Motherhood: A Hexaptych

by Candace Hartsuyker | Mar 1, 2021 | flash fiction

1

She is cold, but they are frost and shiver. She digs them holes in the snow, sweeping ice crystals away. They burrow like wolf pups, snuggle inside enclosed walls. They think they are safe. Once she is sure they are sound asleep, she tiptoes away. They will survive or starve. An icicle will fall and kill them, or a wall of snow will smother them in their sleep. But for now, she will remember them as they were: perfect angels with button noses, chubby fingers entwined.  

2

Every night since she gave birth, she transforms from flesh to feathers. One night, her children wander off the path from the house and become lost in the forest. She transforms herself into a crow and caws. She drops objects on the ground: a button, a thimble, a pebble, a feather torn from her body. Unable to speak, all she can do is hope that her children will find these gifts, that it will be enough to lead them home.

3

Unable to have children, she cries and cries. Her husband tells her she desires too much. She is always reaching, unbuttoning, tugging, bruising imprints on his skin. Sorrow grows branches and leaves until she is a tree. But still, even with sparrows and blue jays and mourning doves snuggling their bodies in her branches, it is not enough. Her flesh splits. She grows a gaping wound. The hole swallows a STOP sign, a bicycle, a park bench. Her husband begs her to stop. The contents she has consumed spill out. Her tears leave silvery tracks on the bark. She tells him he never understood what she wanted. He reaches for her and lets himself be devoured, sealed inside.

4

Her stomach is a shelf to lie on. Her children bite and suckle. Her milk is siphoned away until she is just a shell, a body whittled to nothing, a husk. Her children grow fat as silkworms while she starves. She knows her gluttonous children will kill her with their insatiable hunger, so she unwinds her long hair and then presses it like a rope to their opened mouths, stifles their mews of mama, mama.

5

Her children are afraid of the scarecrow’s twisted mouth and eyes like flint. Sometimes, she thinks of getting rid of it but remembers it’s necessary. Sometimes, her son and daughter pelt icy pebbles at the scarecrow. The scarecrow chases them, then lies down, defeated. Her children come inside and tell her how brave they were, how they tugged at its clothes and pulled its hair.  Once they have gone back into the warm house, she zips herself out of the scarecrow’s flesh and picks tomatoes and carrots from the garden, carries them in her arms to the house.

6

Her great-grandmother passed on the secret to her grandmother who passed it on to her mother. Grandmother’s was made from sand and shell and sea. Mother’s was made from spider web silk and candle wax. For her daughter, she makes a man made of snow. She sculpts him out of ice, chisel working the block, her hands stiff, sometimes growing so tired, blood streaking her clothes. Her daughter tells her mother she loves him. In the sunlight, the man melts in time with her daughter’s endless tears.

Authentic, Real, and Good

by Jemimah Wei | Feb 25, 2021 | flash fiction

The truth is I got hired for my looks and promoted for my flexible standards of truth and that is really all there is to say about it. Except the job was easy enough at first, standing by the door and chiming Irasshaimase! whenever anyone entered, even though it was really more like a roar, IRASSHAIMASE!, which always gave people a shock because we were hired to be pleasant and invisible and the bossman had not counted on us girls developing a bet over who could jump scare customers the most. Fourteen times a day bossman would come out of his office and tell us off, but he didn’t pay enough to hire professionals and he knew it and we knew it and so all he got were three teenagers bored off our tits and entertaining ourselves by valiantly shouting IRASSHAIMASE! on the rare occasion that someone new walked in. That’s what happens when you’re a cheap Chinese man trying to pass off your budget bistro as a hidden Japanese gem, I snarked, to the chef, who was fresh out of polytechnic, and the kind of guy who rolled his own cigarettes. I breathed, you can smell it, and Chef said, smell what, and I said, smell the desperation.

I thought that splinter of coquetry solidified a comradeship between us, but he snitched, and next thing I knew bossman called me into his office. I raised my left eyebrow at the other two girls to remind them that if I went down we all went down; we’d formed a pact to quit together, all at once, out of the blue one day, just to fuck with bossman, but they didn’t say anything back, just looked a little afraid. Everyone lets you down in the end, I remember thinking, and I found myself surprised by how bitter the thought, and not surprised by bossman saying so you’re a clever one are you, and then surprised again when he promoted me there and then to Marketing. What the hell do you need Marketing for, I said, already pleased, and bossman could tell. He simply smiled and said, make me a hidden Japanese gem. When I left his office with my apron off, the girls’ eyes went wide and then wider when they realised I had been elevated off the serving floor. 

No more irasshaimase! for me; I sat in the air-conditioned office and banged out things like House of Bamboo Upholds Philosophy of Making Quality Japanese food Accessible to All and Nothing Warms the Heart like Homemade Miso Soup and at first it was fun, writing these stories, like when I submitted Once Turned Away from an Upscale Restaurant, House of Bamboo Boss Vows to Keep Bistro “Unpretentious” to a local listicle site, and you could see, people loved it, it made a real difference; from the air-conditioned office, I could hear the other two girls outside crying Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! like headless chickens, running this way and that, trying to seat customers and take orders. Bossman was thrilled, he tapped my head, and said, you’ve got a creative brain in there, you’ll go far. Tell them we only use Japanese rice. I outdid myself; the new menu reflected, Come try our Lovingly Prepared Bentos Crafted with Best Taste Koshihikari rice imported from Niigata, Japan! Chef didn’t like this. He said anyone who knew anything about rice would instantly be able to tell we were trying to pass overcooked jasmine rice as sticky Japanese short grains, but I hadn’t forgotten his betrayal, and the next day I wrote Progressive Japanese Eating House Gives Ex-Cons a Second Chance, and Chef was really mad, like, come on, that’s not funny, my mom reads that news site, but he didn’t have time to finish before the streams of Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! piped up again. 

Come out and look, he said finally, and I did, but not properly, I said, what is it, almost aggressively, I was still trying to impress him. Look, he repeated, at the type of people buying into your bullshit, you’re terrible, you don’t have a conscience, and I did look, this time properly. Looked at House of Bamboo full for the first time in god knows how long, stuffed with women in their late forties sporting bad perms and floppy t-shirts; overweight fathers with their bored school-age daughters; flocks of aunties, too impressed by each Irasshaimase! and too excited over the low, low prices, what a value find, what a steal. I was stung, I said, it’s just food, people should be more discerning anyways, precisely as a mulchy looking woman said to her older companion, it’s good, right, do you like it, it’s good? Chef didn’t say a word. I turned and went back to the air-conditioned office and listened to the cries of Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! and thought about how it only meant I was good at my job and hey at least there was a queue, a real queue outside, it’s just business at the end of the day, and you know, it’s a dog eat dog world out there. I was seventeen. I turned the computer back on and started to type but Chef had broken my flow and I kept thinking about that woman in the mid-thigh mom shorts and how she had her hair up in one of those giant faux tortoiseshell clips and how her voice was all bright, like, it’s good right, it’s good? to the wrinkly old lady next to her, was that her mum? I pushed my chair back, crept to the door, and peeked out.

Business was booming. No one was looking in my direction, not Chef, who was carefully poring over a donburi bowl, not bossman, who was plastering my latest poster to the walls, and least of all not the two girls, who were bowing and chiming Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! in sync, just like in the movies, just like in a real Japanese restaurant.

One Long Sting

by Emma Stough | Feb 18, 2021 | flash fiction

From the time I learn how to bleed I keep a scab in the fleshy inner curve of my ear. Small, coarse, red-brown. I tend to it like I should tend to myself. When I am lonely, or need something to ruin, I dig a fingernail into the cartilage, tear the scab. Little blood, bearable pain. I like being in charge of how I feel. If this is being selfish then I am definitely selfish.

At my job, I pick the scab and squint at it on the tip of my thumb while selling lime green diet pills to women who can talk for hours about their skewed body image. I am required to tell you I get paid for this, I tell them. $7.50/hour. They tell me this is terrible compensation for all I put up with.

I keep the scab a secret because I once told a boyfriend and he asked to see it. When I showed him, he licked my ear, and the scab fell into his mouth, and he swallowed it whole. He blinked at me in surprise. I felt an unbearable pain.

There is no medical cure for having a body, the women who don’t need diet pills tell me. This is how I will look—and feel—for the rest of my life.

As a kid, I kept the scabs in an empty gum tin under a loose floorboard. Sang them lullabies.

One of the women buys three whole bottles of lime-green pills every month. I think she is in love with me. Tell me something you wouldn’t tell any other customer, she says. I check to see if my boss is watching. I tell her about the scab. She asks what caused the injury. I ask, What injury?

We meet for coffee in autumn, then winter, then spring. In summer, she asks me to take a trip with her. The diet pill company has gone under and my scab has doubled in size. It requires a little more force to extract; one long sting.

The flight is delayed. I check on the scab in the airport bathroom. I dig around in my ear. It’s nowhere to be found. Fingernails etched in blood. I tell the woman that I have to go home, that something terrible has happened. Take me with you, she says. Your ear is bleeding. A feeling along my legs, prickling, like I’m shaving with cold water. Good luck with your body, I say. In the cab, I make a phone call. And what’s the reason for your visit? After a moment of thought, I say: Disappearing parts.

The doctor asks me what’s wrong. His last name looks like “apricot” but is not pronounced the same. I tell him that the scab in my ear has disappeared. He says, You’ve healed? I try to explain that it’s not the healing I’m worried about; it’s the absence of pain. He shakes his head, like he’s disappointed, and scribbles a prescription out onto a pad. I take the paper and grip it hard through the hallway, through the waiting room, through the parking lot. In the car, I unfold it and find he’s written something absolutely illegible. Absolute gibberish.

Sometimes, when I try to remember what it felt like to be in charge of the removal and the regrowth, I imagine the paper said something like: It’s okay that you’ve handled things wrong. It’s okay to get worse, and worse, and worse.