Flash

POLICING HEAVEN by Fred Pierre

December 2, 2021

To worship the leader is to worship our god, say cult members before they’re arrested. How does religion make you feel? Certain death, stake chips on the hereafter, or spin earth for a sunrise tomorrow? Truth is, you’ve been duped by your broker and hoodwinked by your minister out of your promised immortal treasures.

“You’ll see your whole family in heaven, my friend,” said the minister as he lay dying. Certainty grows when we parrot dogma. To get into heaven, the test is quite simple: Choose kindness before your self-interest. Only one in ten makes it. So many sublets in heaven they can’t even charge rent. In perfection, complaining is frowned on.

Here on Earth, assholes figure they’re going to heaven. Always got their way. Why not paradise? They’ll find where to purchase the next revelation, the next rung to climb the holy ladder. So you shot the last tiger, huh? Put its head on your wall, then fuck on its fur by the fire. Pay the church, pray to Jesus’ mother. Wash, rinse and repeat. Now you’re ready to knock at the gate.

Sad to say, they don’t allow assholes like you into heaven. It’s not paradise if you’re never happy. “They didn’t try half hard enough. Three out of five stars. Did you see the way that angel looked at me?”

For you, they’ve reserved a place away from the others, because to you, your pain feels like a comfort.

You anticipate finer things and old friends, but in the afterlife your family has choices. That’s why they aren’t here to greet you. At the end of the tunnel you see the white light, but those blobs become alien creatures. You’re being stroked by their tentacles. They need your soul for a cosmic experiment.

Say you do get in, how long before the T-cells of heaven reject you? When you cut someone off on your flying carpet, or flip the bird at one of God’s angels? The third time you complain? Because you can’t be depressed. It drags other souls down from the aether.

The dead infest caverns locked deep in the earth, along rivers of underground memory, but it's too dark there, so we raised the skyline, making gravity fully negotiable. You can fly like in Quidditch, but without all the brooms. Just think it and then you are there. Why limit your vision? Free yourself from the doctrines of others.

Do crushed dreams ice your cocktail? That is your shadow rising. What is heaven if you can’t enjoy it? “Pleasure is the first step on the long slide to Hell,” is what they told you when you felt desire, until you wanted nothing but to tear it all down. Burn Earth for a ticket to heaven.

Get on board the train. The conductor is restless. The train passes into a tunnel. The tunnel gets tighter and tighter around you. You’re expelled from the tunnel, aka the canal, in a burst of light.

Meet your new family.

CATGUT by M.W. Brooke

December 1, 2021

Most days your mother languishes on your couch watching reruns of Law & Order. Doctors can’t explain what’s wrong with her brain. You drive her to appointment after appointment between harp lessons—a merry-go-round of CAT scans, MRIs, acupuncture, marijuana, experimental doses of ketamine, prescriptions for epileptics. Nothing calms the tension behind her eye sockets, like a harp string constricting under the chill of night.

During rehearsals in third grade, your fourth octave C string snapped from the tuning pin and whipped across your eye. The harp yowled in your arms, a feral cat too close to human hands. Harp strings are more likely to snap when you aren't playing them, your teacher said, indifferent, swiveling on her heel to correct the posture of the student beside you. A few girls set their harps on the floor and stared, mouths agape as a red line marked your swelling cheek like a jellyfish sting. The quiver of Mormon girls giggled into their skinny collarbones.

For years you played pretentious recitals in ball gowns a hopeful size too small, back straight, elbows out, bouncing ringlets from too-tight rollers your mother forced you into the night before. Now you heave your harps up and down flights of stairs in yoga pants, your spine aching. You know the shape of each harp better than your own body, how each one travels, how to angle them into your Subaru Outback. Your students don't understand how fragile your harps are. Or maybe they don't care, too busy fluttering between controlling parents or abusive boyfriends. But they insist on dragging your harps along with them all the same, those downy notes softening the razor's edge of existence. You teach scales and glissandi and arpeggios and “Aura Lee” to children who hold back tears when their mothers’ cars pull into your driveway.

You lost one of your rental fleet once—an expensive lever loaned to a student who fixated on her fingers whenever a black eye bullied past layers of concealer. She skipped town with your harp, and the police contacted you six months later to tell you she had been found dead in her apartment. “You don't want the harp back,” they said. Its porous wood had breathed in months of human decay.

When you were fifteen, your mother drove you home from a recital in a freak blizzard in May, her knuckles like knobs of white coral against the steering wheel as snow piled on the windshield between each scrape of the wipers. A few miles from home, she pulled over to the shoulder and breathed out like air let out of a tire. Car still running and blinker clicking away, she opened the door and shuffled in front of the headlights. She lifted her arms to the sky and started to twirl, snow fluttering around her like TV static. Isn't it beautiful? she said. You shrunk into the crook of the passenger seat and yelled at her to come back inside, embarrassed and scared of how much you loved her.

Now your mother sleeps in the guest room, fetal and withering. Her muscles atrophy and her belly sags like a bird nest built on the lip of an eave. You're awake in the dark, arranging in your head a shitty pop song your ten-year-old student insists on learning. Crickets saw their legs together outside your window—the same, maddening refrain. And then you hear it: downstairs, a wooden crack like a rotting bough giving way to gravity’s pull. It's sharp and urgent and hollow. You slip out of bed and touch the strings in the dark until you find the empty space like a missing tooth. The string’s nowhere to be found, impossibly unmoored from the soundboard and tuning pin. You imagine the harp string unfurling on its own and shooting somewhere between the couch cushions or behind the piano. You could search for it. You could make a game out of it with your mother tomorrow if her brain doesn't rebel. Or maybe you'll find it months from now, coiled on the windowsill like a shed snakeskin. Maybe you'll never find it, another secret kept between the catgut, the woodgrain, the levers and pedals.

PLUCKED by Faye Brinsmead

November 29, 2021

The firebird came with excellent references.

Polite. Super-tidy. Throws herself into housework. Mows the lawn like she’s skinning a wolf.

Plus, there was the exoticism. Her shimmering plumage trailed over my Ikea shelving and hand-me-down brown velour sofa. Evenings, as we slurped insta-noodles and binged on Netflix, she fanned out her tail until the dim room was full of jeweled eyes.

She didn’t know if she belonged to the peacock clan. Maybe. Her golden beak hooked the last gluggy spiral. Her family wasn’t big on that.

On what? I asked.

Um, family. I’m kinda on my own. Of course, there’ve been loads of princes, golden apples, magic stallions and whatnot.

We went clubbing. Men. One glance, and they went up in smoke. We scooted from roller-disco raves to deep rap moan-athons, pursued by smoke alarms and singed buzz cuts.

No matter how late we teetered home, she’d spring up at dawn and scrub, scrub, scrub. Whatever needed scrubbing. The bathroom sterile as an operating theater.

On Netflix nights, I got the feeling there were fewer iridescent eyes.

Driving to Ikea for a laptop table, we had a tire blowout.

Keep calm, she said. Ease off the gas. Hazard lights on.

As she bent to change the tire, I saw holes in her rump like cigarette burns. A heart-shaped patch, bare of feathers. She felt me looking, angled it away.

I got serious about a guy I met at a sauna party.

You’re leaving me to wing it alone? she asked.

I wanted to protect her from combusting men, but, you know, hand-holding and strawberry candles and fluffy duck cocktails in the bath.

She came skittering home at 6 am, whammed the bathroom door. Sauna guy and I were still awake.

She’s been in there for, like, an hour, he said.

I hoped I was hallucinating the trail of red specks.

But the feather. Its bloody quill scribbling on ashen floorboards.

She couldn’t hear me knocking. What with all the scrubbing.

I got a ladder, climbed in the window. Peeled the rubber gloves off her blood-streaked claws, swabbed her wounds.

Why? I asked her three remaining tail feathers.

Nothing. Everything. All the wanting in their eyes.

We washed her plucked feathers and hung them on the clothesline. Lay on the wet grass beneath them, wondering how to stitch them back on.

DIRTY LAUNDRY by Lisa Johnson Mitchell

November 28, 2021

I pour bleach over the mound, purging, once again, the family secret: Daddy’s arrest—indecent exposure. Socks fall in. Slipped them off right before having sex with my husband, during which I thought of Benjamin, high school lover.

Will Mom die today? Bed sore as big as a baseball. Not eating or drinking. Been seven days. Hampton Gardens is five minutes away, thank Christ. Flannel nightgown, shove it in, hope I don’t have another nightmare where I’m digging into my giant thigh with a knife, the insides like a Christmas ham.

I told Mom I loved her, that she was the best Mama in the whole world, then I put Chapstick on her faded lips and kissed her papery forehead. New jeans, squeezed my watermelon-ass into them. I’m starving, that Three-Day Cabbage Diet didn’t work. For better, for worse, you said. T-shirt from Beverly Hills, all the famous people don’t smell or fart. Their parents never die.

Daddy, Mama will see you soon. Dishrag smells like ripe lady parts, salmon was a bust, stupid Martha Stewart. Mama screamed and clawed my wrist, ‘please help me, please help me’ so I ran and got the nurse who gave her a drop of morphine. Please God, take me instead, I did have that affair. Next: bath towel, the expensive one from Peacock Alley. The plush speaks to my skin and says I will go on living.

Squirt, squirt. Liquid detergent syrups the clothes, in goes the whitening pod that never works, but I’m an optimist, damn it. Phone rings.

Her breathing is ragged, shallow, her heart rate has dropped. Come now.

THE MELT by Jennifer Todhunter

November 25, 2021

My son doesn't turn from solid to liquid or liquid to gas when the melt occurs. He remains in the same state physically, but mentally there is a shift. Heat has been applied in the form of my disappearing from his line of sight, or heading to the bonfire for a beer, or talking to a friend who is a guy who is not his dad, my ex. There is a fusion when the melt occurs, his person to my person, a shadow that follows me wherever I go, that demands we leave this instant, that cries as if I've died right there, in front of him.

The attachment is not cute like the therapist suggested it might be when I explained my son's behaviour to her. It is not the same as when he'd wake with nap-flushed cheeks as a toddler and wobble around the house after me, leaving behind a trail of goldfish crackers and blueberries. Suffocation is such an ugly word, she said, and I nodded, but that's how it feels, I said, when he melts, it feels like he's sitting on my chest and I can't breathe.

When my son was five, his dad taught him Newton's laws of motion, and seven years later he can still ramble them off at the ready, his favourite being the third law: For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Sometimes, when the melt occurs, so does the leaving. The leaving is the equal reaction—equal as being of similar strength, not equal as being fair or just. The leaving is running down unfamiliar lanes at night, unaware of cars racing around corners. It's stomping down streets filled with loaded semi trucks speeding toward the port. It's walking along dirt roads in bear country, a mess of snot and tears, screaming why doesn't anybody love me.

I worry my son learned the melt from my ex. That these behaviours have been condoned because they mirror behaviours my ex exhibited when we were together. This is what I ask the therapist during another session. Why is it cute when my son does it and unnerving when it's my ex? and she pauses, asks me, why do you think that is? I look at the perfectly-trimmed bonsai tree on her desk, the plate of sand holding a tiny rake. I don’t think it’s cute, I say, and she smiles.

My son and I inevitably reach an equilibrium after each melt. We are exhausted and hesitant and confused. We pile onto the grass or the couch or the hood of the car and stare at each other. I think about Newton's first law: an object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it, and think: that is me, I am the force, this will change, but I don't always believe that, don’t always believe myself. I sit with the pressure on my chest, pull at my collar and breathe until the breaths come steady again, until my son’s tears have dried, until we reach our base state. I love you, I say as we hug, because I do—I do love him—and I take the worry that this love will change because of the melts and squish it down one more time.

EULOGY by Dan Melling

November 22, 2021

Derek came in sad-faced because Alastair’d died, said, Alastair’s dead, but I’ve not worked in seven months because the pub’s been closed, so I said, Who’s Alastair? Derek’s face got sadder, said Big Alastair, with the jewelry and I remembered him. He was a dickhead. I said, Oh yeah, and got Shelly over to talk to Derek, but Shelly wouldn’t care either. Alastair was a dickhead who always wore two watches and two thick gold chains and a ring on each finger and whistled when he wanted a pint and one time slapped a girl’s arse as she walked past. The girl was young. First-job-out-of-school young and she was shaking after he did it. Only a joke, hen, he’d said, a wee skelp. Alastair was the colour of kidney failure. He went from yellow to green to purple to a reddish-brown in the space of one face. I used to think he looked like a bloated corpse from the Battle of the Somme. I used to picture him, urea-pigmented, bulging out of the mud and sludge and shell craters. I’d close my eyes and see him leering at me from the middle panel of an Otto Dix triptych. But Derek was sad and because we couldn’t serve beer indoors he went out into the beer garden and because it was May and snowing he was one of only three people out there and he drank and shivered and mourned. Derek was working hard on the pints, going two at a time, and I brought him two out and said, Some fucking day, ay? and Derek said I ken he was a dickhead but I’ve kenned him since school. I said, He wasn’t that bad, and Derek said, Nah, he was, and I could see in the way he wrinkled his brow, he was wondering where the sadness was coming from. I thought I could see him trying not to recognise the answer. How desperately he didn’t want to know that death is everywhere and that it’s always chomping its way towards us. It was like he didn’t want to know that even if death worked fairly, even if it moved sequentially, working through linear generations, he’d be getting right towards the top of its list and because he’s poor and because of where he was born and who he’s worked for there’s no way to postpone it. So Derek stayed confused and he drank his pints two at a time and then added a whiskey to each order. He shivered and watched his breath dissipate and pulled his sleeves up over his hands so that only enough finger was showing to bet on the horses on his phone and he probably remembered what Alastair was like in school and how different the uniforms were then and how different the area was and he probably remembered them being teenagers and fucking lasses and fighting lads and when they worked on the trains and when the trains got privatised and then he probably remembered retirement and all of the time they’d spent in this pub and all of its landlords and all the hundreds of people who’d had my job and the pints and pints and pints and he watched the snow falling and instantly melting while he mourned a dickhead.

JONAHS AND THE WHALES by Avra Margariti

November 20, 2021

You tell me your father Jonah was eaten by a whale when you were a boy. Right before your eyes, you say. One moment you were fishing together in your old boat; the next, the beast breached, snatching your father between shadow-thin teeth as if he were bait. You had to row yourself back to shore. Your spindly arms took weeks to regain sensation. Your heart never did. Is there a Jonah here? the delivery person asks as they hand me a loaded speargun wrapped in brown paper. Your name is also Jonah. The junior who will soon outlive the senior. Or so I thought before your online order arrived, the anniversary approached. When you lie next to me in bed, you paddle like a dog in its sleep. You recite lines from Moby Dick, the Hebrew Bible. I’m grateful I hid the speargun and its harpoon in the garden among my sweet peas. When you hold my hand at night, you clutch it tight like a weapon. I won’t let the whale take you, you vow in the morning, but you won’t look me in the eye. It’s not me you see. Over breakfast you play whale song recordings, try to decipher your father’s secret Morse Code, tap-tap-tapping against wet stomach lining. Revenge, you say. You need to get revenge on the whale, rescue your father from its giant gut. It’s been twenty years, you tell me, the milky white of your eyes bloodshot fever-red. His matches must have long since burned to nothing, the minnow-diet shrinking his proud skeleton. His fishing vest a chilled rag, waterlogged. You need to kill the whale, slice its belly open; you need to get him out. While we stroll through the park, a volunteer asks if we’ll sign a petition to end whaling. You knock the clipboard out of their hands. When I watch the Star Trek movie about humpback whales brought back from extinction, you kick the TV in: tinfoil screen, fishing line wires. Women want me, cetaceans fear me, the hat you never part with boasts above the brim. We haven’t touched each other in months. I wake up in the middle of the night to find our bed empty but your side still warm. The speargun gone from my patch of sweet peas, trampled into muddy confetti. Cheery music emanates from the open laptop, a sea-blue aquarium ad playing on repeat. I drive through town, retracing your steps. The aquarium’s chain link fence has been cut open. Security guards sleep slumped one against the other, tranquilizer darts flashing like lures from the side of their necks. In the whale exhibit, the light is blue and oscillating. The ground rumbles with distant bellows. I spot you on the feeding platform, precariously balanced while the stunted orca below breaks the water’s surface. The beast regards you, sluggish, old. Your speargun falls limp in the water. It sinks fast. Impassive, the whale returns to the bottom of its clear-glass prison. You prostrate yourself across the platform. My arms, you cry, I can’t feel my arms. You dissolve into lament: My father, I can’t find my father. I know, I tell you, and think of the broken TV, and the trampled sweet peas, and the nine-year-old boy who had to row his guilt home.

THREE FLASH STORIES by Michael Haller

November 19, 2021

WORK

I answer a phone for the company. I sit behind a desk in a room and answer the telephone when it rings. When the telephone is not ringing I sit in my chair and wait for the phone to ring. When the phone rings I pick up the handset and listen to the voice on the other end, and when the voice is finished saying what it has to say I hang up and try not to think. Then the phone rings and I answer it.

My boss tells me I am doing a splendid job, but I think he is saying this to keep me from thinking that maybe I am not doing a splendid job and that I am, in fact, wasting the company’s money. But because the company has never shown signs of a money shortage, I do not believe it is possible to waste something that cannot be depleted. Therefore my boss is telling the truth. He is an honest man.

At 5:00 the phone stops ringing and it is time to go home. I do not know whether the company turns off the phone so no more calls can get through, or if the callers automatically stop calling every day at 5:00 and then resume calling at 8:00 the next morning.

At 5:00 I leave and go home to my house where there is a phone in the bedroom. This phone rings occasionally, no, seldom, when I am with it. When I do get a call, the voice on the other end often sounds familiar, but I cannot match the voice to a face or a person. I listen, though, and sometimes speak to the voice.

One day I made a tape recording of my voice and brought it to a nearby phone booth. I dialed my home, set the mouthpiece next to the tape recorder, rushed home, and answered my phone in time to hear my voice on the other end speaking to me. It was a limited conversation but one that I have cherished because I knew who was talking to me. I would like to meet this person from the phone booth, but because of time constraints we will be unable to get together.

THE TOURNAMENT

It was after the billiards tournament I had won. We were standing around the table talking; I was talking about the last shot I made. Hands recently removed from nearby pockets were grabbing my right one and shaking it in congratulations. One of the hands felt like a tongue. There were camera flashes and questions from a reporter. I had won. Then the men took me by the arms and laid me on the pool table, splayed like an X. Two pock-faced men unbuttoned my shirt. A heavyset man wearing tinted glasses took a penknife out of his pocket and stuck it into my chest just above the left nipple. While holding the knife in place with his right index finger, he removed a handkerchief from his pants with his left hand and blew his nose. He then made an incision in my chest that cut in a rising half arc to my right nipple, around and down to a spot midway between sternum and navel, then straight down to my beltline. He rolled back the flap of skin, in the same way one might open a tin of sardines. He sloshed his hands in the opening, then tugged on something that gave with a snap. It slipped out of his hands and made the sound a cow liver would make if it were dropped on the ground. Then they put the skin back in place, stitched me, picked up my fallen organ, and left. A minute later one of the men returned and read me a note: “In order to facilitate recuperation the patient must remain supine for seven days. If the patient attempts to ambulate before the seventh day, it is possible he or she will agitate the part of the body that is healing and tear loose the stitching.”

DOMESTIC

I live in the fear that someone will assassinate me. I will walk out of my house one morning to get my newspaper, and when I turn to wave to my next-door neighbor (who is also getting his paper) a gunman in a passing car will open fire with a machine gun. I will do a writhing death dance in my front yard, similar to the one Warren Beatty performed at the end of Bonnie & Clyde, blood spewing from my wounds like geysers.

I do not understand why anyone would want to assassinate me.

I am not a politician, and to remove any suspicion about my involvement in politics I have stopped voting. Nor am I a religious figure. I have closed the church’s doors to myself and have stopped thinking about God. Politicians and preachers are the usual targets of the assassin’s bullet, and by removing myself from the sphere of the hunted I think I will be safe.

Yet I wake at night and see shadows moving in the dark, hear feet shifting in the carpet...windows conspiring against me.

I will hire bodyguards to protect me at all times and I will wear a bulletproof suit. The protection will cost money but if it saves my life it will be worth it.

GOTTERDAMMERUNG by Howie Good

November 18, 2021

Welcome to the Age of Autonomous Machines, where the brown bears of Kamchatka are cold, ragged, and hungry, and under perpetual ban, and rivers brim with jizz and blood, and fish have the twisted mouths of stroke victims, where saints travel incognito on New York City subways and God speaks to them in a gravelly two-packs-a-day voice, where a peeling billboard declares it’s time to look ahead to the past, when the public gallows stood silhouetted at dusk against a sky of faded red plush.

Blinking like a sick mole against the harsh white light of the desert, the last of the angels steps out of his winged chariot onto the hot tarmac. Little girls in braids present him with bouquets. Jeers erupt somewhere among the hundreds of people solemnly watching the ceremonies from behind a security fence. The plainclothesmen mixing with the crowd pepper-spray everyone within range. On the tarmac, meanwhile, a military band strikes up a brassy tune that has long been a favorite of dictators around the world. Birds hum along.

I fall asleep to music, wake up to the barking of Soviet space dogs. We are apparently closer than I realized to the border of a bygone era. “Better call a repairman,” I whisper to my wife, who is standing on tiptoes, peering over my shoulder. By the time the repairman arrives, it is four in the afternoon and the sky has a long, black crack running down the middle. As he unpacks his tools, he volunteers that he has a titanium plate in his head. I nod numbly. Death, when it finally comes, will have his phlegmy eyes.

THE FLIGHT PATH by Megan Peck Shub

November 17, 2021

The morning my friend passed away—not a euphemism here, for passing is just what she did, through her protracted process, a slow shifting from life to whatever it is that is not life—some engineers launched a rocket at the Cape.

I’d flown down from New York at 4 AM, but I arrived too close to the end for me to cut in, so I stayed at my parents’ house, waiting for the call.

That night, in someone’s backyard, my other friends and I, we stood there, conscious of our collective remaining behind. It was one of those suburban Florida backyards, one in a long, identical row, the ground half dirt/half Saint Augustine grass, primly fenced off from the neighbors. Some of us were drinking vodka, yes. I didn’t partake in the cigarettes because I’d quit, and I figured my friend—since she died of cancer, and here it feels better to say died—wouldn’t want me to smoke. It is not logical to do things for the dead, but we do them anyway, because what we’re doing is actually for ourselves, obviously.

That part of town sits in an airport flight path; when I think of it, I think of watching the bellies of low-flying aircraft, their landing gear reaching out like talons.

One of my friends looked up at the sky.

“She had the best seat in the house for the rocket launch,” this living friend said, her finger stuck toward the sky; some wet-eyed laughter all around the group. A nice thought, but I could not agree. The truth is that I didn’t think it was the truth.

Years ago, when I was 24, I worked at Newark airport with a middle-aged colleague who—unbeknownst to him, absorbed as he was in our rigmarole, in our planes, in the pallid mounting of his days—taught me a lot about pain. The context is gone, but one day he asked me, “Have you lost a friend yet?”

Yet. Yet. What a tag it was—yet. There are words that sound like their meaning. Crash. Bang. This felt like that. Yet: something brutal, inevitable.

I remembered his words, standing in that backyard, looking up at the roving dots, what I imagined were satellites, slung around and around and around our orbit by gravity. The memory played as if released by a needle sliding into a record’s wax groove. “Hit it,” I could hear my friend say, snapping her fingers. This part was imaginary, of course.

The next day I flew back to New York. Every time I leave Florida, I feel like it’s spitting me out, like I’m some kind of flayed pit, hurtling.

This was three years ago. I still hear her ringing laughter, clear as ever, perhaps even clearer than before she left—and here it feels most apt to say she left. I feel her shrugging, somewhere, maybe in my own shoulders, when, from time to time, I smoke a cigarette.

For Jessey