Buffering

by David James Poissant | Sep 28, 2020 | flash fiction

That morning, Ted began buffering. One minute, he was Ted, coffee cup in hand, talking animatedly about this thing he’d just heard on NPR. The next minute, he was a rainbow-colored pinwheel, spinning. I’d never taken Ted for a Mac guy, so I found that part odd. If anything, he should have been that Window’s ring of circles. But, nope: a spinning wait cursor. That’s what he was. But only for a minute. Then, Ted was back, picking up where he’d left off, still talking animatedly about incarceration rates, or interest rates, some kind of rate of which he was very much against. Or for. To be honest, in the full minute Ted was a spinning, 2-D beach ball, I kind of lost the conversation’s thread.

If what I saw happen had, in fact, happened, Ted hadn’t noticed. We enjoyed our coffee and conversation, the way we do each morning, then rose and headed to our separate jobs. I went about my day bundling cellphone plans for small and midsize corporations, and, at five, I went home, kissed my wife, Allison, ate dinner, watched Game of Thrones, asked Allison to make love to me, settled for a hand job, and went to bed.

The next morning, Ted was back to buffering, and things were getting worse. Now, Ted started and stopped with great frequency, lurching in and out of sentences. I worried he’d spill coffee, burn himself, but, as with the day before, the pauses didn’t faze him. He emerged from each transformation gracefully, as though nothing had happened. And maybe nothing had. Around us, no one screamed. No one called 911. Ted smiled and talked, his mustache neat and trimmed, his wire-rimmed glasses as wire-rimmed as ever.

Still, I was unsettled. That afternoon, I left the office not having met my quota, a first in my two years with the company. At home, I couldn’t even watch Game of Thrones, and, when Allison resignedly offered a hand job, I said no. This thing with Ted, it was wrecking my days. So, I resolved to do something about it.

“Ted,” I said the next morning as we drank our coffee at our favorite small, independent coffeehouse—a coffeehouse whose name does not matter because it is a variation on the name of all small, independent coffeehouses, which is to say that its name is a play on words, like The Daily Grind or Thanks a Latte or Brewed Awakenings, none of which is the name of our coffeehouse but of which there must be several insufferable hundred in the continental United States—“Ted,” I said, “are you aware that, every so often—”

“Let me stop you right there,” Ted said.

“You know?” I said.

“The podiatrist says it’s not uncommon and that, if I keep wearing the medicated insoles, the odor will go away.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said. I waited while Ted turned into a pinwheel, then back to Ted, before I continued. “But are you aware that, every so often, you turn into a large Apple operating system spinning wait cursor?”

“Oh, that,” Ted said. “Yeah, must be a glitch in the Matrix.”

For a moment, I didn’t speak. I wanted to rise, to run.

Then, Ted laughed. “Naw,” he said, “I’m just fucking with you. My podiatrist says that’ll go away too. I’m on a couple of medications. Can’t seem to find the best dosage. Fucking HMOs, am I right?”

The next week, I saw more of them, the spinning pinwheels. At stoplights. At the office. Shopping for new blue jeans at the mall. Once, in a crosswalk, the woman ahead of me turned into one, and we collided. The feeling was roughly the equivalent of bumping into a very large marshmallow: soft, but springy, and with that ever-so-slight powdery feel left afterward on the fingers. I fell, picked myself up, and ran. When I reached the sidewalk, I looked back. The light changed. Patiently, cars drove around the woman while she buffered, and, once she changed back, the woman waited for the WALK signal, then crossed the street like nothing was amiss.

In these days, I found it hard to get work done. Even the hand jobs were difficult to appreciate. They weren’t like the hand jobs of our youth, when, dating, afraid to go all the way, we’d started with hands before working our way up to the deed. No, these hand jobs were passionless, as was my wife. Where had she gone, the girl I’d married, the Allison I loved? Days, we went to work. Nights, we watched TV. Weekends, we visited her parents or mine, or else we argued about money or sex, or about whether to have kids. In this, we were wholly unoriginal, which is to say we were wholly American. Which isn’t to say we didn’t have rich inner lives, that we didn’t want more, that we didn’t know that this, all of it, this American labyrinth of cancer and divorce and school shootings and guns and lottery tickets and guns and economic disparity and guns and soul-killing cubicles in the offices of large, soulless monopolizing corporations and guns was and is and always will be shit. We knew the maze, knew we were in it. We just didn’t know our way out.

And, so, we moved through the days, afraid, pretending not to be, and, in this way, we were very much American as well.

And there was so much to be afraid of! After all, what if I turned into one of those spinning things? What if I had already and didn’t know? Would someone tell me the way that I’d told Ted? Or was it a rule—unspoken, but firm—that one was not to go around acknowledging such things?

Another week passed, a week of breakfasts with Ted, a week of bad days not meeting my quota, a week of new blue jeans I’d thought would loosen with their wearing but turned out to be too tight, a week, hand job-less, of new and ever-worsening seasons of Game of Thrones (for, now, even the cast was turning into pinwheels, everyone waiting for Peter Dinklage, spinning, to say his lines).

And then it happened. The day came.

It was a quiet day. The morning had been good, Ted buffering only twice (a record for that week). After months of not commissioning out, I met my day’s quota of cellphone sales. Even the walk home from work was pinwheel-free. People walked the walk of happy people. Pigeons flocked in happy pigeon flocks. All, for a moment, seemed right with the world. And maybe it would be, I thought. Maybe this whole thing had been one short hiccup in an otherwise long and, hopefully, happy life. Maybe the pinwheel thing was going away and we, all of us, could go about our business like none of this had ever happened.

I was thinking this when I returned home to find Allison a large, buffering pinwheel in the entryway. Because of course things weren’t getting better, weren’t going away, because, of course, the problem had never been out there, had never gone beyond this very door.

I ran to Allison, grabbed her, bounced away. Where I’d run into her, the shapes of my hands and face were indents in the spinning disc. As I watched, the shapes pushed back, popped out, like a dented fender hammered into shape.

I cried. On the floor, head in my hands, I wept, and, when I looked up, Allison stood over me.

She didn’t say a word, but took my hand and led me to the bedroom. And we did not watch Game of Thrones. We did not turn on the TV. We went to bed. We made real love. And, for the first time in a long time, there was, as, once, there had so often been, not me and her, but us, a one, a we.

On a computer, the solution for the spinning wheel is called Force Quit. Command, option, escape: a trinity of keys that, clicked, dismiss an application from the world.

With people, it’s easier. You don’t need three keys, don’t even need a word to cut a person from your life. People quit on marriage all the time, step outside and shut the door on love.

Allison, I thought I’d lost you. And, maybe a few months there, I had. But some things are worth waiting for, which isn’t to say worth fighting for. Some things you can’t fight, can’t force. Some things you just wait out.

You sit at your desk. You hope. You squint.

You shut your eyes, praying that, when you open them, the thing you want, the person you love, will quit spinning, will reappear, and love you back.

Originally published in The Mississippi Review

Nesting

by Blake L. Bell | Sep 18, 2020 | flash fiction

Walls

Her nest is too tall by the time Molly realizes she can’t climb in. “I left my tools inside. Should I stop?” She asks her husband, who looks at the wall so hard the plaster cracks.

“Put some of those plaster shards around the outside, honey? Like a fence, you know?” Molly asks.

“Yes, love,” Greg says, grabbing the broom and dustpan for the smaller bits.

They’ve been in a bizarro routine for days. Her mother says she’s using art to heal her loss. She hates calling the dead lost. As if one day, while doing laundry, she’ll find that one she hasn’t seen in years.

Fallen twigs

Genesis is in twigs she finds fallen from pines in their backyard. She spreads them across their guest bed on top of a forest-green tarp. They are so stiff, so still. She needs to make them into something beautiful again. Something with purpose. Molly gathers them together in the center of the tarp and, before she knows it, she’s made a small, semi-circular nest. This feels right, Molly tells herself. I have something here.

Maternity clothes

Greg follows his Dionysus, hoping she can make a way out of what’s crushing her. Him. Them. He believes Molly can make almost anything. He buys her a new hammer and handsaw. She builds and builds—long, slender fingers cutting and weaving fabric from flowing gowns, tying twigs with elastic bands, and eventually, sawing branches from around their neighborhood. Each time she adds to the nest, she snaps a photograph.

Baby Blankets

Some of the last material Molly puts in the nest. One for each child, flown away, she thinks. “Maybe that’s a better word than lost,” she tells Greg as she braids the three blankets into the twigs and maternity clothes. Flown.

Photographs

She takes one last picture of the nest then develops her film. She orders the photos, conception to birth. A slow, steady witness to creation. She studies the structure that looms, that shadows her. The bigger the nest, the bigger the hole. She folds the photographs into thin rectangles and feeds them through cracks in the nest. It’s cavernous, sharp, and wooden. Inhospitable, she whispers to no one.

Hammer and Saw

Molly tells Greg they need to climb inside, just once. He takes pillows from their bed and throws them in the center of the nest, wide as the bed itself. They climb a small ladder. Greg gets in first, then helps Molly. Once inside, she hands him one of the tools she left. In this new world, it is only them and together, they hack at neighboring walls, rough twigs splintering, falling back in the nest, bursting them out.

Millennial Pink Bread

by Meagan Cass | Sep 14, 2020 | flash fiction

As if covered in invisible glaze, her bread bakes pink. She buys new flour, new yeast, sends it into the oven a butter yellow moon. Still it comes out pink, a darker shade each time.  

“It must be the water here. We’ll get filtered; don’t eat it,” her husband instructs, disappears back into his monograph. 

This is the last move, he has promised. The department here is well-resourced, his position tenure track. She’ll find another gig teaching painting soon, how hard can it be in a college town. Now they can put down roots. Yet she feels as if she is watching her life from the ceilings fans, or carrying it on her back like wet cement. Out their bay windows, the sunsets are trying so hard across the soy-corn sky. She drifts back into the kitchen, closes the blinds.

 Her bread is Barbie dream house pink, millennial pink, chapped lip pink. It smells just like her usual bread, as rich and warm as the loaves she’s made them in three different kitchens, in three different states. Before trashing it, she eats a pinch here, a slice there. At first it tastes like her childhood, like pool french fries after a swim meet, like her mother’s rose water perfume. Then it tastes like the sandalwood incense her college roommate used to burn, the girl she used to call her twin sister, a poet whose father had also left her, who also wanted to make a life around art.  

 Then it tastes of her first date with her husband, when she was still in undergrad and he was a grad student, the T.A. for her required Western History course, tastes of the penne vodka he recommended she order at the Italian place, and the mints he swallowed in the bathroom before kissing her at the Gillian Welch concert he’d gotten them tickets to as a surprise. How bowled over she’d been. The boys she knew never planned, just wanted to have drinks, “see where the night takes us,” played her pop punk in their cars.  

 The first date bread makes her body ache with hunger, as if consuming it does the opposite of its purpose, ignites new, hidden needs. She eats all of it, the last bread she will eat in this house. The next one comes out bloody, beating like a heart, slick and oblong like a baby with no face, like the child they will not have. She serves it to her husband as if it is a normal bread, places it on the table beside the roast chicken.

 While he stares, she runs up to their bedroom, retrieves the bag she has already packed full of bathing suits faded by distant oceans, stiff, frayed brushes that just need a wash, a dash of rabbit skin glue, half-empty oils that are still good, and a hundred other things, all of it light on her shoulders.

Two Identical Strangers

by Rosetta Young | Sep 3, 2020 | flash fiction

These days, when I pull up the old photographs, most people still attribute the resemblance between Lydia Lissing and me to the uniforms. My husband, who has always refused to see it, has never gotten past this first reluctance.   

“You all look like the same girl,” he said on our third date, years ago, when I first showed him the line of girls in blue tartan kilts, knee socks, white sweaters, half-smiles. He laughed at the photo, asked if I still had my school skirt, if I would wear it for him. 

A few, though, when I show the second image of just Lydia and me, will say: “Oh, now I see it.”

Snapped by my best friend Amelia, it downgrades our likeness from uncanny to strong. The light is wrong, distorting the planes of our faces. Lydia stands in the sun and, over my shoulder, you can see the branches of a weeping willow. I wear my school sweater, but Lydia has on the white polo. She frowns into the camera and I smile in the shadow.

When I was younger, around the time I was dating my husband, I would use Lydia as a conversation starter.

“Have you ever met your doppelganger?” I would ask. “I went to boarding school with mine.”

You would be surprised by how many people want to believe in the uniqueness of faces. Like my husband, some simply treat the resemblance as a matter of opinion, and others insist there must be a secret family connection. Only a few are willing to admit that given the limited amount of face-types, complexions, features, ethnicities, genetic material, that such freak resemblances are perhaps inevitable.

“But,” they always say, “It’s not like you couldn’t tell the two of you apart.”

I tend to shrug. “Yes and no.”

Lydia came in the tenth grade, one year after me. When she was introduced in the assembly, I had the sense of seeing myself walk in front of the entire school, the terrible immodesty of it, as if I were being forced to watch myself on videotape.

We both had dark brown hair that grazed our shoulders, red mouths, short black eyelashes, pale blue eyes, flat little noses, slightly heavy cheeks. But, of course, it was more than just a collection of colors and features. It was the cumulative effect.

That first day, I heard Michael Anderson, the best-looking guy in our grade, say, “Creepy,” as Lydia and I walked by each other in the dining hall. I kept catching my classmates staring and pointing back and forth between the two of us. No one would quite look me in the eye. Finally, Amelia said,

“She looks like you.”

Sometimes, when I was in class, I would just stare at her. Whenever we spoke, though, I couldn’t concentrate. Something kept slipping away. We’d both get distracted. It was the bed-sheet that wouldn’t stay put on the far corner, that one French conjugation you always forget—that feeling when you can’t remember your PIN for no reason at all.

By junior year, though, everyone began to forget we looked the same, and instead, they thought we looked alike, and then, by senior year, no one ever called either of us by the wrong name anymore.

That last Halloween we tried to dress it up—I think it was Amelia’s idea—and we went to a party as Twins. We wore identical red dresses and did our hair in Heidi plaits. Everyone thought it was hilarious and, by the end of the night, Lydia was in the master bedroom with Michael Anderson and I was chain-smoking on the unfamiliar suburban lawn with someone’s older brother.

After graduation, we ended up at the kind of party where sentiment and nostalgia morph into bacchanalia and delinquency. The boys kept promising to execute stunts more and more daring, and, then, a few of the girls started kissing one another.

Michael Anderson, seeing an opportunity, shouted, “Wait.”

Amelia and a girl from our AP English class unpeeled themselves from one another at the sound of his voice. And then, with everyone looking at him, he pointed at Lydia and then me.

“You two.”

I am not sure why he wanted to see us in particular—it could have been that he liked Lydia or because we were both considered pretty or because it was a particular fantasy of his or because he was articulating something that everyone wanted to see but hadn’t known until that moment. And I am also not sure why Lydia and I laughed and started gliding towards each other in our tank tops and cut-off shorts. Under the bluish, dimmed lights of the party, we looked identical.

Everyone was cheering, and Lydia was laughing, but then, when she looked right at me, her eyes got serious.

What can I say about the kiss itself? Have you ever felt yourself doubled, like your body was a shape cut simultaneously into two sheets of paper and then unfolded to create one unified silhouette? That to be human is not to be a unique thing but just a copy made over hundreds and hundreds of times?