Issue 46 July 2017 Flash Fiction Online July 2017

This past February I celebrated ten years with Flash Fiction Online.

From the beginning, I distinguished myself as harder than most on the stories I read. It took a great deal to sell me on a story.

Now, here I am, 50 years old, and pondering what it is about myself—the development of my own craft as a writer—that left me so very critical of stories that other writers have poured their entire hearts and souls into. And I realized something: I was raised on music.

My family sang beautiful music with meaningful lyrics. I grew up in a church for which beautiful music is a central part of worship. If done well, if affecting, lyrics are poetry. So, I was raised on poetry. I was raised on rhythm. Those two elements—poetry and rhythm—are an essential part of writing excellent prose. They teach a developing author the importance of choosing each word wisely to impart the greatest impact. They teach an innate sense of sentence structure and the importance of the ‘sound’ of words in our heads as we read to ourselves.

This invariably had an impact on my tastes in literature. I found, quite young, that I enjoyed Dickens and Shakespeare. I became a die-hard fan of Ray Bradbury who exposed me not only to the wonders of speculative fiction but an artistry of words that has always left me breathless. As a child, I didn’t read a whole lot. Odd for someone who has ended up the editor of a fiction magazine. I suspect it was because the offerings my school teachers had for me didn’t hold up to the music and poetry I heard at home. I instinctively yearned for language rich enough to leave a tapestry of words on the tongue.

I brought that yearning with me as, years later, I began my journey into the world of words, of fiction, of editing.

Now, as one who wields power over words and wordsmiths, I have high expectations for the words that will appear on the pages of Flash Fiction Online.  And, I like to think, those expectations have helped make the magazine one that is well-respected in the marketplace.

This month’s stories are, to me, shining examples of the artistry of language I look for.

So play a little Bach or Debussy in the background and allow these authors’ words to trip off the tongue and resound inside the head.

Happy Reading!

Erratum No. 1: Where the composer is cited as anonymous, it should read Petra Skaro. I omitted my name because I feared alarming my family and friends.

My sister, worried about my fixation with completing the fugue, took me away from the city apartment I had shared with Abed. She believed the mountain air would ease my obsession.

“Abed called to the Abyss, and it came to him.” I sat on the guest bed, tapping the fugue’s rhythm on my knee. “If I can get the notes right, remember what he played …”

She pressed her lips together. It was the look she got when she was about to lecture me on how a fugue couldn’t summon an underworld dimension. But she exhaled and forced a smile as she opened the guest bedroom’s curtains. “We’ll get you help. Anything you need.”

I was expected to marvel at the morning light streaming over the mountains, but the Abyss was more real than anything around me. More palpable than my dreams and my waking hours. My determination to find it couldn’t be weakened by a view.

 

Erratum No. 2: For instrumentation, replace the piano with a viol built with sympathetic strings.

Abed was designing a new instrument, a viol, when his headaches started. Below the fingerboard, he had added a second set of strings, half-concealed twists of metal and gut that hummed along to the strings tensed above the fretted fingerboard.

Abed said, “Reality can’t be separated into black and white like a keyboard. There is no equal temperament in life.”

He finished the viol just as his headaches became unbearable. For weeks, it leaned against a corner of our apartment as we visited doctors and clinics in search of a diagnosis.

 

Erratum No. 3: The tempo marking “Andante” should read, “The endless cadence of unknowable darkness.”

Between treatments, Abed talked about the contrivances that tie music to our corporeal bodies. He talked about the freedom of the Abyss.

“In the Abyss, there are no heartbeats, no walking tempos,” he said.

“How do you know?” I thought it was his illness speaking. 

He climbed out of bed and wrapped his hands around the viol. His fingers had grown thin and his arms were weak, but he coaxed a deep sound from its strings and improvised a melody. When he stopped, I heard the response: the pulsing silence of the Abyss, rattling against our window.

Despite my fright, I rushed to the window. The Abyss was pushing against the glass. More frightening than its power was the sentience inside its depths. Abed closed his eyes, content; he was playing for the Abyss, his audience of one.

Shaking, I pulled down the blind.

I gently removed the bow from Abed’s hand. When his music ended, the window stopped rattling.

Abed allowed me to help him back into bed.

“Don’t keep me out, Petra,” he said.

I only understood his meaning later.

 

Erratum No. 4: Measure 86, the fourth note of the fugue should be “D.” The theme is always A-B-E-D. How could it be anything else?

 

Erratum No. 5: Remove all fermatas. This marking, telling the players to hold a note as long as they wish, is only an illusion of control.

The fugue has no time for reflection. It must run as powerfully as the energy needed to care for another person.

You must never, ever stop moving.

 

 

Erratum No. 6: Measures 101-120 should be played as if your heart is breaking.

As if your beloved’s illness isn’t responding to treatment, as if nothing can keep him from crying out for the Abyss in the middle of the night.

 

Erratum No. 7: In measure 212, the dynamic should read: “Scream with a reality beyond any dreams.”

When he was in hospice care, Abed asked me to bring the viol to his room. He could barely sip the orange juice through the straw I held to his mouth. I helped him to the chair by the window and placed the instrument in his hands.

The viol seemed to breathe a new rhythm into his blood. He summoned a few notes, and I didn’t stop him from playing because I was happy the music gave him energy.

The Abyss responded with greater force than before.

When the darkness forced open the windows, I tried to hold onto him. The Abyss wanted life, music, Abed. He pleaded, “Don’t keep me here, Petra.”

I let him go.

 

Erratum No. 8: Remove the double bar at the end, and add “da capo infinitum.” Return to the beginning until the end of time.

My sister says the clean air is doing wonders for me.

I have spent the past months sitting by the window with a view of snow-capped mountains. It is beautiful, I suppose, but it hasn’t distracted me as my sister had hoped. The altitude has cleared my head. I now understand how Abed’s improvisations fit into the fugue.

With the errata complete, the Abyss will hear me.

When I reach out, Abed will be there, reaching back.

Mrs. Bhatia was five when the first colony began on Mathuria. On her birthday, her father started a savings account in her name and began working nights and weekends to fund it.

She was sixteen when he got lung cancer, the year before the government mandated the use of respirators outdoors.

“Today, Delhi is uninhabitable. Tomorrow, the Earth.” From his hospital bed, he squeezed her hand and told her what he foresaw: water corroding taps; schools holding recess in giant plastic bubbles to protect children from caustic air.

Amidst her sobs, his voice remained even.

“What will come will come,” he said. “Work hard. Save. Take the family elsewhere.”

* * *

“Today was Vivek’s tenth birthday.” Mrs. Bhatia looked at her husband without expression as he walked in the door. “He’s asleep now.” The house smelled of saffron and cardamom; she had prepared penda.

“I’m sorry.” His shoulders slumped as he removed his respirator and protective suit. “I rushed home. Barely changed out of my scrubs.”

She turned away, frowning. He hadn’t exercised in months, or slept a full night, or eaten dinner sitting down. His practice was booming, though; although respirator use had decreased lung cancer, esophageal lesions were pandemic in populations unable to afford access to private water reservoirs.

And the rupees were flowing in. Finally, they had enough for one ticket to Mathuria. Vivek could travel twelve light-years away, and the expense of superluminal travel was worth it—he’d arrive in just a few months. One day, they could follow.

She imagined the three of them sitting outside, the sun warming their faces. The sky in her mind was blue like it was in the holograms at the history museum.

* * *

The day Vivek left, she strung her mouth up into a smile, as mothers learn to do. Only when she was back home from the spaceport did she drop the strings. Locking herself in the bathroom, she let out a noise that she’d last made when she pushed Vivek out—a groan, like an animal dying.

Things must have been worse for mothers, she told herself, before the development of high-coherence entangled qubit communication. These days, short messages from Mathuria arrived instantaneously; flip a qubit on Mathuria, and the entangled qubit on Earth flipped immediately. But only a few companies in the world could entangle qubits across light-year distances, and then only a few thousand at a time. Larger transmissions, like photos, still took two weeks to arrive.

The bank account was back to empty. The roof needed repairs, and the rain leaking through the ceiling smelled of acid. Mrs. Bhatia splurged on holograms anyway. They twinkled on her coffee table: Vivek as a round, brown baby; Vivek in his school uniform, the creases she had ironed paper-sharp. Vivek, leaving for Mathuria.

* * *

She paced and paced, waiting for the transmission. Finally, her transponder pinged. Even before its red light began flashing, she flipped it open and read her son’s message:

SON BORN NAM?D ROHAN 7 LBS A?L WELL

For the first time since girlhood, she squealed and jumped straight up into the air. She ran into the kitchen and comm-linked her husband at the hospital. Once she had caught her breath, she cracked open a pod of milk, to prepare sweets for the ladies at her book club. For the first time since Rohan left, the kitchen brightened with the scent of cardamom and saffron.

She could almost feel Rohan’s warm weight in her arms, see him fat and milk-drunk, touch his soft cheeks. “Rohan,” she said out loud, feeling the name on her tongue. It was a round name; round like the orb of a new, clean planet. She liked it. Now, to wait for the photos.

A few weeks ago, she had looked over the bank accounts and seen that they had enough for the second ticket, and even part of the third. In another year or two they could all be together again, somewhere better.

* * *

Her hands trembled as she hit “send,” thinking of how Vivek would take the news when his transponder beeped. If only she could see him.

“YOUR FATHER IS NO MORE. CARDIAC ARREST. ON MY WAY TO YOU — BE BRAVE”

He hadn’t seen his father in fifteen years. She hoped that would make the loss hurt less; that day to day, there wouldn’t be anything to miss.

* * *

Her bags were checked; nothing to do now but wait.

Gazing out the spaceport window, she shifted her carry-on to feel the weight of her husband’s ashes against her leg. She tried to remember eating dinner together; she couldn’t. She did remember the last time she had been at the spaceport, her family intact. Same place, different lifetime.

At the other end of the transport would be Vivek and his son. In a few weeks, she’d come face to face with the entirety of what she’d missed out on. Her heart thudded at the thought, and she began to hyperventilate.

She shut her eyes hard against the tears. She wanted to fling herself on the spaceport floor and throw a tantrum, to scream that she had been robbed; cheated of contentment by the mirage of a future elsewhere, and left holding a bag of ashes and holograms. But she had no parents left to soothe her, and tell her she’d done the right thing, and her husband was in a shoebox. So she sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the whirlpool inside her to fizzle out on its own. Maybe that was why her father had seemed so mellow, long ago. Maybe older people got angry too, just there wasn’t anyone left to tell.

“Auntie-ji.” The stewardess touched her shoulder. “You really must board. We depart in fifteen minutes.” Her voice was the perfect blend of warm and crisp, as though she had years of practice dealing with elderly ladies who dawdled at the gate.

Mrs. Bhatia stood, smoothed her white sari, and strung up her smile.

 

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Huh. Odd. Guess I’ll have to save that story about legendary writer Harlan Ellison writing me a fan letter for another day. Oh well! See you next time!

Role Credits!

 

Our grandmothers lie in slips that shine like cellophane. Their breasts hang loose and heavy like bindles from their collar bones. We gaze at the crosses hanging over their beds, so much like marks over graves, as they whisper softly, softly on the edge of sleep.

“The fence was there at the beginning,” they tell us, “before you were chased roe in your mothers’ bellies, before God pressed his thumb into your skulls and the brambles sprang there, before you swam up your mothers’ throats and burst into air. God made one side by side with the other,” they say, “put the fence between them, and the fence was good.” Their lashes settle closed like nestled crow wings, and we curl like snail shells at their calloused feet.

That night, we dream of the fence: the ivy weaving through its galvanized links, waving us closer or shooing us away. Wooden planks behind it blocking our view. We gather by the fence in the morning, like we always do, to collect stones around its perimeter. We search for stones till our feet grow sore from the weight of our bodies. We lie in front of the fence and heap our stones into small mountains, noting hints of granite, amber shards of beer glass, marble swirls of calcium and tar.

We lie there, leaning on our elbows, admiring our stones in secret, till the bruja from the second floor opens her window. She makes a bowl of her hands and rips it apart, shelling the dark earth with pellets of rice. We stare up at the bruja, and the bruja stares down at us. It’s a look we’ve seen before—the way our grandmothers stare out of their windows, like the sky is a paved road they never meant to wander down. Our grandmothers told us the bruja lost her magic a long time ago—that all she’s good for now is conning superstitious pendejos, but we wonder what our grandmothers know and what they don’t know.

“Una brujería,” we whisper to the air. “Witchcraft. A spell.”

We pocket our stones in a hurry, and that’s when we see it: a pigeon huddled by the fence. Its beak parted. Its eye backlit. We poke it with sticks, but it just sits there, collecting and dispelling wind.

“Fly, bird,” we say.

“Déjalo,” the bruja commands from her post above us. “Leave it be,” but we will not be moved.

We stand by the bird till the old witch sighs and closes her window; till the sun dips out behind the fence, tinging the sky with blood and gold; till orbs of jaundiced light undulate from streetlamps; till our grandmothers shout our names from behind their gated windows, and our stomachs coil like chains on bikes we do not have. We place our last Cheetos near the bird’s gaping beak, wipe neon-orange residue onto our jeans before we run.

“We’ll be back tomorrow,” we say.

At night, we fall into dreams of the bruja’s face glowing in the sky.

“Niñas,” she says, “qué están hacien”—her head cracks open, and a flurry of white birds emerge between her eyes. They bullet towards us. Our feet are tarred to the ground. We wake up screaming, running to the window. We gasp for air, brace ourselves against the glass. The fence is out there. The sky is swirling like a bruise.

We slink into our day-clothes, pockets heavy with stones; sneak past our grandmothers’ bedrooms, and slide through our front doors. Outside, we find the bird laying on its side, stilled windless. Its wide-open eye is a cold tar-black. We wonder where the light went, where the wind went, where the tar came from and if we can make it go away. We wonder till the sun rises; till the birds flit out of the trees, over our heads, and over the fence—every bird risen but ours.

We lean against the fence. It whines like an instrument never before tuned, never before touched. We rope our fingers around its rusted diamonds and shake the fence. It makes the sound, we’re sure, of a heart breaking. We kick it, and leaves of ivy snap off and fall to the ground. We stomp the ivy the way we stomp cockroaches. It’s a softer kind of feeling, like cotton smashed between our fingers. Cotton ground between our teeth.

We latch the fronts of our shoes into its diamonds, hook our fingers in and climb. It is hard at first. We are so heavy. But we climb on, together, higher and higher, higher and higher, till we reach the ceiling of the sky. On the other side, there are fire escapes; trumpet vines loping around wrought iron; bushes dappled with the soft, crumpled heads of yellow roses; and a girl on a bike with a face as white as eggshells. She looks up at us with eyes like wells of sky-light. We wave and start to climb down to her, but she gasps, and we know we cannot.

We hold onto the fence and stare up at the sky, more sea than road, cloud-foam so close we can almost touch it. We shove one hand each into our pockets and rub our stones like prayer beads, praying for a different kind of lightness. Behind us, the bruja’s window whines open.

“Niñas,” she yells. “Niñas, qué están haciendo?” We look back at the bruja. Her face is pruned with worry, but her eyes are shining now. “Niñas, dios mío,” she says. “Bájense de ahí! Get down!” Her hands reach through the barrier between the building and the air. Palms open, fingers stretching to touch us, to pulls us in.

“Bruja,” we say. “Do you believe in magic?”

We wink at the old witch, and up we fly.

That it has long been our joke that our hair lengths are inversely proportional, and cannot exceed the same cumulative mass it possessed on the day we met;

That our faith was bound by this same Law, your exuberant pantheism balanced against my quiet nihilism;

That this Law does not apply to beards;

That you were the long-haired hippie boy, born too late for Woodstock, and I the butch bisexual with a pixie cut marching beside you in the climate change rally;

That we shared the same celebrity crushes—Michelle Obama and Nicolas Cage—and this surprised and delighted us;

That on our first date, we solemnly swore this vow: if we ever found a wardrobe portal, take it; or a TARDIS, hitch a ride; or a UFO, board it without hesitation;

That for such an act we should forgive each other implicitly and completely, because there would be no time to ask, and you might only get one shot;

That brides traditionally grow their hair long, and mourners shave it;

That I shaved mine anyway;

That you wore tiny white field daisies gathered by your niece in your braids, like faraway stars;

That you wore them in your beard too, except one you plucked for the Justice of the Peace to press in the pages of her Sufi poetry book;

That though we both had liberal arts degrees and too many strong opinions on Sappho, we loved the stars, and the phases of the Moon, and B-grade sci-fi cheese with rayguns and swamp things;

That we were both the type to volunteer when no one else would;

That when, in the strength of my passions, I rushed headlong into a cause, you would be the sword wielded by the arm of my conviction;

That the best swords are alloyed and folded many times upon themselves;

That I believed in peace above all else, because life was short, and we were mortal, and once life was lost, it ended;

That you believed in peace too, but for opposite reasons;

That no one had yet survived First Contact, and the ships had been recovered empty and adrift, the astronauts completely vaporized;

That I pointed out how this was an absurd conclusion, because all matter, like hair, has to go somewhere;

That fear is an easier thing than hope;

That the fleet drew nearer each day;

That Earth wanted to launch a nuclear arsenal;

That they were running out of astronauts;

That you didn’t ask me before you signed us up for the mission to babysit the shuttle’s payload;

That I didn’t mind;

That they made you cut your hair before we left Earth so your helmet would fit properly, but I had to grow mine out for the same reason;

That you stopped praying that day, and I quietly started;

That we passed the time on the shuttle to the asteroid belt reading aloud from Carl Sagan;

That we agreed the aliens were surely made of star stuff too, in their flat black triangular fleet falling toward Earth like a cloud of loosed arrows;

That they came upon us while we slept, and we jolted awake in our sleeping bags when the shuttle jerked to a stop;

That when we radioed them, they bathed the cockpit in shimmering blue light which tickled my nose like ginger ale fizz and made me sneeze;

That instead of hitting the launch button, we waited;

That it was just like on Star Trek when we disintegrated, like Scottie beamed us up, except nobody asked permission first;

That we reappeared on their craft, whole and sound and long of hair;

That they had followed the climate change rally too, and taken pity on our plight, and this was a conservation effort;

That I insisted they send us back to explain;

That when I rematerialized on our shuttle, you didn’t return with me;

That you did it on purpose;

That it was, after all, the deal we made;

That I was angry anyway;

That I blasted Nickelback over every radio frequency as your punishment;

That the fleet answered me with mandolin music, distorted as in a dream;

That every sword is wielded by the arm of a conviction;

That every arrow is loosed toward a bullseye;

That all matter—not just hair—is conserved, neither created nor destroyed;

That it is all the stuff of stars;

That the stardust would love me in any form, and I him;

That we will always expand and diminish ourselves for each other’s sake;

That we will take turns being the rock or the slingshot, so we may fling each other into adventure;

That I jettisoned the payload;

That my shuttle shot homeward in a cloud of arrowheads;

That the arrows arced over the Earth, but did not strike;

That from the ground, it looked like long, dark tresses threading through the night sky;

That the bright white stars above flashed like a field of daisies;

And that when they fetched me dripping from the cold grip of the sea, the first thing I did was shave my head, as if for a wedding.

Previously published in Toasted Cake, 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.