Grown-Ups Also Lie: Three Micros

by Melissa Bowers | Dec 14, 2020 | flash fiction

Punch Me

he tells his son. It’s okay. You need to learn.

Tenderly, the father kneels, and the boy makes a four-year-old fist, aims for the broad chest, tensed and squared and fleshier than the father remembers himself. Little knuckles against aging skin. A slapping sound.

Not like that, he says. Not with that side. With this one.

He demonstrates in slow motion. The boy studies his father’s hand as it approaches: the flat, hairy planes of it, the calluses. It stops just short of connecting with his tiny shoulder, but the boy hasn’t yet learned to flinch. Instead he lifts his face until he finds his own reflection in the glass of his father’s eyes, a blurred version of himself, watery, like the time he tripped in the rain and fell flat on his stomach just above a puddle, still rippling with wind although the storm had almost passed.

The father looks behind at his life and sees: the bus stop where they pushed him into the street, the classroom where they tied his ankles to a chair, the cafeteria where they poured ketchup down his pants, the park where they stole his bike before dusk, the student lot where they keyed COCKSUCKER across the hood, the party where they took turns peeing into his beer, the locker room where they trapped him and touched him and tore his clothes and left him there, bloody and naked.

The boy looks ahead at his life and sees: beauty.

Try again, the father says, and his son does as he’s told.

A Gathering of Fireflies

The child presses one sticky finger to the window, toward the hilltop, and asks if this is how clouds are made: thick wisps of smoke spiraling above the trees, gentle puffs of impending damage. Dispersing. Disappearing.

No, the child’s mother starts to say, and she considers calling it a bonfire—have you ever heard of them, my sweet?—its warmth only for charred marshmallows and numbed toes, its crackle only for soothing everyone to sleep. She considers calling it a celebration of fireworks, a parade of rocket ships, a wishfall of stars, anything innocent and beautiful to explain this strange new brightness in the night sky.

Yes, she says instead. That is how clouds are made.

While she packs a suitcase, they talk about colors: Green leaves that sometimes glow orange. Blue skies that sometimes turn black. Almost like a bruise, she says, kneeling, touching tenderly the marks along each tiny shin. The child clutches a yellow duck in one soft-skinned fist, rubs at the tufts of fur.

But it’s more of a mountain than a hilltop. And it is not a bonfire, and they are not fireflies, and sometimes the smoke goes deep, deep gray.

The Difference Between an Earthquake and a Storm

It rocks you awake, sweetheart. Almost gently, the ground bubbling beneath your bed, and for a moment you can pretend you are nestled once again in an elbow’s crook, that you have not grown up, that you are not alone. It disorients: Why is the whole world shivering? Just as you identify it, just as you give it a name, it ends—if you are already moving, you might not notice it at all.

It lulls you to sleep, the thrumming. It soothes: The machine you needed for naptime, white noise tucked into the belly of a stuffed owl. Preset 1: Wind. Presets 2, 3, and 4: Ocean, Birds, and Cloudburst, respectively, the rain like static. Even lightning calms you—each rumble of thunder is just a heartbeat.

*

Everywhere feels different but looks the same. There is still sun and light, or stars and dark, whatever existed before the air began to quaver, all the objects wobbling as if disturbed by something spectral. The hands of a ghost. Maybe a portrait comes unhinged and crashes to the floor. Maybe the street goes jagged, a crumbling bolt split through the pavement, the damage invisible until something is destroyed.

Everywhere you look, there it is. On the rattling windows and the flooding lawn, all the gray heavy with wet. You can breathe it, you once told me it has a smell. Like sharp, you said. Like safe. Your footprints—mud-coated, staining the floors, proof of you. I will never see a puddle and not want to reach for your hand. I will jump, even when I’ve forgotten my coat and boots, even when I am helpless and unprotected.

*

You asked questions beyond your years:

Do superheroes always win?

Which one is worse, an earthquake or a storm?

When I hug you, why do you hold me sooo long?

Did you know some things self-destruct? Just break, all on their own?

*

Now that I’ve finally learned the answer, you won’t listen. One of them you can see coming, and the other—out of nowhere—is a catastrophic act of defiance.

And This One is Full of Rain

by Dana Blatte | Dec 3, 2020 | flash fiction

The birds only come once a year. Always on my birthday, just as I’m blowing my age into candle smoke and choking down a sliver of over-sweetened cake because my mom came home early from work to bake it and she gets mad when I don’t eat.

But the birds are back, which makes it harder to forget the numbers, the calories and the sixteen and the time. The time until my death. Or someone’s death — my grandmother’s never been good at predicting the future. I only half-learned it, she tells me whenever I’m forced to go
over there because my mom thinks high schoolers still need babysitters. But you see, this shape is foreboding, she says, tracing whorls into the tea dregs. And this one is full of rain.

//

The birds are hungry for the streetlights. They stumble down telephone wires like drunks, bellies distended with the air they have gorged in the name of pride.

Here, I offer from my crouch on the front stoop. I flick all the porchlights on, even the ones I’m not supposed to because they shine right through the neighbor’s windows. The birds appear at my feet with their beaks split wide enough to eat the shrunken suns whole. They butter themselves in the molten gold.

I wonder if there are birds in the afterlife. I hope there are because I like feeding them light. There’s no weightiness to it as if you swallowed a day and all the clocks came out backward. Time is funny like that. It ebbs between my fingers until I blink and go unmoored.

My grandmother says that’s how you find yourself: you just need to follow the things bigger than your own body.

//

I don’t ask my mom if I can go to a party tonight. It’s my birthday and I just want to get drunk like the birds: papered in gold and fairy-soft on my feet. So I scatter their feather-slick shadows as I back the car I’m not supposed to know how to drive out into the street. The birds swarm around me, pooling in the dusty yellow scythes of my headlights.

At a random classmate’s house, I pull in too far away from the curb. The birds finally subside when I turn off the key.

My neighbors would throw a fit if they lived next to this house, where red and blue and pink and orange spill from every crevice to wash the landscape in neon.

Hey, good-looking, a boy mouths, singsong through the windshield. He sways to a silent rhythm and I swear a bird swoops down to nip a warning at his exposed throat.

Go away, I hiss to both. But he’s too puffed with air to heed my warning.

The bird cuts down again, wings angled into blades.

The boy folds against the hood so smoothly I can pretend he’s still alive.

//

It starts to rain just as I step inside. No one else seems disturbed by the corpse on the lawn or the raindrops fattened on the grass, so I’m not either. I let myself be jostled by hips and elbows and bodies that make me regret ever eating the birthday cake my mom baked. The numbers haunt me again. Sugar and flour and frosting and skin that sloughs away under the
pulsating of the music.

What’s the best way to kill a bird? my grandmother used to joke when she noticed the way they trailed me by the ribbons of my feet. Wring ‘em by the neck.

//

The bedroom reeks of something half-digested and diluted by illegal substances. I cocoon myself under the covers anyway. The sheets are still warm enough for me to pretend this is my house. But I start to drift out of time again, blinking and blinking until a couple so intertwined I can’t distinguish one figure from the other stumbles through the door.

Oh, sorry, one of them says as she slides her fingers into someone’s crotch. Is this room occupied?

I shift back into the present and shake my head. Slowly, then quickly and aggressively. No, no, I was just leaving. Please, uh, don’t let me stop you from doing– I gesture at the bed and flee.

//

There’s a dead bird on the roof. Its mouth gulps toward the moon, but the angle is off. I nudge it a little closer and hope something sweet trickles in.

What a shitty birthday, right? I laugh, more to the wind than to myself. Then, I struggle to my feet. I haven’t really had anything to drink — other than a few sips stolen from a plastic cup I found abandoned on the stair banister — but I still droop from side to side. Best way to kill a bird, I murmur as my feet make friends with the shingled edge. In the dark, it’s easy to see how the ground stretches into infinity, how maybe if I fall there will never be an impact.

Shit, are you going to jump? a boy crows from behind me.

I fall backward. No! Of course not. Are you?

He shrugs. Sure, why not. And he spirals into the air so fast I think I’ve become unhooked by time again. His limbs splay across the ground and I can’t help but laugh at the stick-figured cartoon he’s become.

One by one, everyone else from the party files onto the roof. Laughless and solemn. Wait, I call, but they are already flying themselves off the edge.

The birds descend to pick their skins. Maybe they’re hungry for touch too, or maybe they just want something pretty for their nests.

You see, this shape is foreboding, I hear my grandmother saying, and I can see her tracing their outlines crime scene style on the lawn. Time starts to skitter away from me again as the sky’s teardrops eddy their blood into tea stains.

Lisa Won’t Quit Scuba

by John Jodzio | Nov 30, 2020 | flash fiction

You and Lisa tried to save your marriage by taking some community education classes. Intro to Pottery started in March, Beginning Scuba was slated for May. 

“Maybe learning new things will rekindle our love,” you told her.
 

“Maybe learning new things will prove our love is dead,” Lisa said.

You worked hard at your pottery, but everything you made looked like a melted candy bar. Lisa made a teapot so wonderful that the instructor offered to buy it for $300.

One morning, Lisa slid the divorce papers across the breakfast nook.

“Sorry,” she said, “watching you mold clay only made things worse
 

The divorce was quick and mostly amicable. Lisa got the cat that hated you and the station wagon that wouldn’t stop smelling like tacos. You got the lawn furniture with the spots of mold, the tote bag stuffed full of tote bags. 
       

“I won’t go to scuba if you quit pottery,” Lisa told you.
       

“Fine,” you told her. “It’s a deal.”
       

But then two weeks later you showed up at Scuba and there was Lisa standing by the pool in a blue wetsuit with her fingernails painted to match.
      

“This wasn’t the agreement,” you said. 
      

“It was a waste not to come,” she told you and you had to agree.
  
 For the first two weeks of Scuba, your instructor, this old hippie named Alexi, did not let anyone get in the water. All you did was talk about equipment. All you did was discuss everything that could go wrong when you dove — how you could surface too quickly, how the gauges that were supposed to save your life would sometimes lie to you.
       

“Scuba is more talking about diving than actual diving,” Alexi explained,

“Scuba is more about safety than it is about water.”
      

There was a younger guy in the class named James. He wasn’t sausaged into his wetsuit like everyone else. After class you saw Lisa talking to him in the parking lot, laughing a little too hard. You stopped by the bar that was on the way home to make sure the two of them weren’t there. You didn’t find them, but you found Alexi, only 30 minutes removed from teaching, already wasted.
     

“Hello, hello,” he said, patting the chair next to him, “come, come.”
      

Over the next hour you unloaded on Alexi, told him everything — about your divorce, about how pottery didn’t help, about how Scuba was making everything worse.
       

“Let me help you unfuck things,” Alexi told you as he patted your back. “Let good ol’ Alexi help make things right.”

At the next class, Alexi finally let the class get in the water. Lisa partnered with James and everyone partnered with their partner or friend. You were alone, partnered with Alexi.
       

“Everything that happens underwater needs to happen slower and with more purpose,” he explained to the class. “If you want something to happen underwater you have to want it way more than you want it on dry land.”
       

Everyone slid into the shallow end of the pool. You scuttled around, tried to stop your heart from exploding through your chest. All the equipment was so goddamn heavy. It made you want to stop moving, made you want to curl up on the bottom of the pool and close your eyes. As you were putting the equipment away that night, Alexi walked over to you.
         

“Thursday is our certification test,” he whispered to you. “Be ready to rekindle your love.”

On Thursday, Alexi was standing on the side of the pool giving instructions for the certification test when someone ran in from the parking lot and yelled that there was a car on fire.
       

You looked at Alexi and he winked at you. Luckily the fire in James’ car was only smoldering at that point, some crumpled newspapers that had failed to catch. James stomped out the fire and Lisa walked over and poked you in the chest.
       

“Did you do this?” she asked.
       

“No,” you said, “it wasn’t me,” but your words sounded whiny, unconvincing. Instead of going back to the pool, you got in your car and drove to the bar, started drinking. 
       

“How the fuck was lighting his car on fire going to help me get back together with Lisa?” you asked Alexi when he showed up.
      

“Setting a car on fire has always worked for me,” Alexi said.
       

Alexi tried to talk you into coming back to the pool the next day, said he would let you do your certification test one on one.
       

“Okay,” you told Alexi but then you never show up. You stay in bed, binge watching a fishing show. 
       

Sometimes you still see Alexi at the bar and he tells you to come back to the pool and finish your certification and you tell him you will, this time for sure. You order another drink and scroll through the most recent pictures Lisa has posted of her and James scuba diving in bright blue water, pictures of them tan and smiling, pictures of the two of them all over the goddamn world.

Into the Sink

by Courtney Clute | Nov 19, 2020 | flash fiction

She slipped her thumb into her mouth, sucked in a heavy swallow of air, shrunk her waist to the size of a noodle, and disappeared down the kitchen sink drain.

Slithering down the pipe, she shrugged the darkness on like a winter coat. There was a piece of dark meat rotisserie chicken from dinner last night stuck against the pipe. She scraped the chicken off and savored the wet piece sticking with black drain gunk and slush, enjoying the thought of repurposing waste for nourishment. She dreamed of being a food writer, so she always jotted down her experiences with food, pulling out a notepad, taking logs of accent flavors and sensations that she would then write up into her food journal later.

This wasn’t the first time she dove into her kitchen sink, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Mommy, mommy, I have red itchy dots on my armpit.” Into the sink she’d go.

“Honey, when’s your birthday, again?” Into the sink she’d go.

“Mrs. Peters, Jeremy just threw up at his desk.” Into the sink she’d go.

She’d go in when she was happy too, like she was now after reading Salt Fat Acid Heat for the third time. Oh, how she envied Samin Norsat, her fluent Italian speech, her galloping from country to country to discover the world’s flavors, childless, spouseless.

She stayed among the pipes for hours, laying down among the slush, piles of churned up chive potatoes, broccolini, spaghetti, overcooked ribeye her husband made that she spit up into the sink when he wasn’t looking. Eating dried, shriveled up beef is like gnawing on the hopes of yesterday, she’d written in her journal.           

As she rubbed the waste into her skin like a full body beauty mask and made snow angels, she heard the echoes of her husband calling out, looking for her, the whiny shrills of her children complaining for snacks, emails beeping into her inbox from overprotective parents. But she stayed in the waste.

The waste was silent. The waste was kind. The waste was patient. It listened to her when she told it stories of her life where she was the new Samin. Except she was a food writer, traveling to Morocco and Japan to try chicken tagine and udon and unagi, writing for international culinary magazines, winning awards for her words. Five-star restaurants would beg her to come review their food, and she’d show up with thick, dark sunglasses, a paisley scarf wrapped around her head so they didn’t know it was her.

The waste encouraged her fantasies. To leave her husband. The waste enjoyed when she scooped it into her mouth and described its texture and taste. A decadent smoothie of grime, ground bone, dish soap, and soggy strips of onions. The perfect ending to any day.  The waste felt loved. The waste loved her. She loved the waste.

Eventually, when the outside world went to sleep, when she could hear her husband snoring from their bedroom, she’d emerge from the drain, satisfied with her escape, planning her next food article, where this time she might just finally submit it to a food magazine. She could hear the whispers of the waste snaking up the drain, cheering her on.

Fable

by K-Ming Chang | Nov 16, 2020 | flash fiction

Michelle Dong lived with her father and fourteen cousins in a butter-soft house at the end of the block, the only family in the neighborhood not directly related to us. In another country, Uncle Dong used to be some kind of teacher, but now he sold parts of his car. For years we watched him strip his car part by part, the tires rolled away and the headlamps gouged out, until there was only a hood the color of a cockroach, and even that was gnawed gone by fog. His own yard, the only one in the neighborhood, was a chorus of beheaded poppies, which my brother said was used to make opium. He said that’s why Uncle Dong spent most of the week asleep, all his windows pasted with newspaper, his house balled up and hungover. Inside their garage, the Dongs raised finches, multiplying to six hundred. Every weekend the Dongs would open their garage door in an attempt to thin out their colony, releasing them by the hundreds, a stream of birds as thick as milk.

White birds are bad luck, and that’s why Michelle painted their badness away: she brought the white finches to the driveway in shoeboxes and pinned them to the pavement with her left hand, painting their feathers with her right. She painted them with an assortment of nail polishes, shades I couldn’t name except by making sounds that matched them: clap-yellow, whistle-silver, gut-punch gold.

 Michelle invited me over one time to play a killing game. We went to different high schools – hers was the Catholic school where girls wore skirts like sails, and mine was the public school where police dogs sniffed our asses – but I saw her every day, carrying buckets of water in and out of the garage through the side door. I believed the water was for the birds to drink, but later when I looked into one of the buckets in her side-yard, I saw that she was drowning them, all the bird-bodies clotting the water. They floated on the surface, their bones borrowing more air. My mother always told me that when she was little and raised chicks and pigeons and ducks, she had to fill their water bowls with stones because the baby birds would drown themselves by falling asleep mid-drink. I thought they were stupid to do so, but my mother said I used to fall asleep with her nipple in my mouth all the time when I was a baby. Be glad I dried up eventually, she said, or my milk would have drowned you, my beautiful little bird idiot.

When I went to Michelle’s garage, she told me to leave my net behind. Instead, she handed me her Chemistry Honors textbook, its cover stained with something dark-sweet and viscous. She held another textbook – Calculus – that was symmetrically stained. This is how I kill them, she said. We entered through the side-door and she turned on the lights, fluorescent glow that slid to the floor as slow as mucus. Birds sewed the air into a sky. Some of them were small as wasps, and their shadows speckled the concrete floor where bird-bodies decomposed, some that had already been pared to bone. Birdshit collaged the walls and floor, streaks like an oil painting, and I breathed only through my mouth. Like this, Michelle said, and arced her textbook through the air with both hands, swinging it like a baseball bat, slamming it against the wall. When she lifted the book, there were stains branding the cover and the wall, the finches broken like fruit. Now you go, she said, and I watched the necklace of sweat around her neck, the way it swung in the dark.

I swung the textbook, felt the finches flinch against it, slammed the book against the wall. Lifted it: a dead finch flattened into a comma-shaped shadow. Not bad, Michelle said and spat on the ground of the garage. It was the way men in our neighborhood spat on the sidewalk: the tongue flicking easy as a whip, the spit thick as bird-shit. Later, we sat outside on her driveway on two upside-down buckets and I tried to spit too, to exile the taste of blood in my mouth, but nothing came out of me but a sound, thinned-out.

Michelle wore her cousins’ wifebeaters and kicked gravel back onto the street with her toe. Her hair was ironed to the back of her neck with sweat. Later, I would practice spitting into the bathroom sink, mimicking her mouth so that its shape would become familiar to me; so that when I looked into the mirror, my mouth was hers. There was beauty to her brutality, the way she angled her chin like the sun was perched on it, but I saw that her hands were fluttering like birds. I cupped her hands in my own, the way I imagined you would rescue a bird that had tipped out of its nest, but Michelle jerked her hands back.

Here’s a story, she said, and sat on her hands so that I couldn’t see them. About my father. He had a pet pigeon he leashed to his wrist. Everyone tried to cut it off his wrist and eat it, but he wouldn’t let anyone come near it. One night it happened, the bird was snipped loose and stewed, and my father was so upset he almost slit his own throat, except he couldn’t find a blade because everyone in the village was holding theirs. I asked Michelle if that was why he bred so many birds, if he was trying to pay off some kind of debt, and she looked at me. Her shadow on the asphalt was fading like a bruise. She laughed and I leaned closer to her mouth, wanting to smell her breath, its bait.

Later that summer, my mother woke me early one Sunday morning and told me to come look, come look. It was hailing birds. I looked out at the street and saw: finches freckling the street, their feathers like snow, non-native to this weather. There were so many dead I lost count. Some kind of disease, my mother said, it must be. I watched Michelle from my window, raking up the birds while her cousins got into their cars and drove over the bird-corpses, splaying them open, grinding their bones to light.