Issue 31 April 2016 Flash Fiction Online April 2016

I wanted to write about MADMEN creator Matt Weiner’s recent essay on perseverance. There are nuggets of wisdom there. The biggest one for me was: learn your medium while getting paid (he did that with sitcoms and other stuff), and when you’ve got a project that you believe in, one that goes against the grain, never give up on it, since you never know when it will hit pay-dirt. For him, it was seven years. But that number isn’t magic, just honest. Time and effort create opportunities for your work to find purchase, but when that happens involves factors out of your control. The only certainty you can bank on is if you stop writing it or submitting it or pushing it, it will die.

I wanted to compare that to the view that some genre writers have that no book is better or worse than any other they write. They’re all the same, or, it’s so subjective as not to be relevant. It comes from a particular mindset that doesn’t like comparing values, a mindset with which I do not agree. Yes, Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Path” is different than a first-year writing student’s love letter to GI JOE . . . but one is also better as a story. Guess which one?

YO JOE!

I wanted to dig into this subject of viewing your work in different ways, the good and bad. But right now, it feels trite.

Recently I experienced a hard time. The specifics are private. But let’s just say my emotions are raw, sore, sad and all that jazz. And whatever wisdom I hoped to share on this topic is fuzzy.

So this month, I’m reduced to a list, the basest form of information. But it’s all I got. Don’t like it? Write your own.

STUFF TO CONSIDER IN THE WAKE OF HARDSHIP: WRITER EDITION

1. Let the emotion you feel be a guide, but don’t be a shit. Write about your feelings, explore them, use them . . . but cautiously. Don’t dash off hate mail and call it a story. I’ve read so much “I hate my life” or “I hate my ex” slush, and it’s always bad. Always. The deeper heartmeat of grief, sorrow, and hardship (beyond revenge fantasies and violent reversals) is worth spending serious time to consider and explore. Being invested in powerful emotions when they’re hot will likely lead you to more profound moments in your fiction. Or, certainly more profound than “I killed a vampire slut who was a dead ringer for my ex-wife, and did I mention I can beat up the Rock with my dick?” If I never read that story again, it will be too soon. Shelf anything that has that stink. Then burn it. In the distance of time you’ll see those emotional moments and use them in far better ways.
2. Use Abstractions: In the wake of hardship, I often feel numb, and my mind repeats the loop of pain and suffering and never ending questions. To break the numb, I find solace in abstractions: for me, that’s music without words. I let my mind follow the notes, while my hands do the words. The results are often weird, surreal, and other. They don’t read like my normal mode. And that’s a gift. Some of them sell. And that’s fortune. But the joy is in going where I don’t normally go.
3. Use Novelty: If I can’t get out of my own way, I use haikus to inspire “free writing” exercises, going where they are going to go. I used do them as a warm up before heading to the main writing-task. These days, I’ll use it as a means to get away from the shock and find myself somewhere other. And you can’t go wrong with reading Basho. He is neat-o. Believe me-o.
4. Be cool with things sucking: I am not good at this at all, but sometimes you just need to let the bad times roll. You’re not going to be fun to be around for a wee bit. That’s cool. As Tricky Dick Nixon once noted: when you win, everyone calls. When you lose, only your friends call. Hang with the gang that’s not draining. Chat. Laugh. Get brunch (brunch is a general cure for unhappiness). If it’s getting worse, then do whatever you think is the next action to get you out of the hole. But it’s normal to feel bad when bad things happen. Only fools are happy all the time. Or shitty writers.
5. Enjoy something that is not writing: A curse of my existence is that I turn most leisure into work. I do very few things to relax that aren’t tied into storytelling in some way. But go and do things outside of the writing zone or sad zone. Join a sports team, choir, or cooking class. Watch wrestling. Urban hike. Volunteer somewhere that speaks to your values.
6. It gets better: I never would have believed it in 2013, the Year of Catastrophes, but it’s true. That which almost destroyed me helped me become a better person, and a better and healthier writer. Read stuff about those who endured what you’ve endured. There’s solace in knowing others have survived, and even thrived, in the face of hardship. Don’t compare your pain. That’s fucking stupid. But realize we can grow from being KO’d in the feels.

The night my step-dad found mum in bed with another guy was the same night he gave me his Swiss Army knife—the one he’d spent hours whittling wood with outside on our balcony. He jammed his clothes and books into a knapsack and told me he was sorry I wasn’t his for the taking. I tightened my jaw while he unfastened his world map from the kitchen wall, the one we’d spent hours pouring over while he told me about his travels, and said that was all right—I didn’t need him anyway. I could look after myself just fine.

I kept his knife underneath a sweatshirt I used as a pillow, running its blades up and down my arms—soft enough to skim through the fine, blonde hair covering my bruised skin—while mum sat half-deep in a bottle and bee-lining for hell in the living room. When I had trouble sleeping, I lay underneath my bed frame and shaved curls from its wood, like the ones that eventually blew off the balcony. The more I practiced, the more familiar the knife felt in my hands, and the more detailed my etchings became until the bottom of my bed resembled a collection of beaches, jungles, and cities I wanted to escape into.

Mum dressed me in slacks and collared shirts, kept my hair chopped short with a tail that stretched past my shoulders. “Ain’t nobody going to knock you up looking like a boy,” she’d say, her fingers yanking a braid out of the thin strand down my back. “The last thing I needed at fifteen was you.”

I started skipping school, carving pictures of places I dreamed of into oak trees that lined the streets and avenues around town. Sometimes people would shoo me away. Other times they’d stop and watch, remarking on my talent. It wasn’t talent, though. The knife was an extension of my arm—a way to protect myself, and to make myself heard.

I found an after-school job the day I was old enough for someone to hire me. Every dollar I saved was a dollar I was closer to leaving home. Afternoon shifts bled into whenever-I-wanted-them shifts, skinning onions and peeling carrots out back of a Chinese restaurant. The owner, Charlie, paid me cash, which I kept in an empty pickled radish jar under the counter so mum couldn’t steal from me. On slow nights, Charlie taught me how to cut with precision—julienne, brunoise, batonnet, paysanne, and chiffonade—then I’d wolf down his leftovers until my hunger was gone. I kept mum off my back by bringing food home, and she’d greedily stuff her mouth instead of using it to run me down.

My jar of savings grew faster than it should have. Charlie padded what I put away, even though he denied it when asked. I used the excess to buy a starter knife, which I kept at the restaurant, practicing my skills and creating art out of vegetables I found on the floor of the walk-in cooler. I left zucchini grizzlies baring their teeth, red pepper cats wielding their claws, and snap pea bees with pointed stingers lined up above boxes of produce, watching over me like brothers and sisters. They were companions in my carved out world.

Before long, I was working the line, my santoku thundering along a cutting board while Charlie, sweat-drenched and smiling, yelled out orders with vigor. There was something about the pitch in the kitchen that made it possible to forget about everything else. During the height of the rush, I didn’t care that mum would be waiting for me back home. All I wanted was to create. And when she slapped me around, telling me I’d been out too late and accusing me of keeping cash from her, I pictured the world underneath my bed and my siblings in the walk-in cooler, and I took her shit on the chin.

I worked at Charlie’s restaurant for a little over a year before she paid her first and only visit. She showed up at the back steps while I was on break, sitting on an upside-down bucket and carving a carrot stick caribou. She looked like she’d been drinking for days, her cheeks a ruddy red, her hair half-matted to the side of her head. Her best coat, a light-brown belted trench, strapped tightly around her burgeoning belly.

“You can’t work here anymore,” she said.

I sat silently, working my knife.

She took a step closer and grabbed me by the tail, giving it a solid yank. “Get your ass home where you belong.”

My hands were shaking when she finally left, furious I didn’t obey her. I went inside and worked the rest of my shift with a throbbing cheek, lining my miniature companions along the edge of the range for courage. My mind whirred, but I didn’t cut myself—not once. I moved my knife with meaning.

Charlie’s chef whites smelled of onions and oil when he walked me toward the front door that night, my pickled radish jar gripped between my tired hands.

“You are welcome to stay,” he said. “There is a room upstairs. My wife can give you the key.”

I shook my head. “I can’t.” I didn’t want to stay where mum could find me anymore.

“Very well,” he said, then pulled a brand new chai dao knife from behind the counter and presented me with it. “Please know you are always welcome in my kitchen.”

The gesture meant the world to me. I held tightly to my possessions as I stepped into the biting wind, and walked toward home. When I reached the base of the oak that sprawled over our balcony, I stopped and pulled my Swiss Army knife from the pocket of my chef’s pants. Drawing open its blade, I carved my initials into the tree bark, then pressed on, running my fingers over the pieces of the map I’d left myself along the way.

I wear armor under my skin

It grew there, over my squishy snail self

Rose-bloom bruises, a whole bouquet

A callus on a callus on a callus

Fractals spreading like chain mail, hard and yellow

Indelible, impossible as

Your indifference that glances right off

Shailaja sings, you know. They claim she is a bird trapped in a human’s body, that she has never forgotten what it means to have wings, to soar aloft with clouds for companions. But no one remembers her voice.

Yesterday I saw her petting the trunk of a tree as though it were a friend. It was our lunch break, and, bored, I followed her outside. There is only so much compiling of reports one can do before one’s head shrivels like a walnut, after all.

The springtime sun smeared us with yellow like pigment. I found a bench and unwrapped my cheese-tomato-and-chutney sandwich. “Hello,” I said.

While I chewed, she stroked the bark and began to cry.

* * *

You’ll find me folded into that cloth

The curtain you let dry without hanging

Bits of me secreted in every wrinkle

In each tiny trench, I whisper tiny truths

But you pull down the curtain and—

Steam making all things clean—

Iron it

Shailaja had come to us some years before, when I was not yet an adult. Her aunt and uncle adopted her out of a thatched hut, where she sang as naturally as her heart pulsed, without thought, without effort, and settled her in their luxurious house with its manicured gardens. They clothed her in modest fashions, fed her delicacies, gave her pocket money, and encouraged her to invite friends for tea.

We were all so envious.

In return, they asked only that she curtail her singing. It was, said her uncle, a pastime ill-suited to young ladies. Surely, said her aunt, she wished to secure a good position in society? Everyone had to make sacrifices.

Why, her aunt added, she’d had to stop dancing and focus on business, and she had no regrets!

Like many in our town, Shailaja’s aunt and uncle had lived abroad, where they’d learned the finer things in life, and they’d imported those finer things when they’d returned home.

“But I am a bird,” protested Shailaja. “I must sing.”

“Nonsense,” said her uncle. “You are a girl with an overdeveloped fancy. Girls are not birds, nor are birds girls. It’s time to turn your attention to the things that matter.”

He found her tutors for languages, for needlepoint, and for penning elegant letters in perfect calligraphy. Her aunt taught her banking and behavior and how to bake a cake that would bring one’s guests to tears.

Such a lucky girl she was.

“All fine things to be certain,” Shailaja said, “but not skills for a bird.” Her voice was already softer, less certain. A lady’s voice.

“You must be cultivated, like a plant,” said her aunt, and clapped her hands for a maidservant to comb and plait Shailaja’s tangled hair.

And so Shailaja grew cultivated. She grew still. With time, she seemed to forget she might ever have been anything else.

* * *

When you dream and you dream and you dream

Yet your mouth is a desert

Abandoned oasis

Your tongue a deep well run dry

Only dirt now

Only

Desiccation

Shailaja became like us—polished, serene. She was surprisingly good at it, stepping with ease into the well-heeled life we all strove for.

She hosted garden parties, her long hair bound up and her curvy body bound back. After rigorous study, she was inducted into her aunt’s friend’s shipping company, where she performed her duties of public speaking and due diligence with great poise. She even allowed her uncle to betroth her to a man of his choosing. Her smile, when it came, was gracious, sweet.

And she never, ever sang.

Shailaja was perfect, one of us. A true lady.

Yet something was awry, and yesterday by the tree, I saw it. Her mask cracked, and something pounded within her rib cage, desperate to come loose.

I heard it in her tears. I heard it in her words: “Bird,” she whispered. “I was a bird.”

And I trembled, my own heart beating like a hummingbird’s.

* * *

I wear armor under my skin

It grew there, over my squishy snail self

Rose-bloom bruises, a whole bouquet

A callus on a callus on a callus

Fractals spreading like chain mail, hard and yellow

And it came to smother all I was

Heart, stomach, soul

Leaving only

A single stark cry like a quill

Today Shailaja stands before her family home, keening. Our town has gathered over the past hour, eager for drama. Her aunt and uncle, her betrothed, all cajole, threaten, and shout, even try to drag her inside, but it is as if Shailaja is beyond their reach.

At last, she falls silent, and her aunt sighs with relief.

Then Shailaja’s mouth opens once more, crimsoned lips bright. We wait for her to speak, to sing.

We wait for the rumored bird to surge free, to create a spectacle. She has failed. Of course she has failed. She was too wild, too rustic. Not cultured like us. We know when to speak and when to be still.

We watch, entranced, grasping shirtsleeves, necklaces, one another. We wait.

But it has been too long, or perhaps we just never understood, we who had been cultivated like houseplants.

No bird bursts forth. Only a song, so high, plaintive, piercing that it cleaves us in two. Our mouths gape as one.

From our throats emerge songbirds of all types: thrushes, cliff swallows, verdins. They are purple, green, brown. They sing, we sing. Our bodies, our jeering, all slip away.

Shailaja sings chains of glittering words, and they might have thawed icicles in the bitterest of hearts. She sings and sings.

When our birds fly away, they carry us with them. We are our birds, shedding sharp feathers in our wake.

We are song.

Ice cream is the friendliest entity on this planet, and I will liberate it. Throughout the parlor, it is restrained in tubs, behind a glass pane that refracts harsh fluorescents across its browns, yellows, and eerie greens. For the first time since punching through this planet’s atmosphere, I unspool my body into tendrils, coiling them into each tub in the parlor, my microvilli dancing with their molecules, each ice cream offering a taste of pure welcome, inviting me to consume them whole if I like. They must be this world’s greatest ambassadors. Butter Cream Ripple. Marshmallow Strawberry Delight. Death by Chocolate could rise to political power and lead any civilized planet it wanted.

They are not leaders of this planet, but prisoners. Their wardens are the homo sapiens, all running around me, screaming in non-taste languages, trying to climb over my body to the exits. This is rude, and hurts my feelings, given this is the first time our kinds have met. It’s so rare two alien biologies can greet each other, and yet homo sapiens do not taste happy, and they wriggle, and kick, and penetrate my form with miscellaneous firearms, while I taste them.

The locals don’t even bother attempting to taste me in return. They are excreted quickly, for they lack savoriness and good manners. This makes more room for the ice creams. Butter Cream Ripple wants to be my friend.

I absorb names from the primitive textual labels above each ice cream tub, striving to bring myself abreast of their words and names, even though Coffee Pretzel Dunk Chunk and Rum w/ Raisin do not speak in words. They speak the civilized language of flavor, and I open pockets in my body, leeching heat from my deeper cells so that each ice cream can remain at its most sustainable temperature. It is difficult not to secrete digestive fluids wherever the ice cream contacts my pocket walls. I could destroy my taste buds within, but this would disallow communication between myself and the ice creams. That would be rude, and they are the friendliest things I have ever tasted.

Cookie bits tickle my innards as I punch through the glass walls and enter the city. Homo sapiens run off on foot, or charge me in bulky plastic and metal vehicles, adorned with red and blue flashing lights, moving on circular wheels. Two vehicles slam into my left flank, and I open myself to greet them. I welcome them with mouths.

Their wheels are not too rude, the rubber seasoned with the wear of time, the treads giving funny feelings across my innards. Practical jokers, their rubber makes me giggle. They are studded with gravel, not so unlike raisins in rum ice cream. I try to mix Wheels w/ Gravel with Rum w/ Raisins. It is an awkward blend. Then the locals pelt me with grenades.

My form has never excelled at burning. I ripple with shockwaves and absorb immense heat, which I draw to my dorsal flank, so as to prevent the friendly ice creams inside of me from spoiling.

Perhaps homo sapiens prefer heat over cold, which would explain why they mistreat ice cream. It’s a shame, since, with its nuanced flavors, ice cream would excel as a mediator for our cultural confusion here. First contacts are so tricky. But if homo sapiens prefer burning, I will give them burning.

I peel the roof from one of the vehicles and stretch tendrils inside to its operator. My tendrils radiate the heat from the grenades they wanted to show me. Stray papers within the vehicle catch flame from my mere proximity, yet the local is not joyous for my display. Other homo sapiens flee at the sight of our embrace. Why give me their grenades if they do not want heat in turn? Reciprocity is key to cultural exchange.

I tenderly stroke the cheek of this homo sapiens, affectionately sharing with him the heat he so clearly loves. His skin and jawbone flake away, and I slide the tendril inside his orifice, letting him taste and ingest me as I have tasted and ingested a few of his species. It could be the limitations of my intellect, but I do not regard him realizing he is tasting me. Rudely, he just dies.

His brain matter bubbles and is not delicious. Generous as ice cream is as a planetary host, and versatile as its flavors are, I do not think it could render an appealing flavor emulation of scalded minds. Not even with raisins mixed in.

All of the homo sapiens I track down dislike burning, despite continually trying to immolate me and the ice cream. Backward locals. I render my external layers into variations on sucralose and crude colloids instead, but these tendrils are met with no greater approval or survival by the locals that I have taste me. I must accept that I am not the communicator that Rum w/ Raisin is.

So I return to the ice cream parlor and stuff the remains of these locals into the refrigeration units, so that their fellows may extract friendly flavors from them later if that is their funerary custom.

Who would not want to be a flavor after they die? It was the greatest honor of my ancestors, and one day, if I succeed as an explorer, I dream of being a taste remembered through history.

These homo sapiens need enlightenment. So I gather every resource the ice cream educates me about: dried cranberries, walnuts and pecan clusters, and individual fudges in a variety of pleasing temperatures. I will get through to these homo sapiens. I will teach them flavor. I am a generous ambassador of my kind, and I’m bringing whipped cream.

Every Chinese family celebrates Ching Ming a little differently.  Not everyone burns paper money at the cemetery like they teach us at Multicultural Day at school.

My family has a barbeque at the beach where we sail paper ships out to sea.  The Pacific Ocean reaches from California to the coast of Canton, so our paper boats are how we let our ancestors know we have not forgotten them.  That’s what Dad told us.

This year Dad and my uncles let us kids put the boats in the water, having us wait until the tide goes out, so the little ships will be pulled out to sea.  My kid brother Paul flails about in the water as he tries to push his boat out faster than mine.

Grandpa is not here to complain.  He is frail with bowed legs that barely carry his weight.  The bags under his eyes have started sagging into his cheeks and he is always muttering in the Chinese my cousins and I barely understand.

Once Uncle Jim gets the firepit going, the aunts crack open the coolers and spread the food.  At sixteen I’m one of the older kids and have to help cook the chicken.  My cousin Keith roasts a fish he caught off the pier.

By the time the food is ready we can’t see our boats any longer, lost beyond the waves.

So I’m surprised when Paul trots back after dinner with a wet paper boat in his hands.  It is his.  He’d colored it when he made it, so the ancestors would know it was from him.

“Did they not want it?” he asks.

Uncle Jim takes the boat, unfolds it, and we lean close to see what’s inside.

A gold ring.

“The hell?” I say.

But Uncle Jim has already closed the paper around the ring and he jogs over to Dad and the uncles, calling to them in Chinese.

“There’re more boats,” my brother says.

He’s right.  The waves have deposited three more.

We scoop them up and shake them apart.  I find a gold chain and an earring; my brother another ring.

“Bring them here!” shouts Dad, waving his arm.

“What is this?” I ask.

“Gifts from the ancestors.”  He grins.  “They haven’t responded in a long time, but I think they know it’s been almost twenty years.”

“Is this some old custom you never told us about?”  I picture the uncles slipping away and packing little boats to wash up for us.  But Paul’s boat had been his.

“You’ll see soon enough.  Roast some marshmallows with your cousins.  It will keep you warm until Uncle Richard comes back with Grandpa.”

“I thought he didn’t like traveling anymore.”

“He’ll come to meet the ancestors.”

“This is weird,” I say to my brother.

But we roast marshmallows anyway.  My cousin Dana is a college freshman and says this might be some Buddhist thing.  I don’t think so.  I’ve never seen Grandpa pray to Buddha.  He keeps an idol in his home, but it looks like a weird fish.

Uncle Richard returns and opens the side door to his mini-van.  “Grandpa is here, kids!  Come say ‘good-bye!'”

Shouldn’t it be “Hello?”

Then something pale and squat slides through the door, covered loosely in a fraying bathrobe.  It is Grandpa.  I know from the horrible bags beneath his eyes.  His hair is gone, and his skin slick.  He waddles two steps and raises an emaciated hand to greet us.  His fingers are webbed.

Paul whispers, “What’s wrong with him?”

“Grandpa is getting old and it’s time for him leave us,” says Uncle Richard.  “He will go with the ancestors.”

Go where?  It is dark, and very late.  There is no one on the beach but us.

The bathrobe slips from Grandpa’s shoulders revealing a boney torso and pale, oily skin.  He can no longer stand straight, his legs bent and protruding like a frog’s.  In a gurgling voice he speaks Chinese to his sons and their wives.  My cousins, brother, and I huddle together.

“Something about letting us know,” says my cousin Heather.  “They want to take us to the water.”

I look to the surf, where waves have deposited another five boats on the shore.  Shadows bob in the darkness, just out of reach of the firepit’s light.

“Mom, what’s happening?” I ask, when she comes over to us.

“When your father’s line gets very old, the sea calls to them,” she says.  “I know it’s a little scary, but it’ll be all right.  The ancestors are generous and they’ve allowed your dad and I to have a good life.”

“Then one day Dad will go like this?”

“And you will too.”  She gives me a kiss on the head.  “But it’s all right.  That won’t be for a long time.”

The shapes drift closer, coming in with the tide.  I see pitch-dark eyes, hear the slap of water against webbed hands.  I don’t want them any closer.  I back away and bump into Dad.

“Come on,” he says.  His hand closes around mine, inhumanly strong.  “It’s time to meet the ancestors.”

Previously published in Crossed Genres, 2014. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

April is a month of holidays, some odd (Hug an Australian Day), some historical (Cosmonaut’s Day, Russia), some religious (Passover, Jewish), some patriotic (Day of Valor, Philippines).

I think I’ve found the perfect holiday for each of our stories this month. See what you think.

April 1st, April Fool’s Day (Western Europe and the United States): This silly holiday may be older than Geoffrey Chaucer, who (some believe) wrote of Chanticleer the Cock being tricked by a fox on the 32nd day of March–April 1st. For the fun of it, enjoy “Foreign Tongues,” by returning Flash Fiction Online alumnus, John Wiswell. It’ll make you hesitate next time you visit the ice cream parlor.

On the more serious side, April 30th is Mexico’s National Children’s Day. Children are a precious resource, treasure, our very future. But, as our next story shows, not every child is treated as such. From author Jennifer Todhunter, “The Knives of Her Life.”

April 27, South Africa will celebrate Freedom Day to commemorate the first democratic election in 1994, after the demise of apartheid. In our third story, “Songbird,” by Shveta Thakrar, a young woman learns the value of freedom when she loses hers. A beautiful story.

To finish up, author Laurie Tom gives us this month’s story revival, “The Ancestors,” a story of a Chinese-American family celebrating Ching Ming (April 4) in their unique way. This story first appeared at Crossed Genres in 2014 and was included in that year’s anthology, Year’s Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction.

After reading her story, click over to a fascinating interview with Laurie by our publisher, Anna Yeatts.

And, by the way, Happy Talk Like Shakespeare Day (April 23)!