Issue 81 June 2020 Flash Fiction Online June 2020

Señor Garcia, the viejo on the third floor, was fussing about how he had never done laundry before and didn’t know what to do. He didn’t even greet me with, “Qué buen día, mijo” as I tugged my laundry sack into the empty laundry room. I told him I just needed one second to put Papa’s and my clothes in, and then I’d help him.

I wrestled my school uniform shirt off and started my piles for whites and colors, just like the viejas who were usually there taught me when Papa started to forget about the laundry. When I told him to give me just a few more seconds, he mumbled something.

I tilted my head, questioning whether he really did curse at me under his breath. But I shook that thought away. Señor Garcia was a squeaky clean viejo with a squeaky clean mouth.

I paused my sorting when I caught a sour stench like bad queso fresco. I didn’t make it obvious when the viejo turned to face me, but I almost scrunched my nose. Instead, I smiled politely at him and then at his soiled undershirt. Yeah, my clothes could wait.

“Okay, señor,” I said. “These are the washers. And these are the dryers. Two of each.”

“¿Y qué?” he asked, throwing his hands up, his eyebrows spiking like snowy mountain peaks. How was he supposed to use it?

I showed him where to insert quarters into the washer. He didn’t have any. But I had extras from recycling all of the brown-bagged bottles around the apartment that Papa had forgotten about. “Some people,” I explained, “put their clothes in and then turn on the water, but I like turning on the water first so the soap mixes in.” I told him it was a personal preference and he could do whatever he wanted, but for that demonstration, I was going to turn on the water first. And then I unzipped my lunch bag of detergent and dumped half in because he didn’t have any of that, too.

I asked if he was paying attention and if it made sense because I could go slower. He grumbled and said “Hmph,” so I shrugged and continued.

I lifted his hamper to throw everything in so I didn’t have to touch the viejo’s clothes. I aimed for the opening on the washer. The hamper was heavier than expected, and I missed a little, dumping some on the ground. I apologized, picking up the scattered clothes.

At first, I didn’t understand why the vijeo started to cry—not a bawling cry, but a quiet one, like holding down a sneeze. Then I saw him reach for the pink cooking apron Señora Garcia had worn, and I wondered where she was because we’d always cross paths in the laundry room. She’d offer me a few of the paletas de cajeta stuffed in her apron. Those dulces tasted like dusty air with a sprinkle of stale sugar. They weren’t good candies, but I always thanked her and shoved them into my pocket.

I was going to ask about her. But then he sniffled. And he sniffled again. I stood there waiting, listening as the water flooded down, filling the washer, and as Señor Garcia held the apron, softly crying and clinging onto the last traces of warmth in his heart. That was enough to tell me she was no longer there.

When the washer was ready, I cleared my throat and said this was it because after we closed the lid, the cycle would start and we couldn’t stop it. I asked if he wanted to put the apron in.

He exhaled, “No,” and I told him he could always wash it another time.

As I loaded my clothes into the neighboring washer, I checked each pocket, hoping I’d find a paleta from when I last saw Señora Garcia, but as I placed the last item in, I realized I didn’t even remember when I last saw her. Weeks, or maybe a month, had passed since then. It probably had been that long since Señor Garcia had fresh laundry, too. I felt my own heart lose warmth at the thought of him alone in his apartment, the passing days piling stains onto his clothes until he finally said, “No más” and had to figure out laundry for the first time in his life.

As the washers did their job, I scooted my chair close to him and talked about some of my favorite things, like doing dishes, shopping for groceries at the marketa, and getting the best meat for cocido at Francisco’s Carniceria. They weren’t really my favorites, but maybe there were other things besides laundry he didn’t know about. He didn’t talk, but I didn’t expect him to because listening was all he needed.

I explained how to use the dryer, and when his clothes finished tumbling inside, I unloaded each item, showing him how to fold them. I got one of his button-ups, a white guayabera shirt, and threw it on his lap. It landed on the apron in his hands. I told him to put it on because there was no experience like wearing a fresh-out-of-the-dryer shirt. He was reluctant to put it on, but I started to help him into it and eventually, he swatted me away, saying, “¡Ya! ¡Ya!”—He’d do it himself. He buttoned the shirt, stood up, flattening it against his body, and acknowledged it felt soft and warm. As Señor Garcia ran his hands over the shirt, feeling its heat, there was a moment when he held himself, when he held dearly onto the warmth, and I knew that, for at least a second or two, his heart was a little less cold than when I came in. And that made mine a little less cold, too.

The summer my sister Mindi turned thirteen and the Leukemia began chewing her bones to lace, she built a city of ghosts. For the towers, she stole matchbooks from the forgotten depths of Mom’s purses. For the ghosts, she snipped obituaries from Dad’s Sunday Times. It was June when she finally gathered a bag full of them from her dresser drawer and snuck into the backyard.

I found her behind the abandoned chicken coop, near where I’d once found a nest of field mice. I remembered the way they squealed like tea kettles when I squeezed them, how their little, twig legs kicked like broken pinwheels as they tried to get away. How Mindi had begged me to stop, looked at me like Mom sometimes did and said, “Why can’t you just be normal?”

I loved Mindi.

I wanted to be normal for her.

The chemo had carved Mindi’s scowl to a thinness I barely recognized when she saw me peeping from behind the corner of the chicken coop that day. “Get out of here,” she said. “Geez. You’re such a pest.”

I crossed my arms and planted my feet like a normal little sister would. “If you don’t let me stay, I’m telling Mom.”

Mindi rolled her eyes. “Just don’t get in the way.”

Mindi stacked matches like she played Legos, her lower lip sucked between her teeth as she constructed Eiffel Towers and Empire State Buildings. Beneath them, she laid her ghosts. There was an old man, head like a crackled egg, a woman with missing teeth, a little girl with a frilled collar and wide, saucer eyes. I imagined the matches above them flaring to life, flames blackening their faces and crisping their flat, newspaper hair. The fire would hopscotch from them to the chicken coop, across the brown lawn, onto our back porch. Into the house.

It had been a dry summer.

It wouldn’t take much for a flame to catch…

“Mindi!” Mom’s voice snapped from the kitchen. “Come inside! It’s time for your pills!”

I threw a clump of dirt at the house, but Mindi stood.

“Wait!” My voice cracked, desperate for her to stay. “Aren’t you going to light them?”

Mindi paused, still as stone beside her miniature city. For a moment, I thought she was going to do it. Light them. Burn them. But Mom called again, sounding worried, and when Mindi looked at me, her expression shifted like she saw something she recognized but didn’t trust.

“Come on,” she said. “I gotta take my medicine.”

“But-”

“Look, I built it! I can do whatever I want with it!” Mindi shoved the largest of her towers to the ground with her palm and kicked dry earth over her ghosts. She ran to the house alone, the remains of her city all around me.

* * *

“Grownups are liars,” Mindi told me three months later with hospital tubes curling away from her like unraveled birthday streamers. Monitors flickered above her, neon signs nobody would teach us to read. Our parents hovered in the doorway with Mindi’s doctor, just far enough into the hallway that the beeps and hums garbled their voices.

I walked my fingers over the rainbow wallpaper beside Mindi’s bed and pretended not to hear her.

“They’re going to say everything’s going to be okay,” Mindi continued. “That I’m all right. I’m not.”

I looked at her. Her skin was pale yellow/green. Her eyes were swaddled in purple. I ripped a piece of rainbow away from the wall. “Shut up, Mindi.”

“You shut up.” She sounded so tired. So old.

I peeled another strip of wallpaper away and, when the doctor glanced over his shoulder at us, threw the crumpled rainbow onto the floor, daring him to scold me. His eyes softened, as if the moment was somehow his to grieve, and I imagined ripping that expression from his face with my fingernails, jamming the needles sprouting from my sister’s arm into his skull, draining the sorrow he had no business holding away from him.

Ducking beneath the scaffold of tubes, I climbed onto my sister’s bed, curled against her and closed my eyes.

“I hate him,” I said.

Mindi sighed. “You’re such a baby.”

“I hate all of them.”

Mindi didn’t reply. Instead, she held me.

When I didn’t cry, she held me tighter.

* * *

Mindi’s ashes arrived on a Wednesday afternoon.

Mom stared at the small, impossibly heavy box my sister had been poured into like it had been delivered to the wrong address, until Dad pried it away from her and hid Mindi in the back of the guest room closet.

I grabbed his sleeve, furious, screaming, begging him not to put her in there. Didn’t Mindi deserve to be in her own room at least? But he told me to stop. As he slid my big sister into that horrible, dark space and closed the door, he lied and said everything was “going to be okay.”

That night, while my parents slept, I rescued Mindi from that closet. I clutched her box to my chest and carried her to her room, the cardboard smooth under my palm as I set her on the bed beside me. I pictured my sister inside, folded like a secret note, the entirety of her body pressed into temporary stillness.

Waiting.

I opened the box.

And I imagined Mindi emerging, soft and dark as smoke. I imagined my heart kicking frantically against my ribs, urging me to run as she fluttered toward me, papery and gray like the ghosts she’d built her matchstick city for. Maybe Mindi would lean against me then, her skin cool and comforting, her eyes bright in the moonlight, and I would turn and open her dresser drawer to retrieve the last of her matches.

Mindi wouldn’t look at me like I was abnormal, this time. This time, she would only look at me like she loved me, like I was her sister, and she would whisper, “It’s been a dry summer.”

It wouldn’t take much for a flame to catch.

My Auntie Cheeks moved in with us when I was around the age memories start to stick. She brought with her no belongings and made no requests except one:

“Put me there,” she said, pointing the yellow nail of her forefinger to underneath the kitchen sink.

Fortunately for her, the sink was relatively large for such a small apartment. Auntie Cheeks tucked herself neatly into the cabinet, bent knees on either side of the drainpipe, neck crooked below the crackled porcelain undercarriage of the basin. She was flexible and petite, her skeleton thin as pins, and every joint seemed to rotate one hundred eighty degrees.

“It’s perfect,” she smiled. She had caves in her grin, and the teeth she managed to hang onto were more marrow than bone. Within weeks, the dankness turned her brown leathery skin into gray sheets of parchment, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Best room in the house,” she’d say, laughing with her cloudy black eyes.

Back then, any woman with white hair was an auntie, but no one could tell me how we were related. My dad said she came from my mom’s side, and my mom said she came from my dad’s. My parents rarely agreed about anything.

But Auntie Cheeks didn’t look like anyone in my family. I asked her once if we were really related. She snapped, “Of course we are. I looked exactly like you when I was your age.” I didn’t believe her. No one that old was ever my age.

I spent many afternoons bare-stomached on the dirty linoleum playing with Auntie Cheeks. I’d scratch on the cabinet door like a cat. She would immediately push it open and say something like, “Did you bring me any marshmallows?”

I always tried to have something sweet for her, even if it was just two cubes of sugar or a packet of ketchup from the fast food restaurant down the street. Auntie Cheeks made me taste everything before giving it to her. “To prove you’re not poisoning me,” she’d say. But my offerings were so small, and I ended up eating the whole thing myself. Even when I managed to procure a bigger treat, say a Twinkie or a popsicle, Auntie Cheeks still never seemed to get her share.

I asked Auntie Cheeks what she did while I was at school. She said she spent the day massaging her face, that’s how she stayed looking so young. I asked her to massage my face, just to see how it felt. She twisted forward and threaded one arm through the U-shaped drainpipe like elbows entwined in a lovers’ toast. She put her cold hands on the sides of my face. Her fingers, like the rest of her, were short and narrow. Intense pinpoints of pain bored into my temples, piercing the middle of my eyebrows, and pinching underneath my jaw.

“See? It keeps you young,” she said tearing at my flesh with satisfaction and humming a happy tune.

Auntie Cheeks liked to sing, especially when my parents were fighting in the other room. Whenever my parents started to scream at each other, my Auntie Cheeks would pick up my feet and sing as she cracked the knuckles on my toes to her own special rhythm. Sometimes I joined in, but never loud enough for my parents to hear over the sound of their own shouting.

I only eavesdropped when they argued about Auntie Cheeks. Once, I heard my mother say something about wanting to be able to keep the Clorox under the sink like normal people. And my dad often complained that he was sick of living with three crazy women.

One day after school, I brought Auntie Cheeks a piece of chocolate I found in a heart-shaped tin on the floor of my dad’s station wagon. It was more bitter than the chocolate I pocketed from the bins at the supermarket. My mother found the tin on the kitchen counter and asked me where it came from. When I told her, my mother’s eyes pinched. She said, “Why are you bringing garbage into the house?”

I told her it was because Auntie Cheeks was hungry. My mother said, “Auntie Cheeks can starve for all I care.”

The cabinet was closed, but I knew my Auntie Cheeks heard her. I stood in front of the sink. My mother grabbed the tin, ran to my parents’ bedroom, and slammed the door. I heard my mom yelling into the phone. Auntie Cheeks popped open the cupboard door and said, “How about a song?”

After that day, every night when I went to bed my mother would say that Auntie Cheeks might not be there in the morning. I’d cry myself to sleep, trying to figure out where Auntie Cheeks and I would go if my parents kicked her out. But Auntie Cheeks was always there the next day, asking for a squirt of syrup, or an orange soda, or a spoonful of pistachio ice cream.

My Auntie Cheeks was still under the sink when my dad finally left. When I told her that my mother and I had to go live with my grandparents, I promised to take her with me.

“Can I live under their sink?” she asked.

The cabinets in my grandparents’ house were filled with pills, herbs, and slimy jars with labels I couldn’t read. I said Auntie Cheeks could probably stay under the pullout bed my mom and I would share in the living room.

“No, I like it here,” she said. “I think I’ll stay.”

My eyes and nose started to leak. My Auntie Cheeks wiped my face with her strong hands. “Go and give your grandma a good face massage. It will keep her young.”

The morning we left our apartment, I scratched at the cupboard like I always did. Auntie Cheeks didn’t push the door open. I put two heart-shaped candies on the linoleum. One said, “U R Sweet” and the other one said, “Dream On.”

That woodcutter is such a damn liar.

The way he told it, he busted into the house, found us gobbled up by a wolf, split the creature open, and out popped Granny and me.

No.

No.
Have you ever heard of such a thing? Wolves can get big, but they don’t unhinge their jaws and swallow people whole.
I’ll tell you what really happened. And by the way, my name is Camilla, after Granny’s granny. Call me that, please.

About six months ago, the woodcutter sauntered into the village acting like he was the Goddess’ gift to humanity, with his rippling biceps and a tree log on his shoulder. He tossed it onto the ground and announced that he was – direct quote here –“Open for business.”

Lovely.

The second he stepped into the tavern, the other girls were all over him, but I was busy doing real work. My parents died a couple years back, so at sixteen, I was running my mom’s tailoring business. That day, I had a bunch of orders, and I was off to…

You know what? It doesn’t matter.

The point is, I was wearing my red dress, the one that some of my neighbors think is too risque. Apparently it caught the woodcutter’s eyes because he followed me into the general store. Even if the neckline is too low – and that’s a big if: you should see some of the styles in the city – that didn’t give him the right to grope me.

So yes, I broke his nose.

After that, he started with the name. I still can’t figure out exactly what “Little Red Riding Hood” is supposed to mean, but I’m pretty sure it’s a lewd innuendo about my lady parts. You figure it out.

I’ve learned a valuable lesson from this whole thing. Breaking someone’s nose is a sure-fire way to guarantee their obsession with you. Every time he came through the village selling firewood, he tried to entice me into bed. The more he pressed, the less I was interested in him.

So on the day in question, Granny was sick. I spent the morning boiling down a chicken for broth and hand shaping her favorite flat noodles. When I trotted off down the path with my basket over an arm and my crossbow and arrows slung across my back, the woodcutter was meandering across my field, picking flowers. As I understand it, he was going to stop by my house to proposition me once more. He thought I would be more “malleable” if he caught me at home alone.

I didn’t see him, so I headed off to Granny’s. When I got there, I settled in, propped her up on the bed, and fluffed some pillows under her back. The soup was still warm, and I was feeding it to her when I heard the scream from outside.

I leapt up, grabbed my crossbow, and loaded it while running out the door.

The wolf had the woodcutter cornered against the shed. It was advancing, teeth bared and growling.

The woodcutter had wet himself.

As the wolf sprung, I fired. Bam, right into the back of its head. It yipped, fell to the ground, and was still.

Maybe I should have “missed.” My arrow would have gone right into the woodcutter’s heart, and…

Never mind.

He wept and sobbed and cried, thanking me for saving his life. I got him inside, cleaned him up, and even loaned him a clean pair of Granny’s pantaloons, since his were soaked with urine.

And now he’s telling this story about saving Granny and me from the wolf? Trying to make everyone think I’d lived up to my name of “Little Red Riding Hood” because I was so grateful?

Absolutely not.

Granny slipped into senility a few years back—tragedy, that. And now she’s confused the whole thing by babbling on about the woodcutter filling the wolf up with rocks and sewing it back up.

That doesn’t even make sense.

So tell me. Who are you going to believe?

Originally published in Grievous Angel, March 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

September 2019 marks the twentieth anniversary of Jay’s decision to become a writer. His gift to you all this celebratory year is DO IT – Twelve hard lessons on learning by failing, succeeding by accident, never giving up and saying FXXK WRITING all at the same time. You’re welcome!

Years ago, a colleague argued that “the best writers were the ones who sold well. Great sales means a writer is a better storyteller than their competition.” Just for a moment, forget the idiot logic of this statement (if a book sells one copy, and then four years later becomes a bestseller, did it become better?), or how it ignores things other than “storytelling” that make a book successful (context, zeitgeist, trends in publishing, celebrity endorsement, racial and gender preferences built into social structures that impact sales and audiences, blind fucking luck). From the level of craft their argument was dumb. Sales can tell you one legit thing . . . how much a book has sold. And even then, such numbers are subject to hand-wavery and lying as with all stats. Beyond that, we have a debate about quality.

My colleague’s argument remains a childish love-letter to mythology capitalism and art-as-Social-Darwanism, but it reminded me that for many people the desire to write books is really the desire to be a successful novelist who doesn’t work a day job, AKA: winning the lottery or a jackpot at bingo. Improving the quality of your work is not a direct function of sales (and thank Christ for that). So, how does it happen? One means to improve your work is to abandon what field you think is home and see how you feel on farther shores, a career of perpetual commencement. At least if becoming a better writer is a goal.

Three genres made me think I could be a writer—Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Sure, I loved them, but they also seemed accessible. Literary novelists seemed to emerge from the aether of academia, were old, and most wore cardigans and scarves. But William Gibson looked like the janitor who smoked dope at my high school. Stephen King spoke like a baseball coach from Northern Ontario. I wished Nancy Kress was my English teacher. Couldn’t say the same for Mordechi Richler (who, in hindsight, is flipping awesome).

My initial foray into writing was a gauntlet of military SF, suburban horror, sword and slashing fantasy crapola with occasional quiet literary pieces, the earliest of which I sold. They were garbage and that’s what I was told young genre writers wrote – garbage. And I never would have tried it if not for that humble truth. SF/F folks who started in porn, pulp, and trash magazines could rise above the din and make cool novels. I was too ill-educated in the history of literature to realize that every author starts by writing garbage. Larry Brown, a highly esteemed author of dark Southern literature, noted “if you had read my hundred forty stories or the first four novels, you would have to contend I had no talent. You would have had no other choice.” If I’d been a better reader, I may have gone a different way.

But I churned out buckets of bad genre stories while my reading life changed. Yes, I read George Alec Effinger and Lewis Shiner and Poppy Z Brite, but four years of university had added Fyodor Dostoyevesky, Michael Ondaatje, Octavio Paz, Toni Morrison and Fay Weldon to the mix. And while I still count Philip K. Dick as a perennial favorite and influence, actually reading science fiction was boring me to death. Instead, I commenced an affinity for realism, magic realism, crime, and postmodern fiction.

I also graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and found deep friendships with the more eclectic students whose reading tastes were far wider and weirder than mine. Soon, I felt like a young musician hanging with the local bar band, hunting for lost LPs and rare 7” records with names like Faulkner and Borges and Fantomas more than Scalzi, Doctorow or Lake (these were the hot young guns of SF/F, basically one peer group ahead of us). Then, for about eight years, I tried to love genre fiction more than it loved me. Hey, cut me some slack, it was where all my friends hung out!

But in the land of SF/F the “best” writers with “major” book deals found me shrugging. Awards seemed to matter a lot, and gaming them seemed to matter more. The soap opera infighting was cute until it was exposed to house much hate and racist/misogynist vitriol (and bless those who have pushed it back to the edge of the Neutral Zone). I did find more oddballs and common soldiers, though. Most leaned toward the dark side of genre lit, and I still maintain my passport for the Island of Misfit Toys that is the horror genre. But I soon left these familiar shores.

I made friends with ex-junkies who wrote amazing crime novels, and grit lit editors who did nasty and amazing work for bizarre side-stapled magazines right before they went extinct. I was befriended by a communist genre novelist who helped save my non-existent career (and fed me while I was close to being homeless while others in the field watched me drown). I found writers inspired by Larry Brown, David Goodis, Flannery O’Connor and read deeply from literature not reviewed at Locus or Tor.com.

And with each of these commencements in reading, my writing changed. And always for the better. Some writers are sledgehammers who only like to drive one spike (Bentley Little comes to mind, Guy Kay another). Awesome. They do that kind of novel well. But when your reading life becomes a desert because the genre no longer sings your tune, the work suffers. Decisions must be made – are you a genre writer who likes all that OTHER stuff, or are you a writer who needs to write that other stuff? Because your imagination needs to feed on work that enthrals you with language, theme, structure and story. And for me, most genre fic left me starved.

My career shows that trajectory of reading life and writing life. My first handful of novels were breakneck, hyper-violent genre fiction (though “with a heart,” as one reviewer said). A student of hardboiled horror from guys like Joe Lansdale, Gary Braunbeck, Tom Piccirilli and Norman Partridge, I vented my angry spleen into the iconography of genre monsters and populated these stories with fat vampires, punk rock detectives, luchadores and zombies. and With the Brimstone Files series, I added sex, drugs and the supernatural. And they were fun to write. Still are. But as my reading life shifted, so did the work on the page. Subtext, dialog, and how the world reflects the emotional interior of the characters began to obfuscate the two-fisted hijinks and tournaments to save the world (PRO TIP: the easiest plot in the world is a tournament. We all know the stakes. It generates tension with every round. We all know what the climax will be. We all want to see the underdog win. Thank you Bruce Lee and JCVD, masters of kung fu plot).

In the last batch of novels you can see me evolving as a writer. Putting new ideas and skills to work. Falling forward. Making new mistakes. Writing my way out of who I was to who I am now. I have nothing against genre fic. How could I? But I also have no eternal love or sense of obligation to it. My obligation is to my craft, to work only I could make. And in seven years, I’ll probably look in the rearview mirror and see more signposts of novels and flavors of writing left behind. I hope so. Because if you don’t change, you die, creatively and otherwise. I haven’t written my best novel yet. To do that, I need to say goodbye and hello and keep moving onward.

PS: There are tons of wonderful contemporary writers working today in genre fields. My picks of people I can still read and vibe include: Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Nick Mamatas, the late Project Itoh, Steve Tem and the late Melanie Tem, Jeffrey Ford, Joe Lansdale, N. K. Jemison, Leah Bobet, Gemma Files, Ken Liu, Peter Tieryas . . . and if your name isn’t here, it’s because I forgot!