Issue 67 April 2019 Flash Fiction Online April 2019

Hindsight is a brutal taskmaster for a historian. You can’t use it as an analytic tool, even though it is impossible to ignore. Everyone in the past made decisions without knowing their complete consequences. There was no way to tell if their actions would lead to success, failure, or any variety of unexpected outcomes until the results were in. If you begin with hindsight you can misjudge and celebrate and vilify people for all the wrong reasons.

Which is why you loath “success” bias in writers. Once they go from toiling into obscurity to any degree of fiscal success, they start to offer advice on how to win big at being a writer. Their story becomes a map we should follow. A strange view of “destiny” that becomes a story for everyone to emulate (a case of doublethink to do Orwell proud).

But before they were a success, that map was a maze. There was no certainty that this project would take off, or that they had the chops to write well, or that the agent wouldn’t screw them over, or that a convention would introduce them to a great or awful editor, or that the people who did that fun podcast would later go into publishing, or that marrying into the upper middle class would serve them well, etc., etc., etc.

Everyone desires success distilled, the scale reduced to the simplest of bullet points, but when people turn mazes into maps they tend to erase the litter of dead ends, wrong turns, and tar pits. Yet all of those “paths” were instrumental in the final destination. The path without failure and screw-up is worse than a maze; it’s an intellectual prison that stops us from overcoming challenges and giving up our work for those who were “destined” to succeed.

You remember the anecdote about Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck. He said diplomacy was like a wanderer in the woods. You try a direct approach, but it is often blocked, so other trails, rivers, bridges, and risks are needed. All that matters is the way across, whatever way it might be. What your map might have suggested was the right way is irrelevant. All that matters is negotiating the maze to the other side. Which is where hindsight bias is a liar.

Because that maze you went through? It won’t repeat, not beyond general shapes (publishing is tough) and sizes (you have to make lots of things to generate lots of opportunities) and scales (being a better writer can often help you sell, but connections and a simple style are more fiscally valuable). But those twists and turns and monsters and traps? They were your own. To make it mirror someone else’s maze, you need to erase the failures, regrets, and fuck-ups; the temporal bias; the personal relationships; the uniqueness of your own work.

Sure, wisdom can be compressed to a degree. Yes, patterns, echoes, and portents fill comparative examples. But the actual transformation of your maze into a map is singular, good or ill. The warrior-poet Basho said it best: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.” Turn your maze into a map as unique as your work, and, maybe, it will lead you to a success as cool and unique as your career.

Lena spoke not in birdsong but in birds. When we first met, her greeting was accompanied by fidgeting wings, the shy hop of a wren. But behind the shyness, there was a strength of will, a quiet fierceness that burned in her eyes and drew me in, past the feathers, past the songs.

Our first dates were in parks, at beaches and outdoor cafes, our conversation mimicked by the chatter of catbirds and thrushes. Some flew off the moment they were spoken into being, others followed us with inquiring eyes, as if wondering if they would be needed for further emphasis.

It made our relationship challenging, and sometimes, secretly, I could not help but wonder what life would be like were she more like her cousins, who spoke butterflies and moths, delicate as dust, silent and short-lived.

“Eva.” They came to me with murmured words, soft wings caressing my cheeks. “Be good to her. She’s looked a long time for someone like you.” Someone with gentle hands and a kind heart. Someone to whom birds would never be the enemy, from whom they would never fear cracked beaks and broken wings.

* * *

In the spring, we moved in together to a small place outside the city with plenty of windows and a wooded backyard. When it became warm enough, we kept the windows open. We made do.

Our woods were never quiet. Laughter was a chickadee. An argument was a flock of starlings.

We argued often, over stupid things, quarreling like lovers do. Sometimes, I think we did it just to get our blood up and have an excuse for the make-up ritual that followed, tangling sheets and limbs until we lay beside each other, exhausted, panting, as out of breath as we had been from shouting just a short time before. Pressed close to her, I could feel a fire coiled beneath her skin, flushed red from the beating furnace of her heart, so hot I wondered that it did not consume us both.

“I love you,” she murmured before we slept, filling the quiet dark with the song of nightingales. I held her, the soft hairs at the nape of her neck as light and delicate as down.

A promise was a vulture, circling overhead.

* * *

As autumn approached, she grew distant, quiet. I would catch her staring out the window, rubbing arms grown thin and gazing towards the setting sun, watching avian shadows flit across the sill, unbound by words either spoken or unsaid. I could see there was something deep in her bones, calling her away from me to a place she had never been but knew as well as home. A compass where her heart had been, that pulled and pulled and pulled.

I stood behind her, arms wrapped around her waist, feeling how fragile her bones had grown, heart fluttering against the cage of her ribs. She felt light. Hollow. I feared if I held her too tightly, she would shatter, but without a tether to keep her here, she would rise into the air, fingertips brushing the rustling tops of trees, touching the flames of their canopies as she disappeared into the amber light.

* * *

For the first time since we moved in, the house was quiet. The rustle of wings that had become our constant background noise, the murmur and clack of restless beaks, even the soft, living quiet of owls. It was all gone, leaving behind a silence that seeped through my fingers and burrowed its way into my bones, weighing down my heart until it was too heavy to even dream of flying.

I tried to fill the space left by her silence, but my words fell lifeless and dull between us. She leaned instead towards the call of wild birds as they swept past on their journey south, a longing in her eyes that hurt to see.

“Lena.” I breathed my love for her into her hair, lips brushing the soft skin where her neck met her shoulder. Her hands took mine, skin hot as fire, as if the burning will I loved so much in her was the only thing keeping her with me, fighting a call I could not hear.

She said my name, but I closed my eyes before I could see it take shape, waited until the flutter of wings faded in the distance. I couldn’t bear to watch my own name flicker out, as free as I would never be.

I ached for the sound of nightingales.

* * *

I woke to the smell of smoke and a bitter taste in the back of my throat, aware of the absence beside me before I even came fully awake. I lay there for a moment, eyes closed, holding onto the last moment that she was still there, small hollow at my side still drunk with her fading warmth. Pretending.

When I finally opened my eyes, I saw the shape of her outlined in ash, wisps of acrid smoke still rising from the sheets. In the centre lay a brilliant red-gold feather, barbs scintillating in the morning light. The vanes were soft in my hand, warm, but the rachis sharp as a weapon, hardened in fire.

I imagined her rising from the ashes of her former self, body shiny with heat, fingers unfolding like new wings, curious to touch the air, the sky and everything. I looked out the open window, hoping to catch a glimpse of her between the trees, plumage trailing and brilliant in the dappled light.

I traced the edges of the feather she left behind with my fingertips, noting where the end of the callum was clipped short, as if the words were bitten off before they could be fully said.

A breeze blew in through the window, still soft with the last edge of summer. I strained my ears for the sound of nightingales, faint on the gentle, rushing air as it filled our room and stirred the ashes of her last goodbye.

I sat groovin’ in the last shreds of The Big Easy’s Armstrong Park, blowing my sax, using the Big Buzz to keep perfect time. That’s the one advantage of the buzz, keeping time to the microsecond if you’re willing to jive to multiples of 37.19 beats a minute. If you weren’t, well, tough shit. Think spittin’ in the wind is hard? Try drowning out the cosmic metronome. Try playing offbeat to the Earth’s only beat. Ain’t happening.

Not since nine years ago, anyway. Not since everyone started hearing a hornet in their head. Just a little buzz first, a lone hornet. But it grew. Folks panicked. TV guys bullshitted about a “previously unknown natural phenomenon.” A rock with some crazy-ass structure, spitting waves direct into our brains. They thought it’d fly on by; the buzzing would stop. Bullshit again! Damn thing got caught in L4—a gravitational tar pit—followed Earth around like a rabid puppy. By then? Whole hive in everyone’s head 24/7—can’t hear nothin’. Riots. Suicides. Chaos.

Alphamax walked by, jerked to a stop, flailing his dreadlocks around like bowling pins swirling on a monster strike. I ran up a beauty of a scale for him, caressing the sax like it was my best lover, and in theory it hit those sweet high crying notes everyone used to love, brought people to their feet.

{Why bother, Gator?} Alphamax signed. He always clipped off his signs with his big supple piano hands, obnoxious bastard. Slickest keyboard man around, when that mattered.

I stopped playing to sign my reply. {Keeping in practice, brother. Someday—}

Alphamax sneered. {False hope makes me sick.} He flipped me a curse and stomped off.

Alphamax got no hope. But you gotta have hope in this life or you got nothin’.

Kept practicing, improvising on a theme, thinking back on the soundful days when I slayed ’em in the top shelf Jazz clubs—New York, Memphis, and right here in New Orleans. I even done studio work on a big pop hit, “Lame Static,” by that punk group Slack Knuckle. They craved a retro sax solo, and who am I to refuse coin of the realm? The song was shit, and even my sublime riffs couldn’t change that, but the royalty checks—hot mamma!—sweet and kept coming. Right up to nine years ago. Right up to then.

The soundful days would come back.

They had to.

Gettin’ dark. I packed up the sax and slung the strap around my shoulder, headed back to the public digs to scrounge some potatoes for dinner.

Picked my way around half-torn fences, broken bottles, a burning 55-gallon drum. Passed a crumbling brick wall some tagger’d painted: “Lagrangian Four Sucks.”

Right on, bro.

Saw a crowd to my left, a dozen people leaning over, all ages, all colors. Something in me shouted over the buzzing in my brain, “Check this out, Gator.”

Some too-thin dude in his twenties, purple hair, no shirt, had set up sheet metal, piece of a huge highway sign, LA-4, about fifteen by fifteen feet, laid out on top of sets of old tires stacked two-high. Dude had welded thick circular strike-plates on the edge in front of him, like a drumkit, each one a different size. He wielded two claw hammers and he wailed on the plates, sending his beats rippling through the sign. Dude knew what he was doing, laid it righteous. People leaned over, put their hands on the metal—they could feel it. Feel his beat. They smiled, mouths opening and closing, tapping their feet to what the dude offered there fast and thick.

I ran up to the metal, found an empty spot, put my hands on. Dude powered through a routine, slick, polished, knew what from what, a paradiddle, then a roll, then god knows which else. He used the big buzz. Used it as a backdrop, played to it, surrounded it with his style, forced it to play to him.

Music. Real music. All percussion, yeah, but music. Buzz couldn’t defeat it. You didn’t need to hear it, just feel it in your hands, let it soak through your bones. I laughed, chest heaving, mouth half open.

Inspired, I stepped back, opened my case, stuck the mouthpiece back in my sax. Now what?

I kicked off my loafers and jumped up on the highway sign. People smiled and pointed. I felt the rhythm lick my feet and grooved my hips to it, using what the dude just kept laying down like river rapids of time and tempo.

I blew my sax, improvising on top of the dude, working with what he offered up, what he used to surround the big buzz and tame it. I weaved my lines in and out, followed his lead, matched him, plowing out ahead in double time, then easin’ it all back home. I knew how my notes sounded in my head—beautiful.

Then I soared! Flew free! Like I could blast out of my skin, right into orbit to smash the damn thing that killed music, buzzing in our heads jackhammer-loud day after day after day after…

The beat stopped in a slap. I looked around. The crowd: heads cocked, wincing, looking at each other, confused. A bunch of them signing smack at me:

Old gotee guy: {What the hell, man?}

Teen girl: {You crazy, asshole?}

Hammer dude: {Get off. You’re snuffing my boom boom.}

I stepped down, slipped into my shoes, grabbed my case, slithered away.

They said the thing might leave L4 someday, some big rock might fly by and pull it loose. They said it could be tomorrow or a hundred years or a thousand. They said someday we might even build rockets again, send one up and nuke its ass.

Someday, the big buzz would stop. Someday, people would hear again. And everyone would hear my sax. And stand up and cheer. And love me again.

The soundful days would come back.

They had to.

The day labor spot is a decent place to bum a smoke or snatch a half-cigarette off the ground, but it’s not ideal for finding meaningful work. And when it’s five in the morning and you walked two miles to get here, meaningful work isn’t exactly your white whale. You’ll take any damn gig.

Sign in, wait, seethe, and hope your name gets called. The folks with rides get first dibs. They can haul other desperate men in their clown car, at six bucks a head. The smooth-talkers’ numbered white ball gets sucked up the tube next. They can play the game, spit some blue-collar self-promotion at the shot caller behind the plexiglass. Slick networking with a side of pandering; a greasy sleight of hand, but they get work consistently. I sit like an obedient sheepdog and rarely hear my name.

Two hours later and the solid jobs are gone. The place is dead except for us stragglers, the ones afraid to leave because you never know when the phone might ring and some abusive factory needs a couple of last second grunts.

“Timothy Jones.” I somersault to the counter. I want to kiss him, tongue-punch this savior in the raspberry dress shirt. “It’s only for five hours. You interested?”

For a fee that will be ripped from my check, the van drops me off at a grey and glass building that could use a blast from a power washer. A sweet-smelling man inside the joint hands me an outfit, gives me a few pointers. He looks at me like I’m a bowl of store brand ramen.

The intersection is swarming. I guess that’s the point. The placard hanging from my neck lands square in the middle of my chest. Freedom isn’t Free. Get your taxes done today, have your cash by the weekend. I’m not sure that makes a bit of sense, but I’m not being paid to think.

After three hours, my body could sink the Titanic. The cold is savage, the kind of arctic hatchet only homeless people can comprehend. The Statue of Liberty costume doesn’t help. It’s thin and cheap; insulation clearly wasn’t a thought during the manufacturing process.

Cars blur past when the light is kind. When it’s red, they stare. I can taste their disgust. I am disgusting. It says as much on my birth certificate. I’m a forty-year-old scrub draped in a lima bean-green nylon frock holding a plastic torch. I try to send them mental signals: I know what I am. Look away. Run me over. Can I borrow some mittens and a toboggan?

The guy swimming in cologne comes out, tells me to keep waving my hand. Don’t ever stop waving. But it’s hard to smoke when one hand is waving and the other is raising an artificial beacon. Yes, sir. No problem. The thirty bucks I’ll clear is a real motivator, bossman. Well, actually that’s true. I can hit the dollar menu later. Get my drink on after that. Could be worse. Has been worse.

The next morning is the same as every morning. Wake up, eat a pop tart, leave mom a can in the fridge, daydream about buying Isabel a bicycle someday, walk to the day labor place. Fake it for another twenty-four hours. Slap the truth away.

It’s standing room only. Fluorescent lights expose processed food diets, canyons of stress, decades of addiction, and a lack of daily moisturizing.

“Timothy Jones. Liberty Tax wants you back. Asked for you specifically.”

I take the news like a seasoned chump. “I’m your guy.”

I will always be your guy.

Previously published in Bartleby Snopes, September 2015. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

The Lady waits for the Duke in a body as fragile as sugar glass, resting her head against the cool marble of the colonnade that circles the Hall of the Nobles of Io. She watches the sparrows as they flirt and twitter between the shade and the sun, like socialites at a debutante ball or starships popping in and out of visible space at the great port of Ganymede, so long ago and moons away that it seems now like nothing more than some childish fancy.

The body was a gift, made especially for her. The first time the Duke placed her inside its delicate flesh, he led her with sinister tenderness, Gently now. Gently, to the garden and bade her sit, wait for him a moment while he retrieved something from the house. As he disappeared through the doors of the manor, the Lady’s breath caught in her throat: the small side door to the gardens appeared to have been left unlocked. Like a bird who found its cage suddenly flung open, the Lady sprang towards the garden door, but the bones of that fragile body shattered under nothing more than the vigour of her movements and left her lying there, twitching like a crushed insect at the foot of the flower beds, the pounding of burst blood vessels and, louder even than that, the roaring laughter of the Duke filling her ears.

#

The Lady inhabits many bodies. The sugar-glass body is for travel, a failsafe against her escape. The body she dons as the Duke’s chief consort–a showpiece he wears on his arm at formal events–has features so exaggerated that her spine strains and her hips throb and her skinny thighs tremble under their weight. As the Duke’s etiquette coach, she occupies a basic demonstration dummy, plain, stripped of any distracting features, its skin coarse and worn and seldom repaired, so different from the skin she grew up in, as soft to the touch as the dresses her mother wore to full-Jupiter balls, the skin that, orphaned and desperate, stripped of everything by revolution and war, sold a copy of its neural network to a brain broker, condemning her, this version of her at least, to be forever imprisoned in bodies not her own.

* * *

With difficulty, for the muscles of the sugar-glass body are weak, the Lady holds out a hand to the sparrows. One hops into her open palm, bobs its head as if to say, I’m listening.

She recalls a story, read by her governess, of a princess whose cruel husband forced her to work in the palace butchery. So she befriended a starling, taught it to speak, then sent it across the sea to her brother, who came with his armies to wreak vengeance upon his sister’s captor.

Something resembling hope kindles within the Lady; if she tells the bird her sorrows, will it take her message to a rescuer, some distant Ionian relative with the power to set her free? With much effort, she lifts the bird to her lips and whispers her misery to its bobbing head. She tells it about the Duke, how he made his fortune from the war just as her family lost theirs, how he’d bought a title from a Jovian noble who valued a full belly more than his peerage and the Lady because he needed someone willing–or unable to refuse–to teach him the proper airs and graces, and how it wasn’t long before he discovered other uses for her, too.

Her lips tremble. No, she must tell it everything. She tells the bird about the other bodies, the ones she doesn’t like to think about–the fox body, the hind body, the boar body. How the Duke likes his game with a streak of humanity. How, with a flick of the wand he keeps at his belt, he unspools from her human vessel and grafts her onto his quarry. She shudders to remember the horrible sounds she has made, the maddening grip of panic, the terror of the animal brain as it decides whether to flee or fight; the howling of the Duke’s hounds, the flash of their teeth, the warmth of her own blood, and the creeping cold as life seeps from gaping wounds.

* * *

Footsteps approach. From the sound of his stride, the Lady knows the Duke is angry, and when the Duke is angry, he likes to hunt. She must release the sparrow now, but fear freezes her fingers.

“They dare to toy with me,” the Duke rages as he comes near. “Humiliate me because my blood is not blue.” He spits onto the marble. “Nobility! We’ll see how noble you are”–he turns his eyes on the Lady–“we’ll see how you like to be toyed with.” His mouth glistens with anticipation. “Come,” he says, reaching to take her arm.

The Lady starts as if waking from a terrible dream: she has no royal brother to save her from across the sea, no vengeful army that will come to her aid. She has only herself and the things she has learnt from her suffering–the cunning of a fox, the quickness of a hind, the daring of a boar–and the sparrow clutched in her hand.

* * *

“Wait,” she says. The Duke stays his arm for a moment, looming over her like a guillotine.

Like a firmly pushed garden door, her fingers open; the sparrow darts out, and then up, and as the Duke lifts his hands, the Lady lunges.

Her legs shatter; her paper-thin lungs tear open; her wasted muscles scream; but her hands close around the wand hanging at the Duke’s belt. And with a series of motions that break each of her pale fingers, she tears her mind from the sugar-glass body and hurls it towards the sparrow, flying now higher and higher to join its flock.

And as the rush of air fills her ears, the Duke’s roars echo through the colonnade, grow fainter, fall silent.