Night Vision

by Anna Gates Ha | Oct 18, 2021 | flash fiction

During a commercial, I ask you to tell me about nights in the jungle. We are blue and then white and then green—the quick, flickering light of television on bare skin.

Rain forest, you say.

I like jungle better. I mouth it into the lip of my beer. The way it digs like a shovel in the beginning. The way it presses against the roof of my mouth in the middle. The way it kisses the back of my teeth at the end.

Tell me.

You say you spent every night looking through your camera with the night vision on, the forest turned Ghost-Buster green.

We watch: A man goes into the wilderness with nothing but a metal pot to boil water, and he builds a life, a temporary life, out of this nothingness, this chaos of trees and weather. The first day, he builds a banana-leaf shelter, its roof a braided puzzle. He weaves a delicate nest of twigs in which he grows a fire, not for warmth, the man says, but to keep the poisonous snakes at bay.

Were you scared? I ask. I don’t know why I want to hear you say it.

Nah, you say but turn to look at the only window in my apartment.

We watch: The man eats black beetles and a snake that he stabs with a spear. A spear that is nothing more than a very sharp twig. He rolls off the snake’s skin like he’s undressing a woman’s leg, discarding the balled-up pantyhose on the ground, the flesh pink and pulsing underneath.

They choppered in supplies for me once a week, you say. Oats and water and powdered Tang. I had a generator for my laptop.

We watch: A night shot, the man glowing green, his face bright and overexposed. It is raining and his fire has gone out. He squats beneath the banana-leaf roof and blows into his cupped hands.

I’ve never felt closer to death, he says.

We watch: The man in a helicopter, chartering back to civilization. It has been two months. He is dirty and half naked and thin (the screen flashes to a before picture, his cheeks puffed with fat). He looks at the camera and says, I’ve never been more alive, man. Never in my life.

Have I ever felt these things? Alive, dead.

Once, my train got stuck in the tunnel beneath the bay, and my heart beat like something was happening. The lights went out and people clicked on their phones and the cabin filled with white, dancing rectangles. A baby cried and an old woman next to me said she thought she might faint. There was the distant smell of burning oil.

Then the lights came back on, and we arrived at Embarcadero five minutes later.

I think about telling you. I don’t.

The show ends, and you turn off the TV. The light from the street pours at us, licks our edges like frost.

Then you’re looking at the window again, and say, There was this one night. 

I slide my legs down so my stomach is against yours, my chin resting on your chest. You smell like eucalyptus.

You say your camera was busted. It’s damp in the rain forest and the equipment doesn’t like it. You say you heard something circling the camp. Around and around and your camera was busted and you couldn’t do anything but sit there and listen and wait for morning.

It could have been a panther, you say. Or it could have been nothing. The mind plays games when it can’t see.

Then I’m on my phone, looking for a night vision app. I find one and download it while you’re lying with one arm behind your head. I turn it on, set my phone on the dresser. I pull the comforter off my bed and throw it over the window. The room goes dark.

And you’d think that it would make us cautious: something watching us. But it doesn’t. It makes us brave. Reckless. It makes us who we wish we were.

We hunt for each other, blind and laughing at first, but silent and breathing deep once I’m on top of you, your hands pulling on my hips, my hands pressing into your shoulders.

I imagine what we’ll watch later. If we’ll look like panthers or prey in the jungle. Our recorded bodies pixelated and green.

We Don’t Boil Babies

by Alicia Dekker | Oct 15, 2021 | flash fiction

You don’t remember Grammy saying the words, although you were there. You were the baby. You’ve heard the story a million times, if you heard it once. “We don’t boil babies,” is the punch line—at least the way your mother tells it.

Your mother is a great storyteller. She backs that tale all the way up to the afternoon picnic the day before you were born. Oh, she tells you, she stuffed herself. Sauerkraut and cracklins! Pork sausage and chili! She knew she was in labor but still, she ate. She was eighteen. What did she know? She could have asphyxiated when they put her under—she knows that now—because they did that back then, you know, put you under.

And your father? He was at the picnic. But then Pappy loaded him in the pickup and hauled him back to school. Dried manure flew from the truck bed as they bounced down the lane. Oh, they all knew she was in labor. But Pappy said: What was he going to do? Best not lose that scholarship.

(You have questions you never ask, because you know better than to interrupt your mother’s performance. She has turned her light on you, and you soak it in like a moonflower. But you were born on a Tuesday. It’s hard to imagine Pappy, with his leathery farmer’s tan and oil-soaked cuticles, sanctioning a mid-week picnic.)

But I digress, your mother says, time and time again.

There are photos: Your mother in a voluminous printed dress, lost and wide-eyed in a sea of wrapping paper, ribbons, and a highchair. Her mother, younger than you are now, in severe cat-eye glasses and modest beehive. Your aunt, fourteen, looking smug.

And then there is you: In black and white, squinting at the camera through a glass bassinet. Swaddled and semi-sleeping. All that hair! You didn’t cry. You were a good baby.

Thank goodness Grammy came into the kitchen when she did! Your mother chuckles as she says this. She was only eighteen. What did she know?

You picture yourself: Tiny arms and legs writhing like points of a flickering star. Jerky infant kicks and salutes from deep within a tin tub on the kitchen table.

Thank goodness Grammy came into the kitchen when she did. Your mother laughs. What did she know about bathing a baby? Just that the water should be sterile… But Grammy took the steaming kettle from her hand. Your mother was only eighteen.

You are almost twice that age when you tell this story at a dinner party. You laugh where your mother taught you. Forks pause, mid-air; wine glasses return gently to the table. That’s a terrible thing, your friend’s husband says. Was your mother ill?

You stab something—a bit of lamb? a Brussels sprout? —on your plate and shove it in your mouth; make a show of chewing. Keep chewing until the conversation moves on, and then tuck the smallest buttered potato in the hollow of your cheek, for the rest of the meal, while you reconsider all the other funny stories your mother told you.

Account For What You Have

by Alexandra Blogier | Oct 8, 2021 | flash fiction

First, blanch the peaches. Run them under cold water to peel their skin away. Feel the flesh underneath. This is the last thing your mother taught you— get your house in order. The heat is urgent and unforgiving, but soon you will be far from here.

The storm will hit the coasts, both east and west. The house you are in is on a cliff on a curve of ocean. It will not last the night. The house you are going to is small and without windows, for there is nothing there to see. It won’t take long to get to the Property, acres of land so flat they make you feel desperate and unmoored like you could wander into the grass one day and never be found.

Buying the land was Hannah’s idea.

Maybe one day we’ll look back on these as the dark days of our early adulthood, she had written to you in a letter when she was traveling aimlessly around the country, winding her way around and down. You were twenty years old and could feel someone else’s heartbeat pump through your body. You didn’t mean to get pregnant, didn’t mean to stay pregnant, but you had already stopped making active decisions, already started letting things happen to you. You were a motherless daughter with an avocado inside you, blooming into a daughter of your own. You knew, by then, that those were the last days you had.

When Hannah called to tell you about the land she found in the middle of the country, you knew you would say yes. She was the first person you had spoken to in weeks and her voice over the phone was far away, but she spoke evenly and clearly and you thought of that exhibit you and she had gone to as children, the one where you stuck your hand into a box and felt something spiky or squishy, something completely foreign to your closed eyes and reaching fingers, only to open the box and find it was something familiar, something you had known all along.

Holy fuck, she said, when she saw you. She laughed a wild laugh and buried you in her arms and did not let go, and you knew then that you were bringing your baby into a world you could manage.

You spent the next two weeks sleeping in a tent, carrying water from a well in buckets, watching Hannah haul wood and build your home.

I can help, you told her. I’m not that pregnant.

Any pregnant is that pregnant, she said.

How did you learn to build a house?

How did you learn to make a baby?

She laid down next to you, head to your head, and you braided your hair into one long strand.

What if I can’t do this? You asked. It was the first time you voiced that fear.

You can, she said. You will. She did not look at you. You don’t really have a choice.

And then she was born, your avocado that swelled into a melon and pushed out into the world as a tiny wailing creature, and you knew just what to do. Nurse her when she was hungry, listen to her lungs pull in air. These things were no longer hard. They were choices you no longer needed to make.

You wake up one morning and the spiders have spread their tangled webs across the earth. Their silken husks cover every branch of forest, as though they built their homes as they were fleeing. This is how you know the storm is here. It is a tectonic shift, it is bigger than you thought it would be. It will do more than flood the coasts, it will split the Earth apart and fill it back up with water. Your knees buckle and you are on the floor, thinking, Oh, I didn’t know bodies could do that. You are gasping for air, you are choking on nothing, and then you hear the baby cry out in her crib. The only thing you can do is go to her, kiss her along her fragile spine, and say, listen to your body, listen to what it is telling you. You did not expect the world you shared with her to be like this.

You drive for hours, the baby asleep in the back. The mason jars clink with every turn you make, chimes that tell you there will be enough food for a few weeks, nothing more. The rain has started in sheets, the phones have already stopped working and you know Hannah will be waiting for you, her shadowy outline in the doorway. We can do this, you hear her saying to you, we can make this work. There is a dull buzz in your brain as you get closer to the Property, a frequency you cannot ignore.

Steam rises on the road that is filled not with cars but with people, spilling across both lanes. You wonder if they know something you do not if maybe you should not be in your car but among the swarm. You turn to face the baby. She is staring at you and you say, baby, I’m here. Darling, I’m right here. In months, these people will be nothing but bones pacing the empty earth. The houses you pass will decay down to their lonely frames. How many times can you truly start over? There is one turn left to make, but you don’t stop, you don’t even consider stopping. You do not say goodbye to Hannah, if only because you don’t know how.

Keep going into the darkness. Head towards the coast, already crumbling. Do not slow down, do not look behind you to the land fading fast. Do not calm the baby as she is crying. Do not lift your foot until you are over the canyon. Close your eyes and do not look down.

Girl on A bike, Boy in Dayton

by John Bensink | Oct 4, 2021 | flash fiction

Jack is sixteen when he sees Marie the first time, then 84 when he sees her again, though he doesn’t know he saw her before, and those caring for him—tolerating him—wouldn’t believe him anyway, for the brain is falling away from the man, who’s always looking blank-inward and couldn’t be seeing much of anything at this point, and clinically sees less every day. But he’s got this crack of a smile lately, thin but it never goes away, as if some long-awaited wish has been delivered and, now that it’s finally here, it can never be taken away.

So weak, this old Marie, and trouble breathing, never without her oxygen tubing, a wispy frail most avoid looking at too long not because she’s not knocking on Death’s Door, she’s pounding on it—so close to stepping through people might fear she’d pull them in with her if they’re too close. But Marie, terrified on her arrival, has calmed; where there was quaking, there is now a gracious serenity. She seems fearless now and…if staff were surprised to see her alive yet one more day, imagine how amazed they are at an insouciant old lady who, despite shuffling to her wheelchair, can’t wait to get out of her room and get to breakfast and then whatever the next thing might be. Carefree, at her age, laughing, even with that old failing heart coming apart like a cheap engine that was never assembled properly to start with.

*

They met in Dayton in 1952 and fell in love in one minute-forty-nine seconds—the duration of their time together. It was a summer trip with his father, checking in on hardware accounts, bring the boy along from Lancaster, let him see some of the world and what his old man did in it.

Girl on a bike, blue fenders, wicker basket leading the handlebars. Green-and-yellow checked dress, blonde braids draping down her back, saddle shoes a lot like his. She kickstanded it carefully out front, Jack watching her from inside as his father showed the owner a new hinge line he repped.

Marie entered and the bell jingled and Jack looked away fast so he could pretend he just happened to look up at the sound but she was onto him even though she was only fourteen—onto him before she realized she was onto him, somehow. There was a snap across the space between them, a cable connecting them and getting tauter as she crossed to the counter and their hearts pounded the same roar.

The owner pushed two quarts and a pint of paint he had mixed forward, then asked if the boy could help the girl load them up. Jack waited for nothing, grabbing the two quarts as she reached in for the pint and body-voltage surged back and forth as his hand grazed hers, then a look, stop-time like in the movies, and he was walking her out front, the two adults going back to their hinges.

After the jolt came bottomless shyness. Whatever this was…it couldn’t be anything, could it—kids, what do they know? The cautious walk side by side, avoiding eyes, then placing the paint in her basket—another hand-graze as crackly as before. Kids, they know nothing, but somehow, they know this is everything. A minute where nothing is said (nothing is ever said, really), then she smiles and nods thanks and mounts her bike and pedals off. Sixty feet away she looks back over her shoulder and there’s Jack, staring, smiling, and she pedals away fast, braids whipping and bouncing on her back in the splashy sun and though they can’t remember it now they also never forgot it.

*

The heart is always at work—monitoring itself for problems and creating solutions. It fixes itself endlessly, a squad of brain, blood, and electricity always working and finding ways to stretch out the beats and outplay the inevitable failure. Marie’s heart started pulling apart when she was eight, but no one knew, it was such a small disintegration—slow, at the cellular level.

She thought he must have moved to Dayton and she would surely see him again. She thought she would go around a corner and there’s that big square face with the apologetic eyes and the farm-boy smile. She thought about him for a long time, but then she stopped thinking about him…but a part of her that she forgot about never stopped thinking about him.

The heart is a genius, but the brain is a hundred hearts—a thousand. So many sectors of Jack’s brain are closed off, nonregenerative, some behind rusted-shut doors that will likely never open again, others down tunnels that have been dynamited and for practical purposes never existed—uncountable collapses that sucked away whole decades of his life, people, places, and emotions included.

But the Ohio girl: the area that holds her is as alive as the day it formed in him—even stronger. Jack forgot about her but it didn’t—it’s independent of him and now, so sturdy and resurgent, when so much of him is gone, it signaled to her; and it signaled, through her, all the people who decide for her. So last week they brought her to this assisted living complex in Pennsylvania, backdropped by the Allegheny National Forest, with a south-facing patio looking onto quilty fields and a lead-gray river.

It signaled to staff to put them, the best-behaved residents in the complex, side by side on the patio, she with the failing but determined heart, he with the addled brain but for the one perfect part.

Marie is too weak to speak; the place he speaks from is dead. But outside in their wheelchairs, faint sun just warm enough, there is no need. They don’t know each other but they know each other completely. They do not speak, they have never spoken a word, but they have also never stopped speaking, across all these years.

Necrotic

by Elise Blackwell | Sep 30, 2021 | flash fiction

The passion with which she took to the house and garden surprised him. She told him her grandmother taught her to cook when she was a girl. She’d just been waiting for a kitchen. She cooked hard, rolling pastry, stirring sauces with a wooden spoon, punching down yeast doughs and reanimating them with the warmth of her hands. She domesticated what she brought in from the yard, pounding great loose piles of basil or cilantro into pestos, transforming fat figs into glossy jewels suspended in glass jars, reenvisioning weeds into the bouquets that sat between them as they ate what she made.

“You’re an alchemist,” he said, “turning mud to gold.”

She shook her head. “Just a painter of still lifes.”

Outside she seemed tireless, turning the earth with a shovel, releasing its scent, revealing swarming life. The soil crawled with earthworm, ant, and what the child next door called doodlebugs.

When he stepped onto the porch in the summer gloaming to beckon her in, the air was perfumed with just-pruned lavender, rosemary, and mint. Mostly he watched, but from time to time he helped in some small way: putting away her tools, sweeping dirt from the stone pathway, coiling the garden hose according to her directions, its brass head resting in the center.

“Bring your passion to our bed,” he said sometimes, and she always did, the smell of garden still on her, their sex fierce.

It was a cool morning when he heard her cry out and ran downstairs to her. “The gutter was clogged and I was trying to open it,” she said, presenting her arm, the ring finger marked by two red punctures. “Cuts?” he tried, but she shook her head.

“The snake smelled like cucumbers.” She wilted into the passenger seat as he drove her to the hospital. Her hairline was sweaty, her face the strange yellow of dusk coming to a dirty sky when the refineries worked round the clock.

She came home that night with her arm bandaged elbow past fingertips. “We wait,” she said, “and I am not good with time.” For two days she stared out the window. He brought her sandwiches she didn’t touch, milk she did not drink.

On the third morning he awoke to the odor and saw her changing her bandages. The closest thing in his experience was when the neighbor’s dog dug up a weeks-old gopher from the compost pile. Now he tried not to compare the smell, afraid that any analogy would mark it in his memory.

The doctor had thin blond hair and the look of a woman grown suddenly old. Her cheeks and forehead glowed unnaturally red. “A side effect of a medication I’m taking,” she said, pointing to her face. “Not contagious.”

When she unwound the final pieces of gauze and released the smell he turned away—bile already in at the top of his throat.

“Cytotoxins in the venom,” the doctor said, “have caused local tissue death.”

He heard the word amputation and was surprised to hear his beloved ask, “the arm or the hand or just fingers?” as though she were comparing items at the market. In the end, they took the bitten finger and part of another. She cried when she emerged from the anesthesia but was otherwise stoic, taking less morphine than they offered, never complaining of pain or speaking of phantom digits, careful to cover her disfigurement but not seeming to dwell. Yet she did not go outdoors, except from porch to car door and always on the stone path. And she did not look him in the eye for more than a nervous moment.

Six weeks later the garden had gone wild. Tomatoes burst with their own weight, huge basil gone to flower collapsed sideways again the front fence, fruit rotted on the ground, attracting robins, bugs, small mammals that skulked away when he turned on the porch light.

Inside she cooked one handed: grilled cheese, pasta from a bag, soup bought somewhere else and heated, a bowl of grapes grown a continent away.

Upstairs they did not make love, coming only as close as his hand on her back, brotherly, or a workday’s goodbye kiss, lips closed.

One evening they lay on the bed, him in only pants and her in a white gown, watching shadows scrape the ceiling, not touching.

“My hand disturbs you,” she whispered and at last gave him her full gaze. “I know it looks horrible.”

But it was not the way her fingers looked that kept him on his side of the bed.  And he knew that if he inhaled she would smell like the lavender mist she sprayed on her face after she washed it, like the mint in the toothpaste from the health-food store, like her beautiful hair. Yet only the stink of necrosis filled his nostrils, and his stomach clenched.

To leave her now would be to admit he is a bad man, one permanently immature, and so he rolls over to make love to her as though she is a person who will not decompose.

Originally published in Newport Review.

Congee

by Joy Guo | Sep 28, 2021 | flash fiction

Five hungry blonde girls, sitting pertly on their haunches, holding court in the lounge. You all live on the same floor in the freshman dorm, go to the same classes, but still you take their orders. Marcie, the leader, asks, “You don’t mind, do you?” Of course not. Makes sense why it has to be you. She wants the hot and sour chicken, but, oh, can you please tell them not to slather it in sauce like last time. Jill and Megan pick from the Chef’s Specials section of the menu, dishes so luxurious, three different kinds of fish and shrimp, you can’t fathom ever ordering them for yourself. Rachel chooses the spare ribs – she’ll take a bite from the middle of each one and then toss the whole thing, ignoring the precious hunks of meat still clinging to the bone. And Sam says quietly she’ll have the mixed vegetables, the cheapest thing on the menu besides plain rice or an egg roll. For a minute, your eyes meet hers. The two of you might be more alike than you believed to be possible. But she looks away and, like the rest of them, doesn’t say thank you. You tell your friends you’ll be right back.

The woman on the phone has a rough-hewn accent, “r” and “s” sounds thrusting into “l.” She wants to know if you want extra lice. Closing your eyes, you see her bending over a stack of takeout menus, straining to hear you over the din of oil spitting against hot pans, the radio blaring top 40 hits, the cooks’ fluency in both Mandarin and Spanish smack talk. Her hair is tucked into a low bun, a few grey strands pasted to the nape of her neck. Her fingers are adorned with cuts, burns, blisters from a lifetime of working in a kitchen, unlike yours, which are soft and smooth and weak.

“How long will it be,” you ask, biting back the urge to switch to your second tongue.

“Usually twenty to twenty-five minutes. Your name?”

You hesitate for only a beat. “Marcie. M-A-R-C-I-E.”

At exactly fifteen minutes, you excuse yourself to use the bathroom. Instead, you wait outside, stamping your feet, rubbing your arms, wondering where the delivery man is. His scooter is almost as old as you are, its gears squeaking in protest, the brake requiring a healthy stomp to lodge. You worry about the day that brake decides it’s had enough, sending the rider tumbling into an unforgiving highway shoulder or against the flank of a car. You worry about him traveling to dimly lit buildings, collapsing from exhaustion. He isn’t so young and strong anymore, this delivery man.

When he finally rounds the corner, the scooter tooting a familiar, weary put-put in hello, you swallow the relief puddling in your chest. He takes off his helmet and smiles at you.

“Jia?”

“You’re late,” you say, reaching for the plastic bag.

Ba doesn’t hear. “I wish I had known this was your order. Ma didn’t say anything!”

The door at the entrance bangs open and you jump, but it’s only a boy from the second floor, who brushes past without looking over. Still, you have a horrible feeling that you had been seen.

“Can you just give me-”

“You look too skinny. Do you not like the dining hall food?”

“Please, Ba, the bag?”

Ignoring you, he retrieves a small bundle from the back of the scooter. It’s a chipped metal canister, one you saw every day growing up. Ba’s dinner pail.

“Here. Ma made it special. You’ll like it.” 

And because you know he won’t leave until you take it, you reach over and pry it open. Congee with pork floss, freckles of sesame oil, green scallions, and a cut-up century-old egg. You ate this when you stayed home from school with a fever, saving the best part for last, spooning every drop from the yolk. You loved it. You still do.   

Then you imagine those perfectly upturned noses wrinkling, their shoulders curling in disgust, the bottle-pops of laughter.

That looks like hair! Are you really going to eat that?

You’ll have to throw it out.

“Thanks, Ba.”

He hugs you and you wish you can wad yourself up into the lining of his jacket collar. Tucked away there, you can go back to being ten years old. Standing on a stool to reach the counter, poring over the words on the menu, picking out the misspellings. Ma wielding a cleaver the length of her forearm and whacking ribs apart with beautiful precision, Ba handling a wok pulsing with flames as though it’s a loyal pet. You are beside yourself with how much you love them.

But here you are now, with all these friends who are waiting. You shake him off and promise to call this weekend.

As Ba putters away, you don’t look back or wave, but dart inside, bumping into Sam.

“The food arrived just as I was coming out of the bathroom,” you hurry to explain before she even says anything.

“Okay.” She eyes the bundle as you edge towards a trash can.  What’s that?

You decide you will show her if she asks.

But she doesn’t.

You can still feel Ba shivering right before he let you go.  

“Hey, can you take this food? I need to drop something off in my room. Be right back.” 

“Okay,” Sam repeats.

Nor does she ask why you never want anything when the girls order takeout every Friday from that Chinese restaurant. What was the name again? Jade Dragon. Golden Pagoda. Lucky Panda. All the same, anyway.

In the safety of your room, you take out what Ma made. You think of Ba riding alone at night in his thin jacket, with no gloves. The congee is still warm. You lift it up to your mouth.

Life-Forms

by Robert Scotellaro | Sep 23, 2021 | flash fiction

Multilingual

We’re in the garden.  There are fragrances there, fluent in many languages.  Cassie digs, plants, pats the earth.  We’ll soon be wedding cake toppers—her lacy gown/my penguin-wear.  There are wind chimes, tinkling.  They were once blown into a tangle of silence.  It took a while to untangle them.  Perhaps there is a metaphor here.  The story changes.  We are continually winnowing it down (what is at stake) like Russian nesting dolls.

Her engagement ring is over an earth-crusted trowel, in league with sunlight.  There will be a faint ghost of it on her finger when she takes it off at night.  I’m in a lawn chair strumming a ukulele.  She wants a baby.  I want two dogs and a Harley.  “No hurry,” she tells me. 

“People pray for a basketful and carry a cup,” she told me once.  You could break a tooth chewing on that one.  As she goes back into the house, I glance at a rose she’s brushed past, bobbing, then at the accordion folds of her shadow up the steps.

Bachelor Party

The stripper comes in with a behemoth in tow, slices through testosterone thick as whale blubber.  She waves off light from her eyes.  Someone gets a towel and puts it over the shade of a standing lamp.  The dimmer light hides a bruise I noticed earlier, caked with make-up.  Many of my friends are married.  The “ball and chain” jokes morph into a sizzle with wide eyes on her: “Look-what-you’ll-be-missing” eyes.

The behemoth speaks with a heavy Eastern European accent.  He lays out some rules, then holds up a wall with his arms folded.  A chair is placed in the center of the room and I’m in it.  The striper unzips my trousers slowly like she is revealing the secrets of the universe.  We waited this long, so what the hell?  Then pant leg by pant leg she pulls off my jeans to cheers.  I’m in my tighty-whities.  My friends’ expletives are small explosives with confetti inside.  The behemoth has a boom box and plays some garment-shedding music on it she finds irresistible.  She’s pretty good.  And fit.  She’s in no hurry.  There is a restless shuffling from the watchers and I’m not certain, but I think I hear someone say, “Oh, momma!”

She’s down to just her panties, turns her red-lacy butt to the revved up onlookers.  Tony gets up and hollers something unintelligible, so exuberantly, he farts and everyone laughs.  The behemoth does a “Sit the fuck down” gesture with his bearded head, and Tony does as he’s told.  She makes much of her lap-landing.  Circles the runway, then gyrates down.  The feverish hooting crescendos.

There is something overly floral about her scent.  Not Cassie’s garden.  This is olfactory abuse.  I feel her breath in my ear: “Now ain’t you the show horse,”  she says.   It sounds rehearsed.  I smell something burning.  It’s not cigarette smoke or pot.  “Shit,” the behemoth says and turns like a weather vane and rushes to the lamp.  The towel is nearly on fire.

Cave Entrance

“Do we really need protection?” Cassie says.  “I mean, what are we actually protecting against?  Let’s roll the dice.  Get frisky.”

We are at a party.  It’s snowing out, lightly.  Our coats are atop a pile on the bed, slightly damp, and Cassie finds the weighted sum of them inviting.  She has stopped taking the pill, says they’re making her moody.  We’re using condoms now.  I haven’t any.  My brother is at the house feeding our two yellow labs.  My Harley is in the garage waiting for spring.  Waiting to spring.  I want Cassie’s arms around my waist and the world to whiz on by us, or seem to, as we whiz on by it.  Velocity can air one out.  Air two out in all the right ways.

Lately Cassie’s been urging us to make love in odd places.  Says she always wanted to make love in a barn, in a hammock, in a mall dressing room.  Everyone is in the living room with their drinks and an ooze or riptide of gossip.  We are in the bedroom of a close friend.  Cassie is staring at the pile of coats and lifts one end.  It is dark inside and there is the combined scents of all our friends (natural and unnatural) and a hint of the weather outside.  When I was a kid my mother got me a book of snowflakes.  A single flake for each slick page.  I marveled at the sight of each in isolation.  Nearly planetary.  Each a unique, irreplicable art.

Currently they are merely damp spots on coats as Cassie smiles, goes to the door/the knob and pushes in the lock button.  Goes back and finds another cave entrance.  I glance inside.  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.  There is no end in there, no top, no bottom—only future now.