Issue 39 December 2016 Flash Fiction Online December 2016

I was watching a documentary about Robert Redford when Robert Redford walked in. He was still dusted over with snow from skiing. In my paint-covered jeans and beanie, I showed him around the house. He lifted things gently and asked questions. I answered carefully.

‘Over there is a music box I’ve had since I was a baby.’ He wound the little box, and it played a warbly tune. ‘Here is a stone from the Great Kei River in South Africa.’ He held the stone. ‘This is a photograph of my father as a young man.’ Robert Redford said, ‘He liked to sail, then.’ I said yes. He said he also sailed, and even though I already knew that from the documentary film, I nodded and said, ‘Oh?’ The flurries outside were bluing the light in which we stood. He tapped my shoulder and flashed his rapid grin. We went for a walk in the cold pines and came back in to do the crossword. We hesitated at the headlines about police brutality and mass shootings. Huddled together at the breakfast table, Robert Redford smoothed my hair as we sat, passing the pen back and forth, trying to locate the correct vocabulary.

Later, we made dinner. Robert Redford poured a wicked good red he’d brought, and I roasted a whole chicken and wee potatoes. The dining room was pretty with its papering of green parrots, and the table set with the pink camellias I’d bought for myself the day before. Every now and then snow slid from the roof in a little whoosh. I sat cross-legged on my chair, and he had his shirt and sweater sleeves pushed up to his elbows. We talked of moths, the different kinds of moths that feed on tears, and I may have cried a little because his voice was so beautiful. To distract him, I asked what kind of animal he would like to be, and he said very fast, ‘A horse.’ He wanted to know my animal and, since I hadn’t been feeling very grand, I told him I would like to be a dormouse. And he looked at me kindly as if he knew exactly how much I had been sleeping lately.

The TV was playing the 11 o’clock news. Someone announced, ‘Tonight, a quiet New England town is shattered by violence—and rises above it.’ Robert Redford looked grave as I expected he would. He held my hand in his across the table while we finished the wine. Then he pushed himself back and did the dishes humming Wild Mountain Thyme. I watched his socked feet glide across my wooden floor. I sang the sweetest verse out loud: ‘I will build my love a bower by yon cool crystal fountain, and round it I will pile all the wild flowers o’ the mountain… Will ye go, lassie, go?’

We didn’t talk about childhood illnesses or divorce that night, nor did we talk about the pains of humanity at large, even if those things which we had in common worried hungrily at the door. Having watched the biography, I knew he carried a deep sadness within him somewhere, and he seemed to locate the deep sadness within me. With small gestures, we acknowledged each other’s aches. We made ourselves a fire, and we watched the reflection of the flames ripple in the old glass windows. Robert Redford asked if he shouldn’t read something, which of course was all I wanted. I pulled down The Yearling and some slender volumes of poetry from the blue shelf. In the lamplight, he was haloed, and his voice rose and fell with a richness that was very satisfying to hear. When he liked a passage, he read it twice, and the second time more slowly. ‘Read the end,’ I told him. And he did. The dog and the cat came into the room, and it seemed that even the dark fir trees outside were listening. ‘Somewhere beyond the sink-hole,’ he read, ‘past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.’

I was falling asleep on the couch when Robert Redford kissed my eyelashes and put my head on his lap. He kept reading to me, though, and I drifted off knowing that he would stay all through the night. It was late when I woke again, but I knew he was awake, too. He said, ‘Watch the signs now.’ He said, ‘Take your time—everything’s going to be fine.’ Somehow violin music was playing in the background. The next morning, I found myself dusted over with snow, and I waited until it melted and became remembered snow, before mopping it up, taking my time.

They didn’t want me to look human, so they didn’t give me eyes. They thought if they shaped me like a monster — a hulking ton of red Mars clay, mute and blind — that she wouldn’t love me.

They were wrong.

* * *

The first time I held her, she changed something inside me. They didn’t notice, couldn’t see through my craggy exterior, into a body that had suddenly become molten. Flowing. Alive in a way they would never have wanted.

She did it with her cries, with her tears soaking into my coarse hands. She made me what she needed me to be.

* * *

I couldn’t sing her lullabies, for they had not given me lips — let alone a voice. I lived with a pulsing ache, stronger than the heartbeat I didn’t have, a hollow pain where my eyes should have been. A rasping fire at my throat, every time I sought words.

She shouldn’t have been content with my silent rocking, no matter how tenderly I cradled her to my granite chest. She should have wailed for her mother, her father.

But she was silent as I was silent. Her tiny fingers couldn’t even close around one of mine, but she tried anyway. She breathed, and the slow rise and fall of her ribcage against mine lulled me. I felt like I could breathe for the first time.

I’m supposed to comfort you, I thought with all the strength of my mind, willing her to hear.

She cooed as if she understood.

* * *

Daily I sat her down before a viewscreen I knew only by touch. It seemed unspeakably wrong that she would learn the beauty of words not from the caretaker who loved her, but from a monotone stranger.

We learned — she, enfolded in my lap — tales of the stars, of the biodome that harbored us, the one her parents spent all their days maintaining. We learned of ancient earth and the new hope of terraformed worlds.

When her parents returned for their brief visits, she let them hug her. She spoke to them and them to her, and I suffered in my molten heart a great jealousy.

When they left, we returned to our tranquility, our comfortable ways. And for a time I could forget the countdown of my life.

* * *

Since her first coo, we had been linked. She traversed the landscape of my mind and changed it with her presence, with the mental footprints left behind. I constantly evolved to be what she needed: steady, warm, safe.

But I hid the truth until she grew too strong and hardheaded to keep back.

She wept. “Only two more years?”

I had been robbed of the comfort of tears.

She paged her parents. Her voice shattered our silence, thick with rage, pain, and the sharp edge of fear.

They told her it could not be helped. I was only ever made to see her into her thirteenth year when she could choose a life-path as her parents had before her.

They told her no magics could hold me longer.

She vowed to show them wrong.

* * *

She touched the walls of my mind, the halls of my heart. She made little changes — a nearly indestructible shell, an attempt at eyes and a mouth. They took their proper shapes but offered no functionality. None of it was enough.

She clung to me on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. Her tears soaked into me, but could not revive my dying clay.

“Please don’t go,” she whispered hoarsely.

I shuddered and held her tighter. I nearly stole her breath trying to press comfort and strength into her.

Dawn came. I felt a change not wrought by her thin fingers and lithe mind; a thirst suffused my bony exoskeleton. I strained, a fire in my throat as I fought to find words. A low moan, as of earth breaking, escaped me and her fingers closed around my hands.

I cracked. Crumbled, slipped between her fingers and returned to the silence of sleeping red clay.

* * *

I heard her first, voice a deeper timber acquired with age, but familiar as my own ruddy form. She shaped me with care, with the power of her life-giving body. She wanted the child growing within her to love me, so she gave me a voice. She wanted me to look human, so she gave me eyes. 

I returned to life, knowing my years to be only thirteen once more, and peered into her eyes — her aqua-bright, shining eyes — for the very first time.

* * *

Previously published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, 2015. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Change is inevitable, more frequently than some are comfortable with. Life changes almost constantly, yet so many of us worry ourselves sick over even the smallest changes in our self-perceived normalcy. Why is that?

Change comes, worry or not. Change comes, wished for or not. “If I could change the world…” to quote from the song performed by the immortal Eric Clapton.

Easy or difficult, small or large, life-changing or life-affirming, change comes to all of us.

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

Profound! How about this one from Greek author, Nikos Kazantzakis:

“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.”

Or, from Robin Sharma, a Canadian Leadership and Personal Mastery speaker who once said, “Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.”

I’ve come, from personal experience, to find these insights to be entirely true.

I just wish I were better at dealing with that messy middle bit.

This month’s stories are all about change. For some, it is expected, for others not. Each character deals with it differently, some successfully, some not. But each story touches the heart and, hopefully, will make your next life change a little richer.

First up, from Hannah Dela Cruz, “A Box Full of Winter.”
From FFO Alum, Kelly Sandoval, “A Menagerie of Grief.”
Another FFO Alum, Kat Otis, offers us “Hinterlight Abbey.”

And, finally, this month’s reprint selection, “Molten Heart,” by yet another FFO Alum, Alexis A. Hunter.

Just remember, if nothing ever changed there would be no butterflies.

When my daughter’s chest fell and did not rise again, when her doctor looked at the monitors and shook her head, when it was over, really over, and still she lay there, my grief pushed its scaly head out of her chest.

My grief was a dragon, with scales of steel and eyes of flame. It barely fit in the room, and its breath was hot and wet.

“Shane, Will, I’m so sorry.” The doctor’s grief was a butterfly, joining the cloud of like insects that circled above her head. Some were flickering, soon to fade.

“Are you?” I asked.

“Will!” Shane said, in that sharp, behave yourself tone of his. He clutched his own grief, the clean white mass of shivering fur that’d been following him since the doctor told us there was nothing to be done. He had given up then, and we’d all known it, even Lexi, who’d spent the last days of her life seeing that damned dog at her father’s heels.

“I want to go home,” I said.

He looked not at me, but at my grief. “Where will we keep it?”

I looked at Lexi’s body. “Everywhere.”

They didn’t get along, Shane’s pretty little dog and my great ugly dragon. It was the dog’s fault. The way it pranced at Shane’s heels, so clean and appropriate, while my pain smoldered in the living room, curled around the couch where I’d taken to sleeping, its breath fogging up the windows. At night, the dog whined for hours. I could hear it pacing the bedroom, scratching at the door. Was it already trying to leave him? Maybe he only kept his grief for my sake. For the show of it.

And such a show he made. He took his grief to the funeral. The “remembrance celebration” as he insisted on calling it. He took it to Lexi’s boyfriend’s house, where it no doubt lay in her boyfriend’s lap and got its ears scratched. He had it at his heels when he greeted visitors, accepted flowers and food, cried and clasped hands.

I stayed on the couch, and my grief’s breath made everything dingy and faded.

“We can’t keep putting this off,” Shane said, weeks after we’d finished the last frozen casserole. He held the box of dust that had been my daughter, and his eyes searched the room like he’d just bought a new photo to hang. “I don’t think they’ll let us scatter ashes at the library, but–“

“I don’t care.” My grief pressed its nose against the box. It tried to breathe her in, while the dog at Shane’s feet growled and leapt, like it could rip through scales with those tiny flat teeth. My grief ignored it, dropping its head into my lap.

“We have to do something,” Shane said.

I ran my fingers over my grief’s scales. They had begun to rust, and the rough red patches looked like some sickly rash, another disease come under this roof.

“Do whatever you want.”

He gripped the box, knuckles white. The dog started howling again, that high, keening noise that’d grown so familiar in the dark.

“Can’t you shut it up?” I asked. “I never sleep, anymore.”

The dog tilted its head back and shrieked. I swear it did. A sound like falling. Like watching your child exhale for the last time. Shane didn’t even seem to notice. He was looking at my dragon.

“It doesn’t mean you loved her more,” he said, and his words were almost a whisper. “It just means you’re fucking selfish about it.”

He looked away, shoulders slumped, and the box slipped from his fingers, hitting the carpet. It fell sideways, the bag spilling out. For one long, shaking exhale, he froze. Then he turned and walked down the hall.

His grief followed, with a new, mangy ghost of pain at its side. I knew that shape, could see Shane leaving in the lines of its ribs. He always gave up first. I was the stubborn one. It’d been a good thing, once.

My grief’s breath was warm and wet on my back, and it smelled of salt and ash. I picked up the bag that had been our daughter and held it against my chest as my grief tore at me with rusty claws.

“Stop it,” I said, turning so we stood nose to nose. Its mirrored pupils reflected my bloodshot eyes. How ugly we’d become. “She’s gone.”

It isn’t that my grief grew less, as I faced it. Only, it took up less space. First chest high, then hip high, denser and brighter than it’d been before. The rust fell away, revealing a dragon of silver and gilt.

It could follow me, now. Down the hall and into the bedroom Shane and I had shared.

He was sitting on our bed, stroking his pair of griefs.

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it wasn’t enough. “I miss her.”

I sat beside him, and his first grief pressed its head into my hand. Its fur, though as soft as it looked, froze to my fingers. I’d never touched it, not in all the weeks that Shane cuddled it to his chest. My hand ached when it licked my fingertips.

“We all miss her,” he said.

“I know.” I rubbed feeling back into my fingers when his grief turned away and jumped from the bed.

“We’re not ok,” Shane said.

Our griefs circled each other in silence, stiff legged and wary. Shane’s second grief, the starved one, stayed in his lap.

“I know.”

He leaned into my shoulder, and I stroked his grief. It flickered under my fingers, shifting in and out of focus.

It flickered. It did not fade.

My dragon curled around his icy canine, licking its face with hesitant affection. They lay together, Shane’s grief sheltered under a silver wing.

I pulled Shane closer. Maybe we’d never be ok. But it didn’t matter. For now, he needed me.

Our griefs lay watching us, breathing as one.

It feels trite jumping back into THE GUTTERS of my salad days as a writer. The GUTTERS of today are far too real, horrific, and sad. The country elected a racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist demagogue. Hard to get in the time machine and go back into the world of publishing’s zaniness of 2005 with any sense of value when people of color, the LGBT community, Muslim-Americans, Jewish Americans, and various communities and groups of friends are targeted with fresh threats, intimidation, and violence as part of a presidential celebration.

So, FXXK WRITING, what is to be done?

I wrote a letter to myself. Why? Because, frankly, while I’d like to think I have a strong moral compass, one informed by the horrors of history, I needed to talk to myself and rethink how I face politics in this country, as a both a resident and as a writer. And what better way than through the written word?

—

Dear Jay

This is you writing. How are we? Confused yet? Great! Because we are entering some confusing goddamn times.

So, that election proved Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, might be right. “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” And there is no mighty warrior coming to slay the snake in the White House. The snake thinks he’s Conan, for fucksake.

But I think we can both agree that old Bob Howard was half-right. Barbarism isn’t a triumph state. It’s a commencement point. It will end if something else begins. It requires change and must be challenged. To paraphrase Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, if war is “politics by other means,” then one front in that war is art. And art, when done true, when it doesn’t flinch, when it’s at its best, has power, be it fiction or non-fiction, as many writers and artists have proven.

So, it’s time to rethink your way of interacting with the world. Time to take that punk rock attitude and focus it outside of the usual destinations. Time to stand with your favorite people in this world: the outsiders, the underdogs, the ones with the most to lose. And here’s one way.

Write your truth. Communicate ideas. Work with others to help them do the same. Writing is an act of agency in times when many feel powerless. It gives shape to ideas that grow. It builds connections. It challenges conventions. Dig deep. Write the hard stuff. Speak truth to power. Which isn’t easy. It will hurt. Be reminded of those who have inspired you in the past and learn from writers who have challenged authority and wrote in defiance of oppression, calling out the ugliness and forcing us to reconsider where we stand and what we believe, folks like Mariano Azuela, George Orwell, Tadeusz Borowski, Margaret Atwood, Reza Baraheni, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Toni Morrison, Alan Moore, Chinua Achebe, Sherman Alexi.

Then write. The coming era might be best suited to your old job as a horror writer. Horror writers create works about human extremes, and lord knows the future will have monsters to prey upon this world: old slime in new bottles that must be stopped. But whatever you do, don’t be silenced as we go into an era of resistance against a president whose champions revel in his calls for oppression as a means to make America “Great” Again. And, as a historian, you damn well know there are no good old days; especially if you’re a woman, a person of color, stray outside the lines of hetro-normativity, an immigrant, and belong to any faith other than a strain of Christianity.

Walk the talk, brālis. It’s not easy. But as scared as you might be, it’s not a piss in the ocean compared to the fear that others have lived with in this country. Learn from their courageous examples. Stand with the underdogs. Fight for them. Fight with them.

And, remember, safety pins are not enough.

Best,

Jay

If you liked this post, support a local org fighting the good fight, like The Southern Poverty Law Center, or perhaps volunteer for organizations who can use your skill set to help those most at risk.