Issue 87 December 2020 Flash Fiction Online December

I’m in Hell. That must be what this is. I can’t fathom a god who would possibly interpret this as heaven, crammed in this damned steamer trunk; me and twenty three other Wayang Kulit shadow puppets, entombed with the smell of ox hide and musty bamboo.

I dream of a life before this one. A life in which I spoke a language other than the one the Master speaks for me. A life in which I could move my own vulgar arms, speak my own profane will, make my own damning decisions. I’ve been here so long I can’t remember what I did to deserve damnation, but a shadow of that life tells me I do.

I can remember the freedom to speak and move and live. It’s embedded in my memory as if to torment me.

We’re traveling today, the trunk jouncing around in the back of an ancient flat-bed pickup, following a circuitous route from backwater village to backwater village. When we stop, the Master sets things up. He takes Kali out first and talks to her like a lover, caressing the hair that’s glued to her head, fixing her dress, touching her all over.

“I think we’ll perform Rama and Sinta tonight,” he might say to her. “You will be the lovely Sinta, of course. I’ll dress you in green and gold and red. Put bells in your hair.” He kisses her painted face.

Does he know what we are? Does he know of the fallen souls that inhabit his puppets?

Sometimes I think he does.

The rest of us stay where we are, stacked one atop the other, cushioned with dozens of colorful silk costumes — costumes that the audience will see only in silhouette, simple shadows of what we really are. We listen and wait for Master to set up his screen and position his lanterns. Only then does he take us out, but only those he needs. Sometimes five, sometimes twelve. Sometimes I wait weeks between the nights he chooses me, but every time he opens the trunks I hope for a glimpse of sky or stars. Otherwise I pass the hours and days praying. It’s fruitless, I know. I’ve long since spent every opportunity I had to redeem myself. But what else is there to do? Fret over the dark or the damp? Seethe over Bung Ok’s elbow jammed against my nose?

Bung can’t help it of course. Poor bastard. He’s no more capable of independent movement than I. Only at the Master’s bidding do we waggle our arms about and shiver and shake and make horrible war with one another behind the old water-stained silk screen, our shadows telling one of a hundred tales that the Master carries in his memory, all to the delight of villagers who might throw the Master a coin or two or feed him a supper of rice and vegetables.

The villagers see the same stories, endlessly repeated. I know them all by heart. I could shriek out my own lines if I but had a mouth to utter them.

But the Master speaks for me. For us all.

“Rama — my lover and lord — will come for me, oh, Rahwana the Evil One!” he says for Kali.

And I, dressed in spikes of bamboo that shoot out from my head like a devil’s halo, play Rahwana. Master laughs and holds me high and shakes my puppet body with terrible joy. “Rama! Bah!” the Master says for me. “Rama will die with my dagger in his heart, Little Sinta. And you will be my bride!”

Kali trembles and shrinks low on the screen while I tower over her, until Bung Ok comes dressed as Rama, the majestic prince of Thai fables. Rama shakes his sword, he commands me to be gone. But I will not. Rather Rahwana will not. Rather the Master will not. So Rama beats me with his sword. He hits me again and again, so hard sometimes that my bamboo frame shudders and aches.

One day he’ll break me. It has happened before. Then my pieces will be tossed into a box, there to wait until Master can fix me, until my ox hide flesh can be rejoined with my bamboo bones, and then I will speak again because my Master makes it so.

The truck is stopping.

Perhaps tonight we will perform Rama and Sinta, and I will be Rahwana. Perhaps tonight I will see the stars.

Originally published in Flash Fiction Online, December 2007. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

I’m standing in the school bathroom, peeling off a ghost, when the new girl walks in. She’s a mess, all running snot and smeared mascara, and I’ve got my hands full of wet, writhing pain. My other ghosts, each a discarded moment of loss or fear or heartbreak, press closer. All of them watching with hurt, hungry eyes.

You get used to it after a while. Sort of.

I step back so the girl can pass me, figuring she won’t notice. Mostly people don’t. But the ghost, already free on the left side, reaches out its slick, transparent hand and touches her. Maybe it’s that, the contact with a ghost so new, still attached, that does it.

She shivers, stumbles back, eyes gone wide.

We stare at each other. Me looking at her. Her looking at the ghosts.

“Wow,” she manages. Her voice catches on the word.

“You all right?” I ask.

“Sorry. Things are just a lot right now. Got a text from my Dad. He’s not supposed to know this number.” She gestures, vaguely, nervously, in my direction. “You?”

“Like you said. Things are a lot right now. Better not to hold onto stuff. I’m Brooke.”

“Ash.” She reaches out her hand, then pulls it back, tucking it into her pocket. “That’s a lot of, umm, stuff, you’re not holding.”

“Yeah, but once I get them off, I don’t notice so much.”

“Really?” She sounds wistful.

“Yeah.”

Ash’s eyes are still bright but she’s done crying. She glances at her phone, making a show of checking her email. When she looks at me again, she’s composed. She’s vivid and a little wild looking, her hair a garish rainbow of colors, her clothes all somber grays.

“Does it hurt?”

“You ever get a bad sunburn? The kind where the skin comes off in strips?”

“Sure.”

“It’s like that.”

She smiles, shy and mischievous and hopeful, and my stomach twists, that fluttering, anxious, wanting feeling.

“Can I help?” she asks.

And that’s how Ash and I become friends.

* * *

We’re in my basement, watching videos on my laptop. Ash is warm and close and too quiet, so I know she’s going to ask before she does.

It’s not the first time.

“You could teach me how,” she says.

The thing is, I don’t want to. I like that she cries. And yeah, that’s terrible, I know. But when I was six, Dad was in the hospital bed, made strange by monitors and tubes, when my mom sat me in her lap and showed me how to make my first ghost. I haven’t cried since. Things at home are calm, real calm, all the time. Ash is like a storm.

Maybe everyone’s drawn to what they fear.

“I miss my friends,” she says. “I miss my house. I even miss my dad. Everything. All the time. It hurts, Brooke.”

What do you say to that? How do I explain that it starts with the big things, but then you forget how to cope, until any pain, no matter how small, seems too much to take?

“They stand around my bed at night.” I nod up to the ghosts. “They get so close; I can’t even see the room. Just all these eyes, watching me.”

“They’re always watching you.”

“Yeah. That’s my point.” I’ve woken to the pressure of their eyes and found myself shaking. I’ve made ghosts out of that fear and sent them to join the crowd of watchers. And so it builds and builds and now Ash is grabbing my hand, wrapping it in her icy fingers.

“Please,” she says. “I need your help.”

She needs me.

“Where does it hurt?” I ask. “Where do you feel it most?”

She goes quiet, then her free hand flutters to her throat. I follow the motion, guiding her other hand there, and run our entwined fingertips over her neck, leaving goosebumps in our wake. Her breathing is sharp and her eyes are wide and she is so very close to me and my fingernails catch on the edge of her ghost.

“There. Feel it?” I run her fingertips over the seam.

“Yeah.”

“All you have to do is pull. Be gentle though. Don’t rip it.”

“You do it,” she says. “Help me.”

I hold her hand as she peels off the ghost. I help her tug it free. It has her face, its expression pained, locked in lonely grief, while Ash goes calm.

“It’s so easy,” she says.

One of my ghosts wraps its arms around hers. They cry together, heads bent close. Ash sits next to me, knees pulled to her chest, and I don’t know how to reach for her or what to say. She doesn’t need me anyway. The pain is gone.

The pain is standing right there, and now she’ll never heal.

“Let’s watch another show,” I say.

* * *

In daylight, it’s simple. They’re translucent, faded memories, easily ignored.

At night, there’s only ghosts and ghost and ghosts: fearful, desperate, weeping. All of them me. Me at seven with skinned knees and no one to call for. Me hiding, terrified, at ten.  Me, broken-hearted, from last week or last month or last year.

I could send today to join them.

I can feel the knot where the pain sits, in the pit of the stomach. Feel the edge of it, like a scab begging to be picked. I keep seeing Ash’s ghost, crying. I didn’t mean to leave her crying.

How many times have I left myself crying?

They press close, watching me with wounded eyes. The one that comforted Ash’s ghost touches my hand, wet and strange and familiar. I hurt. But so do they. I can’t unmake them, can’t turn them back to wounds. But there are other ways to comfort pain.

I take the littlest one, the six-year-old who’s still crying for her father, into my lap, and I whisper to her that it will be all right. I’ve got her. I’m here.

The Christmas card arrived late. It cost 599 rubles and played “Holly Jolly Christmas“ for thirteen seconds, until the “this yeeear” bit.

Merry CHRISTmas Jae

Pastor Ivanov says

“Jesus is the Reason, for the Season!!”

Your Father and I pray together every day

Come home soon

She meant well, but none of it rang true for me. I reflexively tore into the card to see the cheap piezo speaker and integrated circuit inside. Just overpriced electronic junk, accompanied by an ineffectual statement of faith.

I thought of Father’s ventilator and Mother next to it, praying in tongues. She was the child of American evangelicals, that rare missionary kid who never stopped believing.

I popped the lithium cell out of the card, dropped the rest in the bin, and rolled back to my workbench.

* * *

A month later, a birthday card plopped wordlessly through the mail slot. I looked up and shook my head. I paid a Sochi postman 4,000 rubles monthly to deliver to my private lab in a shallow cave outside city limits, all for a couple belated greeting cards. I wiped the tip of my soldering iron with a wet sponge and set it in its stand.

Happy Birthday Jae

Pastor Ivanov is right

“Christ is our Great Physician!”

Your Father and I miss you

You should come home

None of her claims were true—most falsifiably, the bit about my father. Vegetables can’t miss.

* * *

The Moscow Hospital’s legal representative had spoken to us in Russian. “We must consider his quality of life. What is the reason for not letting go? Is it for him or is it for yourselves?”

It was the first time I’d ever seen my mother react in anger. She slapped him across the face, stared for a moment with a heaving chest, and stormed out. The man didn’t blink. He turned to me and said, “This doesn’t need to be a bilateral decision.”

My father lay between us, breathing in perfect shifts. Everything was there—all the same body parts and grey matter as six months ago—just not doing its job. Mother firmly held that he was alive and aware, simply unable to connect his consciousness to his motor functions.

I didn’t know what to think, other than that I missed his voice.

“We have a duty,” the representative continued, “to dedicate our limited resources to viable cases. We’d like to avoid a legal battle, but are prepared to make this decision for you, if necessary.”

“Viable cases?” I repeated in Russian. I stared at my father. Who could separate vegetable from viable? It was outside my purview, even as a medtech engineer. I designed machines; I didn’t write the ethical rules surrounding them.

I sat down and held Father’s hand. He smelled bad up close, months of cursory sponge baths piling up. The representative made me confirm that I understood the situation and turned for the door. I mumbled an apology for Mother as he left.

I sat there for hours knowing I couldn’t make this decision. There had to be another way. I went downstairs and got a taxi to the airport.

* * *

It was morning, near the end of winter, when the machine on my workbench started to pump and writhe and beep. I encased its frail innards in chrome and emerged from the cave.

I stalked the Caucasus Mountains with a shotgun folded over my forearm until I found a grand old boar nosing for mushrooms under a leafless Georgian oak. I shot it in the head and dragged the heavy corpse back to my lab, leaving a bloody trail in the snow behind me.

* * *

Atop the boar’s headless shoulders, the silver machine perched shakily. For testing purposes, biointegration was easier without worrying about superfluous body parts. The real thing would take a little longer, but Father would keep his head, wearing the machine as a backpack. He’d walk out of the hospital on his own two feet. If he was aware, as Mother claimed, he’d enjoy his newfound mobility: picnics and real baths and neighborhood strolls.

The autoaccelerometric compensators kept the top-heavy beast balanced on its hooves. Once I got the heart rate right, its body warmed. Its lungs expanded and contracted in timely shifts.

The motor functions interfaced somewhat less perfectly. Its legs struggled to move conjunctively, and the thing fell over a hundred times throughout the night. And a hundred more the next morning, and the next evening.

But slowly, microadjustment after microadjustment, it became viable. When it could follow my laser pointer across the length of the lab without tripping over itself, I switched it off.

It would forever be a work in progress, a lifetime of small tweaks—but what wasn’t? It worked. That was what mattered. I was ready to go home.

 * * * 

I woke on the cold floor, cheek wet from drool, to the sound of a snowmobile engine. I looked immediately to the prone beast by the door.

I saw it with fresh eyes, and it was undeniably grotesque. The harsh contrast between animal and machine, the blood-stained neck, the limp body waiting to be artificially awakened. And the worst part was, even with all this work, its functionality ended at the neck. I wouldn’t hear my father’s voice.

Maybe one day, though. I’d at least bought us time.

I approached the boar and turned it on. As it stood to attention, it released a smell, something like methane and death. Nausea bubbled in my throat and I doubled over, dry heaving.

That body was not alive.

Not at all. I was just forcing air into its lungs.

I heaved again, then gathered myself, wiping spittle from my mouth. There was an envelope on the floor behind the boar.

Jae

Pastor Ivanov says

“Sometimes love means giving up control”

I’ve let your Father go.

You should come home now

I switched the boar off and it sank to the floor without protest.

This time, everything Mother said was true.