Issue 34 July 2016 Flash Fiction Online July 2016

When Nora arrived at the fertility clinic, Jim was there, waiting. He was an amazing husband, hard-working and kind, and made entirely of flesh. Nora’s only regret was that they met too late to have a baby unassisted.

“How’s Vivian?” Jim asked. “Did you see her baby?” 

“A bundle of silverware isn’t a baby,” Nora said. Her sister’s son was made of spoons carefully pieced together in the shape of a baby boy. Plenty of places sold human-looking bodies, but the current fashion was a less biological appearance. 

Nora hated that everyone built children instead of bearing them. Her friends made children out of plastic wrap, quilted silk, and reclaimed wood from antique ships. The beach outside their apartment swarmed with fake children that didn’t eat or sleep. Everyone insisted that SentiCore children loved their parents as well as any flesh-child did, but Nora found it hard to believe. “It’s basically a robot, programmed to coo.”

Jim shook his head. “He’s not programmed. SentiCore generates a randomized blend of the parents’ minds.”

“Building a kid seems wrong,” Nora said. Jim wanted children, and he didn’t care whether they were flesh or not. He only agreed to come to the clinic because he knew how important it was to her. “Thank you for doing this.” 

The doctors weren’t optimistic about their chances. Nora was almost fifty, and while her body had been rejuvenated, her eggs were in terrible condition. The doctors implanted three embryos and told her to come back in twelve days–on Nora’s birthday–for a pregnancy blood test.

“This will be my birthday child,” Nora said. “We can have a party after the test. I’ll invite all our friends, and get a big cake–” 

“What if they don’t take?” Jim asked. “Would you really want all your friends around?” 

“A party for just us, then.” Nora refused to consider failure. If this didn’t work, she was too old to try again.

* * *

Nora went to visit her sister. There were still five days until her birthday, but she was certain she was pregnant, and she secretly hoped Vivian would notice. “Why not go back to work, Viv?  It’s not like the baby really needs you for anything.” 

“Oh, but he does. SentiCore children develop better in an enriched environment, same as a flesh baby.” Vivian had her glasses on and her eyes were continually flicking to the side to check which fashions were trending. She adjusted the bracelet lights embedded in her wrist to a sapphire blue. 

“Should I pick him up?” Nora saw made children everywhere, but she’d never touched one.

“Sure, go ahead. We’ve decided to call him Rory.”

“He isn’t very cuddly,” Nora complained. His body was hard and cool to the touch. With a SentiCore you could animate almost anything, so she was baffled at her sister’s choice. “Will he tarnish?” 

Vivian laughed. “He’s stainless steel. Sturdy, and easy to clean!”

Nora stroked the spoon that formed one of Rory’s cheeks. The SentiCore unit in his throat made a gurgling noise. “You’re young enough to have a flesh baby.” 

“Nobody has flesh babies any more.” Vivian said. “Too much work taking care of them. If he doesn’t like the spoons, he can pick out a new body when he’s a little older. The system is very practical.” 

Nora forced herself to smile. Vivian was nothing if not practical. When her knees had gone bad, she’d replaced her legs with the flexible bio-plastic that was currently trendy, and she often talked about someday replacing the rest of her flesh. Nora hoped it wouldn’t happen any time soon. She worried she wouldn’t love her sister as much if she was made entirely of plastic.

* * *

The morning of her birthday, Nora decorated the apartment with brightly-colored streamers, determined to have her party. Jim didn’t help her decorate, but he didn’t object. 

The clinic drew her blood.

The results were ready in seventeen minutes. 

None of the embryos had implanted.

* * *

When they got home, Nora burst into tears. It was her birthday, and the pregnancy was supposed to be her birthday present. The timing had worked out so perfectly, as though the universe was promising her that it would all be okay. She felt betrayed. The bright colors of the streamers mocked her. Jim noticed her staring at the party decorations and quietly took them down.   

The streamers had been too cheerful to bear, but it bothered Nora to see the room go back to normal, as though nothing had happened. “I need to go out.” 

“Let’s take a walk.” Jim left the streamers in a pile on the floor.    

They walked along the beach, and the tears on Nora’s face felt cold in the wind. A boy made of popsicle sticks was on the beach with his father, flying a kite.

“It doesn’t matter to me what you’re made of,” Jim said. “Why would it matter for our child?”

The popsicle-stick boy crashed his kite and broke it. His father picked up the pieces. That was what she wanted, someone to take care of, someone who needed her. She was too old for a flesh baby, but it wasn’t fair to build a child unless she could love it as her own. Was the body really so important? 

The father fixed the kite, and the popsicle-stick boy ran down the beach, laughing. Nora and Jim went home. The colored streamers were piled on the floor. Reds and blues and greens and purples. She thought of Rory, gurgling and cooing, and of the popsicle-stick boy’s laughter.

She grabbed an armful of streamers and crumpled them, pressing the paper into a tiny ball. It was the size of a baby’s head, and the paper was soft.  She could never have the flesh child she’d always wanted, but she could have this. She could build a child to raise with Jim–a child of crepe-paper streamers; a birthday child made in bright colors, full of celebration and joy.

Previously published in Daily Science Fiction. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

I remember the static voices:  “Bomb.  Bomb.  Bomb.” The great, distant flash.

I remember the day the bomb seed entered me, thrust deep and spilling into my bones and blood. I am a Nuclear Daughter. I will bear its children. For six months I have watched them swell, twisted lumps pushing out of my abdomen like fists, slow motion punches that eventually open into palms, fingers splayed and grappling for oxygen and light.

I’ve named them Lily and Nod.

I haven’t the heart to tell them that the light here is vicious and the air is poison. Nothing grows on the outside anymore. The green spaces have quivered to yellow-brown, the vineyards have shriveled, and the April lambs drop dead between their mothers’ legs, memories of a nevermore spring.

Mama Nuri says it was the same when the first bombs burst over her mother’s mother’s sky. They slammed into the horizon, she says, and shoved the silver cities down, ripped their breath away and replaced it with twisted seeds. With no cities left to take, this last bomb has taken us instead.

Mama Nuri says the bombs know who deserves its children.

I am a Nuclear Daughter.

Someday my children will grow out of me.

I imagine them nestled against my cheek, cooing with the tiny mouths I know they will never use. I imagine them giggling secrets to each other and running through fields on feet they will never have. I imagine them growing older as I grow old and I try not to mourn.

Today, I can feel my pulse echoed in them when I wake, hand cramped against them to still the pain. The straw mattress I share with the other Daughters is too thin to cradle the shape of them and I stroke my fingers over their knuckled masses. There is pressure too, now, lancing through me, dangerous and insistent. Maybe they’ve finally decided to push their way out of my kidney and into my womb where they can dream themselves into real children.

I have been dreaming lately of Daughter Sarah, found dead two weeks ago in the west ravine. Her body was bloated and black, her bomb child sprouting out of her chest like coyote brush. Her flesh had peeled away in careful, curling strips to reveal the pulpy, faceless infant, three arms frozen against the yellow sky, a hundred fingers aching for Sarah’s embrace.

Today, the morning is red and clear and cold. I dress in heavy leather, folding it carefully around Lily’s jagged spine and Nod’s insistent cooked knee.

“Tainted,” Mama Nuri says when she sees me. She makes the Helix Sign above her head, spits onto her own gnarled feet three times and walks in a wide circle around me, her eyes on the twin mounds curving out of my body.

I have tried explaining to her that Lily and Nod are my children, grown from me like limbs from a tree, like vines, flowers, but all of the old village women insist we Daughters have been cursed.

“You still have your moon blood, girl,” she says. “And no man has seeded you. Your body is poison. You infect us all.”

Death incarnate, says she, the echo of the bomb spreading under my skin.

I climb the bluff cradling them, past a toppled winery with withered grape veins like a forgotten heart. My pulse is Carignan heavy. I remember the last of the grapes, beads of fruit the color of old blood. Bitter, sun-puckered things that clung to my teeth and soured my stomach as if trying to convince me that they had never been worth the trouble to begin with.

The bluff crests, climbing high, and I curl close to the earth. Animal low. Hand, hand, foot, foot, I ascend. The wind is sharp as glass this close to the sea, and I pile my hair over my nose and mouth as I make the final crawl. Lily pinches my spine and Nod spreads himself like a dull sigh against my stomach. I pause, letting the acid air sting them into stillness before hefting myself up.

The ocean breaks below us, a tableau peeling wide and white against the rocks. I close one eye. Click. I close the other. Click. And tuck the image deep, pushing it down to where Lily and Nod can see it. Where they can smell salt air and wide swaths of foam surging onto a wild coastline, pale arms entwined, embracing. I smooth my palm over the mound of them, uneven and rocky as the shore.

For a moment I imagine those open fists closing around my fingers, three hearts beating in time with the tide, and I lower us into a hollow between the stones.

I shed my leathers and, shivering, wait.

Finally, there is a swell. A surge. My kidney quivers. I can hear Lily and Nod squealing, feel them hammering their fists up and out, up and out. I am screaming with them when muscle and bone heave aside, and Lily and Nod burst through flesh.  Pain becomes fear becomes joy as they surge upward. Their bodies coil together, and their heads loll heavily in secret rhythms I can feel in the backs of my eyes, my toes, my breasts. I can hear a cacophony of children laughing. Lily and Nod and would-be others I never knew lived inside of me. I watch as they scamper up the tender cords of Lily’s legs and Nod’s strong back, their heads thrown back, faces shining as they emerge into the crimson world.

For a moment, my children are a city, silver and pure and bright as the dawn.

We go to the animal shelter on a Thursday. I want a dog. Liev says Thursday is the kind of day for getting a dog. We’ve done all the paperwork, been approved as “pet parents”—which is what the shelter calls it and Liev tried not to roll his eyes too much when they said it to us over and over. There were so many questions on the form and the shelter did a home visit and at the end of the whole thing I thought that we might as well have just adopted a human child except that neither of us likes that idea. There was a baby once, but then there wasn’t and sometimes we accidentally remember and it feels like someone has snuck up behind us and sucker punched us between the blades of our shoulders.

The first dog we see is as purely white as snow. His fur thick and I think about how I could push my fingers deep into his coat and maybe it would just keep going and going until I was up to my armpits and there was no way out. So we go on to the second dog.

The second dog has eyes the color of rubies—glowing red—and fur the color of the bottom of the ocean, so dark and emptied out. This is the dog we decide on. Liev wants to name him Abercrombie and I say no to that. We each have decided that we’re allowed one veto. I suggest Pog, because I always liked that game as a kid and because it almost sounds like “dog.” Liev vetoes that one. We settle on Catnip, though neither of us remembers being the one to suggest it.

Catnip chooses the living room as his bedroom. He settles onto the couch at ten PM exactly, and glares at us until we leave. In bed, Liev says, “Catnip seems a little weird.” I reply, “I like him. He’s got personality.” Catnip overhears this, all the way down on the couch, and decides that I am his favorite.

In the morning, Liev goes to work and I make breakfast for myself: pancakes the size of dinner plates and too much butter and syrup and a pot of black coffee. Catnip comes out and paces next to me until I give him a pancake and he eats it in one bite. Syrup spots cover the floor—they make shapes like golden inkblot tests. I spot a cat and Catnip sees a baby. He points it out with one paw, very delicately. I nod and wipe the syrup up with a paper towel.

After a couple of weeks, we have gotten our routines down. Liev goes to work and Catnip and I make breakfast and then take a walk and then do a crossword puzzle and then we take another walk. The second walk is always the longest—we go all over town and through the woods and down to the graveyard and Catnip paces as I sit on the grass and stare at stones.

Sometimes when Liev works late into the night, I sit on the couch next to Catnip and listen to his breathing as he falls asleep. If I’m lucky, I fall asleep next to him and fall right into Catnip’s dreams. Catnip often dreams of the ocean. One night he dreams of swimming through the water, diving down past all of the fishes and the weirdest animals I’ve ever seen—all with so many arms and mouths so wide and eyes like glowing orbs—and deep, deep down to the bottom. There are shipwrecks covering the floor and we swim inside centuries-rotted ballrooms, where skeletons dance with stingrays, and into the cabins where dead men sleep so peacefully. Catnip can’t speak, even in his own dreams, and so he points to a painting on the wall of a ship. It is of a woman holding a child and the child has golden curled hair and eyes the color of moss and the woman looks so happy that I want to wake up, because I think my heart will burst except maybe that’s just because I’ve been holding my breath. And then I wake up and Catnip stays dreaming and I go up to my own bed and wait for Liev and somewhere in there I fall into my own sleep.

On a Friday, Liev tells me that he thinks we should move. He says, “this town holds too much of the past.” And I don’t disagree. Catnip paces between us, wagging his tail, and I think about how moving will take us far away from the stones and the grass and the graveyard.

Our new house is small and bright and Catnip likes it. I try to settle in, to find new routines, but often I get in the car, Catnip hopping into the backseat, and drive back to our old home. We walk our old path, we sit on the grass. I sometimes talk to Catnip as if he will answer back. I say, “look at the sky, Catnip, it’s so blue.” I say, “I would have taught her so many things. I would have taught her why the sky is blue and the ocean is salty and the stars are so damn far away.” And Catnip listens, wagging his tail, and his eyes shine so bright and red like traffic lights.

And one Saturday, I wake up before the sun and the house is quiet. Liev sleeps beside me, so peacefully, and so I tiptoe to the living room and I sit down next to Catnip. Catnip rests his head on my knee and we stare out the window, watching the sun slowly rise and the light fills the room and we both stay so quiet that we can hear the other breathing and that is enough.

There is sunshine today and dirt beneath the woman’s fingernails. She is digging in the garden, a large hole, the size of her body, carefully measured. When she displaces a bit of earth, large clumps erode from the sides and fall into the bottom. This makes the process slow and cumbersome, but she doesn’t mind. She revels in the small exertion; sunlight warmed skin, soil mixed with sweat to form a primordial ooze.

When the phone rings, she’s surprised. She sits back on her heels and stares at the kitchen door, wide open, the white of the phone blending with the white of the walls. She rises, bones cracking, bare feet soundless on the grass. She slips onto the stool by the phone, picks it up, listens to the static before the sound of a voice emerges. “Hello?”

On the counter, she has a jar of cultivated seeds.

“Mirabelle? Is that you?” It’s a man, too young to know her name.

“Yes,” she says.

She twists the cap off the jar and pours the seeds into her hand. They are smooth and moist.

“I found you on the internet; that sounds bad. I mean I saw your picture on my recommended friends list on Facebook, and I couldn’t be sure. It’s just that your hair is blue and shorter now, but I know your face, I know it’s you.”

When she was young, she ate watermelon seeds. She would lay in bed at night and ache as they swelled to life in her stomach. She remembers feeling pink and green on the inside.

“Who is this?” she asks.

“Oh my god, Mirabelle! It’s Jason, Jason Connor. From high school. You probably don’t remember me, but I remember you.”

She brings the seeds up to her face and inhales the fragrant, earthy scent of them. 

“You’re looking for the other Mirabelle, my daughter.”

It was a ludicrous desire for immortality that inspired her to share a name with her daughter. It was similar desires that led to the gulf between them. Mirabelle Jr. couldn’t stand her mother’s strange, sometimes reckless inclinations, even though she shared in them. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry, my mistake Ma’am. ”

She cups her hand and pours the seeds into her mouth, casts a glance at the backyard as she swallows. Tonight she will curl up in that hole, bury her body, naked and warm, fetally arranged. And the seeds will grow in her, roots spreading through her veins, arthritic hands turned to bark, pain transmuted to cellulose, vascular bundles replacing her heart with xylem and phloem pumping ions and glucose from root to leaf, leaf to root. In the spring she will emerge, verdant and new. 

“Is your daughter there? Is she at home?” the voice asks, quiet and reluctant.

She remembers the flash of the red and blue lights in the hall, the police at the door, hats in hand, eyes downcast. She feels the seeds travel down her throat, like the lump just before tears flow. 

“Sorry,” the woman replies, “but she can’t come to the phone.”

Her eyes flutter to a small sapling in the backyard, beside her freshly dug hole. It’s four feet at most, an evergreen, bent slightly like the curve of a young woman’s back. 

In the first installment of THE TOILET OF ADVICE, I enjoyed the bliss of offering you the worst .02 cents about writing careers I could muster, a parody of what I see being handed out like free crack to eager first-time addicts. I now feel obligated to offer some genuine and helpful advice. And I will. But first, I want to explore an undercurrent of the advice industry that makes me queasy. How so much of it feels like a con, or a cult, or an otherwise dubious and manipulative entity.

We often require advice when we’re wounded. When something is broken. When we’re not at our best. We’re vulnerable and trying to negotiate being emotionally raw in a challenging marketplace that is far more indifferent than unforgiving towards our suffering. It’s in these moments that self-help gurus, advice mavens, and a thousand different flavors of Yoda start to shine. These beautiful people with inspiring stories and perhaps even a little science to validate their agenda seem to offer an answer, hope, a salve against whatever it was that burned us and forced us to seek advice in the first place.

Being vulnerable also means we may seek, take, and try things out of desperation. And everyone, from professionals in the health industry to creeps in cults and snakeoil salesmen, know it.

I’ll never forget during the worst year of my life, when I was unemployed, grieving for my dead mother, and contending with divorce, how much I wanted something, anything, to help me feel better. Because nothing did. Nothing. Numbness, failure, and despair burned through my waking hours with such force that I was amazed every morning that I, in fact, felt worse than yesterday. I was desperate for money, for employment, a place to live, all while holding my psyche together in the wake of my mother’s death and the end of my marriage.

In this condition I’d gone to a group grief counseling session, despite my aversion to group therapy, because I had never felt so consumed by terror. It was an awful experience, with people suffering far worse than me. But it was all I could afford, because it was free.

When I got back to the house that was no longer a home, I stared out the window. A very terrifying moment of clarity arrived. Here’s what it sounded like:

I get it now. I get why someone would just go to the bar, drink themselves into oblivion, and burnout their credit cards until someone took the reins of their life for awhile because, fuck, there seems to be absolutely no proof that things are going to change, unless it is to get worse, so why keep fighting? Why not find solace in abandonment and fuck off until you had no other choice but to look up to see bottom, because nothing I do makes a difference.   

That day, I chose not to go down that road. But I also found a deeper sense of humanity for people whose lives are a mess, who feel this way and make awful choices. Who are vulnerable and making decisions in the worst circumstances. 

So, what does this have to do with pithy writing advice?

A little.

When I was in that desperate period, I craved affirmation of a better tomorrow and felt the pull of those who sold a good image, a hopeful message, a system that would help you be a better person (as validated by beautiful folks straight out of central casting with bodies provided by the happy fascist at CrossFit Extreme!). The answers, ideas, and too-good-to-be-true plans, the stuff my naturally skeptical, cynical, and critical mind would not have touched, became Sirens of hope. I considered doing things and taking work that would have been heinously damaging to myself and my career, but seemed fine considering I had no other options. My ability to think rationally and honestly about who I was and what my moral core were had almost been comprised.

This is not to say there aren’t things to be done in such states that can’t be helpful. You have to find what works for you (some people love group therapy, which is a legit approach to mental health). But remember: there is an industry ready to prey upon your vulnerability with as much callus intent as the image industry that wants you to eat garbage, diet forever, and workout until you look like professional models whose sole occupation in life is to look unobtainable. They want to sell you shortcuts to daydreams. Processes to perfection. Ladders of success. And they will spend top dollar trying to convince you that you need their method, their booklets, their audible files, their workshops, their annual meetings, etc.

Which is why most advice is fit for the toilet. Especially when you’re desperate for it.

Most writing advice won’t ruin your life, of course. And buying a self-help book isn’t a death sentence. But I fear that all too often the hardships of the writing life often makes people vulnerable to bad ideas more than we want to admit.

So, here are some practical things to consider about writing advice:

1. Who the hell is giving it? Look at credentials. Question credentials. Do you like their fiction? Sure, some people write advice better than fiction . . . but why listen to them about, you know, fiction? Do they demonstrate their facility of language and narrative in a way that grabs you? Are they publishing regularly now? Do they publish more about what you should do with your life than making their own stuff? Non-fiction sells better, and there’s always a bigger audience for advice than fiction, so be wary of the advice dispensary arm of many people’s writing careers. INCLUDING MINE!
2. Why does this particular advice speak to you right now? Some advice can be a missing piece of the puzzle. David Morrell’s narrative form of outlining revolutionized how I saw preparing a novel. But many people will tell you things that you want to hear . . . that may not be good for you. For instance, some writers don’t need to revise much. The rest of us do better with revision, even though it’s a pain in the ass. You can make it NOT a pain the ass, which is good. But if you don’t revise because it’s a pain in the ass (and not because you’re a first-draft-wunderkid) just because someone said revisions are a waste, methinks you aren’t thinking critically enough. Don’t just listen to those telling you what you want to hear.
3. This advice is not enough: whatever advice you’re given, it’s what you do with it that counts. Which is why advice is cheap and those who dispense it are never accountable (nor should they be, unless the public’s trust is invested in their expertise). You can’t sue Anthony Robbins or Oprah because you used their advice and failed. In the end, advice doesn’t mean shit. You need to find your own way. Sure, gather data, find processes that speak to you, but never be beholden to any doctrine thrown at you like a life preserver.

Which reminds me of something I read in Denny O’Neil’s great book on how to write comics. He quotes Basho, the Japanese master of the haiku. “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”

“There is no other way. And there never was.”

As women, maternal instinct runs deep in some of us. I say some of us because, like any human trait, its presence or absence can vary to a great degree. I suppose it could be said that variation from the norm is the norm. 

I had no maternal instinct as a child and young adult. I hated dolls, didn’t like ‘playing house,’ I was a Sandlot kind of girl, hanging with the boys instead of babysitting, ripping the knees out of countless pairs of pants, hair a wild tangle, more likely to have dirt than makeup on my face. 

But then one day in 1992 someone put a baby in my arms. Not any baby. MY baby. And, Boom! There it was. A sudden and sweet and nurturing love and protectiveness. Mama Bear was born. It surprised no one more than me. 

For what it’s worth, I’m still more likely to have dirt than makeup on my face.

This month’s stories all rely strongly on some aspect or another of maternal instinct. 

First up, “Green on the Inside” by Star Spider–a haunting little piece of magical realism and a mother’s regret.

Next, from Lora Gray, “Nuclear Daughter,” in which the strain of post-nuclear devastation and the strength of the maternal instinct meet.

Chloe Clark’s “So This” is a powerful literary story of longing and loss and healing. 

Lastly, our recycled story of the month, “Birthday Child,” by FFO multi-published author, Caroline M. Yoachim, a fascinating look at a near-future world of infertility and pre-fab babies.

Enjoy!