Deaths of the Actor

by Abigail Oswald | Dec 16, 2021 | flash fiction

The actor has died thirty-four times. His first death, a grotesque slow-motion spearing in the midst of battle, was looped in a viral video and produced a glut of comments which were either laughing with or at him—he’d never conclusively determined, but he feared the worst.

It’s dramatic, that first: The actor stands triumphantly atop a pile of bodies, sword dripping a hot, liquid red. But in the end he is felled by his own hubris, an opposing soldier’s weapon smoothly piercing his heart at the moment of supposed victory. He’d finished with a guttural, rattling moan that he now regrets—too fake, too performative, and increasingly humorous the more it is replayed, but this had been a later take and he was tired of dying, wanted to go home and feed his cat. He had just moved to LA and wasn’t being paid much to die anyway. The armor was heavier than it looked.

Something about his death resonated with the masses, however; they wanted more of it. So when he got a minor TV role—the inevitable adaptation of a popular horror movie for the small screen—the creators decided to kill him off for ratings. He now suspects that they cast him expressly for this purpose. Halfway through the season, he opens the wrong door to unexpectedly meet a man with a chainsaw. The antagonist makes quick work of him—the actor only releases the first few seconds of a scream before a clean, swift cut across the jugular takes the rest. It unnerves him, watching later, to see his head cleaved so effortlessly from his body. That one stuck with him; every now and then he finds himself running his fingers compulsively along his jaw, just to confirm its attachment.

It is through his sacrifice, that incomplete scream, that the rest of the cast is alerted to the killer’s presence in the house. He makes a guest appearance in season two as another character’s memory, but even in this form is doomed to relive the moment of his death over and over until he cannot bear it, escaping to purgatory or the afterlife or whatever the hell comes next. None of his roles have explored this, of course; they simply close their eyes and cease to be.

The actor has only continued to die since then. He has been skinned alive, hit by a bus (this one was funny, he has to admit, especially played in reverse), chopped up and fed to his girlfriend, strangled by an anonymous lover, eaten by his cat, felled by smallpox, shot, shot, shot—the list goes on. It’s beginning to irk him, the idea that his very presence in a story might now alert the viewer to the possibility of his demise. Not to mention confronting mortality for a living is starting to take its toll. Just once he wants to be the hero, the survivor. Just once, he wants to live.

Recently he’s had several panic attacks on set, passed off as severe heartburn before he can escape to another room to let the fear pass. He schedules an appointment with a highly credentialed and very expensive therapist while crouched in the corner of a bathroom stall, asking the secretary to repeat the fee in a whisper that echoes off the tile. He’ll have to sign on for additional deaths just to afford her services.

During their initial consultation, the therapist claims that all this dying is actually a good thing. A constant exposure to his greatest fear might help him overcome it, she says. He responds that he fears the deaths are only serving to increase his pervasive existential dread.

In an effort to combat the fear, the therapist pulls up a collected reel of the actor’s deaths online and has him watch it on a loop, cheerily observing his face and bodily reactions as he does so. He is unnerved by the steady smile on her face but dutifully watches one after the other, wincing, feeling each death as a ghostly pang in his body, an absence he cannot concretely define.

In the end, however, she pauses very suddenly and says his name, which he does not immediately recognize. His fingers brush his cheeks and come away damp; he’d never been able to cry on command, he recalls, almost amused. Perhaps he has found the secret. Together they look at her computer, an agonized self he does not recognize frozen on the screen, mid-scream.

I saw this one, the therapist comments suddenly, a gleam of recognition in her eye. You know, for what it’s worth, you’re good at what you do.

Sweets From Strangers

by Tian Yi | Dec 16, 2021 | flash fiction

When we heard that Mingming’s grandmother was coming to live with her, my sister and I asked our parents endless questions. Our Yeye and Nainai were faraway figures whom we saw once a year, after long flights. They held us in their insistent gazes and tested us on Chinese characters in the newspaper, shook their heads sadly as each year we forgot more and more. Buhui, we’d say through giggles.

Zhege ne?

Buhui.

It seemed impossible to have a real grandparent present in a house, in a life. But all our parents would say was that Mingming’s mum must need support. We knew that Chen Ahyi was sometimes ill, so it was easy to imagine her as a very tall and very thin tree, bending in the wind, and the grandmother as a post, strapped to her side.

Our impression changed when we saw Mingming’s grandmother walking her to school, though it seemed more the other way around, the tiny, wrinkled woman hanging onto the crook of Mingming’s arm. Each day they shuffled slowly to the gate, where Mingming disentangled herself without saying goodbye, leaving her grandmother to shuffle slowly away. Our parents tutted about golden lotuses, wondered about the kind of family Mingming came from, that had maintained such backward practises for so long. Wondered if that was why her dad had left. Later, in the playground, Rosie and Hannah danced around Mingming calling her grandmother a witch, and we joined them, pretending we couldn’t see Mingming’s tears. When my sister asked if I really thought golden lotuses meant something witchy, I nodded firmly, and she did too.

One day, Mingming and her grandmother came shuffling towards us in the park. Our parents had told us not to move from the swings, so we sat there, swaying gently, legs dangling.

Why haven’t I met these two children before? Mingming’s grandmother said. Her Dongbei accent was just like ours. Mingming stared at the ground. You all look the same age. Aren’t you friends?

We are, I said, for some reason.

Have one, she said, holding out a small open tin. For a moment I thought she was offering us jewels, but they were sugar candies, the size of fingernails, translucent and tempting. My sister and I took one each and popped them in our mouths.

Mingming ran to the climbing frame. Her grandmother stood there in front of us, taller than us, in this position.

You two are lucky, she said. If he’d lived, Mingming’s brother would be four now.

We didn’t say anything. When Mingming’s grandmother finally shuffled away, for the first time in my life, I didn’t turn to my sister. I didn’t want to look at the features that were identical to my own, because I didn’t know what I would see there. I felt her swinging again next to me, but I stayed still, holding the candy under my tongue until it melted, until there was only the sugar-sweet spittle left in my mouth.

The Marriage Market

by Susan Wigmore | Dec 9, 2021 | flash fiction

An old Bedford van passes you on the track to the *moussem. On top, penned but precarious, barely a bleat, goats. Good meat, you’re told. Behind you, the woman who shares your bed, the woman who wants to be your wife, she says. The woman who fucked your sister. Clawed you red and hollow beneath your ribs.

The stale breath of last night’s argument lingers in the space between you. You’re grateful she hangs back; you’d struggle to be civil. She doesn’t deserve you, you think, and you consciously walk in time to the sound of drums from the market, swaying your hips so she can’t help but see. You decide to hate your sister for tarnishing the precious, sparkling things in your life.

Some children notice you, whisper behind hands as you approach. You know enough not to stop and fall prey to them, despite the stupidity of being separated in the crowds if you get too far ahead. So, you slow down and look purposeful. Two girls giggle and move closer. Others take their lead and surround you on three sides, keeping a distance, eyes smiling, but leaning in, taking liberties. You want to bat them away. Then the track is filled with the noise of camels, solid, incontrovertible, and drovers’ sticks and shouts cutting the air. The children scatter into the market and you make yourself look at the woman behind you.

She is slight, blonde hair wrapped in a yellow Berber scarf, layers of colourful fabric. She looks the part. You never knew you’d grow up and fall in love with a chameleon. You never knew you’d grow up and fall in love with anyone.

“Bitch,” she says.

It’s a term of endearment in your shared language; perhaps there’s an edge to it now, you think. Perhaps there isn’t. But you hold your tongue. You know how she turns things: she doesn’t want a lecture about love.

You want to remind her of that night in your flat, trawling through The Rough Guide, the bottle of white Rioja, the sex. The story of the young lovers driven apart by their warring families, whose tears became the two blue lakes nestled in the mountains nearby. That’ll never be us, she said, as she fed you a pomegranate, placing its arils on your tongue with more tenderness than you have ever known, enjoying your pleasure as they burst in your mouth.

Instead, you walk along Champs-Élysées, even managing a smile at the joke scrawled on a scrap of cardboard, and don’t care now if she follows you or not. You pass makeshift meat stalls, aiming for the large white tents, red flags fluttering, where the signing of the marriage contracts takes place. Flies lift in unison from a goat’s head hanging from a hook, before settling once more. Live chickens dangle by their feet from the hands of customers, stupefied by their upside-down view of the world. On a blanket in the dust, spines of porcupines stripped from carcasses. Everywhere is flesh. You feel disembodied.

You follow the steady stream of brides and grooms, nearing the end of their journeys from remote villages high in the Atlas Mountains. It’s a time of promise and plenty: stalls swelling with dates, king walnuts, pomegranates the colour of an autumnal setting sun. Teenagers eddy and swirl. Boys and girls drawing and redrawing the space between them with a furtive glance through lashes, the flash of a smile, a hand raised provocatively to the mouth. You think of the annual fair on the common back home when you were a teenager, with its dodgems and hot dogs and dark, shadowy places: the moussem is as taut with sexual tension and possibility.

A sudden movement by some steps catches your eye. A small lizard pinned to the ground, a spider fast as dust in the wind.

“Camel spider,” says a man who is watching you watching the struggling lizard. He looks at you optimistically and takes a step closer.

“I’m here with my friend,” you say quickly. My husband, you lie, in a just-in-case voice, louder than necessary. The camel spider begins to ingest its meal. You slip a scarf around your face and search the crowds for a woman wearing yellow.

She’s seen you, walks towards you. Her step is sure. She lowers her eyes. You look at the pomegranate held in her outstretched hand, see the tracery of leaves and tendrils hennaed there, like the brides you followed earlier. She holds the fruit to your ear and taps. Hear? she says. There is a round perfection to the sound, metallic in its clarity. And there is no decision to make. Your gaze is as unwavering as her hand.

*moussem: a traditional festival or celebration

Oil Drills

by Lauren Weber | Dec 6, 2021 | flash fiction

She reached into the fridge for one of those individual tubs of yogurt designed to release the digestive tract. Her mother arrived and filled the house with reminders of her climbing age: thick orthopedic shoes by the door, prescription meds strewn across the bathroom counter, short gray hairs embedded in the carpet. There was a baby shower: mountains of diapers and blankets and onesies patterned with dinosaurs. She remembered dressing her first child in these items, alone in her ex-husband’s home. He left before dawn every morning and returned late, not because he preferred to have sex with someone else, but because he experienced something much more offensive—the determination to advance in the ranks of his employer. Now she was pregnant for the second time, married just as many.

The yogurt made her stomach turn and she spit it in the sink. At the baby shower, her mother gave an unbearable toast about this process bringing together every woman everywhere. That in a time of such divisiveness and unrest, it was the children who reminded us all of our inner unity.

Her mother was wispy, approaching mysticism, and small currents of mascara flooded the folds that had set in her face over the past few years. 

“To love,” her mother said, raising a glass of pink liquid, “and to rebirth.” The women surrounding her smiled, followed her lead, and drank from their glasses. She barely knew these people: women from high school, from down the street. She didn’t know what love had to do with rebirth nor what love had to do with the birth of this child, but she raised her glass all the same, sloshed the too-sweet juice down her throat.

Most nights, her second husband came to bed around midnight. He pulled back the sheets and rested his ear upon her bare stomach, always growing as if to meet him halfway. It was a ritual they never agreed upon as if this part of her body was divided between them. The pregnancy separated her into thirds—one for the child, one for her husband, one for her. She slept, then woke up around three in the morning and plugged headphones in, listening to the news of faraway countries in unfamiliar languages, lulling herself back.

Years ago, she sat at a quiet table in the back of a club, near the bathrooms, knees pressed against the first man who would get her pregnant. Their conversation only paused at the grating sound of vomit racing into a toilet bowl from behind the closed door. She stared at his long, dark hair as he explained himself to her. He studied at the city’s university and had dreamt from a young age of advancing cloud seeding technology.

Cloud seeding, he told her, is a type of weather modification that changes the amount of precipitation that falls from the clouds. Substances are released into the atmosphere that transforms the clouds—so nothing is destroyed, just altered.

This reminded her of something her mother told her as a child. Each time an eyelash or nail clipping or baby tooth fell from her body, it arrived in someone else’s pocket, so no part of her was ever lost. 

“Remember that,” her mother had said, pulling a glass of wine to her face. “No part of you is ever lost, it’s just waiting to be found somewhere else.”

She told him this and it was over. The way his eyebrows softened, the half-smile that stretched across his face. He loved her now, already.

He was gentle, brushing the damp hair from her forehead, slowing whenever she winced. 

“I didn’t know it would be like this your first time,” he said. No one really tells you anything, she wanted to say, do they?

He said he was flying home, across an ocean, before she could put words to the growing within her. 

She met the man who would become her first husband in a grocery store. He was staring at slabs of fish atop crushed ice. They married within the week, eloping at a nearby national park. Oil drills obscured the mountains, and she knew that this place—like her marriage—would be short-lived, even though it came with the intention of eternity. She wondered if life was defined by the men she met and the things they gave her. But this thought depressed her, and so instead she focused her eyes on the drill digging into the earth, searching for the remnants of ancient beings, compressed and transformed, as he spoke his vows to her.

He would love the child, but only in relation to her. When she left him, he would forget altogether about the daughter, still soft and biting.

The news floating in her ears each night probably spoke of bombs and drones and climate collapse, no matter the language. She woke in the morning to her mother pacing in the kitchen, blending peas and apples into a paste for the baby; her husband leaving, going to an office where he was needed and useful. And she lay in bed, hands around her swollen belly. Nothing she had lost over the years was wanting to be transformed and found, nothing at all. 

Evening Clay

by Josh Wagner | Dec 3, 2021 | flash fiction

The speaker made us choose:

“Your house is on fire. Family and pets are safe. What one thing would you take with you?” He hunted us with his eyes. Shoes squeaked over the gym floor, echoing in the frost of our hypnotic teenage lethargy, “…just one thing…”

The bell rang, and we exploded like buckshot.

*

That summer, wildfires funneled through the canyons toward our little five-acre plot of fenceposts and sagebrush. The bald ridge flaunted sparse pine. If the fire hit all this scrub, there’d be no stopping it.

What would I take?

Dad built the house for my mother before I was born. Last year she took her own life in the gully where, in autumn, elk descend by the hundreds. We’d constructed a memorial with a cedar bench, iron cross, and a ring of standing stones.

Everything I valued now was part of the earth. Flames might blacken the stones, singe the cross, ash the bench. Scorch the ground where she offered parting words to a starlit sky. Sometimes I’d go down and listen for their echo.

“We’ll have to move,” Dad said.

“They’ll put it out. They always do.”

The evacuation order gave us 48-hours.

*

Sunset brought traces of smoke over the hills. We spent the day hauling boxes to our new apartment. I grabbed two beers for one last walk down to the cross and stones. I sat on the bench, watching silver sage turn purple. I imagined the ridge going up like a phoenix glaze of cloud-feathers molding renegade light into evening clay.

Most of my anger had fizzled out. Only cold heat remained, trapped in brittle stone. I’d stopped asking why she didn’t stick around to see me graduate, write a book, start a family… Now I ask why our world still can’t soothe agony raw enough to blot out such dreams.

What would she have taken with her, given the chance, in flight from the burning house of her mind? Leaving me crippled, a coal in the grass, desperate for an evening gust. My whole life ahead of me, which really isn’t any time at all.

Only sparks now. I had to choose.

I emptied her beer at the base of the cross. A fresh glow licked the horizon.

If you could take just one thing…

Then I heard her voice. Like an echo under all that ash.

Take the fire.