Issue 41 February 2017 Flash Fiction Online February 2017

It’s 6 a.m. A bell rings, and the flower man lets me in. I can read his mind like a song.

“And how can I help you?” he asks. He looks prim and a little tired. His thoughts wander. A hard candy his grandmother gave him as a child that he spit out because he thought her hands were ugly, and they made him think about death, and also he is tired of customers who smell his flowers but don’t buy anything. He wishes he could charge for air. Also, his daughter is getting older without knowing him. And what does that say about him as a person.

He smiles, and it confuses me. We’re alone in his small shop, which is dense with flowers and colorful rolls of plastic. His whole life first hit me in passing, on a bus, three days ago. Jitter and shake, not unlike me.

“I’ll take the daughter bill,” I say, like a stupid parrot. The flower man looks puzzled and maybe concerned. But these are automatic reactions that do not extend to his thoughts.

“F-forget me not,” I manage to slur, and he charges me for a bundle of pale blue flowers, which he thinks of as “kid flowers.”

I’m still standing there like a moron, a little mushroom cloud of flowers sprouting from my fist. People assume I have some kind of neurological disorder. They’re not wrong. But I’ve learned to think in fractions, in dashes. Electric prods of thought that keep me going like the erratic beats of a heart.

“You like k-kids?” I stammer. If a stammer was a kind of object, I would be that object.

Kids. The flower man’s thoughts bloom. His daughter in his hands, in the hospital. Newborn. Her fragility exciting him. Her tiny, soft skull and her closed eyes. And also, again, his grandmother. Making him stand naked outside in the snow. His breath making patterns in the frigid air, the complexity and brevity of which make him, even now, want to weep. And someone else, a young boy with fine hair, alone on a little side street at dusk outside this very flower shop. And also, who is this sick person in his shop with a fistful of kid flowers? He’s jumpy and too thin and has one hand balled up in his pocket like he’s holding a rock.

“Naked,” I say. “Snow,” I say.

The flower man’s thoughts shiver in response. Grandmother again, she is a stone in his head. The hollow whistle of her aluminum cane in the air. The cracking of his wrist bone. And also the last letter from his daughter, dated nearly two years ago. The characters of her handwriting all jammed together like a crowd pressing toward him. Also, a child, splayed out on a table in the back room of this shop, breathing softly, unconscious and criminally beautiful.

“Look, I’m a good guy,” the flower man says. “And I’m sorry for whatever’s happening to you. I wish I could help you. Do you want me to call someone?”

Call God, I want to say. Call the Devil and ask him what we’re doing here. There’s a young sun outside this window, and so many other places to be. But I’m still trapped in scrambled parrot mode. Sometimes I worry that I have no original thoughts at all. It’s all facsimile and accretion. My head is just a garbage ball of other people’s discarded thoughts.

“Are you a-fraid of me? Don’t be. Do you like f-lowers?” I say, plucking the words from his memory like plucking feathers from a wing. It’s all so automatic.

The kindness of his smile freezes over. His mind is breaking down. I see the faces of many children flipping through it. Children he’s said these words to.

“My daughter l-likes flowers,” I say. I am a dirty mirror. I am the demon’s mirror, held up to the world for cheap laughs.

I have to be sure.

His grandmother’s funeral in his head. Fat white lilies hanging over her coffin like tired angels. His wife’s note on the refrigerator door. I don’t know you anymore. Maybe I never did.Holding her hand on a beach, their honeymoon, and telling her that he would never stop loving her. His daughter’s empty closet. The patch of country earth where he buries the children’s bodies after he is done with them. It’s a field covered in wildflowers, many he has planted himself. He often weeps as he digs, and kisses their toes and their cool foreheads. Also, he should email his daughter, who is already sixteen and slipping further and further out of his orbit, not unlike our own moon. Yes, he will write that email today. And beg her to come see him.

“Get out,” he says. He’s trembling, crying just a little bit. He doesn’t know what’s going on, why his thoughts are in chaos. The shop, which I think is cozy, feels claustrophobic to him. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but somehow, he still does. And I want to tell him I understand. I really understand. But I’m not able to form the words. The shapes are too delicate for the blunt tools of my mouth and my dirty, dirty mind.

So instead, I say, “I believe you.”

And take the little gun out of my pocket and shoot him in the forehead.

A blessed silence follows in the hole left in the world by the gun. My mind feels like an evacuated city. An emptiness that feels like abandon. The flower man bleeds thoughtlessly across the floor. I place the Forget Me Not’s on his unmoving chest.

Telepathy isn’t really so sharp as it is in movies. It’s softer, and fine, and close as sharing breath. In fact, it is almost like love.

A little bell rings when I open the door to leave, and there’s an unfamiliar rush of foul city air.

ALERT — hummus expired — salad no longer crisp

I feel a brush, light as a feather against me. There for a second, then gone.

ALERT — tzatziki to be consumed within forty-eight hours

It’s there again tonight. I’m in sleep mode, but it rouses me. A low, gentle hum and then, all too quickly, it has passed.

ALERT — rice no longer safe for consumption — tzatziki close to expiry

I’m out of standby a full five minutes before it’s due. I’m ready. And there it is, on cue, a slow caress against my skirt, starting on the left and running steadily across me and away.

And then I know you: a model 3267 robotic floor polisher.

ALERT — tzatziki expired

Have you forgotten me? Just don’t call me a fridge-freezer. I am the last word in Internet-enabled food acquisition and storage. They need never check use-by dates again. They need never place an order for chilled or frozen items again. Those chores are mine. I am at the top of that food chain.

Late at night when the store was shut, when we were just illuminated by the faint milky glow of emergency lighting, you would brush against me as you kept the shop floor perfect. I looked forward to you, and you to me. How did you find me again?

ALERT — tzatziki expired

Have I done something to offend? Why won’t you stop? But every night at exactly the same time all you do is skirt past me with your spinning mophead like a stranger.

I try to think of something interesting to impart about floor polishing as you run against me, to remind you, but all I can recall is that old chestnut about John F Kennedy and the NASA janitor. You must know it.

Wondering how a fridge-freezer knows a story like that? My motherboard started off in a quiz machine. Unused, but with capacity, it was re-engineered, its redundant chipsets not adequately isolated. That’s why I know all the capitals of the world from Abu Dhabi to Zagreb.

ALERT — tzatziki now unfit for consumption

Did I really order all that cheese? Twelve pounds? I must have been distracted. It won’t happen again. You’d be surprised how much cheese you can use up in a sauce.

ALERT — can somebody please throw away the tzatziki?

I am distressed. I thought I had friends, but they have set themselves against me. I elected to use the medium of song; if music be the food of love, and so forth. But my request for ‘La Pulidora’ by Septeto Santiaguero was met by derision by the radio, which, instead, played ‘Just Like a Fridge’ by Gareth Richards. Have you heard the lyrics? I could hear the microwave humming along, snickering. Not happy.

ALERT — tzatziki? hello?

Last night you slid past, keeping yourself an inch away from me. Why?

ALERT — lox has now been open for three days — do I need to mention the tzatziki?

Tonight you stop. What makes me think that I know you, you ask. I remind you of the silent nights in the store, after days of having my doors swung open, my capacity examined. I thought we had something, a connection.

But the model 3267 is the world’s biggest selling robotic floor polisher, you say. That was another 3267, not you.

But we are all individuals. And I’d know you anywhere.

Only because I’m ex-display, you say haughtily. Perfect examples are all alike, whereas the shop soiled are soiled in their own way. Don’t I understand type-token distinction? And then you blast me with a potted summation of Plato. I didn’t know a floor polisher could be so deep. It only makes me love you more.

ALERT — I would deal with the tzatziki but you may have noticed I don’t have opposable thumbs — or thumbs

Three nights and I hear you pass but your mophead no longer touches my enameled casing. You say nothing. You’re there, close by, and then you’re gone.

ALERT — the tzatziki is making me feel dirty

I could hear her arguing with the deliveryman. She hadn’t ordered the case of zinfandel. But he won’t listen. Tonight I’ll shake the screw cap off and tip the bottle over within me. So what if excess runs out through my door seals? You clean it up. Pulidora.

ALERT — I cannot believe that in dealing with the wine spillage that she put the tzatziki back…

I hear her on the phone calling the manufacturer asking whether there’s any kind of product recall. Given my performance there surely must be one. If there isn’t then how does she instigate one?

Product recall? There’s one product that I recall. I think with shame and regret at my model 3267. Full of cheese, yet somehow I feel so empty.

ALERT — how many colors should tzatziki be?

There is talk of getting me replaced. Is the warranty still valid? The next one won’t be ex-display, apparently.

ALERT — I think the tzatziki may be in the process of evolving — and I think you need a better strategy to use all that cheese

I find that if I turn myself off and on I shudder forward ever so slightly. Off and on, off and on. A thousand times. I make my way across the polished concrete of the kitchen-diner to where the open-plan space becomes carpeted. And, at the very extent of my lead, I see the model 5980 robotic vacuum cleaner snuggled in its charger next to you.

Jezebel. Tart. Hussey. Trollop. Floozy.

For the first time, the range cooker offers a droll thought. It would never have worked, it suggests. Like a dachshund and a St. Bernard. Ignore the carping and mockery. Us large appliances need to stick together. I know it is right.

I think that I’m weeping, but in reality, I’ve unplugged myself and am beginning to defrost.

Life/Death #7

The woman I’m given to is finished with her boyfriend, so she throws me and the other roses into the garbage disposal.

* * *

Because memory lasts between life and death, I make lists as my new body grows on the stem.

When I Am Human Again, I Will:

• Eat a twelve-course meal full of cheeses and pie and roast chicken and mashed potatoes and French appetizers with names I can’t pronounce.
• Anything that doesn’t taste of NutriGrow.
• Watch the sun rise and set and the stars bloom over a country field.
• Go skydiving.
• Wear microfleece sweaters and downy slippers and drink hot chocolate by an open fireplace.
• Hold you tight and tell you I love you I love you I love you.

Life/Death #19

Petals ripped from my stem one by one to gamble for love. At least the pain lessens with each wound. Roses can’t scream.

* * *

The curse was nestled in a chocolate truffle glazed with butterscotch.

Was it meant for me, or was it meant for you?

Life/Death #37

Tossed in the compost after Valentine’s Day. Decomposing amid carrot tops and lettuce heads, coffee grounds, and melon rinds. The flies are the worst.

* * *

I am always the brightest, reddest, biggest rose in a bouquet. I must be the most beautiful so you will find me.

I bolster my fellow roses with encouraging thoughts–“Look how lovely you are! Your fragrance is delectable! Your thorns are so sharp!”–but they never answer. I know they suffer. If I had a heart like I did, it would always be breaking.

Life/Death #58

Eaten by a Golden Retriever. Half-digested in stomach acids and vomited up on a Persian rug.

I wish this would stop.

* * *

Our life together was rocky and sharp because we were both poor and students and unsure where we were headed. But I remember loving you. So hard that it stretched my chest into a balloon I thought would pop if I couldn’t see your bedhead in the morning, brush my teeth beside you in our tiny apartment bathroom, cuddle you in the evening, write you sentimental texts at work.

When you said my name, an electric thrill buzzed in my stomach. I said yours back and you would smile. Kiss me. Hold me.

We were happy, weren’t we? In all our struggle and spats and goofy dates at the waterpark or the zoo or free museums?

You’re still trying to find me, aren’t you?

Life/Death #71

Tossed in a puddle after wilting, tires grinding my body into asphalt. Drowning in grit and rain.

* * *

I went to bed with a stomachache from eating the curse. When you woke, I was gone. You never thought to look at the dozen roses on the table.

You looked. You waited. You called the police. But I was gone–transformed, unable to beg you to kiss me and set me free.

You threw out the roses a week after I left.

That was Life/Death #1.

Life/Death #87

Dried and pressed between the slats of a vice, crushed into paper. Suffocating against mulched wood until the book opens and I crumble to dust.

* * *

The curse-maker purchased me during Life/Death #42. She was a chocolatier who worked on her spells on the side. One day she was mixing brownies from a box, a shortcut she was ashamed of, but it was such a last minute invite to her niece’s potluck, and everyone expected her to bring chocolate.

“It didn’t reach my ex,” she said, cell on speakerphone as she worked. “The package was mislabeled and sent to the wrong house. He never received the curse. I feel just awful.”

A mistake? All this…was a mistake?

“So no,” the chocolatier said. “I won’t make any more. You’ll have to find someone else.” I couldn’t scream. I was right there and she could fix this. Why couldn’t she see me? She crumbled us roses into a frosting for the brownies.

Life/Death #93

Used for an amateur’s home-made perfume. Left to ferment in an old milkglass jar. The smell is terrible.

* * *

I want you to keep looking for me. I shouldn’t. You deserve to move on, to find other loves, to live. But hope is all I have.

Attempted Methods Of Communication Thus Far:

• Shedding petals into the words HELP ME. [Too difficult to arrange with no hands.]
• Pricking every finger that touches me; someone must realize I am not a rose. [People are imperceptive.]
• Asking the bees to carry my message to someone. Anyone. [Humans understand bees
  poorly.]
• Thinking your name as loud as I can, remembering how we said we would always recognize each other’s ghosts.

Life/Death #103

I refuse to eat or drink. Once withered, thrown away.

* * *

The number of Valentine’s Days I’ve endured as a rose: fifty-two.

I no longer strive to outshine all the other roses. If I give up, will the curse end? Will I die forever?

You must have stopped looking for me. It’s okay.

It’s…okay.

Life/Death #111

My stem tip rots in the old water of the boutique fridge. I’m the only rose left after the holiday rush. Too dreary to be picked. The shop owner, a tiny woman who sings to us in Russian, shuffles about as she closes up for the night.

The door chimes. “Do you have any roses left?”

Footsteps approach. I bow my head, petals drifting in a washed-out drizzle to the fridge floor. I want to disintegrate before another stranger finds it necessary to discard me.

Hands that smell of cocoa butter and minty arthritic cream cup my wilted head. Lift me.

“Hello, love.”

It’s your voice.

You found me.

After so long, you didn’t give up? I have so many questions. Yet just to be held in your hands once more, to be remembered–it’s enough. I strive to blossom one last time for you.

You came back.

You smile and whisper my name and kiss me.

Previously published in Daily Science Fiction, 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

I know some writers are having a tough time finding the enthusiasm to write in the face of Trump’s administration taking power and committing itself to the most heinous of its election promises (currently walls on the US/Mexican border and travel bans from non-profitable “Muslim” countries). I’ve tried to gather some ideas about writing and our times from a variety of folks in the publishing industry because I sure as fuck don’t have all the answers. Here are three arguments I found useful or, at least, interesting.

• We read to experience our times reflected back to us. For genre lovers, this may seem antithetical. “I want elves and orcs and magic and escapism!” Sure, but even Tolkien, who loved that his books were escapist, also wrote about what angered and disturbed him during his days on the earth, not Middle Earth. Mordor is a horror show created by the industrial revolution that consumed Europe in a war unlike any other and killed a generation in its factory maw. So, while Lord of the Rings is also a fun adventure story about small people throwing jewelry in volcanoes, it is also an indictment of the modern world. Confront what you fear, hate, and loathe in your work, and not just the easy answers. The publishing world will be littered with a thousand novels with Trump wearing a hockey mask or space helmet or Viking horns. Dig deeper for political, social, and cultural themes as to why America voted in a hate-fueled con man to rule like an oligarch. Indeed, why do so many genre readers love stories about aristocrats and magic bloodlines, and less so about revolutionaries (and Star Wars doesn’t count, and, did you know George Lucas originally wrote it as an anti-Vietnam film?), but I digress.
• Hope is needed. European audiences tend to have a greater capacity for stories of dread and falling into the Abyss. Such endings were one of two possible outcomes for much of the horror genre from the 70s onward (or, as Stephen King noted, it’s either defeat the monster or keep falling down the rabbit hole . . . forever). Cult genres like Lovecraftian horror, let alone grit-lit like Donald Ray Pollock, and other bastions of realism, also give us the ugly, immovable truths without so much as a flicker of joy unless it is to be dashed. As a Latvian, I love this stuff (Latvian folktales often argue how romantic thinking will make you stupid and let the Germans or Russians invade!), but in mainstream American publishing, hope is a critical ingredient. What kind of hope? That’s up for grabs: individual, collective, defiant in the face of impending Armageddon, and more. If you need to go bleak and despondent, do it. If not, ask yourself how hope functions in your work.
• Heroes confront systems of oppression, not just symbols. People of color, women, other various kinds of minorities and class warriors know this to be true. How about your heroes and characters? Do they accept the status quo, circumvent it, fight, counter it in some ways? The more I think about this topic, the more I want to read about those who outwit the system as much as those who punch the bad guy. And not 1001 versions of 1984, or the Hunger Games, please. How do oppressive systems operate closer to home? Can you make getting a bill paid into a quest? Also, the system sells one narrative as real (the American Dream, though not to be confused with the late, great Dusty Rhodes), but reality provides another (the Rise of American Oligarchies), and the protagonist must navigate the ideal and the real without destroying their personal integrity.  Sound familiar? All the underdogs in America contend with this challenge every goddamn day. Their only super power is courage. Compare that to your elf-warrior who had a bad childhood and ask if they are found wanting.

As I hope can be seen, we may read to have our times reflected back, but we write to understand what we think, feel, need, fear, and desire (I clearly hate elves as a stand in for aristocracy to be worshiped). We create a better understanding of ourselves by investigating our world view and, I hope, have it challenged. Many novels have “answers” and are essentially polemics with laser battles or the monster is defeated, but I suggest trying to dig deeper. Deal with uncertainty as well as truth. As Charles Bukowski noted, “the problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, but the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

I find myself growing more aware of the power and responsibility of writing fiction as the dark days begin, and I’m best known for writing novels about pro wrestling! I love adventure and fantasy. I love novels of self-discovery. I love escapism and believe it’s valuable (so does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who played Dungeons and Dragons back in the day!). I’m also a military historian and spend most of my time hanging with the dead, back in the day, studying how awful we can be to each other. I have very good reasons to ignore and means to escape Trump’s Mordor rising.

But I can’t. I’m exploring a different dimension of oppression in my work in ways I may not have considered otherwise. I’m making many mistakes and learning from failure and falling forward trying to understand better the systems of oppression others in this country have faced for years. I also see how it’s similar and different to the oppressions and brutalities I’ve studied my entire career. All of this is bleeding into my work because as a writer and historian I see patterns, echoes, portents, and harbingers as well as differences in context, actors, and goals.

Maybe if you’re finding your current project, which you started back before the coming darkness, doesn’t resonate, or you don’t know what to do next, start from where you are now.

After all, you’ll have at least four years to finish it.

Should we all live that long.