Issue 2 November 2013 Flash Fiction Online November 2013

To save a princess you will need three things:

• A #2 pencil.
• A graphing calculator.
• An ally, preferably fearless.

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You will need an ally because princesses are notoriously difficult to rescue alone. Your ally should be a family member, a mother or sister who fed you and tied your shoes when the ambit of your life whisked you through blown dandelions and video games. The tying of shoes isn’t important; the feeding is. Bread, water, and the quiet feast of stories, bedtime or otherwise, without which you would not exist. If you lack such an ally, stop reading now and go find one. To rescue a princess you must be absolutely chock full of stories. You must gorge yourself on them.

For the calculator, the only acceptable models are Ti-83 through Ti-103, from Texas Instruments. Your Sharps and your Casios will not be recognized here. Not the SL-9140 you bought from the big air-conditioned Tokyu Hands in Shinjuku-shi, your starched school collar cutting into your Adam’s Apple that summer day like a sweaty torc. Not the E-1000 from the Indian mama at the copy shop next to the refectory. Ti-83 through Ti-103.

The pencil can be any pencil, as long as it is #2 and will shade.

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You will identify your princess in one of several ways:

• The swish of hair against her neck.
• The smell, clean and royal, of her deodorant.
• The way she infiltrates your thoughts, masked and silent, like a wide-eyed ninja.

Remember that princesses are elusive and brilliant, but also quite deadly. You should know this from the stories fed to you by your ally. Be cognizant of the knife-wielding Rapunzel, the needle-flinging Scheherazade.

Do not trust first impressions in this matter. Someday you may be wise and dependable and discerning enough to know a princess by sight. Not now. You are too fresh, too fearful. You are too easily swayed by suggestion, and your new friends in this land are nothing like the old.

There is only one way to accurately identify your princess, and that is to sacrifice your ally. Surprised? Try not to show it. Lead her to the stone altar–don’t worry, she will trust you–and carefully insert a blade in her throat.

Repeat as necessary. Sacrifices are not clean affairs. Lean your full weight against your bedroom door when your mother comes tiptoeing near midnight, bearing cantaloupe. Pretend not to hear when your sister calls across the house, frantic, in Korean or Farsi. Hurt them. Insult them. Wear headphones. Leave without explanation. Remember, your goal is to inflict death.

Don’t worry too much about her well-being. If you have chosen your ally well, the magic will work to revive her in the end. You should understand this instinctively, from your knowledge of stories. Sacrifices are guaranteed to have value.

Don’t lose focus. At this stage, the work of finding a princess is yours alone. You must navigate this kingdom without a map, scuff your toes on endless highways, and find somewhere in the deadly throng a princess in genuine need of aid.

You may use a calculator for this portion.

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When you have finally found your princess, make note of these things:

• Whether or not her castle has a moat.
• Whether or not her castle has a high tower.
• Her name.

The name she gives you is almost certainly false. Still, certainty of falsehood is more useful than you might think.

If there is a moat, you will need to find yourself a thin, hollow reed, suitable for breathing. Look to the side of the pavement the next time you go to the lake to clear your thoughts. You may be smoking a painful cigarette, or just fogging the winter air with your breath, Russian scarf around your neck. Crouch down and poke through the soil to cleave the reed from its roots.

If there are spires or towers, prepare yourself for a climb. Don’t think about the fall right now. In fact, never think about the fall.

There is no need to discover if her castle has guard dogs. Princesses always have guard dogs.

#

Go to the outer gate at the stroke of midnight, alone but armed with all the tools and knowledge you have prepared. Feel the moonlight mottle your face and neck. Smell the woody gravity in the air. Remember the stories you read, the games you mastered, the friends you lost and left behind in your home country. Remember who you are, for once you are inside, it is very easy to forget.

With your pencil and a piece of paper, very carefully sketch out a map of your surroundings. Like Hansel and Gretel, you’ll need to be able to find your way back again in the end. Make it crystal clear: remember that when you return you may be dizzy from blood loss, intoxication, or starvation. Fold the paper into a neat square, and bury it somewhere safe.

This is the difficult part, the part for which there is no guide. To succeed, you will have to draw upon the secret powers that your ally imparted to you in your youth. If you can spare a breath in the battle ahead, mutter to your ally a thanks, or an apology.

You will become wounded. You will run out of breath in the poisoned labyrinth beneath the battlements. You will fight with every ounce of strength, drink from every magicked goblet, and sneak, shivering, through the palisade of nightmares. You will need to solve the puzzle to every room, know the trick to every mechanism.

And when you reach the end of the gauntlet, scale the tower with the moon shining on your face, you must be aware that here, in America, in the real world, sometimes your princess is in another castle.

#

Ready?

Then re-sharpen your pencil, re-sheath your calculator, and vault that wall.

My son’s second hamster, the really furry one, the one who keeps me awake at night, he’s hard to see. I can’t always get a good look at him, but I know he’s there, chewing the wires in my walls.

He eats straight through to all the important parts, spits out the little pieces of rubber metal debris, as if they were no good, as if he were a robot hamster, back from the dead, living only on wire and useless bits of electronics. But only the ones I’m most connected to.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m so different from him. Sometimes I wonder how to count to three.

Those are the times I cry when I’m swinging the hammer to open up my walls. Those are the times I make a mess of drywall and plaster and my wife talks about leaving. She can’t remember our trip to Germany, but I can. I can see what she can’t, and I can’t forget—eins, zwei, drei—I just don’t always know what it means.

I can’t forget him either. I can’t let him run through my house.

Because it’s only a matter of time before he finds his way out, and what if there’s no wire out there for him to chew?

My son’s second hamster has spit out enough of what runs through my walls that I can no longer watch TV or even turn on the lights.

He disappears under my door with the patter of little feet. “Honey, did you see him? He was right there, in our doorway.”

“No, love, I didn’t. Did you? Did you see him again?”

He leads me around the house, but I have a hammer, and now I have holes.

I don’t want to miss seeing him, even if it is only in my walls. I can’t stand it when I do. Those faint little movements stepping from hole to hole, memory to memory, I don’t want to forget them.

Like in Germany, when my little boy jumped into the picture with his mom. He smiled and the wind blew his curly hair across his eyes. I didn’t need to see them to know they were blue. He thought he was so cute, shouting the little German he knew.

It was. Cute enough to put holes in the wall.

My son’s second hamster leads me to a different room almost every night, but never Sam’s. He won’t go in there and neither will my wife. I want to, but not until I catch his dead hamster. Maybe then I’ll be able to open his door again.

It’s as if the hamster were reliving a memory, running from me like he did when Sam was three and we had returned from our vacation in Europe. But he only escaped once when he was alive, and it makes me wonder whether he really knows where he is or if he’s lost somewhere I’ll never find him.

My son’s second hamster made my wife leave me. She couldn’t stand my inability.

He eats real food and talks in German if you catch him. We’ve only been there once when Sam was three. It’s crazy that he remembers Sam or that trip. It’s crazy that he remembers Sam knowing a little German, cute as can be.

He didn’t even see him there but he knows Sam stood by the Rhine river, his blonde hair against his big toddler cheeks. He was beautiful and sad and missed his second hamster, the one who keeps me up at night. He missed him like I miss my walls, so much he had to see him.

#

Now that I’ve caught him, I’ve become something of a successful well-traveled businessman, and I’m getting an official divorce. I sell wire to corporate giants who run it around the world, several times, from what I understand.

My son’s second hamster still keeps me up at night, but he’s usually in my pocket where I can keep him safe.

He counts off in three’s, but I have no idea what he’s counting.

I have no idea what I’m counting.

Eins. Zwei. Drei. Ready or not, here I am.

I’ve replastered the walls and have learned to sleep. On the count of three, I can do almost anything.

I only have to pat my pocket to remember him.

I only have to put my hand there to know how to live—to remember how to do the simplest of things—like breathing or eating or remembering what his blonde hair looks like in the wind.

I settle Dad into one of the few chairs with armrests and ask if he’d like me to fetch him a magazine.  He shakes his head almost before I’ve finished speaking.  It’s his standard response these days: if in doubt, say no.

The street door opens and a couple come in with a little girl.  They’ve not yet sat down when the buzzer goes and the screen flashes above the reception desk: Mrs Tracey Palmer to Dr Aziz Room 5.  The woman hitches her bag up her shoulder and sidles out.  The little girl scurries across to the huddle of toys in the corner and the man flops onto a seat nearby.

He’s wearing a red football top with a name on the back and the figure 8.  I could pretend I think he’s the real Steven Gerrard and ask him for his autograph, but all I’ve got to write on is Dad’s repeat prescription form.  I could ask Dad about Liverpool’s prospects this season, but he’s turned off his hearing aid against the jangling Muzak, and me.

The little girl shuffles pans on the hob of a red plastic cooker.  She has a shock of curly hair that’s almost too big for her, like Crystal Tipps from long-ago children’s TV.  She turns to her dad, a wide grin revealing the gap in her front teeth.  “What do you want?”

Beside me, my dad’s breath rattles in his chest.  Steven Gerrard says nothing.

“Do you want tea?”

“No.”

“Coffee?”

“No.”

“Pancakes?”

“No.”

No warmth, no manners, but no anger or irritation either.  His gaze fixed on an empty space midway between the reception and his daughter, so secure in his refusal he needn’t even feign absorption in his phone or the small ads in the local rag.

“What do you want, then?”

What, indeed?  I steal a glance at Dad.  I’m relieved, in a way, that his eyes are closed.  It would be embarrassing to witness this together, take me back to being a teenager squirming between her parents at a sex scene on TV.

“Peace and quiet,” says Steven Gerrard.

In one smooth movement, Crystal Tipps returns to her pots and pans.  Her smile doesn’t waver, like a prima ballerina programmed not to notice the pain in her toes.

She stirs the air in a yellow frying pan with a wooden spoon.  I could tell her I’d love a pancake, and tea, and coffee too, but it’s her dad she wants to feed, not me.  He sits, immobile, betraying no interest in his child.  His mind, perhaps, on bigger problems: his wife’s diagnosis; the bills that can’t be paid.  Concerns we couldn’t dream of, his little girl and me.

Dad makes a noise that’s half cough and half burp.  His wrists are stick thin in his frayed shirt cuffs and there’s a cluster of bristles under his chin where his razor didn’t reach.  People will judge me for it, but I can’t help him if he won’t let me.

Crystal Tipps holds out a blue plastic plate towards her dad.  My stomach clenches.

“What’s this?”

“Peace-and-quiet pancake.”

Who could resist such ingenuity?  Who could resist that smile?

Staring into space, Steven Gerrard keeps his hands by his side, as if his daughter doesn’t register at all.  Whatever his worries, surely he could find room for an imaginary pancake.  Surely yes would be less trouble than no.

Crystal Tipps returns the plastic plate to the toy-box.  She packs away the wooden spoon and the pans.  Spirits away her feelings with the toys.

How many real pancakes will she have to rustle up before she makes sense of this moment?  How many squirts of lemon juice, how many spoons of sprinkled sugar before she’s assured it’s not her fault?  It could take until she’s middle-aged and watching another little girl fail to charm her father, for her to truly understand.

By then, it will be too late to make him eat her peace-and-quiet pancake.  Too late to tower over him, forcing him to swallow every chill rubbery bite.  Her father will be too old and fragile, his hands too unsteady to hold the plate, his gums too delicate to chew.

Dad’s head jerks forward as the buzzer summons him from his doze.  The screen reads: Mr Herbert Grayson to Dr O’Callaghan Room 4.

“Mustn’t keep the doctor waiting,” says Dad.

Fixing my smile, I rise from my seat.  I offer Dad my arm, but he shakes his head, pushes against the armrests and, little by little, shuffles to his feet.

Helen Keller once said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched—they must be felt with the heart.”

The heart is an odd thing.  Despite its physical durability it can be shattered by a mere word.  Despite its practical usefulness it can leave us flustered and vulnerable in the presence of a charming smile.

In selecting stories for Flash Fiction Online I’m always looking for stories that tell me something about the fragile, vulnerable, yet resilient qualities of the human heart.  The three stories you’re about to read explore three aspects of the heart: Grief, Love, and Longing.

“My Son” by Christopher DiCicco; “Princesses” by Jeremy Sim; and “Peace-and-quiet Pancake” by Anne Goodwin.

I’ll let you decide which is which.

Enjoy!