Issue 64 January 2019 Flash Fiction Online January 2019

“We cannot make an omelet without mushrooms,” said Anton Antov.

Down in the bazaar, there were locally grown staples, stacked alongside pricey imports. Eggs were plentiful, there being no shortage of chickens on Mars. Herbs, of two dozen varieties, grown in a little greenhouse on the other side of the atmospheric plant. Tiny, shrink-wrapped, fearfully expensive packages of dill, parsley and basil, hauled all the way across the inner solar system, losing much of their natural flavor along the way. No mushrooms.

“I can order them for you,” said the manager. They sat in his office, which was cantilevered above the ground level of the market dome. Large picture windows provided an exquisite view of the produce section. “The current transport is already on its way, so we’re talking about the one after that, if it isn’t full already. I can get you a small package of mushrooms in about two years.”

The sous chef, a patient, and normally genial man named Raul, winced. “Sardar,” he said, “I can’t tell him that.” He scratched at his thinning hair with his hand.

“I don’t understand why you still work for that tyrant,” said Sardar. Similar occurrences happened regularly, and the two were well-acquainted. “Why don’t you quit?”

“He’s not that bad. He just has high standards. Which I happen to appreciate,” said Raul. “Where else can a person learn cooking here? He studied in Europe.”

“True,” said Sardar. “But the cost. The cost.”

This was true, both literally and figuratively. There was only one Anton Antov on Mars, and few options for the hungry aside from making their own meals, eating the invariably tasteless cafeteria food, or reducing their teeth on surplus MREs. The petty tyranny of the sole formally-trained chef on Mars was just part of the astronomical price to be paid.

* * *

In the tunnels near the atmospheric plant, an assistant chef named Nisha, had an idea. She had obtained a small electronic hygrometer, used for measuring humidity, and had cajoled a friend at the municipal planning office into providing her with a list of recently repaired leaks.

The atmospheric plant, a sprawling industrial complex that produced oxygen from a variety of source materials, and stripped excess carbon dioxide from the air, also had equipment to keep humidity at equilibrium, and a complicated network of insulated ducts, carrying air and water in both directions, branched out through underground tunnels to the rest of the settlement.

At each of the locations on her list, Nisha wiped a finger, delicately, on the piping to check for moisture, took a quick reading on the monitor, and then crouched down to check for fungi. This was, as one might imagine, a dirty, sweaty job.

“I’m going to send you a snapshot,” she said.

“Nope,” said Anton, glancing at the screen of his phone.

“They’re mushrooms,” she said.

“Ewww,” said Anton. “Really? Behind that filthy pipe? You need to tell maintenance about that.”

Nisha said nothing, waiting for Anton’s inevitable denouement.

“Also,” said Anton, precisely as she’d dreaded, “Also, they’re almost certainly toxic. Do you want to kill my customers?”

She sighed. “I’ll try something else,” she said.

“I certainly hope so,” said Anton, waspishly.

* * *

“No,” said the farmer. He wore a neatly pressed white lab coat, rather than denim overalls, and had a surgical mask hanging loosely around his neck.

“Why?” asked Raul.

“Do we really need to get into this?” said the farmer. “No, just no. And don’t look at me like that.”

“I only need it for an hour or two.”

“You are not borrowing a pig,” said the farmer.

“I’ll owe you a big favor,” said Raul, with a wheedling tone.

“For one thing, they need to be specially trained for that,” said the farmer. “Neither of us know how to do that.”

Raul opened his mouth to speak, but the farmer held up a finger.

“They like to dig,” said the farmer. “Do you really want a pig rooting around, making holes in things? The air out there isn’t exactly breathable, if you know what I mean? You enjoy sniffing carbon dioxide?”

“I’ll keep it on a leash.”

* * *

Anton Antov weighed the truffle in his hand. “How?” he asked. “How did you obtain this?”

Raul and Nisha exchanged glances.

“There’s an experimental hazel grove,” said Raul. He checked off carefully memorized points on his fingers. “They grow them in imported lime, in order to keep the soil alkali, and then coppice them–“

“That means cut them down to stumps every year,” said Nisha. “So they don’t get too big for the greenhouse.”

“Yes,” said Raul. “It turns out that truffles can potentially grow in the roots of hazelnut trees. The spores must have been accidentally imported a few years ago.”

“How did you find it?” asked Anton.

“I borrowed a friend’s dog,” said Nisha. “Training it turned out to be easier than expected. There was one tiny bottle of synthetic truffle oil for sale down in the market, and apparently the smell is almost exactly the same.”

Anton sniffed the truffle deeply, and smiled, grimly. “This will do for the pasta salad, and the eggs.”

His tired assistants began to relax.

“However,” Anton said, “We are running low on olive oil.”

After the funeral is over—the bee hovering around the lilies shooed outside, the hands shaken, the image of her grandmother lying on satin and wearing the wrong shade of blush slowly dissipating—Susan thinks about the last of the blackberry wine. She has half a bottle in her refrigerator, the same bottle her grandmother had been coming over to help finish before she’d had her stroke and Susan found herself suddenly making decisions about caskets and cremation. The responsibility shouldn’t have fallen to her, but her grandmother’s children were all dead or in prison or simply… gone, like Susan’s father. Susan was the oldest and the favorite. It was her burden to shoulder.

She hadn’t regretted that decision as she’d made choice after choice—Would her grandmother want this? Like this? Laugh at the spectacle of it all?—but the need to get it right had pressed inexorably down on her in the endless strain of days before the viewing. When her grandmother left, it was as if she’d taken all the certainty in the world with her. Without a will, even the arrangement to have a viewing followed by cremation felt like a compromise Susan couldn’t help but fumble.

It was difficult enough to do right by someone when they were alive. Gone, it felt more like an impossibility.

The sun is setting by the time Susan gets home and grabs the half-drunk bottle of her grandmother’s wine, and she walks out the back door still in her funeral clothes, leaving her husband to deal with the casseroles from the neighbors. It’s darker in the woods behind the house, the tree cover dimming everything. She keeps moving until the blister on her heel becomes too painful and she has to stop and sit down. The grass prickles her calves where her dress doesn’t cover, and it hurts to breathe, like the air is too heavy for her lungs. The glass bottle is cool under her hand, and she focuses on that instead.

Her grandmother was always making something—beer or wine or moonshine, once. They’d open a couple of bottles at the monthly farkle game with all the cousins, the six die clattering off the vinyl top of the card table, everyone gossiping and heckling while their grandmother smoked a cigar on the wrap-around porch and the bug zapper snapped.

Susan opens her eyes, and everything is going up in shadows as the frogs sing somewhere in the distance, cicadas quieting down for the night. She and her husband and the cousins will scatter her grandmother’s ashes out here, the closest thing to sanctuary Susan knows how to give, but it still feels like something’s missing. People in movies always pour one out for the dead, she thinks, and uncorks the bottle. She wants to say something, but she’s not sure there are words for this, so she just pours. The sound of liquid hitting the leaves is soft and mundane, and that will have to do instead. For the first time that day, Susan feels the tension begin to ebb from her shoulders.

Something’s wrong, though. The wine smells sharp in a way it’s not supposed to, and Susan takes an experimental swig and starts sputtering, coughs it up through her nose. It tastes like burnt applesauce and vinegar, and it burns. She wipes her face on the hem of her dress, sucks in a breath that doesn’t remind her at all of her grandmother, and feels her eyes sting. The woods tighten around her, suddenly oppressive, and Susan clutches the neck of the bottle, resists the urge to throw it, to slam it against something unyielding until it shatters. She wants to scrub the ground clean of the spoiled wine, wants to suck the moisture back up from the earth.

She wants an uncontaminated resting place.

Susan takes another sip—penance, maybe—and attempts to hold it in her mouth but almost gags. She can’t bring herself to swallow, spits it messily to the side and tries to ignore the aftertaste. She thinks if her grandmother were here she’d laugh in her smoker’s burr and tell her about the disaster that was her first time making whiskey. She’d offer again to teach Susan how to make blackberry wine herself, and they’d mark down a day. And then life would happen and a month would pass and the dice would roll and another bottle would get opened and they’d be back in the same place, making the same promises.

Susan lies down, leaves from last autumn crunching in her ears, and stares at a sliver of sky. Maybe in a couple of months or a couple of years, she’ll open her grandmother’s stained recipe book and the messy scrawl of handwriting won’t make her ribs ache. She’ll read the ingredient list with composure. She’ll sterilize the bottles and pick berries until her fingers stain into bruises. Maybe she’ll follow the recipe to the letter and fail. Maybe she’ll try again, and fail again, and try again until she’s close enough. Maybe. For now Susan sits on the ground, stuck on the wrong side of twilight, and holds the half-empty bottle of wine—unable to take it back to the house, unable to drink it, and unable to pour it out—the scent of vinegar eating away at the night.

Salt, spices, fat, honey. My favorite moments are when he licks his lips and asks for more. A third roast chicken, a ninth roast potato, another crumbling slab of baklava. I leap up, float to the kitchen, bring more and more and more. Grease coats my fingers as I bring a morsel to his mouth. He smiles as his lips close around my fingers.

After the meal, I bathe him while we talk. His chins are shiny with fat, and baklava crumbs litter his chest, threatening to slip into the smooth folds of his stomach. I wipe him gently with warm water, turn him, oil him, powder him. I tell him about my day, glossing over the boredom of my job at the grocery store, but detailing every step I took in preparing dinner. He hums appreciatively and tells me what he’s seen on the news today, delivers his analysis, thoughtful and moderate. And then we plan tomorrow’s dinner.

He asks me to help him roll over for bedtime and I do. He is sleek and rounded like a walrus. I help him use the bedpan and curl up next to him to read before sleep. I have a new recipe book I’m teasing him with: reading it in bed with him, but literally behind his back.

I wake in the pre-dawn dark to make his breakfast, clean him, roll him onto his back. I leave for work with a head brimming with recipes, plans, a shopping list. Spices, salt, fat, honey. But when I get home, arms laden with groceries, his bed is empty. Panic lances through me before reason reasserts itself: He can’t have gone far. He hasn’t been able to walk in years.

I call his name softly. There’s an answering groan from the bedroom. I hurry over and find him on the floor beside the bed. Awake, he can’t roll himself over, but a nightmare flipped his whole vast self out of bed. I can’t get him back in. His breath is labored, his lovely round face creased with pain. His arm and ribs cracked under his weight when he landed. There’s not even room to roll him onto his back on the floor. I clench my fists in frustration and dial 911.

At the hospital, they move him with slings and machines. The nurses don’t care for him properly. They don’t oil him or powder him, they would let him sit in his bedpan all day. Worst of all, the food is scant and terrible. He doesn’t complain, but I know he’s suffering.

I return home, cook him a proper meal, bring it in. I slip sweetbreads in cream sauce past his lips. He gives me that special, sly smile that’s just for me, and asks if I happen to have brought any more. I am delighted to say that I have.

The next day, I’m met at the door to his room by an earnest woman named Shelley, spelled Chellee. She spells it for me carefully, as though it matters. Shelley is his social worker. She grasps my arm and insists on talking to me, and no, it can’t wait until after dinner.

Shelley steers me to an antiseptic alcove and talks at me while I contemplate the bags of dinner cooling at my feet. She monologues about obesity, codependence, enabling, mortality. Finally, she asks if we have an agreement. I tell her we do not and head back to his room to feed him, clean him, oil him, turn him.

He’s unusually quiet tonight. He turns down thirds, and I feel him watching me as I pack the leftovers up. As I bathe him, he tells me his doctors want him to lose weight. To stay in the hospital for a crash diet. To lose enough weight for surgery, not to heal him but to trim his stomach so he will lose more, more, more. He wants to walk again. He doesn’t want to die.

Of course he won’t die. Apart from the cracked ribs and arm, he’s the healthiest person I know. I soothe my hands over his smooth flesh and tell him he’s beautiful just as he is. I aim his penis into the bedpan and he sighs.

The diet is awful. He’s only allowed to eat what they bring. I spoon grey meat into him, pallid vegetables, meager mouthfuls of rice. Tasteless low-fat fiber biscuits pass for dessert. I can’t help how my lip curls as I wipe the dry crumbs from his chest. His face is grey and drawn with hunger. He tries to tell me about the news, trails off in the middle of a sentence. For the first time, there is silence between us.

I ask Shelley if the food could at least be good. I offer to cook to their specifications. She folds her face into a sympathetic smile as she refuses.

Salt, sugar, fat, spice. I smuggle in garlic powder, smoked salt, truffle oil, honey to doctor the food. It’s like gilding cardboard. He rewards me with the ghost of a smile. I wash him, oil him, turn him, powder him. His once-firm rolls are sagging under my hands. Emptying like an old balloon.

The next night, I wait until the nurses and Shelley are gone before bringing out a tiny golden treasure: a little ball of spun sugar, dusted with chile powder. It’s mostly air, after all. It can hardly hurt.

The fine threads of sugar melt onto his lips like a kiss. He closes his eyes and hums. When he opens them, his gaze is smoky as ancho chiles. He licks the sugar from his lips and asks for more.

Salt, spices, fat, honey. He is mine, mine, mine. We smile sly, secret smiles at each other as we eat.

You are a sucker for inspirational messages, task lists, and resolutions. And all of these are good things in moderation. But the end of the year is fat with affirmations and goals. Sure, you want to sell more books, write more books, make more money, grow your audience, etc.

But instead of buying into the New Year Industrial Complex, you will try to offer something else as 2019 rushes into being.

The need to be resolute.

Be resolute in the face of

• Shifting job stuff that has eaten a lot of your time for writing and exercise.
• Shifts in your own writing and career you could not have anticipated.
• Shifts in priorities in life, art, and more.
• The distance between desire and reality (because as much as you want to look a the unvarnished reality of how this world works, you are often a kid-on-Christmas-get-your-hopes-up-mutherfucka).

You have a lot of great things in play, much of which are in flux because of the holidays, and the horizon seems a lot brighter than in years past.

Which is why you must be resolute: to make the best of these opportunities, to endure their failures or success, and do the next thing.

Because to be resolute does not mean to just endure hardship. It means to keep going. And for the purposes of this column, that means keep writing, keep building your career, keep practicing your vocation.

There is one truth in publishing, as opposed to art—you cannot rest on legacy unless you’re the 1% of success. You have to keep growing and making stuff. Period.

In classes at Google and other companies, that’s your battle cry to the students who are worried about perfection. “Make the thing. Then make another thing. Keep making things. In the end, it is the only part of the process that you have 100% total control.”

Be resolute. Make the next things. Make the best of all that shakes out.

Dear Lisa,

5^thWeek in Hell

I’m lying on an army cot at my outpost. Every breath, I suck in a battalion of bugs. Damn insects. It’s raining and they decided to come in here where it’s dry.

Last night I about got plugged writing a letter using this same flashlight. A sniper saw it.

That would be a helluva way to sign off—with a big glob of guts.

Your friend, Bill

p.s. I got a nasty paper cut licking the flap of Nancy’s envelope. Only one letter so far. What’s up?

Dear Lisa,

Let me tell you about a weapon with a killing punch. Howitzer: 109 mm. Weight: 27 tons. Type of shells: White phosphorus. Chemical. High explosive. Illumination.

Two weeks before I got here, a battery killed 900 of the 1600 VC hit. Yesterday two companies were sent to take a hill. 500 strong. Only 67 came back. Took the damn hill though.

Stay cool—Bill

P.S. I used to hate Disneyland. Not it’s all I think about.

* * *

Lisa,

I’ve been awake for 42 hours. I stood outpost last night. The posts aren’t sandbagged or fortified. Just a shelter half-staked, so if it rains you won’t get too wet. Mine’s staked over a grave.

I hope the bastards smokin’ pot and burnin’ their draft cards appreciate how hard it is peein’ in a bunker even when you’re lying on your side and there’s a downhill slope.

The goddamn mosquitoes are having me for a picnic, and we’re out of knock-down spray. I’ll probably get Dengue fever like the lieutenant.

Love, Bill

P.S. I don’t tell Nancy the stuff I tell you. She thinks I’m on some vacation getting this bitchin’ tan.

* * *

Hey Angel,

It’s been 14 days since I heard from Nancy, so for the last few days I’ve been saving my thoughts for you. I’m at an outpost and so is a damn near-dead Vietnamese farmer. He stepped on a land mine near his hut. Now his guts are feeding flies.

The choppers that are used for evacuation are out picking up dead and wounded grunts from a recon patrol ambushed 2 hours ago. A marine came back with an ear tucked inside an M&M wrapper, later speared it on the antenna of his Jeep.

Life is cheap here-right and wrong must be talking to someone else.

I figure I should get a letter from you today. Hope so.

Christ, I’m homesick, Bill

P.S. I’m off on a nature hike—all canopy, no light.

* * *

Hi Doll,

Just changed pens. Mine’s been skipping for the last ten letters. This one’s Gunther’s. If we didn’t have a mascot, he’d be perfect—a big goofy gorilla from Missouri who sleeps with his fiancee’s garter belt.

On pay day I left money on my bunk, and he put it in my locker. We never steal from each other—just from the company next door, mops and brooms.

I’ll never take electricity for granted again. Guess that’s true of a lot of things. I’m so horny I can hardly put my hat on.

I have 7,360 hours more to serve till I get leave.

Your friend and a bit more—Bill

P.S. I’m so bugged about no mail from Nancy that I halfway wish I’d get shot up bad enough to get sent home.

* * *

Hey Lisa,

Let’s start out with what I did today:

5 a.m. fired off the guy.

6:00 I hit chow (stale toast and raw bacon).

7:30 our work day began.

10:00 me and Gunther worked with ammo.

10:30 we switched from coffee to beer, which always improves our mood.

Noon we ate hot chow in marmite cans.

1:00 we cleaned the gun. Gunther cleaned the muzzle break—I cleaned the breech lock. All that bullshit was finished by 3:30

I am pissed right now because this is the 6^thday since I didn’t get one single letter. Got a damned bill though, forwarded from the telephone company.

Missing everyone, Bill

P.S. Did you hear about the bed-wetting Klansman who went to his meeting in a rubber sheet?

* * *

Hi Lisa,

How’re things?

I’m sitting in my hole, trying to stay awake, wondering where the war is. I’ve learned two things: Never take off your boots unless you’re showering. Never turn in your M-16 once it’s drawn from the armory.

Well, I ain’t visited a shower in days. Think I’ll risk it. Gunther has hotel soap from his leave in Thailand. It smells like pretty girls, warm feelings.

As always ___________ !!! Bill

P.S. Marines requisition about anything, even Kotex. Great bandages, helmet pads, slathering BBQ sauce on pigs.

Dear Cheryl,

There are two types of warriors her, classified by drugs. Drunks destruct in alcohol, fighting among themselves. Potheads rely on marijuana, peaceful and agreeable.

You can tell a Head by their smokes. Never flip-top boxes. Always soft packs, opened from the bottom. A carton of Kools, $2.50. Mama San skillfully rolls each cigarette between her palms—tobacco tumbles—and she replaces it with high-grade pot.

The new cigarettes are tapped back in their packs. Each one is stacked in its carton. All for $10. A $12.50 investment yields 200 mentholated marijuana cigarettes. I carry a pack in my shirt pocket, lighting up here, there, everywhere.

Miss you, Bill

P.S. Don’t believe Johnson when he says counterinsurgency in the countryside is winning the “hearts and minds” of peasants. B.S.

* * *

Cheryl,

Gunther. Something got his arm at the elbow, and he gave a funny little wave, like a flag salute, watching his hand crawl on the ground. Head down, he muttered, “Crap-ola,” as if he’d dropped his only glove. Then he passed out, real laid back.

Medic. Tourniquet. Whole blood. Morphine.

I held him, my fingers clenched into fists. He squeezed back, still alive, hanging on.

Jesus, there was too much blood.

Bill

P.S. Pages of the new testament fill my pillow. Gospels on a recon in search of a soul.

Hey babe,

Sarge just strolled in. Told me to get my shit together. A truck’s leaving for the airport in PleikU in 30 minutes. He snatched my M-16 and walked out, not another word.

Fuck it! I’m gone! I’m coming home, baby!

Love ya, Bill

Adapted from “Purple Daze” (Running Press Teen, 2011). Reprinted here by permission of the author.