraction of her father’s net worth. She had been given a faux-Georgian mansion with many large, echoey rooms, and a bedroom filled with flouncy, cartoonish princess touches, like an overstuffed pink chaise that nobody ever lounged upon, and a luxuriant bed with enough layers of canopy to repel every anopheles mosquito and tsetse fly in the Congo, should they have ever been called upon for so prosaic a purpose. Which they were not. And before she killed him, she was briefly blessed with Anthony, who was about as mean a motherfucker as had ever attended our school.

Anthony was a towering, brooding boy from whom things had mostly been taken away: his father by the police when he was ten years old, his mother by social services two years later, his capacity for kindness and empathy by the world at large, whose main lesson to him was that things had to be taken or they would never be had at all.

We were perplexed by this unlikely pairing. The football player/cheerleader nexus was a well-trod path, of course, but Anthony wasn’t particularly handsome, or particularly talented, or particularly clever or amusing. Junior college washout was his ceiling, we all thought with some satisfaction as he was banging our anonymous heads against walls or kidney punching us in the hallway for no apparent reason.

Even now, years after high school, we still wonder at their relationship. Why, of all people, would a girl like Alison choose a boy like Anthony? Were they obeying some natural law, the attraction of opposite forces, the positive to the negative, the damned to the divine? Was she testing her admittedly fabulous luck, an adolescent Icarus winging her blithe way toward the event horizon of Anthony’s black hole? Or perhaps she simply made that most common mistake—mistaking ferocity for confidence, viciousness for strength?

But now, years removed from the events in question, we have begun to think—to hope, really—that in their brief time together, they found something more. Is it too outlandish to believe that Alison, so thoroughly blessed with an easy life, saw something that we could not, the boy behind the pain, the man that he might have, under different circumstances, become? Or that someone like Anthony, a boy who had been given nothing, might be the only one among us who could pierce the surface Alison, to find his way through all of the dazzling unearned gifts to the sad, lonely girl beneath?

In the end, we suppose that it doesn’t matter. The details of Anthony’s death, obscured by layers of lascivious speculation and rumor-mill enhancement, were never completely clear. Some of the common threads seemed plausible enough: the red convertible, a turn taken too fast, Anthony perhaps standing up on the passenger seat, overcome with the exhilaration of youth, the joy of his association with the second-prettiest girl in our class, with the never-experienced sensation of having at long last gotten a break, of feeling that his luck had finally and irretrievably changed.

And Alison was, in turn, given that last moment with him, hands still clenched on the steering wheel, feeling as though she might never be able to let it go. The convulsive lights of the emergency vehicles strobing off the dashboard of her expensive car. The moonlit sheen of blood on the road, so much blood, a covered corpse on a gurney being shoved into the back of an ambulance, a brief glimpse of the infinite present, the moment in which the Anthonys of the world both exist and do not, where she is simultaneously the luckiest, second-prettiest girl in the whole school and something else entirely.

Alison disappeared soon after that, hustled off to one of those private schools devoted to hiding the shames of the rich. We made our anonymous way through graduation and into the world, discovering, via a cadre of federal prosecutors, that Alison’s father’s job was perhaps much more illegal than it was important. We begin to forget Alison entirely, dredging her out only occasionally as a cautionary tale.

And then, years later, we see her again. She is a phlebotomist at our HMO, the technician who extracts blood for laboratory tests. We’re not sure it’s her at first. Her posture is stooped, her skin grainy and tinged with fluorescent-light gray. We glance at her name tag—yes, it’s Alison, all right—and are filled with a momentary fear that she will recognize us. But of course, we needn’t have worried. She was far above our social sphere back in high school, and now it seems that she moves through the world seeing only veins—shy, hard to locate veins, assertive, throbbing, easy veins. She knots a blue latex band above our bicep and then inserts a needle into the crook of our arm. Blood spurts into the vial, and we sit together for a moment, watching it fill. We give it to her freely, this intimate part of ourselves, our lifeblood, the contents of our heart. Under the circumstances, it feels like the least we can do.

No Matter How Pretty They Look

by Kristina Saccone | Dec 23, 2022 | flash fiction

It was our first once-a-month grandmother-granddaughter date at the JCC. I hopped on the treadmill while you did Jazzercise, all ladies over the age of 60 – or maybe 70, but at the time, I couldn’t tell the difference – and one man, Norman. Ink blots on his bare head, pants up to his ears. The ladies laughed in the locker room about his little grunt each time he leaned on his

right foot. They said it sounded like their husbands trying to come. You sat there with them, all of you naked from the waist-up, folds of silly putty skin rolling over a couple of ragged surgery scars, some galaxy-size stretch marks, and one larger-than-tarantula wine-colored mole above a pale, lumpy buttock. You talked like old friends – though you said you barely knew any of them –breasts resting on their stomachs, thighs, towels wrapped around their waists, giggling about Norman as though at an afternoon klatsch, fully dressed neck to ankle.

I watched this with my robe tied shut, in wet shower shoes, shielding myself with the locker door, mortified by all that skin and laughing and wetness and unadulterated fat. At the time, I was worried about the guy I was dating, his obsession with an ex, whether he fucked me for fun or to forget her. When you mentioned my “mysterious man” to the ladies, they turned their fleshy bodies at me and poked for details. I showed them Trey’s Match.com photo, and

their crooked fingers reached for more detail. They cooed over it, but you, you never minced words. You said, “No matter how pretty they look now, they all turn into Norman one day.”

I stepped behind the shower curtain and let the robe slide off, water rolling off my belly. Trey’s ex – or so he said – had a flat tummy and round butt, but mine was curvy, channeling suds from the crease between my breasts to my belly button until the soap disappeared. I got out of

the shower with nothing but a towel on my head. Until then, I had never been naked in front of anyone but boyfriends or the doctor – no, not even in front of Mom, not since I grew breasts–but you and your friends didn’t blink because I was just one of the ladies.

Norman winked at us on our way out the door. I left a voicemail for Trey in the parking lot, not sure I wanted him to call back, before we picked up pastries and ate them in the car, buttery flakes crumbling all over our laps. 

Your Lover, The Clown

by Iona Rule | Dec 20, 2022 | flash fiction

You meet him at your niece’s birthday party, where the kids run feral, coked-up on pink juice and icing. While he performs his act, your sister is with her mum friends, drinking warm wine in the kitchen and whispering loudly about that mother in the PTA. The men are outside, comparing their latest acquisitions: BBQs, lawnmowers, mistresses.

He makes balloon animals, a menagerie passing through his hands. You watch the deft way his fingers move, creating knots and curls, producing life from nothing. The children request eagles, frogs and unicorns, which he produces with an effortless flourish. He asks you what animal you would like. You look into his whitewashed face with its scarlet smile and diamond eyes and reply

“A hedgehog”

 because you’ve never been easy and spending time with your family makes you bitter. He keeps smiling and creates a dolphin, presenting it with a comical bow. It’s not even close.

“I will practise,” he says, which may be the kindest thing anyone will say to you today. You want to tell him that a group of hedgehogs is called an array, but that you have never seen a group. You have only ever seen one.

You take him to a bar after and ask if he’d like to take off the face paint and the oversized rainbow dungarees. He says he’s comfortable as he is, and you’re relieved.  You order a Negroni, and the ice cubes click against your teeth with each sip. He tells you about his family. You expected fire-eaters and acrobats and are disappointed when he talks of a plumber and a librarian. You tell him about your parents, how you always wanted to be different but never quite managed.

That night you take him home. You undo his bow tie and remove his blue bowler hat, but ask him to leave his face paint on. As you have sex, you stare into his face, which is always smiling, and wonder if it could always be like this. In the morning, after he leaves, you apply your lipstick, moving the crimson paste beyond your lip line, curling up the edges in a permanent grin.

You meet your lover, the clown, every Thursday. He smells of grease paint and candyfloss. He always comes in costume, straight from a shopping centre opening or a circus audition. Every time, you ask him to leave it on. It amuses you to think that you may be passing your lover on the street or the bus, and never know it. That you have never seen his real face. 

The last time he comes over, you tell him you’re ready and ask him to take off the mask. But he won’t.

“You never take off yours,” he says.

He kisses you, smearing paint on your face, below your eye, like a tear, ties his red shoes, and leaves.

You find the gift he has left on the bedside table. A balloon animal. The hedgehog he promised, and beside it, a pin. Because he knew you so well, after all.