So Much Closer Now

by Cathy Ulrich | May 7, 2020 | flash fiction

The girl detective has just turned fourteen. She will be kidnapped a week before her fifteenth birthday, ice cream in the freezer, balloons wilting on the dining room table, birthday cake gone stiff and dry. The housekeeper will sweep up ashes from the girl detective’s father’s cigars, she will run the dishwasher, do the laundry, leave meals out on the table that grow cold while the girl detective’s parents wait for a ransom call that never comes. The housekeeper will keep the house fresh with opened windows and lemon polish, she will find blank pieces of paper hidden in places she thought she had already checked, turn them over in her hands, over and over, crumple them up and throw them away.

The girl detective, at her fourteenth birthday, has 19,000 followers on Instagram. She shows them pictures of the magnifying glass her parents gave her, what do you want with a thing like that, her mother wondered, poured herself a glass of red wine. The girl detective’s mother doesn’t have as refined a palate as her husband when it comes to wine; she tells the housekeeper to keep something nice on hand for guests, drinks from the same cheap bottles she did when she was young.

The girl detective was holding her magnifying glass above her hand, admiring the wrinkles and hairs and tiny scratches of her skin, she was thinking everything is so much closer now, and her father said, it’s time to start thinking about growing up.

When the girl detective was small, there was a nanny. The girl detective doesn’t remember the nanny, but there she is in the family albums, standing in the background at the girl detective’s birthday parties, one, two, three.

The nanny is smiling in the photographs and the girl detective is smiling and the party guest and her parents are smiling. The girl detective thinks everyone was so happy then.

The girl detective doesn’t recognize anyone in the family albums except her mother and father. Even the little girl in the photos, she thinks, was that me? Was that really me?

The girl detective, sometimes, asks her mother things, like what happened to the nanny, who is this in the photo, can we get some ice cream?

The girl detective’s father goes on business trips from time to time, that’s what she’s heard her mother tell people, he goes on business trips from time to time. The house is always quieter and somehow heavier without him. The girl detective and her mother leave his place empty at the dinner table, scrape their forks across their plates.

What happened to the nanny? the girl detective asks.

I don’t remember, her mother says. I don’t know.

At her fourteenth birthday, the girl detective shares a video with her Instagram followers. She is writing a message with invisible ink.

It’s just lemon juice, she says. It’s not hard. It’s science.

She shows her followers how heat brings the message forth, browning her words into reality.

I’m here, the girl detective writes. She tears off scrap of paper after scrap of paper.

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

The Meteor

by Jen Michalski | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction

The meteor fell from the sky and landed in the yard of the couple. It charred the grass and flattened the grill and sent the soccer ball whining until it was flaccid. It pulsed, a white and orange marbled planet, stoic, propelling waves of heat through the neighborhood, wilting the tulips next door, melting the tires of a Toyota RAV4. The woman came out of the house, drawn to the murmurous sphere, its undulating marble lava moving in its core. She walked across the warm soot, embers stinging her face, the waves becoming hotter and hotter. The man came out of the house.

We have to leave. He pulled at her synthetic shirt, which had begun to melt to her skin. The whole neighborhood has to evacuate.

I want to stay. She did not look at him. I think I am in love.

With the meteor? He squinted his eyes at the white-hot light, pulling at her arms. Are you crazy?

Don’t you feel the enveloping warmth of its heart? She struggled to free herself from his grasp. Don’t you understand the radiance of its mind?

It’s going to kill you. He hooked her by the arms and began to drag her away. You’ll thank me later.

The fire department came. Fire trucks from several municipalities joined in, and the firemen knocked down fences and sawed down trees until they could surround the burning rock with their hoses. They sprayed the water, and steam filled the air, burning the neighborhood squirrels and raccoons. The powerful streams of water bounced off the meteor and pelted the aluminum siding of the houses, stripped paint off the cars.

Several times, particularly in the thick steam, the woman escaped the man and secretly made her way back to the meteor. The entire neighborhood waited in the gymnasium of the nearby high school except for the emergency response units and the man and the woman, who, without protective clothing, were badly burned. The woman was blind in one eye, and began to lose sight in the other, but with her arms in front of her, she felt her way again and again to the now-cooling mass.

Several hours later the meteor was the temperature of bath water. The neighborhood was ruined. The man urged the woman to go to the hospital.

I’ll wear my scars as proof of my love. She stood on the warped frame of their patio door. The attached deck had long since burned away, and she looked strange, up there in space.

Weeks later, the community association met again in the gymnasium. They decided to move the meteor to a vacant field outside the neighborhood, behind a billboard that advertised DNA testing. Everyone voted in favor except for the woman, who wanted the meteor to remain in their yard.

My love for the meteor will never die, she insisted.

The man forgave the woman. After all, the meteor landed in their yard, without provocation. In its own way, he supposed, it could be considered beautiful and pure. The chances of another meteor falling in their yard were incredibly remote. As she lay in bed recuperating from her injuries, he knew she would come to her senses, see the damage the meteor had caused.

Things got better. The man brought the woman chicken soup and diet 7-Up. They watched movies on Netflix in bed. Eventually the woman got well enough that she could sit on the couch, and they watched Netflix there. Sometimes they even held hands. It rained in the spring and the earth absorbed those tears. The dirt expanded and filled the depression of the meteor. Grass grew over it. The neighborhood slowly recovered. Squirrels ran along the newly constructed fences. Other things returned.

When the woman became well enough to leave the house, the man asked her where she wanted to go.

To the meteor, she answered. And she left.

The man brought chicken soup and diet 7-Up to the field behind the billboard, but the woman refused them. She sat and leaned against the hard gray orb, trying to wrap her arms around it. At night, the man brought blankets to keep her warm, and a parka when it began to snow. Still, the woman grew thin. Her hair got matted. She looked homeless. The man could not understand why the woman he loved did not love him, was killing herself for a meteor.

He filed for divorce. The woman did not return, and he stopped visiting her. He heard that maybe she had taken ill, or died, but he kept himself from checking. He stayed in the house. After an extensive interview process, a new woman came to live with him. She seemed to have no interest in meteors or any other types of heavenly bodies. They watched Netflix on the couch. Things returned to normal.

One night a few years later, another meteor fell from the sky and landed in the yard of the couple. It charred the grass and flattened the grill and sent the soccer ball whining until it was flaccid. It pulsed, a white and orange marbled planet, stoic, propelling waves of heat through the neighborhood, wilting the tulips next door, melting the tires of a Toyota Prius. The man came out of the house, drawn to the murmurous sphere, its undulating marble lava moving in its core. He walked across the warm soot, embers stinging his face, the waves becoming hotter and hotter. The new woman came out of the house.

We have to leave. She pulled at his synthetic shirt, which had begun to melt. The whole neighborhood has to evacuate.

I want to stay. He did not look at her.

Originally published in The Rupture

Photo by Alan Labisch on Unsplash

Alas, Behind the Garage

by Dan Chaon | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction

Alas, behind the garage where the trash cans are, hunched and weeping, your cousin Glenna says she is pregnant and you are the only one she can tell.

You are ten–a boy–and she is fourteen; the two of you smoking grass.

 “It’s going to affect your little balls,” she’d said once. “You won’t be able to have babies.”

You let her smoke this one for free, the two of you passing it back and forth. Usually, there‘s a charge, even for relatives. Two or three dollars for a joint as long and skinny as a nail–and you go to the playgrounds and basketball courts and video game arcades and the county fair–which is where you once made more money than you could comfortably keep in your pocket,  a wad of bills thicker than your fist.  

And you take the money back to your cousin Keith–who is Glenna’s twin brother who she can’t stand most of the time–and he gives you more of the joints to sell, which are like thin little cocoons that you keep in your pocket.  

And Keith has always said that he thinks Glenna will die before she is twenty. He doesn’t want her to die, but he still thinks she will.

And Glenna saying that the guy is twenty years old and he already has a girlfriend who is seventeen and dropped out of high school and who plans to kick the shit out of Glenna if she ever finds her.

And you say, “How do you know for sure?” You watch as the joint turns to ash, millimeter by millimeter. “Unless your stomach starts stretching out or whatever.”  

“Do you know what a period is?” –she asks.

You think of first grade. You think of learning how to write sentences. How beautiful and remarkable it was to learn the punctuation marks. It had made you so happy to make that dot at the end. You darkened it and darkened it with your pencil, until you broke right through the paper onto the blonde formica of your desk. 

“Sure–I know,” you say–although you know you don’t. But you will know enough–soon enough–and this crying and this whitewashed garage wall and these black bags full of your dad’s beer cans are part of what you will know–and you sit down cross-legged and she wants you to press your palms against her palms–and so you do. The only comfort in life is going on with it.

Originally published in wigleaf

Talking About Ernie Banks

by Kathy Fish | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction

Their father drank Hamm’s when he finished his shift. After supper, on good days, he’d grab the boys and hang them upside down by their ankles and they’d scream and flail their arms and when he put them down, they’d ask him to do it again. He smelled of beer and hot metal and sweat. He told funny stories about the men he worked with who were not nearly as smart as he was. He was a toolmaker and he could eyeball to one-sixteenth of an inch.

Neal was the oldest and he and his father worshipped the Cubs. Neal had baseball cards he kept in a shoebox, but the Ernie Banks he kept pressed between the pages of his catechism. If his brothers begged enough, he’d take it out and show it to them. They waited for the day, the really good day, they could ask their father to take them to Chicago for a game.

In the evenings they watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and National Geographic and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. They had a full set of Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias their father had bought from a door-to-door salesman. They owned a Bible kept always in a box in the parents’ closet. They turned the thin, gilt-edged pages with just-washed hands. They loved the pictures and, most of all, loved the Pietas. They loved the grown, dead Jesus draped over Mother Mary’s lap, his pierced ribs, his crown of thorns, the purple lids of his eyes.

They played church and Neal was the priest. He stuffed Wonder Bread into their mouths and said, “The Body of Christ,” and they gagged and washed it down with grape Kool-Aid from Dixie Cups for the blood.

Summers they heard train whistles and the factory whistles and the rustle and squeak of corn growing in the fields outside of town. They heard tornado sirens, blaring from all directions, thrumming inside their brown chests and they stood out on the front porch and scanned the yellow sky for funnel clouds. They heard police sirens and ambulance sirens and made the sign of the cross. If the sirens were close, they ran to see where they stopped.

Once they watched Mrs. Ernst rolled out of her house on a stretcher, her face dark and shriveled like the shrunken heads on National Geographic. They drew pictures of her and wrote, “What, me worry?” underneath and tacked them to their walls. Their mother tore down the pictures and when their father came home he called them little bastards and Neal got the belt. They ran and hid under the porch and pressed their fists over their ears.

Every day at three-thirty they heard the Deere whistle and got lost quick because their father would round the corner of Leland Street and he didn’t want to see them until suppertime. He’d sit at the kitchen table with their mother and drink Hamm’s and tell stories and they would hear their mother laughing.

Sometimes he missed supper altogether and their mother sent them to bed early. They’d wake up later to the sound of him coming through the back door, the scratch of a chair across the kitchen floor, their mother’s sharp voice.

They held their breath. They closed their eyes, then opened them wide. They curled their toes. They rocked themselves. They shoved each other. They pressed their fists to their ears. Their stomachs hurt. They bit the tips of their fingers. They listened hard. They never cried.

And Neal would reach across the bed they shared and touch their backs. His voice in the dark, like the skirr of cicadas, talking about Ernie Banks and Wrigley Field and the Cubs until they fell back to sleep.

Originally published in Frigg Magazine

Amelia

by Aubrey Hirsch | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction

Amelia hates it when people call her Amy. Amy is her mother’s name, she tells them, and her grandmother’s name. And she is nothing like them. She is educated. She is a career woman. She wears pants and a leather jacket and has short hair because she is a flyer. And Amy and Amy? They are helpless wives of alcoholics, dragging their children behind them like designer luggage through the clatter of empty whiskey bottles.

She also does not want to be called Meeley anymore. It is an unfortunate nickname. It conjures images of undercooked oatmeal and apples that have sat too long in the blue bowl on the kitchen counter. It reminds her of the time she rode her sled off the roof of the farmhouse. She spent a moment on the ramp, angled toward the clouds. Then a long beat in the air—flying! It was the same stomach-dropping feeling as being at the top of her arc on the swing set, the moment when the chains go slack and you just fall. And then the hard smack of the ground. Her dress torn, her elbow bleeding, her molar turned to powder in her mouth. She shifted it around with her tongue. Rubbed it against the roof of her mouth. Mealy.

The students in her class called her “the girl in brown who walks alone.” That’s what they printed under her photo in the yearbook. Maybe she wouldn’t have been alone so much if any one of them had had half a brain. Or even a quarter of a brain. A quarter of a brain she could work with. But the girls at school were mindless idiots. They were just looking to get out of high school, get married, have baby after baby until they get a boy to carry on the family name, and die having learned nothing more than they knew in high school. Amelia filled a binder with images of women doing men’s jobs and doing them well: scientists, doctors, a mayor in New Jersey, a pilot. And look at her now. Ten world records under her belt. Now she is attempting her biggest stunt yet. The papers say she is the first woman to attempt to fly around the world. But she knows better. She is looking for more than good press.

Amelia really doesn’t like being called Mrs. Putnam. She’d rather be called anything else, including almost all of the cuss words. When the reporter from The New York Times captioned her photo, “Mrs. Putnam,” she was so mad she couldn’t see straight. George smiled a wide, beaming smile. “What do you think about that, Mrs. Putnam?” he said. She would have pitied him if not for the searing heat suddenly cloying at her brain. “I don’t know, Mr. Earhart,” she’d spit back. He struck her, the only time he ever did. She knew then she’d have to leave him. She rubbed her flushed left cheek. It would happen soon. She would board the Electra and never look back.

A.E. she doesn’t mind so much. She could make a fuss about society reducing her whole being to two letters, but she doesn’t. She concentrates instead on her flying. It is her escape. She takes Canary, her yellow bi-plane, up to eight-hundred feet where even the air she breathes feels different. Up there her busted sinuses magically clear and her headaches evaporate like dew in hot sun. No one is as fast as she. No one can follow her up this high. This is where she gets away. This is how she will get away.

Amelia is what she really wants to be called. Fred Noonan, her navigator, calls her Amelia. “Amelia,” he says, “we should start sending the signals now. We’re about three hundred miles out.” She nods at him, takes his hand. He calls in their coordinates as if they are still heading for Howland Island. But they are not. They are going to Gardner Island. It will be lonely there but beautiful. Fred is a marine man. He can make them shelter and find them food, fishing in the island’s big lagoon. She has nurse’s training. She will keep them safe and healthy. Her hair will get long. Fred will grow a beard. There will be no whiskey and no stupid girls and no grandmother telling her to wear a dress like a lady. Every morning she will wake up, naked as the day God made her, to the feeling of warm wind on her face and Fred’s sweet voice in her ear whispering, “Amelia.”

Originally published in Smokelong Quarterly

Good Enough

by Shasta Grant | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction

I heard my daughter was working at Laundry & Tan Connection and hoped it wasn’t true but when I went inside, the bells on top of the door jingling to announce my arrival, she was standing behind the counter. 

“Jenny?” I said. She looked almost the same as when she was a child: hair still long and wavy, only now her face was thinner, her skin a deep bronze.

She looked up from a magazine. “What are you doing here?” 

Coming here seemed like a good idea, since I was driving through town. That wasn’t exactly true, but it was only two and a half hours in the wrong direction. If I had turned around, I could pretend she wasn’t stuck here. I could pretend that in August she packed her bags and moved to Durham or Keene or Portsmouth with the others. 

 “You got laundry you need to do? Or you want to tan?” she asked. 

She wouldn’t look at me and I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t expecting her to throw her arms around me. The place was empty and quiet except for the whirling sound of a few washing machines. The owners of those soon-to-be clean clothes must have been next-door buying chips and soda, browsing the aisles of empty VHS boxes, the tapes stored behind the counter. Nothing much ever changed in this town.

“I’d like a tanning booth,” I said.

“Come on, you don’t really.”

“I’ve always wanted to try it.”

“Fine. What level do you want?” she asked.

“What are they?”

“You should start with level one unless you already have a base tan,” she said, finally looking at me. “Which you obviously do not. You want some lotion?” She motioned to the display of rectangular packets hanging from the ceiling with names like Chaos, Smokin’ and Hot Stuff.  

“What do you suggest?” 

The last time I saw Jenny and Shawn they were in middle school. We drove around town in my new car because there wasn’t much else to do. I thought the leather seats and electric windows would impress them. I wanted to take them to lunch but Jenny refused so we drove for a little while and then I brought them home to the trailer we had lived in together all those years ago.
“A lady came in yesterday, insisting on Chaos but she’d never tanned before. She came out with her eyes bloodshot and watering and said she felt high.”

“So you recommend Chaos?” I hoped to make a joke.

“If you want to feel high.”

The day I left, the kids sat quietly on the sofa and watched me pack my things. Their father and I had picked up that plaid sofa on the side of the road. Someone decided it wasn’t good enough anymore and pinned a sign on it: FREE. 

 “We’ve got a promotion,” she said. “Thirty-five percent off a bottle of lotion with a one-month unlimited package. But I don’t suppose you’ll be here long enough.”

“I deserve that.” 

“You’re probably better off paying by the minute. You can stay in the level one booth for up to fifteen minutes. It’s three dollars and fifty cents for a full session.”

Saturday mornings, when we used to be a family, Jenny and Shawn would sit on that old sofa and watch cartoons while I made chocolate chip pancakes in the kitchen and smoked Newport cigarettes. 

“Jenny,” I said. 

“You want the lotion or not?” 

“No. Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“I’m working. If you came here to see what a failure I am, now you know and you can leave. You know the way out of town.” 

She closed the magazine and placed it next to a stack of Avon catalogs. I picked one up and turned it over, hoping not to see her name and phone number on the back but there they were. I sold Mary Kay when the kids were little. For six months I was a Beauty Consultant, which sounded important. We all thought I’d get one of those pink Cadillacs. I didn’t even make enough money to cover the cost of the starter kit. 

In the end, Jenny used the makeup on her dolls, smearing Mystic Plum on tiny plastic lips. She’d set up a beauty salon in the living room with those dolls lined up on the sofa, waiting their turn. Shawn took the role of receptionist, bringing empty teacups to each customer. 

 “You’ll need to put these over your eyes,” she said, handing me a pair of funny looking goggles.

“I don’t really want to tan.”

“I know,” she said.
I remembered what she was wearing the day I left: a corduroy jumper with a white turtleneck. I had brushed her hair that morning and snapped her favorite barrettes in place. I held onto that image but it wasn’t enough. I wished I could tell her something beautifully sad about leaving: that I waded in an ocean of grief or that the loss rested in my heart like a heavy stone. I was happier after leaving and I couldn’t tell her that.

“So that’s it then?” I asked.

“I guess so. I need the goggles back.”

The bells chimed and a young man came through the door. He nodded at me and smiled at Jenny, handing her a can of soda. He asked if she’d be at the football game on Saturday and I saw a trace of pink on her tanned cheeks.

I came here to tell her it wasn’t too late, that she could leave this town too, but seeing her behind the counter, I understood she never would. 

Jenny returned to reading her magazine. The young man unloaded his wet jeans and t-shirts into a metal laundry cart. My fifteen-minute session was up. There was nothing left for me to do but go. I stood outside, the little plastic goggles still in my hand, hoping she’d rush through the door to get them.

Originally published in Pithead Chapel