Issue 83 August 2020 Flash Fiction Online August 2020

Late one night, Alfonso crept to the manager’s cabin and stole a box of twelve prime cigars. He returned to the bunkhouse and sat on the edge of his stinking pallet, smoking these pungent cigars one after the other. Alfonso was an ancient cannery worker, disdained alike by his fellow canning union men and the seasonal city kids. “It’s more than criminal for us not to have a nice cigar when we’re the ones doing all the work,” said Alfonso. He and I were alone in the squat bunkhouse. The cold room already reeked of fish and bodies, but the thick smoke of the cigars ran up my nose and died there. I hid in my filthy blankets, feeling ill. I knew if I peeked back at Alfonso, the scales stuck to his ruddy arms would be winking in the glow of the cigar’s tip.

Out on the beach, the moon rolled its big belly among the rest of the cannery workers, all of them blind drunk on grain liquor. The canning union men staggered on the wet dark sand and traded each other meaty punches. The seasonal city kids guzzled while perched on logs at the high-tide mark. “I smoke this for Jack Buenavista,” said Alfonso. “I smoke this for Trinidad Rojo.” Alfonso was always swearing fealty to the bygone heroes of the canneries. I was the only one who listened. I was up from the city, muddling through my first miserable cannery summer, not a union man but not yet accepted by the seasonal city kids. Over the dark sea, another trawler came our way, engorged with glistening fish.

The next afternoon, the manager pulled all the city kids off the canning line. The manager’s gut clung like a baby to his middle, and his legs plunged into waders slick with blood and fish grease. He stuffed us into the hot little canteen. “I do not blame you kids,” he said, “You’re up here earning your dollars for an education, a house, a lover back in the lower states.” He dripped syrup over us until we preened. “If you find out who of the canning union stole my cigars,” he said, “You tell me.” He rustled his hand in his waders. He produced a foul one-hundred dollar bill, which he fluttered like a handkerchief. “For your troubles,” he said, “now get back on the line.” We scurried out, and he called in the canning union.

Rain came in fat gouts. Without the guidance of the canning union men, we clogged the slime table and jammed the feeder machine. We ran around mewling and shaking, covered in guts. When the union men returned, they cleaned up our mess with a fine sustained rage burning in their eyes. They were steeped in year after year of seething fishmeat, while the city kids came and went, dabbling.

That night in the bunkhouse, boots squelched, fists hit palms, and there was the terrible rasp of something being sharpened. Ivan, a fat union man with glittering earrings, stood up near the door. “So, you bitches, you little runty milk-feeders, who stole the cigars? The manager is docking pay,” he said. I writhed in my blankets. From among the folds of the odorous wool I peered at Alfonso. He lay on his back, staring at the weathered wood above him with drowned eyes. No one said a word. Ivan stomped back to his bunk. Bottles clinked. I dozed.

Shouting woke me. Ivan and another union guy stood over Alfonso’s bunk, screaming into his face. Alfonso said nothing. They ripped him from his bunk and shook him. Ivan waved the wooden cigar box over his head, shouting Wake up, betrayal, wake up. The bunkhouse disgorged its filthy tenants into the mud and the rain. The canning union men held Alfonso in their midst, while around them the city kids yipped and yelled. “Stop, stop,” I sobbed. I tried to fight my way to Alfonso but was repelled by a dozen fetid, muscled backs. Someone shoved me and I fell into the mud.

The crowd bore Alfonso up the muddy path to the manager’s cabin. A single sodium bulb burned over the door. Ivan banged on the door until the manager emerged, still wearing his waders, congealed hate upon his face. Ivan and the others brought Alfonso forward, and kicked him behind the knees. The manager stood on the concrete stoop above Alfonso. Ivan offered him the cigar box, which he turned over in his hands. “Well, old man?” said the manager.

Alfonso opened his mouth. Stubs of rotten teeth marched in weary formation. His weathered tongue lolled out of his mouth like a sea cucumber. “Nyah,” he said. He waggled the tongue back and forth, shining in the rain. The manager’s face squirmed and bucked. He raised the box up high, and swung it down. He broke the little wooden box over Alfonso’s head with a wild crack.

Alfonso fell forward into the mud. The crowd roared and drew back. “Take him away,” said the manager. Ivan and three others said they would haul him to the infirmary. I followed them, toiling through the mud, believing they would pitch Alfonso from the docks and into the frothing oily water. At the infirmary Ivan said he’d fallen from his bunk. “Liar,” I said. “I’ll drown you,” hissed Ivan. Alfonso came back to work a week later, addled and weak. He died in his sleep a week after that.

That was how we lost Alfonso. I was heartbroken, for Alfonso and I were interested in the same things. We talked some nights of putting the manager into the canning machine, and of the fishermen who braved winter seas on boats rhimed with ice. We both knew a woman in Pioneer Square who would serve you lunch and charge you nothing, so long as you promised to kiss her old neck when you finished, and tell her of the beauty that was still in Alaska.

CW: MENTAL ILLNESS, DEPRESSION, SUICIDE

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!

* * *

I’ve done my best to write more uplifting and instructive columns for an entire year. But sometimes you must drink bitters so that the dime-store lemonade tastes sweet. So, buckle up—here be trigger warnings on mental health issues, perhaps best summed up in the excised line from a Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

“There is no lonelier man than the writer when he is writing. Except the suicide.”

Ernest Hemingway

The worst thing about being a writer isn’t the pay or the unfairness of success or how hope pollutes expectations. It’s the silence. There is toil, creation, investment and refinement, strategy and other considerations, then the final launch into the cultural marketplace—a marketplace that will ghost you at its leisure.

I hate silence. Silence means you are out of control. Silence is a prelude to disaster. Silence means you’re dead. Silence breeds monsters named hope, pride, expectation. So you ignore the silence with more creative work, the one thing you can control. But silence can’t be ignored forever. And it takes many forms. Contracts fail to arrive, agents refuse to send your work without a seventeenth revision, payments are bad or late or both, important people don’t call back. We keep tossing pebbles down a well hoping for a splash. When we are greeted with silence, we make more pebbles. And for what? In twenty years of writing fiction (ten years on short stories and ten years on novels), the discrete and direct returns have been negligible. Books published. Short stories published. 50,000 hours of labor for an extra $20 a week if the check doesn’t bounce.

It is easy to look at such accomplishments and conclude that you have wasted everyone’s time, including your own. The opportunity costs are enormous. Twenty years learning how to do something that, at every stage of my career, could seem like a waste. When I was published 14 times in one year, which required 243 rejections, my dad did the mental math and was aghast. “The odds of doing well are terrible. Are you sure you want this kind of work?” I went gung-ho on Kindle books and had thousands of people download free copies of the first novel in my new series, but trifling sales followed. I was almost thrown off Goodreads for soliciting 500 honest reviews, which helped me sell 20 copies of all three books: my best terminal success. When I finally got a publishing deal and busted my ass to make it sell, I ran out of steam and saw hopes of a new contract turn to cinders.

If that time had been spent learning UX design, basics of electrical engineering, coding, getting a second MA in project management, administration, or library science, wouldn’t it bring me more success and joy? Couldn’t I have just found a better line of work and then farted out the occasional short story and reached similar targets and had a 401K? From a rationalist perspective on my career, the money is awful, the opportunity costs vast, and there is no proof of sustained effort equating to material success. Where is the upside?

Ignore the creative enrichment and consolation prizes I mentioned last month. There is a harder benefit to be discussed—the role of writing in how one derives meaning in life.

Because it isn’t a hobby. It’s not a pastime. It’s not solely for personal satisfaction. It’s not a job, even if writing is labor. It is more than these individual elements. And because of that, it has a stranglehold in many writer’s lives on the topic of meaning. I’ve found great joy and stability in welding “writer” to my identity, and great relief when I abandoned that title and just wrote as part of my life. But recently, the role of being a writer has added a new layer of meaning in my existence. Caution: sad story ahead (please no emails, I’m good, but I need to make this point without it being trauma porn).

For over a year, I’ve fought against suicidal ideation (passive). I’ve had days and weeks and months of my brain trying to convince me that everyone would be better off if I drank Draino or otherwise walked into oblivion. I did all the things, took all the stuff, but it was a slow recovery. But among the dark thoughts tangling my life was an insight. In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl noted that in the death camps some people endured. Others, consumed by the horror, lay down, expelled their bowels, and died. Such deaths are complicated, but Frankl’s research uncovered a factor that made a large difference between those who were killed and those who expired. For many survivors, they had something meaningful in their life that the Nazis could not steal, something they could look forward to in the future—a clock they put together in their mind, hoping to make it real; a loved one they wished to see again, whose memory was kept in the one place the Nazis could not invade; a hometown, a game, a job. There was something meaningful in their mind that proved true in the work of Nietzche, paraphrased here: “A person with a ‘why’ can endure any ‘how.’”

Doped and depressed, writing was a lifeless task. All of the concerns from the first part of the article were loud, clear, and convincing because they were all true. So much time lost, so little gained in a world that finds value in power, money, and security. I had struggled for years under the poverty line. Buried in the morass of zombification and suicidal daydreams, writing seemed meaningless, my career even less. If I stopped writing, no one would miss me. A mediocre therapist offered me one insight. “You’re right. You’re compromised. You can’t do what you’d normally do. So, why not accept that and see where the writing takes you?” Suicidal, medicated, and depressed, I had nothing to lose.

I wrote. Slowly. Terribly. Like learning to ride a bike in your forties. It was shite. There was no Act 2. Characters changed accents midstream. It needed monstrous revisions. It was angry, lusty, ugly, a character story of someone spiraling into unethical waters, the story of a good person who fails to combat his worst nature and exchanges tragedy for a brief moment of power. It’s among the ugliest things I’ve created. But my mind was ugly. So I followed the ugly for months. I woke up wanting to die but often got out of bed because I had to get a page done, to see something new, something I created that didn’t exist, and it became part of the road out of ugly. Every time I sat down, the darkness in my mind received sparks. No roaring fire, no maelstrom of genius, just sparks. But sparks seem bright in the dark, and I followed them day in and day out as I worked through meds, therapy, side effects and more until I found some kind of stability.

Then, COVID hit, and American racism and violence against BIPOC communities returned with a vengeance into the national dialog for those who had chosen to ignore or dismiss it. It felt useless, paralyzed, and compromised against such national horrific tides. I supported protests as much as I could, blared my own Klaxon against hate to audiences refusing to believe racism still existed, and I let the sparks grow in the dark. Two novels completed in less than two months. Both are ugly, salacious, mean, and revel in their foulness—as if I was vomiting my disdain for the human race into art where there was some sense of control, even if it was only fiction.

Killing myself is off the agenda, but I’m no fool about its capacity for a comeback. Or of the role that fiction has had in my recovery. There is no normal. So challenges and opportunities abound. So, even though I’m a never-was trying to be a has-been on the comeback trail, to quote Art Bergman, and any commercial success may be another pebble down a well, I march on. Because I still have something to say. My sparks need lit. And there is enough time for cold, dark silence in a grave not of my own making.

And that may be the only wisdom I really have to share.

Keep sparking.

JSR

Elise goes into the woods behind her house and falls over her dead grandmother.

Well, not quite.

Elise sneaks into the woods behind her house and trips into the loamy concave of a grave the forest has sucked back beneath her skin. The crude headstone tells Elise that Mary Ann is buried here. No: the stone and its name are half-swallowed by moss and Mary Alice is napping in black dirt beneath Elise’s knees.

Elise goes home and says, “I found Grandma in the woods.”

Mother ties her apron strings too tight. Her hands are calloused and smell like basil and thyme and she strikes matches with switch blade flicks of her bony wrists, touching the flames to twisted candle wicks. “Like hell you did. Stay in the yard,” she tells Elise; there is no please implied.

“Okay,” Elise says.

She goes into the woods. She finds: old glass Coca-Cola bottles, dirty (2); silver hand mirror, cracked and tarnished (1); ribs, big (5); broken lightbulbs (2); copper locket, empty (1); discarded socks (3); candy wrappers, Snickers and Baby Ruth (3); human molars (many); baby doll, sun-bleached and naked (1). She gathers the things in a burlap bag and carries them home.

“Keep that junk out of my house,” Mother says. She has a brown cat that doesn’t like thunderstorms or Elise or humans, and it winds through Mother’s ankles like silk as she brings water to boil on the stove.

“Okay,” Elise says. She tucks her bag in a corner of the garden shed between rakes and a chainsaw with gummed-up teeth. In her bedroom, she digs dimes and fifty-cent pieces and two-dollar bills from under her pillow; in the kitchen, Mother tends softly to plants in terra cotta pots.

Later, but not much: “Get back before the rain comes,” Mother yells at Elise through the screen door as she picks her bike up from the ground.

“Okay,” Elise says. She bikes to town, and in Walgreens the boy at the register is covered in spiraling tattoos that nobody notices except under flickering fluorescents. His name is Adam, or maybe Prometheus. He doesn’t wear a nametag. He doesn’t need one. “There’s a body in the woods behind my house,” Elise tells him.

“Aisle three.”

“Thanks,” says Elise.

In aisle three Elise finds: baking powder; salt; aniseed; poppy seed; bird seed; Kleenex; wide mouth Ball mason jars; bottles of Coca-Cola; disposable razors; white string lights in boxes; candles with batteries; candles with wicks; hand-held radios; charcoal pencils; manila file folders; herbal tea samplers; Wet Ones™ antiseptic wipes; leftover Independence Day decorations, 75% off. Elise leaves most of these things for people who need them more and buys four packs of AAA batteries and a 22 fluid ounce spray bottle of generic brand bleach.

“Have a good evening,” Prometheus drones as he puts Elise’s receipt in the bag.

“Something like that,” says Elise.

She beats the rain home by seconds. Mother hums and stokes a fire in the hearth as Elise takes a fat white candle from the kitchen drawer and a pair of scissors from the bathroom cabinet, and when she leaves again with her Walgreens bag in one hand the slam of the screen door is lost in a crack of thunder. She takes her burlap bag from the garden shed. She goes into the woods.

When she returns, her socks are muddy. She stands dripping in the unlit kitchen. Mother sits cross-legged on the counter with her hair loose and the cat in her lap. Her eyes glitter in the darkness. “Go,” she says, very very softly. “To. Bed.”

Elise goes to bed.

The dawn is still grey and drizzling; the house is clammy and chilled. Elise pads into the kitchen where Mother clutches a mug of tea to her heart and leans against the counter and regards Elise with a concoction of disappointment and all-encompassing fury.

An old woman sits at the table. What hair she has is white and dirty, as is her wrinkled skin. The cat purrs under her ashen fingers and when she snaps her head approximately a hundred and sixty degrees to track Elise with pale eyes, dusty pearls click at the hollow of her throat. She doesn’t blink. “Good morning, dear,” she rasps.

“Hello, Grandma,” Elise says, and beams.

Originally published in Steam Ticket: A Third Coast Review, Vol. 20, Spring 2017. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

A long time ago, I knew this guy named Agriellos Angriopoulis. Angry, for short. He lived on the top floor of a crummy old house at the east end of Chestnut Street. The only way to get to his apartment was to climb up the fire escape, into the bathroom window over the tub, but Angry didn’t mind. The rent was only one hundred twenty-five dollars a month, heat and water included, and Mrs. Petrakis in the apartment below left Styrofoam boxes filled with gyros or moussaka on his windowsill every afternoon.

A few weeks after I met him, Angry got a job with Asheville City Schools, answering their Help With Homework line. In those days, pre-internet, if you needed to know something, you had to either look it up in a book or ask somebody. Angry worked from home, sitting at his kitchen table, surrounded by carts full of library-loan references and encyclopedias. A big man of huge appetites, he liked to drink retsina straight from the jug and eat kalamata olives and fried chicken wings while he answered the phone, dressed in only a pair of XXL boxers patterned with pictures of the Acropolis.

At first, the answer line job was like quiz shows and crossword puzzles all day long. Angry loved it. “Quick, man, who wrote Oedipus Rex?” he’d holler to himself. He was an enormous hit on the phone, always ready with a joke or an interesting tidbit. “Hey, did you know the heart of a blue whale can be as big as a VOLKSWAGEN?” In the beginning, it was only elementary school kids calling him, then it was high school kids, then college kids, then even their parents.

I heard him one night around dinnertime. “Slice it up in quarter-inch slices,” he said. “Dip in beaten egg, then in seasoned flour to which you’ve added a tablespoon of cornmeal. Fry until golden brown, and drain on absorbent paper.”

He hung up. “Lady wanted to know how to fry okra,” he told me, biting into an olive.

He studied my face. I must have looked a little skeptical.

“What?” he said. “It’s right there in the Encyclopedia Britannica, volume C. ‘Culinary Techniques,’ subhead ‘Deep Fat Frying.’”

* * *

Before long, Angry’s phone was ringing around the clock. He suggested flu remedies, gave traveling directions, offered in-depth advice on pet grooming, bank investments, and marital relations.

I guess it was inevitable, given the growing number of calls, that he’d have to decrease the detail of his replies. But soon, what it looked like to me was him totally fudging every one of his answers.

“Evolution or creationism?” a high school boy asked. Only one week before, Angry would have taken his time on a question like that. He’d have consulted multiple sources and discussed it from various perspectives: scientific, historical, religious. But that night, he didn’t open a single reference book.

“Lemon drops,” he said, and he hung up the phone.

“Angry.” I was startled. “You’re not even trying. Are you tired? Do you need some time off?”

He just stared at me, his face immobile, his eyes black and deep.

The phone rang unceasingly; hundreds of people with hundreds of questions.

How deep is the ocean? Is goodness absolute? How does wood petrify?

“Vanilla pudding,” he replied. “Rubber raincoats. Latex paint.”

Thousands of questions. It was a marvelous mystery to me: The more cryptic his answers, the more people called.

How many stars in the universe? Is time truly without end?

“What’s the secret of a happy life?” The supplicant’s desperate voice reverberated through the receiver.

Angry smiled a dreamy smile. “White-out,” he whispered, and he hung up the phone.

“White-out?” I said. I contemplated Angry’s answer. “Oh!” It struck me. “You mean it’s only when we realize no mistakes are irrevocable that we can ever be truly happy! An ever-ready supply of emotional correction fluid! Forgiveness! Oh, Angry!” I was weeping, and I barely knew why.

“Snap out of it!” He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. “When I was in sixth grade, I’d sniff white-out. I’d get dizzy, fall down, and look up girls’ dresses. That’s what I meant. I was happy back then.”

* * *

What’s the weather in Phoenix?

When we die do our souls live on?

Blackbirds. Nail polish.

Does anybody hear my prayers?

* * *

Suddenly one morning, after scarcely three months, Angry was gone. Out the window, down the fire escape. Just like that. On the kitchen table, beside the ringing telephone, he’d left a polished chicken wing bone wrapped in a snarl of his own coarse black hair.

I wondered, for a minute, what to do with it. Should I wear it around my neck? Should I boil it up and make it soup? Should I wrap it in satin and put it in a heart-shaped box?

“Oh, Angry, what does it mean?” I wondered. But only for a minute.

I picked up the ringing phone.

“Hello,” I said. “Answer line. Can I help you?”

I met him in a parking lot.  He was unattended, headlights lifted up to the sky, wheels slowly turning, going nowhere.  As I leaned over him to place my hands on his body, his hood ornament snared my cross, and his wheels stopped spinning.  It was not raining, but his wipers drew slow half-circles on his windshield, spreading the fluid that spurted from his ducts. I knew then he had found God, that he could become one of my flock.  After all, he was one of our creations, and we were children of God.

I opened his driver-side door and folded myself into the seat; the chair glided back to accommodate my long legs and the robes that flooded my ankles. I glanced in the mirror to scan for passengers, but found only my reflection.

The seat warmer was on; his steering wheel was padded with velvet; there was a bracket for a phone or Bible. His only flaw was the Darwin fish affixed above his rear bumper.

As I closed the door, his dash lights flickered, and his wipers tucked back into place. Both turn signals came on at once, as though to ask me a question. “Church,” I said, and his engine hummed to life. I belted myself in and sat back.

* * *

I am Anglican, but he took me to the Pentecostals. It wasn’t the closest church, but maybe it was the one I needed then. I sat in the back, a stranger to the congregation but not The word. I expected him to be gone when I exited but he was where I’d left him. When he saw me, he unlocked his doors.

“Who are you?” I asked. He flashed his high beams; I glanced at his license plate: HGRPWR. I decided to call him Hugh.

Instead of asking God for direction, I asked Hugh. When I was hungry, he took me to a restaurant that served the kinds of meals he thought I needed. When I was lonely, he drove me to the mall so I could walk amongst crowds. And sometimes, he drove off onto some quiet road and pulled over, his headlights pointed to the sky, wipers splashing. I pulled out my Bible and read to him. Together we shared a moment.

* * *

One morning, I glanced down at the street where Hugh had parked himself, and saw a purple-haired woman yanking on his door handle. I ran out onto the street. The sun was so bright I had to squint to see. God was on my side, I was sure.

“Miss,” I asked, “May I help you?”

She saw my robes before she saw my face, and tempered her frustration. “I’m just trying to get into my car,” she said.

“Are you sure it’s yours?” I asked, frowning. She looked at me sideways; I blinked slowly as she rattled her pink fingernails against Hugh’s body.

“Yeah,” she said, pointing at the colourful waves painted on his sides. “I know my car. It’s one of a kind. What kind of an idiot thought they could get away with stealing it?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I had stolen him. I had been accused of similar crimes, of stealing people’s souls.  But souls are not things and they cannot be taken.  I had simply offered him solace and he had taken it.

I shook my head. “He opened his door for me. He led me home.”

She shifted her feet, and stiffened; her eyes wavered between mine and my clerical collar. “He? You stole my car?” she hissed. I pitied her and her contempt for the church.

“How could I steal an autonomous car?” I asked. “When I found him, he was—confused. He chose to stay with me.”

She glanced at her phone, her fingers dismissing images of mindless modern votives, then dismissing me. “It’s my car,” she said defiantly. Her eyelids flickered; she clenched her jaw. There I saw it, the glimmer of worry under the surface. She was built on doubt, not faith. “Maybe I should call the cops,” she said.

“Maybe we should pray,” I countered.

She huffed air through her teeth. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Hugh opened his door, nudging my thigh. I smiled, placing my hand on his roof, gesturing to her to make the next move. So she jabbed the alarm on her fob, and Hugh began to wail.

I admit it, that was my undoing. I couldn’t handle his despair. I laid my hands upon him, made the sign of the cross, then retreated to the other side of the street.

She smiled triumphantly, and took my place. I watched them part through the sea of parked cars, then disappear.

I should have hailed an Uber and followed her, but I walked to my church and asked God what to do.

Be patient, he told me. So I was.

* * *

I saw him again a month later. He was parked alongside broken-down taxis and buses, pickups, sports cars, all of them damaged in some way. But he was nearly perfect.

And there she was, the purple-haired pagan, trotting towards him on too-high heels, her keys in one hand, her phone in the other. I could see she was still lost.

She pressed the fob to open his door, not noticing he’d already opened it, for me. The windows might as well have been blackened, because she didn’t focus on him, just her phone.

He honked at me, and she glanced up, startled. She recognized me and glared, but I just smiled.

She barked her orders at him. Rattled, he backed up too quickly, tapping a cement partition and knocking the Darwin fish onto the road. She shouted angrily as he lurched forward and away.

I knelt in the street to retrieve the emblem. On impact, the fish’s nubby legs had broken off. The ichthys itself—the fish—was intact.

I smiled as I tucked it into my robes. Hugh believed.