Author Archives: oblongmagazine

May 20 2014
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Fiction

To the Woman Who Pushed In Front of Me at the Avocado Stand

 

by Anna Mantzaris

 

First of all, I understand! These are not just any avocados. Forget the Hass, with its sad, pimply no-one-wants-to-go-to-prom teenage skin, or the pedestrian softball-shaped Reed that just screams boring. These are organic ‘Sunshine’ avies (the adorable nickname you used!), voluptuous and smooth, filled with a nutty, decadent meat that does not compare. After pushing your hand-woven basket that I imagine you were thrilled to find on your three-week trip to Marrakech (maybe your Babymoon?) into my left side and swiping me with your fuchsia-color windbreaker-clad arm, I got the picture: You needed these avocados FAST. Who was I to stop you? And I very much appreciated that you explained why you needed the climacteric fruit a.s.a.p. ‘These are the only avies my son will eat.’ Of course you couldn’t wait until I plopped my little gathering of three semi-ripe on the scale and took out my wrinkled $5 bill. You had places to go. People to see. Avocados to eat.

And let’s face it, my uninspired idea to simply consume the avocados sliced, or maybe tossed into a sad little salad of romaine and cucumber, could not compare with what I bet were your grand plans – freshly mashed guac with lobster chunks and just-snipped dill, or a perfectly smooth and chilled dinner-party soup laced with home-grown fresh garlic and topped with a crouton made from cruelty-free yeast – sure to wow your guests who are also go-getters, people who aren’t afraid to fight for their heirloom tomatoes and free-range squab. The kind of folks to get the last block of Gruyère.

But what I really admired was the way you stood front and center of the patient farmer and ate not one, not two, but all three of the remaining sample slices. Popping each one in your mouth as if it were your birthright. Your magic ‘pills’ that allow you to continue through your day like the urban panther you’ve become.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I initially mistook the slow, small smirk you gave me as you turned on your heels to leave as an apologetic smile. ‘She’s sorry!’ I thought to myself. ‘No big deal!’ But no. As I toted home my crinkled little brown bag that had begun to tear, I realized I was mistaken. You weren’t making amends for a temporary lapse in social skills. You weren’t asking for forgiveness. It was a look of satisfaction that said, ‘You – who apologizes when someone steps on your foot, with your plain brown hair and less-than-average height, who came here with that sweet man in front of the bread stand, smiling and patiently waiting to buy a loaf of pumpernickel, you who is underpaid but always over tips, who would rather wear an ill-fitting sweater than return it to show how much you liked it as a gift – will always be behind me.’

 

– Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer and editor. Her work has appeared in publications including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Cortland Review and The Lascaux Review.

 

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May 13 2014
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Fiction

On Fault

         

by Austin Eichelberger

 

Allen stood in the bright morning light spilling through the narrow doorway of their bedroom, looking at the patched blanket across the bed where he and Elaine slept, the skin of his bicep molding around the corner of the door frame. His arms were folded and he stood in silence, one leg relaxed and behind him – as if it was dark out and he was pausing sleepily as he came back from the kitchen with a glass of water or a Tums. The bed – that same wooden, four-post frame where his grandfather had been conceived; the sheets Elaine usually smoothed after he had left for the auto shop; the quilt her grandmother had made when Elaine was still in diapers – sat empty, seeming very flat and far too large, as if a body should be resting there, as if a body should always be there. Even the sunlight that fell across the quilt was gray, Allen thought, as his eyelid twitched; all the blues and reds and oranges looked muted.

Across town – in another bed, with a white sheet pulled up to her chest and clear tubes making graceful turns out of her nostrils – Elaine laid awake, nestled between the dull whistles and murmurs of hospital machines. She had been home a few days before while Allen was still at work – after teaching her three piano lessons for the day – when she collapsed from a rare sort of seizure pattern that can pop up in mid-life without warning, a tangled string of syllables that the doctors said quickly and without relief in their voices. Allen had told Elaine that he’d be home at five-thirty, which turned out to be just a half-hour or so after she stopped walking and began falling down the stairs – laid there with her forehead daintily on the bottom step, her dark blonde hair fanned out around her – but Allen had forgotten she was making chicken parmesan and renting a movie – honestly – and went out for a beer with Dave after work.

Allen had not arrived home until six-forty, a full hour and fifty minutes after Elaine’s thigh jerked and her eyes rolled back, and by the time he found her – so still and beautiful, her face relaxed and eyes closed, like she had decided to nap in the strangest of places – her face was slightly puffy and a string of dried saliva ran out of her mouth, up her cheek, past her eye, and onto the carpeted floor. The saliva was specked red, like the glass pendant he had bought her for their last anniversary, and her tongue sat limp against her teeth, pushing slightly against her open lips. Allen had called 911 and rushed around the house, turning off the oven and fanning smoke from the alarm, trying to pin down how long ago it had happened, if he could’ve been home to catch her, how far she had fallen and if it caused any extra injuries, if lying upside down on the stairs like that for long enough could cause brain damage or encourage blood clots. She had been in the hospital ever since on doctor’s orders, despite Allen’s arguments, despite his adamant claims that monitoring Elaine was his job.

Allen blinked against the suddenly harsh light of their bedroom, turned his head from the dust motes settling on Elaine’s quilt, and coughed roughly as he straightened up. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing in the doorway, staring at the bed as if waiting for movement, for Elaine to pop out from under the impossibly flat sheets, smile at him with her twisted grin and apologize for taking the joke so far. Allen scratched the side of his head and decided to go out for a smoke, thinking of what Elaine had said on Monday as she laid between those pale hospital sheets: ‘We can’t blame ourselves, Al. Some things just happen.’ She had smiled at him after she’d said it, rubbed the back of his hand with her soft palm. He’d told her he had to go, had errands to run and a few things to do around the house. ‘Okay, baby,’ she’d said, reaching out for a hug. ‘Be safe.’

Now, on their front porch, Allen snorted out smoke and crushed his cigarette on the wooden railing, leaving a tiny smoldering pile of black tobacco on the clean white surface. He walked back into the house, past her coats hanging by the front door, the slippers she left in the living room the week before, the pan in the sink filled with crispy, blackened chicken and burnt cheese, before stopping by the answering machine and its blinking red light. He lifted the old cordless phone from the kitchen wall and scrolled through the missed calls – four over the past two days from the auto shop’s main number and three missed today straight from his boss’ private line. Allen reached out and held down the delete button before setting the phone back in its cradle, listening absently to the shrill pealing tone even after all the unheard messages had gone, and then padded back down the hall toward their bedroom doorway.

 

– Austin Eichelberger is happily still teaching English and writing. His fiction has appeared in Cease, Cows, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Gone Lawn, Extract(s), Eclectic Flash, First Stop Fiction, and others. You can find more of his writing at austineichelberger.wordpress.com.

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May 06 2014
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Fiction

The Heart of It

           

by Laura Baber

 

I.

There were twelve robins on the roof today. I saw them outside my window, huddled against each other with orange colored breasts still bundled in winter’s down feathers. Fluffed up in defense of their tender heads and alert, hopping feet; pecking at berries hidden in the black flaps and folds of the roof tiles. I did not know that robins flocked. I think usually they do not, but were together this morning only to protect themselves against the bitter wind. Or the loneliness of a sudden springtime birthing.

 

I turn my head to ask you, but you are not there. The fact of it was 15 years ago, but I still forget and turn my head to talk to you. To tell you stories. To ask you questions about the daytime habits of robins.

 

 

II.

 

It was your fingernails that first told us something was wrong. Where we were, deep in the jungle, no one was whole. There were always stomach revulsions, skin lesions, something that grew red and itchy against the crook of an elbow. We did not pay attention to these minor annoyances. We put up with them for faith, you and I. For belief in the work that we did.

 

The days were long and hot and wet. Even before the rainy season, before the floods, my hair grew mold in it. My belt, the one with the copper buckle that I’d brought from back home, turned a green patina that would never turn back again. I felt the same way, being there. Patinaed with a hue that wouldn’t turn back again.

 

Sometimes I’d complain. ‘There’s no aid work in Paris,’ you’d say then, wiping sweat from your face with the red bandana you kept shoved in your back pocket. ‘These are the conditions. This is the work.’

 

I believed you because I believed in you, in the work we did. I trusted your face, whole and proud, shining in the dying light of a jungle afternoon.

 

 

III.

 

We called them tube wells. Long, six-inch pipes inserted deep into the heart of the earth, bringing up fresh, clean water to those who’d never had it before. For those who had lost child after child to diarrhea, to waterborne pathogens, to poverty. Thinking back on it, I should have seen that nothing was so easy. Nothing, all the way good. But youth has no room for pragmatism.

 

‘Almost ready,’ I said to the experts, come in to evaluate. On the first day their large-boned white skin shone bright against the dark smallness of the population. By the second, they’d turned red and puffy, burned uncomfortable by a long day in the sun. Still, we pressed on. We measured and scienced, clipboards clutched in hands. These were the conditions, this was the work.

 

‘The rainy season will come soon,’ they said to me though I knew this. I knew it better than they. I was no stranger with red puffy skin.

 

‘We’ll be ready.’ I pointed to dates on my clipboard. Calendar rows marked in red. Monsoons that could swing in and out of dates and time, ruining everything. ‘They’ll be dug,’ I said.

 

‘Every village.’

 

The diesel engines, the ones that create the long holes down to the heart of the earth, they don’t work in the rain. They get clogged and rusted, sometimes carried away by rising water. With the monsoon threat barreling down on us, circled in red just weeks away, perhaps we went too quickly. Did not do all the sciencing we should have done. I can look back now and ask: Did we go too fast? Now that I have the luxury of pragmatism, but not of you.

 

 

IV.

 

All day I listened to the sounds of that diesel engine, fitting and drilling. The electricity of it took something precious away from my days, blanketed them with a constant buzzing and whirring. I tried not to mind that I could no longer hear the wind ruffling thatched roofs or clanking tin tops. That I lost the rustle of the giant palm fronds waving their old, primeval arms. But I noted it, this sign that something was not right.

 

Too much was still good. I could feel the wind blow cool against my skin. I could taste fresh coconut from shoreline trees and drink beer smuggled in on military ships. I could lose myself in the endless varieties of green or nap under a bright white mosquito net. I could stand against you, shoulders together, doing the work.

 

 

V.

 

Fingernails do not lie. Their ridges and lumps and colored marks indicate very specific traumas. This is where that drawer closed on my ring finger. This is where I cut into my thumb bed too deeply. This is where I hit myself with that hammer, turning the index fingernail a blue-black-purple before I lost it altogether.

 

Back in Connecticut, we noticed your fingernails had gone wrong. There had been other signs of course: headaches, stomach aches, dizziness. Days spent in sterile rooms where doctors spoke of Lyme disease and vertigo. One said that sometimes people don’t adjust to coming home. Sometimes it’s in your mind. You laughed at him, that one.

 

Because it wasn’t in your mind. It was in your fingernails. Long white streaks, small round dots. Classic signs of arsenic, they’d say later. But not classic enough to catch the cancer before it spread.

 

The clipboards measured and scienced. ‘Mass poisoning,’ they said. ‘Whole villages succumbed.’ Arsenic from deep in the earth brought up by tube wells.

 

 

VI.

 

I cried when I heard it. Cried for you, and your fallen-out hair and your pancreas that had turned against you. Cried for the fingernail streaks and the skin lesions and the day your shoulders slumped against the world and I knew you had given up hope.

 

I sat by your bedside and I held your hand.

 

‘We killed them,’ you whispered and I shushed you. I had no answer for that.

 

– Laura Baber is a humanitarian aid worker and writer who has lived and worked in Central America, Eastern Europe and Asia. She currently resides in New York City and has just finished work on her first novel.

 

 

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Apr 29 2014
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Fiction

Clonycavan Man

   

by Natasha Arnold

 

So when I see the legless leather body that is Clonycavan Man inside the glass case and my brother reads the plaque aloud about the archaeologists sifting through the peat to find vegetable oil styling the tuft of hair clinging to his head and determining that he must have been wealthy to have been able to afford it and that he was short in height and about the forensic specialists guessing he’s in his early twenties like I am and taking the dents in his skull to mean he was murdered I wonder why we burn or bury our dead instead of throwing them into bogs since all we ever want is to be immortal just like my brother says right now to Look at this blighter for feck’s sake died before Jesus Christ even happened and here we are still looking at him and my brother is right because we want to be looked at forever until the universe dies and beyond but look at all we know about Clonycavan Man who’s tiny like me and who styled his red hair like I style my red hair and we can guess only that he probably died for being rich or pretty or femme like they call me and we don’t know why he died just that he did and how and now he’s no different from a leather satchel and my brother huffs and says Feckin figures and I wonder if he’s thinking the same as I am about how Clonycavan Man could be a brown and legless me but instead he taps me on the shoulder and says I know a real bit of craic and he takes me to the Viking Ireland room where a warrior all bones just his skeleton lies in a glass case of his own in the position that they found him buried in with his dagger and his sword beside him but that’s all he is I think just bones just white just hard parts and my brother’s face reflects onto the ribcage like it’s imprisoned and the hard white bone parts don’t say anything about the dagger and sword and so I ask my brother You think he died like a real man don’t you and I don’t care what he says to me because I could travel forever on the sound waves I just made.

 

– Natasha Arnold is a second-year student in Old Dominion University’s Creative Writing MFA program. She currently lives in Norfolk, Virginia. This is her first publication.

 

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Apr 22 2014
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Fiction

4 out of 5 in 1981

by B.J. Jones  

The hotels are empty, the shops are closed, and the sand is undisturbed. A few people walk by wearing jackets. Linda gets off a bus and joins the few walkers on the beach’s boardwalk. Linda just got off her shift at the hospital where she is a nurse assigned to pediatrics.

She often comes to the beach to sit on a bench and watch the ocean. She only comes in winter when all the vacationers are gone. In winter she owns the beach.

Linda takes a book out of her purse and starts reading when a man with a red suitcase stops in front of her.

‘Excuse me miss?’ he says.

Linda looks up from her book. ‘What do you want?’

‘Sorry to disturb your reading, but I wanted to know if I could interest you in what I have in my suitcase.’

Linda puts her book down without marking her place and looks around.

The man puts the red suitcase on the ground and shows Linda his hands, ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you. I’m only selling video tapes. Here look.’ He starts unzipping the red suitcase. Linda stands up but keeps watching the man. He isn’t lying. Stuffed in the red, imitation leather suitcase are video tapes. ‘Video quality is good. I can guarantee it. What kind of movies do you like? I have some nice romantic ones here.’

Linda sits back down on the bench while the man is on one knee shuffling through the video tapes. ‘I don’t like romance. What else do you have?’

‘I have it all miss,’ he says.

‘Wait, are those Beta? I don’t buy Beta.’

‘What? Beta is the future. VHS is going down! I predict that by the 90s everyone will be using Beta. Everyone!’

‘What makes you think that?’ she asks.

‘Because I’m also a professional psychic.’

Linda chuckles. ‘Sure you are.’

‘I specialize in sports and pop culture,’ he says.

‘Do you have any predictions today?’ she asks.

‘I’m a modern day Nostradamus. I will let you in on a few. One, a popular football player will be tried for murder. Two, the Boston Red Sox are going to win the World Series. Three, The Eagles will reunite. Four, there will be a black president. Finally, Beta will win the battle over VHS,’ he says counting with his fingers.

‘I’m sure all of that will come true one day,’ she says.

‘Thank you Linda. Good luck on your next shift at the hospital.’

‘How did you know my name?’ she asks, getting up from the bench.

The man points to his head and says, ‘I just know these things.’

Linda swiftly walks past closed stores and empty hotels with the man shouting from the bench.

‘Remember Linda. The future is Beta! The future is Beta!’  

 

– B.J. Jones writes about rogue pharmacists, phantom limbed windmills, quidnuncs, Luciferian calories, amorous bowling shoes, Funkhousers, martyred coupons, Nietzschean wire hangers, invisible tomatoes, and pen clicking adversaries while living in Dubuque, IA with his wife. Some of it even gets published.    

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Apr 15 2014
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Fiction

We Are Sure We Came From Here: Ohio vs. Munich

 

by Jon Steinhagen

 

Your father and I are seeing a lot of things we can’t pronounce. Your father thinks he can pronounce things but the people here just look at him funny and it takes a couple of tries to get what we want or we give up. He doesn’t like the breakfasts at the hotel. He likes hot things but we get continental. It’s part of the room rate. It costs extra for a hot breakfast but your father won’t spend the money and anyway we’d have to leave the hotel and we’re already eating out twice a day.

There’s a castle that from where we are looks like a toy but when you get up close you can’t see all of it at once. You go in and you pay money and they only show you a little bit of it but I suppose we wouldn’t have the time to see all of it and you know your father isn’t good with stairs. I realized the other day that empty rooms one after another no matter how historic all look the same. All there is to drink here is beer but they give you so much of it even if you order a half liter and the steins are so heavy you know me with my wrist problems. I’m bringing you home a nice big glass stein you can use to hold your leftover pocket change or you can use it to drink beer if you can drink that much.

We still haven’t found the graves and I told your father maybe he didn’t hear right but he insists and so we been to every cemetery except three. We’ve seen an awful lot of pretty headstones though. We can read the names we just can’t read what comes after the names but they’re pretty.

The desserts are something however but all that cream and know how your father loves chocolate but it’s no good for him and so he belches half the night.

Here’s a picture of your father with a stranger because of the hat. I’m in the picture too but you can’t see me because the woman who took it for us didn’t really understand and so I’m there but I’m not. So your father and I bought hats. They match. They’re much cheaper here probably because they’re common. We’re blending in.

There are a lot of churches here but we haven’t been in any only the graveyards. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for your great-great-grandparents and whoever came before them and their brothers and sisters if they had them but like I said we haven’t found them and I’m worried we made this trip for nothing.

Don’t forget Tuesday is trash day so put the cans out on Monday night and put the bricks on the lids so the raccoons can’t get at it.

That’s all I can think of. Your father says hello and would you like a hat?

 

– Jon Steinhagen is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists; his play BLIZZARD ’67 was recently produced at the New York International Fringe Festival. His fiction can be found in print and online, recently in Barrelhouse, Four Ties Lit Review, and The American Reader.

 

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Apr 08 2014
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Fiction

Lincoln, Lincoln

 

by Chad Greene

 

When I was a child, I thought like a child – thanks to the encyclopedia my parents purchased. Or, more exactly, thanks to the one volume of the encyclopedia they didn’t purchase.

See, next to the Bible on our bookshelf were 27 of the 28 volumes of Funk & Wagnalls’ New Encyclopedia. Growing up on the farm, we were poor, but my parents were believers – believers in the power of education to improve their children’s lots in life. So, the moment the checker at the grocery store handed them a free copy of Volume 1 and a full-color flyer informing them that ‘the purchase of Funk & Wagnalls’ New Encyclopedia is an excellent investment in your children’s future,’ they made up their minds to find the funds to buy the rest – one a week for the next 27 weeks.

For the next 21 weeks, they kept that promise to themselves – and to their children. But then, somewhere early in the Ss, the grocery store suffered a mysterious shortage of Volume 23. The store, my parents said, had run out before they could purchase a copy. To make up for it, they said, the store had decided to substitute Funk & Wagnalls’ The Presidents – a collection of brief biographies of every Commander-in-Chief from George Washington to George H.W. Bush.

Because my parents had raised me to believe, as they did, that education could empower people to escape rural poverty, I read over and over the biography of Abraham Lincoln. The sixteenth president’s comprehensive campaign of self-education, which culminated in passing the bar exam despite never having attended college – let alone law school – inspired me to strive for academic excellence.

When I was a child, I trusted my parents implicitly, so it was only years later that I started to suspect that there had been no shortage of Volume 23. When I was a teen, I was deeply disappointed – and frustrated – to discover that volume was the one that contained all the entries related to ‘sex’. But, by then, my otherwise exhaustive knowledge of the lives of presidents had developed the fatal flaw that would allow me to one day be blindsided by deep disillusionment: In my mind, as on our bookshelf, presidents and sex did not go together.

When I became a man, I thought I had put the ways of childhood behind me. Out of loyalty to Lincoln, I had registered to vote as a Republican at the age of 18, and – a few weeks after that – enrolled at the only alma mater of a Republican president that had accepted me: Whittier College.

Presidential scandals, though, had left me feeling conflicted about both of my first two adult decisions.

The Republican Party of the late 20th century, I understood, was not the Republican Party of the mid 19th century. Then, I understood, its members had been motivated by desire to create racial equality; now, I had started to suspect, they were motivated by a desire to maintain economic inequality. But first the rumors, and then the revelations, about the sexual misconduct of Democratic presidents both past and present – I went to Whittier during the Clinton Administration – repulsed me on a visceral level. Literally: Those scandals drove me away from the Democratic Party I might otherwise have embraced.

Speaking of scandals, Whittier College – of course – is the alma mater of Richard Nixon, the only man to ever resign the presidency. But its proximity to Disneyland allowed me to worship my childhood hero on a daily basis as an enthusiastic cast member at its ‘Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln’ attraction on Main Street, USA. And ‘attraction’ was the appropriate term for it because, in a purely platonic way, I was attracted to Disney’s audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln, which – with its noble face cast from an actual life mask of Lincoln and its dignified address compiled from his historic speeches – seemed a perfect representation of the president I had idealized and idolized since childhood.

Ironically, it was there, at the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’, that I had the unhappiest moment of my life when – more than 125 years after his assassination – I was a witness to Abraham Lincoln’s first sex scandal.

‘There’s something wrong with President Lincoln!’ shouted the mother rushing her children out of the auditorium. ‘He’s making obscene gestures! And dripping fluids!’

When we went to investigate, the rest of the cast members barely suppressed smiles. I, however, was utterly unable to hide the emotion evident on my face at that moment: horror. For, there, in front of a spectacular painting of the U.S. Capitol, was my animatronic Lincoln – his right hand spastically pawing at his crotch. As more and more of his hydraulic fluid dripped onto the stage, his shoulder and elbow were starting to smoke from the exertion. I sprinted to close the curtains embroidered with the Great Seal of the President of the United States.

‘Well, I’ll never be able to put a penny in my pocket again,’ shuddered one of my fellow cast members.

Without thinking, I punched him. There, in that shrine to presidential dignity. There, where the only passion that had pumped through my heart – until that moment – had been a religious reverence for the savior of our country. Lincoln, who had won the Civil War. Lincoln, who had reunited the house divided.

Lincoln, Lincoln.

I thought I had put the things of childhood away, but – as I inhaled the scent of Lincoln’s spilled lubricant – the childish chant of kids skipping rope consumed my mind: 

   

Lincoln, Lincoln,
I’ve been thinkin’:
What on Earth
Have you been drinkin’?
Tastes like whiskey,
Smells like wine:
Oh, my God,
It’s turpentine!
 

Strangely, it was at that moment that I had my first truly adult thought: There is no perfect person. There is always something wrong with the wiring.

 

– A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, Chad Greene is an assistant professor of English at Cerritos College. Whenever he isn’t planning lessons or grading papers, he is attempting to put together a novel-in-stories tentatively titled Trips and Falls.

 

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Apr 01 2014
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Fiction

The Long Flight

by Rhoda Greaves

They ask if you have anything to say. You look up towards us in the gallery, and I hope you can feel me there with you, holding you. I think you’re going to say something, just for me. And I’m trembling. I want you to. But I don’t want to be recognised. Not that I’d deny you. Not even here.

My aunt and uncle lent me the money for the flight, even though they thought I was crazy to come. I spent it drinking mini wines and trying not to tell the nice man in the smart grey suit next to me, why I was travelling to the States alone. My parents gave me the money last time. But made me pay it back when they found out why I’d gone.

You shake your head, and my heart falls back into line. The journalists take out their pads and scribble. And to my right she flops into her hands, weeping. An older man props an arm awkwardly around her shoulders, but instead of it soothing her, she just gets louder.

‘My babies,’ she wails. And as she pulls her hand from her mouth, tendrils of snot contaminate the arms of her long black jacket: she clutches herself in a hug. Pushing her silver-threaded hair back from her face, she looks towards you; her eyes ragged, her cheeks streaked with sticky black makeup. And I can’t understand what you ever saw in her.

‘Why aren’t you sorry?’ she shouts at you. It comes out a slur; as if she’s drunk.

‘Evil bastard,’ the old man says, like he’s just taken a gulp of raw sewage. Evil? I just know you as you: letter writer, lover. You’d said that if you’d been granted one final wish, it would have been to spend half an hour alone with me, so we could be like the Bible says; as one.

Your face remains impassive. You can’t hear them. But if you could?

Another woman, a younger, better kept version of her, kneels at her side and offers a tissue: she blows so hard I almost shush her.

You stand. You walk proudly like you told me you would. And I want to tell all of them: ‘That’s my husband, you murderers.’

I look away. You’d warned me it would take longer than I’d think to make the pronouncement; more than just the flick of a switch to turn the body off. There are some like her, weeping for their own loss. And others. Men, whose blood-baying eyes shine in the falsely bright lights. I wrap my scarf a little tighter to better hide my face, then glance at my watch, and wait. For their cheers.

     

– Rhoda Greaves is a PhD Creative Writing student at Birmingham City University, dog blogger, and Mum. She was awarded second place in the flash fiction competition Flash500 (2011), was longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize (2012), and shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize (2013). Her work has been published by The View From Here and Litro Online.

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Mar 26 2014
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Fiction

One Sunday at the Beginning

by Alan Beard

 

She was wearing green to match her eyes. Her body slipped in the dress as she moved. They watched reflections in the water by the mill. Window rectangles made circles. Her face rippled with lines of light reflected up from the water. It made it difficult to discern her features.

The little woman with grey precisely parted hair in the dark corner shop tried to give him copper belonging to a previous customer. A gang of sparrows pecked at dust in the car park. Girls leaned against the wheels of parked lorries. One had hair like a sticky lion’s mane. Each railing cast an angled shadow on to grass. He almost threw the matches up to see the red box blink and sound in the air.

She had watched an angler struggle and net a fish she told him. He looked over. The angler now read The Sunday Mirror, a white oblong in the man’s hands who was otherwise like the bush he sat beside.

He handed her the matches. Her hands, cigarette, light flashed in some deep area of his brain. A cavern. The scene – the river, the shop, the sky, her in the rippling light – was there like a cave painting. He tried not to breathe out.

– Two collections of stories published: Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (Picador, 1999) and You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press, 2010). Recipient of the Tom-Gallon Award and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Stories/‘flashes’ in many magazines and anthologies including London Magazine, Flash Fiction, and Best British Short Stories 2011. Website: www.alanbeard.net.

 

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Mar 18 2014
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Fiction

Insurance

by Carrie Etter

 

By three that Wednesday, coffee could no longer invigorate me. I looked out my window and saw the least scenic area of Santa Monica, a sprawl of office buildings and warehouses next to the 10 freeway.

Intending to go out to the atrium for a cigarette, I had risen from my desk when Heather, our receptionist, looked in. ‘An old guy named Scott,’ she said. ‘Said he wanted to see a woman-agent.’

‘Sure. Show him in,’ I told her.

Scott looked about sixty, thin and tall with the lightly tanned skin that’s almost unavoidable in southern California. He had a handsome, long face that reminded me of one of my father’s friends, and I suppose that’s what made me warm to him right away. I put out my hand. ‘Marcy Belter,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

He responded with a surprisingly limp handshake. ‘Scott Thomson; that’s without a P.’ I was about to gesture to one of the chairs in front of my desk when I saw he was already easing into one, shifting a few times to find the most comfortable position. ‘Back problems,’ he said.

‘Sorry to hear it.’ I sat down behind my desk. ‘So, what brings you here today?’

‘I need to get my wife’s auto insurance. It’s about to run out, and I, uh, need to change companies.’

‘And you’d like a quote?’

He looked puzzled for a moment, then answered, ‘No, I don’t need a quote, just the insurance.’

I smiled, took out an application, and began asking for details. Scott replied unhurriedly, seeming to relish telling the facts about his Sara even though he didn’t expound on them with anecdotes as many other husbands did. Once we reached the end of the form, I said, ‘We’ll just need her to sign this – I’ll give you a prepaid envelope to send it back to us. Will you be paying by check or card?’

I had been looking in my desk for the envelopes, which Heather had restocked in a different drawer than I usually put them, so it was a moment before I noticed Scott slowly shaking his head. I wondered whether after all this he didn’t have the money. ‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘She can’t sign it.’

‘What do you mean, she can’t sign it?’ I asked hesitantly. I thought of my aunt’s crippling arthritis and tried to think of the best words to use. ‘Is she physically unable to sign it?’ I said at last, wondering, then, how she’d be able to drive.

He gave a low chuckle. ‘You could say that.’ I waited, setting the envelope in front of him and gently closing my desk drawer. He stared straight at me for the first time since he came in. ‘She’s in a coma.’

I stared back. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘In a coma. At Cedars-Sinai.’

I was quiet for a minute, thinking. ‘We,’ I began, then clarified, ‘insurers do not cover people incapable of driving.’

He didn’t respond immediately, then slowly rose and said, ‘Thank you for your time.’

I felt an impulse to put the application and return envelope in his hands, but I didn’t do it. Though he was already in the doorway, I said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you.’ He halted, glanced at me over his shoulder, and turned away. In the next moment he was gone.

That was three weeks ago, and every night since I’ve had trouble falling asleep, smarting with the unreasonable desire to have my own future husband, should he find himself in such a situation, make the same attempt and perhaps succeed, forging my name for the sake of keeping me safe when I can no longer be hurt. How can any man intuit or respond instinctively to such a wish? How will I know?

  

– Carrie Etter’s third collection of poems, Imagined Sons, has recently been published by Seren. Her short stories have appeared in New Welsh Review, Jawbreakers: An Anthology of Flash Fictions, and elsewhere. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, where she has taught since 2004.

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