Issue 14 November 2014 Flash Fiction Online November 2014

Li brushed the snow off of the Buddha statues that covered the steps outside of Yue’s house. The clouds hung heavy in the sky, and Li was sure that it would snow again soon. But Yue would make the most hideous gurgles and whistling breaths if she did not brush the snow off of the smooth round heads. Their serene gazes and jolly bellies radiated peace and joy.

The idea of the Buddha statues was perverted by the presence of Yue, visible through the window, a lump of what was once human, his decaying rolls of fat rippling over the edge of the lounger that served as seat, bed, and podium. His flat, frantic eyes followed Li and she tried to ignore him. 

Li had been brushing off the statues for so long, she had almost stopped minding. It was just another chore, another necessary part of life. She imagined her mother brushing off the statues, and her mother’s mother, and her mother before that, for as long as her family could remember. Her imagination wandered further, and she could see a different little girl, and another after that, their tiny bodies shivering in the light of a hundred future snowfalls. A pit grew in her stomach, and now instead she saw herself, withered and deformed, trapped in the endless repetition by Yue’s need for a caretaker and her own inability to imagine a world, past or future, without him.

She wished Yue would die, but knew that his demise was not so simple as wishing. The Dark Man had explained Yue’s predicament to her.

“He has no attachment to life, but he has no attachment to death,” the Dark Man said the last time she stopped him on these same snowy steps, begging him not to go without Yue. “He cannot leave one form of existence when he does not recognize any form. He has no attachments to any world, or any person. But he will never be free, he will never escape his grotesque form, as long as he is attached to the rules of the game.”

The chessboard was always out in front of Yue. Li did not understand all the rules of chess. The only game she ever played was the clean-up game of housework. Li followed Yue’s straining movement as she guided his arm around the board, moving the pawns and rooks. It ended when the Dark Man tipped over his own black king in defeat. 

Sometimes Li thought that he lost on purpose, enjoying the eternal suffering of Yue and his family. But Li had a feeling that he respected the rules of the game too, even if he was not as attached to them as Yue. 

Every year, Yue and Li waited for him, and every year he came to play for Yue’s last thread of attachment that kept him in this world of appearances. And his time had come again. 

Li saw the Dark Man’s form appear at the foot of their driveway. She stopped brushing off the Buddhas, triggering Yue’s indignant blubbering and sputters until he also saw the Dark Man, which triggered excited blubbering and sputters. 

“How are you doing, Li?” the Dark Man asked as she led him inside. 

“Not great,” said Li. “Play better this time.”

The Dark Man sat across the board from Yue and chuckled, and Li was reminded of dry leaves cracking in an autumn wind. Li took her place beside Yue and picked up his arm, guiding the dead limb to the pawn he desired to move. Limp fingers pushed the white piece forward and the game began. 

Li watched as they played, observing the dance of the pieces that always ended in disappointment. Though she held such a great stake in the outcome, she could still appreciate the beauty in the logic, the rhythm of each changing turn. She could understand how Yue could accept the nonexistence of the world, hold no attachment to life or death, the statues outside or even Li, his ever-present puppeteer, while still failing to see the nonexistence of the rules of the game.

Because in truth, there were no rules. 

If there was no world, no life, no death, no people, no forms, then why were they all respecting this impermanent idea, this unnecessary attachment?

Yue wanted to reach for the bishop. Li did not let him.

A whine began deep in his throat, hissing through cracks and holes in the skin of his neck. The Dark Man smiled, broad and deep, the smile of a skull.

Li guided Yue’s hand to his own white king, and tipped it over. A surrender. 

Was she allowed to do it? Li did not care. Neither did the Dark Man. Yue’s flat eyes filled with rage, then understanding. The Dark Man nodded a farewell to Li and both men were gone. 

Li was alone in the small room. She brushed the chess pieces off the board and watched them fall to the floor, meaningless outside of their purpose in the game. 

Outside, it began to snow. Li watched the white flakes stick on the heads of the enlightened stone men, a less grotesque immortality decorating what were now her own steps. 

When it stopped snowing, she would go outside and brush them off once more. Yue was not here to make her do it now, but it was still a necessary chore. And Li did not really mind the activity anymore.

In fact, she had grown rather attached to it. 

My Uncle Joe spent five years in one of those “re-acculturation” centers. He was one of the lucky ones — locked up, not put down — because my grandfather had so much money and my dad says Joe was always his favorite. 

I was only nine then, and I still don’t know how many people my uncle bit. I know it was enough that my mom left us the day after Dad turned him in.

“Joey’s one of our best patients,” the receptionist told my dad. She wore a thick turtleneck and too much perfume. “How nice for him to go home in time for the holidays. Here’s your kit–sedatives, vitamins, first week’s blood supply. You’ll be getting shipments weekly; like any produce, it needs to be fresh.”

Dad grunted. Neither of them mentioned the last piece of the kit, the gleaming wooden stake.

“Bet you didn’t get grub like this in the clink, Joe,” said my grandfather. 

Uncle Joe smiled with his mouth closed. My dad had given him the smallest possible portions of everything, and I think all of us but Grandpa were praying he could get through this late-night Thanksgiving Dinner without throwing up. 

The night before, Dad had shown Uncle Joe the bedroom set up in the basement, pointing out the cardboard and blackout curtains over the two small windows. My uncle ruffled my hair. “Look at you all grown up,” he said. “You playing football this year?”

“Next year,” Dad said.

Joe licked his teeth. “I haven’t been to a football game in quite a while.”

“One thing at a time.” Dad gave him a blood pack and pushed me up the stairs. He wedged a kitchen chair under the doorknob. “Should give us some warning, anyway.”

From the look of Dad at dinner I’d bet he lay awake all night, holding that stake under his pillow.

“How about pie?” said Grandpa. Uncle Joe got up and fetched it, then went outside. Dad followed him. 

I gulped my pumpkin pie as fast as I could. “I’ll be right back, Grandpa.” I paused by the glass door to the deck. Dad and his brother stood outside it, looking over the back yard: one skeletal figure, one full-fleshed.

“I wish there’d be snow,” Joe said. “Snow and a full moon, it’s almost like daylight again.”

Dad reached out and dropped his hand on Joe’s shoulder. 

“Get some of this pie, Joe,” Grandpa called from the dining room. 

In the morning, we would find the cardboard ripped away from the basement windows. Ashes would drift across the bedspread downstairs and dance with dust motes in the sun.

I would say, “Wow. He really hated it, huh?”

And Dad would squeeze my shoulder. “He regretted what he’d done to others. Couldn’t live with it. You hear me?”

So that’s how we tell it. My grandfather is proud of his boy’s conscience, his courage. I can’t argue with that; I just think he’s got the wrong son in mind.

I try to keep pressure on the bullet wound but blood still leaks out between my fingers. It’s a deep red against my green scales. I don’t know if I hit that damn bug, Renny. But he hit me. It’s been quiet for a minute or two, or ten. I think I’m in shock; staring first at my blood, then my badge, then my blood. The sun’s starting to get low in the sky, casting long shadows in the rocky canyon. My thoughts drift.

In my mind, I see the government frigate orbiting. Big letters on the side say Interstellar Alliance of Planets, but I can’t remember the identifier after it. Doesn’t matter. Rumor is, the IAP collapsed from the weight of its own bureaucratic ineptitude long before I woke up. The nearest outpost I can remember was at least fifteen jumps away. Those guys are now probably local police or warlords or farmers. If they’re not dead. No help is coming.

I struggle to stand, pain exploding in my side, and stick my head up to see if my floater is still there. It is, and the weathered saddle bags are untouched. I creep toward it, each step a painful reminder I’ve been shot. Holding my archaic pistol in hand, I notice it’s unusually heavy now.

My tongue instinctively shoots in and out of my mouth, smelling Renny’s copper-rich hemocyanin. Unlike me, he bleeds out the blue stuff. I did hit him, then.

“Stop right there, Masok,” Renny shouts.

“Damnit, Renny. I took a bad one. Fact that I’m not dead means you took one too. Can we stop shooting at each other?”

Nothing.

“Renny?”

“Yeah, okay,” he responds.

“I’m gonna get my med-packs and some of that home-made whiskey, okay? You want some?”

He’s slow to respond. “Yeah, whiskey sounds good.”

Staggering to the floater, I rummage through the saddle bags for my last two med-packs and a metal bottle with the well-worn stenciled words “In Case of Emergency” on it. We’re so far out in the Fringe that getting another floater or any medical supplies is nearly impossible. The IAP, if it still exists, hasn’t sent a ship in over two generations.

I hobble over to Renny and survey my handiwork. He’s shot in the gut and is barely conscious, propped up against a rock. Most of his eyes are closed but I see the feelers moving around his mouth.

Slumping to the ground beside him, I prep the med-pack but he waves me off.

“No, just give me the bottle.”

Flipping open the top, I pass it to him. He looks at the writing on the side and chuckles, then coughs. “Ain’t that the truth?”

I tear open my shirt, slap on the med-pack, feel the pinch of the needle and the sucking sensation as it closes over the wound. Immediately, the pain subsides.

Picking up my last med-pack, I prep it and lean over Renny. He tries to push me aside as I get to his wound but he’s too weak, his chitinous arms too heavy. They fall limp at his sides. I put it on and activate it.

Renny’s eyes light up after the meds hit his system.

“Masok, you idiot,” he rasps. “That was a waste.”

“Old habits.”

He takes another swig and hands me the bottle. After a long draw, I give it back.

“Damnit, but bullets hurt,” he manages. “Why didn’t you shoot me with a sun gun?”

“Same as you. Can’t afford the charge. Don’t know where you been lately, but nothing in town generates that kind of power. So, lucky you, you get a bullet.” I change the subject. “Why, Renny?”

“I could ask you the same thing. You coulda looked the other way.”

“I did more than my share of looking the other way. Couldn’t do it anymore. You knew I’d be here, knew I had to be. But you tried to rob that old mag lev anyway. That’s why we’re both shot. With bullets no less.”

Another chuckle. “I just wanted to get off this rock. I miss flyin’. I miss salvage. Those were good times.”

“Don’t bring that up,” I say. “That debt’s been paid.” 

But Renny has to go there. It’s all he’s got left and, even now, he’s looking for leverage. Renny found me in a salvage operation four jumps away in cold sleep. When he woke me up, I had lost eighty-seven years and any hope of a pension.

“You were an icicle in that IAP ship before I found you,” He says. “I liked you better then.”

Before my badge.

“Yeah,” he continues. “With that mag lev’s cargo, I coulda bought my way off this rock.”

 ‘This rock’, though not crowded, has its share of natives, colonials, former IAP and aliens. Not much else, though. Maybe Renny’s right. Maybe I should book passage somewhere else too. But where would I go? We get so little word of what else is going on in the Fringe, much less the rest of the galaxy.

I hear his labored breathing as we sit for a while. “Where you gonna go, Renny? Where is better than here?”

“My pocket,” he whispers. He points because he doesn’t have the strength to reach into it. I lean over, withdraw a picture. Across the top it reads, “Monoceros, Ptolemy Cluster, Orion System.” The picture shows lots of water and green plants I’ve never seen. Everyone in it wears little more than a smile.

“Looks nice,” I say. I hold it up for him to see and he smiles too. He stares at it unblinkingly for a few moments before I realize he’s dead.

Reaching over, I close all of his eyelids. “Looks like you got off this rock after all.”

I put the picture in my pocket. The sun stabs a shaft of light into the canyon and it reflects weakly off my tarnished badge. I rip it off my blood-soaked shirt and gently slip it in Renny’s pocket.

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”  ~Benjamin Franklin

I read a book recently.  I won’t reveal the title.  But it seemed like an awful lot of people died.  Just when one family finally got a handle on life and things were looking up for them, Wham! the father would get killed in a logging accident.  For such a heavy-handed book it became, sad to say, almost laughable, a game to guess who would die next.  

Why do I bring this up in an issue of Flash Fiction Online called “Death Comes to Flash Fiction?”  Because that book changed my view of death in fiction.  It made me scrutinize death and the purpose for it in everything I’ve read afterward.  Which is what makes all three of this month’s stories remarkable.  All passed the death test for me.  I won’t tell you who dies or how.  That’s for you to find out, but I think you’ll be satisfied all around.

First up is “Monoceros Ptolemy Cluster,” a tough as nails, brush-the-dust-from-your-ray-gun space western by author Steven W. Johnson.  

Next, “Black Friday” by Brynn MacNab.  When Uncle Joe comes home for a visit, Dad starts keeping a stake under his pillow.  A heartfelt take on the Vampire trope.

Last up we offer “The Rules of the Game” by Alexandra Grunberg.  Death plays chess with Yue year after year.  If death wins, Yue dies.  A deep and subtle story about the way we mortals tend to cling to mortality.

Enjoy!

Suzanne W. Vincent

Editor-in-Chief,

Flash Fiction Online