Issue 15 December 2014 Flash Fiction Online December 2014

Death’s daughter walks into my bar, her steps as smooth as a silver dollar gliding down a silk sheet. She’s dressed in a black suit and carries a coffin slung over her shoulder. The coffin’s an ugly, misshapen affair and covered in cankers of rust. The letters engraved on the lid are reduced to tell-tale scratches, but I know that they spell out my name: Hugh Matthews.

Death’s daughter plops down on a bar stool and takes out a deck of cards. It’s a well-loved deck; the edges all rough and nicked. 

Death’s daughter deals the cards.

“You know the drill. One hand. Five-card draw. You lose, you die,” she says.

Death’s daughter wants a glass of bourbon. It’s a trick of hers. Wants to keep my hands busy and away from the cards. My forehead’s covered in a slimy sheen of sweat, but I nod and pour her some apple juice. She never notices.

The lady guns it in one shot. Squints her eyes. Lets out an appreciative sigh.

“Good stuff,” she says.

“You know it.”

“When are you gonna serve me the real thing, mister?”

Her smile is like a knife-slash. I polish a shot glass and pretend not to care about the cards on the bar top, but I keep them in the corner of my eye. 

“You’re still a minor, for all I am concerned.”

There’s a spark of anger in her eyes. Nothing major though; just a flame thirsty for more oil.

“It’s the after-hours. This place is empty. Nobody will care.”

I shrug. “My house. My rules.”

Her shoulders slacken. “You sound like my dad.”

“All good dads sound like that,” I tell her.

I look at my cards and sweet Jesus I want to toss them all.

“How’s the wife and kid?” she asks, tracing her fingertip across the rim of her glass. Little shit doesn’t even look at her cards.

“All good. Can’t complain much.”

“And the tumor?” 

She springs the question like a switchblade. I fiddle with my cards and hope to God she doesn’t see that my hands are shaking.

“Huge like a walnut,” I say. “How’s your old man doing?”

“Still wants me to inherit the business. I’m kinda crap at it.”

“How so?”

“You’d be dead if I weren’t.” 

The girl’s hair is long and jet black. Strands of it wriggle and writhe like spider legs when she’s irritated. And boy, is she pissed. 

I pour myself a bit of Gentleman Jack whiskey. It should taste like anti-freeze and lighter fluid.

But it’s apple juice.

The girl’s glass is empty and the bottle’s behind the counter. I tell myself it’s the nerves. But her smile tells me otherwise. We both know the juice came out of the whiskey bottle.

“So are you going to take me today?” I ask her. 

Death’s daughter arcs her eyebrows. No tête–à–tête, no dancing around. I am way too bold.

Death’s daughter sighs; her breath smells like carnations and cobwebs. “You’re overdue, Mr. Mathews.”

She’s right and then some. The headaches feel like the tumor is trying to crack my skull from the inside. Its roots run deep and it keeps clawing.

“Is Kristie still in college?” Death’s daughter asks me.

“Yeah,” I say, while mulling over my hand. “Works a bar job, just like her pop.” I smile. “I send her money when I can. She’s going to graduate next semester she says.”

“Cool. I hear student loans are a bitch, though.” Death’s daughter tosses two cards. “And the mortgage?”

“Beth’s got two jobs. Busses tables. The tips ain’t half bad. She gives piano lessons too.” I want to toss my entire hand, but I keep the ten of spades. Tenth of August. Our anniversary.

Death’s daughter replaces our cards. I get four. She gets two. Her wrist flicks the cards my way with scalpel-like precision. Thwip, thwip, thwip, thwip.

The headache kicks around inside my skull. I can’t look at the cards. I just reveal.

Pair of tens. 

Death’s daughter laughs. 

“Well, shit,” she says. I look at her hand. She’s got a pair of threes. 

“Lost again. Told you,” she says. “I am crap at the job. The scythe’s not my style. I just want to play games.”

She picks up her cards, and shoulders the coffin. “Gotta bounce, Mr. Mathews. I have a lot of games to play. There’s a lot of cancer and old age in this world.”

She turns a bit too quickly. All the bluster and youthful bravado — gone.

Her hand is on the door handle when I call after her.

“Wait.”

She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even face me.

I swear I saw her pull those threes from her sleeve. My heart pounding against my ribcage. I know she’s screwing with me. I know she wants to see me kick and writhe.

The words crumble and flake away inside my throat. I say nothing.

After a while she says, “If it’s okay with you, can I come again tomorrow? To play another game?”

She’s not asking. I know she’ll come. 

“You’re welcome to.” I say that, but I’d rather have a fistful of spiders crawling in my mouth. “Maybe I’ll give you real bourbon if you’re a good girl.”

She opens the door and a gust of wind blows through the bar. The cold cuts right to the marrow.

“Say hi to Beth and Kristie,” Death’s daughter says. Then she taps her chin and adds, “Oh, yeah. Your anniversary is on the tenth, right? This month? At this moment Beth and Kristie are driving to the jewelry store to buy you a Rolex. The one where you bought her the wedding ring? Might be a lot of traffic on the way there. Drunk drivers and stuff.” She shrugs. “Or not.”

And with that she’s gone.

An ancient Irish carol says, “The darkest midnight in December, no snow, nor hail, nor winter storm / Shall hinder us for to remember the babe that on this night was born.” 

Those haunting lines speak of hope in the midst of the the deepest despair.  

Our Christmas story this year is just as haunting.  “Hairbrush, Socks, Pencils, Orange,” by Kate Heartfield, is a story in which a daughter learns something about her father that changes the meaning of Christmas.  You may be surprised exactly what she learns.  We hope Kate hasn’t fallen in despair waiting for it to be published.  We’ve been saving it for our December issue since March.

And speaking of hope amidst despair, our own Flash Fiction Online staffer, Stefan Milicevic, offers “When Death’s Daughter Deals the Cards,” a gritty tale of a coffin-toting girl and a bartender on a winning streak.  

Finally this month is a story that may not fit our theme and may not be as plot driven as we usually prefer but that we couldn’t pass up.  “The Secret Lives of Sea Monsters,” by Cislyn Smith, is a charming story that is what it says.  We hope you’ll love it too.

Happy reading!

Suzanne Vincent

Editor-in-Chief

Flash Fiction Online

I didn’t have the kind of father who would fake reindeer tracks. And Mom would never have left us alone in the house, not even for as long as it might take to do it. 

So I knew no human made those marks.

My sister Stacy wasn’t convinced it had been reindeer. Any animal could have made them, she said. We stood on the couch in our nightgowns and pigtails to look out the window, our bare feet scrabbling for purchase on the sagging cushion. We argued in whispers while Mom made coffee.

We told Mom we wanted to make a snowman.

“I guess,” she said, frowning, looking out the window. “You don’t want to open your stockings first?”

We shook our heads in unison. 

“A snowman first,” Stacy said.

As we put our clothes and snowsuits on I asked, just to be difficult, if Dad was home. We hadn’t seen him around that morning but that didn’t mean much, because he often slept the day away, especially after the nights he came home at dawn. 

“No. No, Vera, he is not home.”

“Why does he stay out all night, sometimes?” Stacy asked.

“Some men do.” 

That was always the answer.

We knelt down in our snowsuits, while Mom stood listless, staring at the road, the trees. 

We didn’t know what reindeer tracks looked like but we knew these were not them. These were spidery and splayed like the claws of a great bird, blue-dark deep here, there a tracing on the crust of shining snow, as if the creature had scuttled, settled, then scuttled again.

“Girls,” Mom said behind us, her voice like a branch breaking. “Inside. Stockings. Now.”

We sat on the living room carpet while my mother paced. We knew what would be in each stocking: Hairbrush, socks, pencils, orange. The same things every year. Things we could use.

“Eat,” she said. 

When we were younger she used to pretend the stocking oranges were treats, that they tasted better because they were special. Our magic oranges, she called them. They would keep the monster away all year. 

Monster, singular. That didn’t strike me as unusual, when I was very young. I didn’t know it was strange that our family had its own monster, or that my mother believed in it.

This time she said nothing about treats or magic. She just looked out the window and frowned.

This time, one of us decided to argue.

“Mom,” Stacy said. She was almost a teenager. “There. Is. A. Bowl. Of oranges. In the kitchen.”

“These are different,” she snapped. “These are gifts. Gifts have power.”

Stacy rolled her eyes. I snickered nervously.

My mother turned her eyes on us, then, at last. She dug her thumb into an orange and tore some of the peel off; they were the loose-skinned little ones with the big seeds my mother called pips. Then she knelt and grabbed Stacy by the shoulder, then sat on her legs, holding her against the side of the ratty brown couch. Mom stuffed the wound side of the orange into Stacy’s mouth, ripping more of the peel off with her long fingernails as she shoved. My sister’s lips, contorted with weeping and wet with tears and juice and snot, opened enough to let the flesh in, to let the pips drop out of her mouth into my mother’s hand. 

I ate my orange piece by piece, in silence. It was so sweet it was eye-watering, so sweet it was bitter. I spat the pips out neatly, into my child’s palm, before my mother came to collect them.

Stacy and I sat defeated beside the spindly pine tree. I remember how the needles on the carpet stuck to my sticky hands. Mom threw the pips one by one at the door and all the windows, as she did every Christmas.

I wondered, then, whether this was the first time those marks had shown up – or whether it was only the first time we’d noticed them. 

The little pips struck hard and too loud, like larger things. 

When Mom had thrown them all she went around again and picked them up. She saved our Christmas pips all year. Some mornings, in bed, we heard her throwing them. I tried to pretend it was birds hitting the windows.

“Okay,” she said, red-faced, standing in front of us. “We might as well start the presents. Your father won’t be coming in this morning.”

Her breath came short but I saw the relief in her face. I wondered whether the pips would work to keep my father out. For that was the last Christmas I even half-believed the lies my mother told me, the last Christmas I denied the truths she would not tell. 

I never called my father Dad after that. His face looked sad when I called him “Jimmy”, or when I refused to speak to him at all, but there was nothing I could do about that. I knew he was different, somehow, when he stayed away from us at night. That was all I needed to know. I never wanted to meet the monster that we kept out with my mother’s bitter magic of small gifts and defiance.