Issue 53 February 2018 Flash Fiction Online February 2018

We needed groceries, so we pawned my sister’s leg. Not her leg, but the prosthetic with a steel pylon tibia and detachable foam foot that once belonged to her father, Royce. Royce is also the name of the leg. The leg now hangs above compression socks, enema bulbs, and breast pumps in the medical supply aisle at Kotov’s Pawn.

Pawning the prosthetic was Mom’s idea. She held Jersey’s bucking torso while I pried the leg from her panicked grip. We then spent two days licking our wounds in the empty tool shed while Jersey ripped through the house like a mongoose on speed: smashing windows, punching mirrors, drilling holes in the drywall with a curtain rod. Later she refused to look at us, pulling a curtain of black hair across her face with bruised and bloodied hands.

After buying groceries, Mom handed us the leftover money we made from Royce. Not Royce the father, but Royce the prosthetic leg. The leg was all Jersey had left of her father; she didn’t want to, but she took the money. I’m saving my money for bus fare to an amusement park called Sunshine Palisades. Jersey says Sunshine Palisades sounds like a place where children are turned into donkeys and forced to work in meatpacking plants.

Carameled meatballs and geriatric cage fights are just some of the attractions touted in the Sunshine Palisades tri-fold. I keep the tri-fold between a picture of Moses and a list of Ten Commandments in the back of Mom’s Bible. The Bible’s cover is furred with fungus, its pages falling out like feathers as if it were a living, breathing thing. Mom’s read the thing twice and has placed it in the bathroom with high hopes that Jersey and I will start reading it. I refuse to read it even though “Honor thy father and thy mother” is one of the commandments. There should be a commandment that says, “Thou shall not abandon thy wife and child.”

I’m not a child anymore; I’m fourteen. Fourteen is old enough to know that you can’t save money for Sunshine Palisades when you’re spending every red penny in the foyer of Kotov’s. Kotov’s foyer is a gauntlet of temptation: swirling lights, smoky two-way mirrors, coin-operated games. The games are rigged so that you can never grab a $100 bill in Tycoon Typhoon or pull out a stuffed mongoose with the Claw of Chance. And chances are the chocolates in the plastic eggs will turn to dust when their shells are cracked open.

I open the Bible, pull out the Sunshine Palisades tri-fold, and stare at the pictures. I picture myself in the front car of the roller coaster, arms up, eyes wide with joy. Mom’s green eye peers through the bathroom door, through the hole where the brass knobs had been before they were pawned, her cheek pinched in a smile. She smiles because she thinks I’m reading the Bible. I’m not reading the Bible; I’m thinking that I’ll never make it to Sunshine Palisades, the place that may or may not turn children into donkeys, and I’m also thinking about Royce. Royce the father and Royce the prosthetic leg. The Royces.

Royce the prosthetic leg used to lie in bed between Jersey and me like a third person, the heel resting upon the pillow as a bald head. Jersey would turn her head in her sleep to suck on Royce’s foam toes. Now, without Royce to separate us, if our toes touch at night, Jersey heaves a hissing sort of sigh before pushing my foot away.

We were pushed away by our fathers. Jersey’s father, Royce, snapped off the television when she was three, hobbled out the door on his one good leg, and never came back. I always thought Royce the father would come back for Royce the prosthetic leg, and for Jersey. But Jersey says she doesn’t care anymore about the Royces. Not Royce the leg, not Royce the father.

My father, who is not Royce, is someone I know nearly nothing about. Nothing but two shreds of information—he had copper red eyes and he may or may not have worked at Kotov’s Pawn—not nearly enough detail to stitch together a picture of the truth.

Truth is, I play the coin-operated games in Kotov’s foyer to catch the copper red eyes of a man who may or may not be standing behind the smoky two-way mirrors, and who may or may not actually be my father. My father might not even work at Kotov’s Pawn. He might work as a supervisor in a meatpacking plant, in a place that’s just a bus ride away, in a town called Sunshine Palisades, a town with an amusement park name.

I don’t know my father’s name. For all I know his name could be Moses. But names don’t matter, Mom says. Fathers don’t matter. What matters is that we have food to eat and a mattress to sleep.

Jersey sleeps beside me, her lips pushing in and out like a suckling child. I’m not a child; I’m fourteen. Fourteen is old enough to know that your sister’s prosthetic leg cannot be your father. Fathers are not made of steel and foam, but are living breathing things made of flesh, bone, and hair. Jersey’s black hair covers her face like a closed curtain. The curtains were among the first things we sold to Kotov’s Pawn. Kotov’s will buy nearly anything, even breast pumps and enema bulbs and antique Bibles with loose, yellow pages, but they can’t buy memories. Memories are stories which cannot be taken, stories you can tell yourself over and over again just as easily as flipping through a tri-fold’s glossy photos. I have no photos of my father, no memories, no stories, no name, just eyes like red coins staring back at me in the smoky two-way mirror—two copper pennies—worth next to nothing.

Previously published in Fjords Review (online), January 2015. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Over the course of the past ten years we’ve done quite a few themed issues.

Often magazines or anthologies will have themes, and often they call for submissions of stories with certain themes. We don’t, really. At most we have a separate submission category for Seasonal submissions–stories that might fit a particular holiday. But we don’t receive many Seasonal stories, and it’s a struggle to put together enough great stories for, say, Christmas, that we have little to no desire to specifically ask for themed submissions for themed issues.

But often themes happen organically.

We’ll suddenly find ourselves in possession of a handful of great stories that would be perfect for the hijinks of April Fools’, or the reverence of Mother’s or Father’s Day. We’ve done Christmas issues, horror issues, science fiction issues, fantasy issues, romance issues. (I do, however, find myself sadly lacking enough great stories to put together a cowboy issue. Wouldn’t that be swell?)

But organically themed issues don’t always happen, which means more often than not I’m taking a list of otherwise unrelated stories and figuring out some connecting thread that will make excellent fodder for this monthly introduction. Sometimes that’s a challenge–which is when Anna is especially grateful that she doesn’t have to do it.

Sometimes it’s easy.

This month it was easy.

When authors submit to Flash Fiction Online, they submit in one of eight genre categories: Fantasy and Slipstream, Science Fiction, Horror, Mainstream, Literary, Humor, Seasonal, and Other (for stories that don’t seem to fit any of the above). In all of these, I have a high expectation for what I describe as “sparkly” writing. In other words, stories with prose that whispers of a strong background in excellent literature.

That kind of prose tells me the author reads great works, reads poetry, reads current literary styles rather than relying solely on the outdated modus operandi of the pre-20th century classics. That kind of prose tells me the author has a well-developed sense of rhythm and style, voice and sentence construction. That kind of great writing can’t be faked by constant scouring of the thesaurus for lofty words or by trying to mimic what is thought to be intelligent-sounding sentence construction. It can only happen when a writer has immersed himself in so much great literature that it can’t help but ooze out his writerly pores and show up naturally at the tip of his pen.

I will admit that FFO has a soft spot for science fiction and fantasy, but we often see the best prose from authors who submit in our Literary or Mainstream categories. And the science fiction and fantasy authors who we most often publish are those who write great sci-fi/fantasy stories with a flair for the literary.

These are authors whose heroes include Ray Bradbury and Patricia McKillip, because damn, those two know how to write prose! (Knew, in the case of Bradbury. Sadly, he passed away in 2012. He was 92, so I suppose that’s to be expected. Still…)

This month’s stories all blew me away with the power of their prose, combined with powerful storytelling. And although one of them was submitted in our Fantasy and Slipstream category, it stands up well against any literary story I’ve ever read–and I’ve read a healthy number.

So sit back and let these beautiful words bounce around inside your head. You’ll be better for it, I promise. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll help make you a better writer.

The day after the Russians launch their satellite into space, Jacqueline and I skip school and hide in her attic. We spend hours looking through all the junk her mother keeps up here, chew Turkish taffy and cherry lumps until we feel sick, and tell each other all of the worst jokes we know—including the ones Frank learned when he was in the army and made me and Martin swear up and down we’d never repeat to anyone before he told them to us. Of course, I tell them to Jacqueline anyways, and the sound of her laugh is like a tickling feather until I can’t help but laugh too.

“Ssh, ssh!” she whispers, afraid that someone’ll hear us, but I can’t stop, and finally she claps her cherry-scented hand over my mouth to muffle the sound. It’s as if the feeling of it steals all of the air from my body all at once, and for a moment, as we lay still in the hushed, sunlit attic, her fingers warm against my lips, there’s nothing else to the world but this lack of space between us. If the Soviets drop an atom bomb right now, our whole town will disappear, and we’ll still be right here, Jacqueline and Stella and a bag of cherry lumps.

“Stella Elaine Collins,” Jacqueline says, sitting up and shaking her head at me.  I blink and sit up too, surprised by my own foolishness. If the Soviets really do drop a bomb, we’ll be very, very dead. Besides, I don’t want to think about that now. That’s the whole reason we’re not at school, the whole reason we’re eating candy in the attic and not discussing Shakespeare in some windowless classroom. The Sputnik launch and the Soviets are all anyone can talk about, and we don’t want to talk about it.

“Jacqueline Jane Bryant,” I say, and she wrinkles her nose at me. She hates her middle name—apparently it’s ‘plain’ and the two Js are ‘ridiculous.’ But I like it.

“If Margaret Collins knew the sort of jokes her daughter’s been telling,” she says, “she’d wash out your mouth with soap.”

“And if Dianne Bryant knew the sort of jokes I’ve been telling, she’d never let me near you again,” I say.

“Which would be tragic, of course.”

“Of course.”

Jacqueline grins and pops a piece of taffy into her mouth. Talking around it, she says, “I still can’t believe Frank taught you those.”

“Martin begged him for weeks,” I say, reaching for a piece of taffy—not because I want one, but because I don’t know what else to do with my hands. My brother Martin is just two years older than me, eighteen now, but my brother Frank was grown when Martin was still knobbly-kneed and I was missing my two front teeth. Martin worshipped him back then, of course: his strong, clever, funny older brother. Sometimes I think he still does, at least a little.

“Martin,” Jacqueline repeats, smiling that smile, that one I’m not so sure I like. “Martin’s grown up since he went to college, don’t you think?”

I shrug. “He still seems like Martin to me.” That’s not quite true—he’s certainly not knobbly-kneed anymore. But something about her tone of voice makes me want to be belligerent on purpose, as though I’m talking to my mother and not my best friend.

“He doesn’t call me Jackie anymore,” she says, and I swear she’s not really talking to me, but someone invisible standing behind me, someone who exists only in her own thoughts. “And he looks so much older now, with his shorter hair …”

I twist the waxy taffy paper in my fingers and try to think of something to say. Jacqueline never used to talk about Martin like this. She never used to talk about anyone like this, and now it seems to slip into almost every conversation we have: little things about Martin, about celebrities in magazines, about the boys at school.

Jacqueline doesn’t want to talk about bombs. I don’t want to talk about boys. I guess we’re both avoiding the things we think might crush us.

“Do you think he likes me?” she says, and I close my eyes and try to find my way back to childhood, back to blue skies that didn’t threaten to crack open at any moment, back to Martin teasing Jackie and her saying that she hated him, back to a time when cherry candy tasted like summer instead of all the things I’m not allowed to want.

“Do you think a bomb is really coming?” I say, instead of answering, and I can feel her frown even if I can’t see it.

I’m expecting her to say once again that she doesn’t want to talk about it, but when she answers, her voice is summer-breeze-soft, violet-petals-soft, and her answer is almost, almost, almost what I want it to be.

“I don’t know, Stella,” she says, quiet. “Do you?”

“What would you do,” I say, because I have no answers today, only questions, “if you knew it was going to, tomorrow? What would you do today?”

There’s a smile in her voice when she says, “Go see An Affair to Remember even though my mother thinks it’s scandalous … Wear a short red skirt even though my mother thinks it’s scandalous. Eat a whole chocolate cake all by myself. Jump into the downtown swimming pool in nothing but my nightgown.” She pauses. “Kiss someone.” My stomach twists. “What would you do, Stella?”

It’s so quiet here, quiet enough to hear the difference between my shaky breathing and hers, and as I sit with her question echoing in my ears, with the smell of cherry candy in the air and the sunlight on my skin, with her sitting so close to me, asking me what I would do at the end of the world, all I can think is this, this, this.

Nina’s Saturday has begun just like the past three weeks. In the kitchen, she makes herself a bowl of Cheerios. It’s a weekend, so she treats herself to a jar of blueberry yogurt. She twists the lid off and licks the smear.

It’s 3:00. Chloe is picking her up soon. It’s darkening outside. There’s a rumble in the distance. Thunder spoils milk, her Granny would say. Having lived in Canada for half a century, she never forgot German sayings. Nina empties the rest of the milk into a glass and drinks it up.

* * *

They’ve arrived at the Bavarian Forest Restaurant in Kitchener. The pink neon sign, of which only the “Forest” part remains, buzzes feebly.

This is their fourth gig at the Bavarian Forest as dancers. A singer and a comedian are also part of the team. Today, instead of Dave, there’s a new comedian. But they aren’t surprised. Comedians come, comedians go. Singers come, singers go. Backstage, Chloe and Nina put on their Rio-the-Carnival costumes. Nina puts a tiara on her head. A slight headache has already begun.

The air in the restaurant is stagnant, like that of the Amazon rainforest. Offstage Nina sees Linda humming, pearls of perspiration on her forehead. Nina and Chloe come onstage from either side, eyeing each other with pasted-on smiles. The rhythm doubles. Samba. The scent of Chloe’s coconut oil lingers in the air, and Nina thinks of her piña colada at the Copacabana. The red-cheeked old men behind the beer steins catapult their arms into the air, iPhones in their hands.

That’s okay. People staring at Nina know that she is a dancer. She is, not she wants to be. Just like she is a woman, is 25, is Canadian. She is, even though she isn’t on Broadway, in Kitchener.

That’s why she doesn’t have a day job. Because she is a dancer. For Granny it wasn’t an occupation. Every day since she’d left college, Granny put a yellow Post-it on the door of her room: “What are you going to do with your life?” When she was about to go on a Contiki tour through South America—unlike most of her friends who took grand European tours—the note read: “You want to die before you live?”

* * *

In the hall, Nina finds Chloe sitting on a young man’s lap, still in her Rio dress. A large, rugged hand is petting her belly.

“Oh, hey,” she says, looking at Nina, labouring to smile.

Yes, Nina knows this. If only this wasn’t two hours away from home, she’d let her go with him. But she can’t. She wants to go back home. “Er—I’m ready to go.”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Hey,” a calm, deep voice pops up from behind Nina. She turns around. There stands the comedian. She sees him better now that he’s without his makeup. Well into his thirties, his hair a straight dark blond, his eyes green, his lips thin. “If you need a ride, I could take you.”

What other options does she have?

* * *

His Focus heads back to Toronto on the 401. It’s begun to rain. Neither of them talks. All she hears is the shush of the tires. Suddenly he asks, “Where do you live?”

“Runnymede.”

He doesn’t answer. He looks into the rear-view mirror, squinting at the high-beams from behind.

He turns on the radio. A female, country pop-star is playing.

“Bitch,” he mumbles. “I teamed up with her in Ottawa a long time ago.” He glances sideways at Nina for a second. “Just for one night. She slept with the manager of the club and the next day we all got let go. She got her happy-solo-gig-ever-after.”

Silence falls. Ooh, Nina says, in an almost inaudible voice.

“What are you up to tomorrow?” he asks.

She thinks about Sundays. Are they different in any way from Saturdays? She sleeps in, pours the rest of Cheerios into her mouth directly out of the box, eats chocolate bars. Mumbles to herself, gets drunk in the early afternoon, and watches random video clips on YouTube for hours. Oh, sometimes she smashes the Rio costume against the wall; what she doesn’t do on Saturdays.

“Nothing special,” she says. “You?”

“Me?” he says. “I’ll cry.”

“Cry?” She turns to him. “But… you’re a comedian.”

“So?” He shifts to the left lane and passes a car. “Crying is healthy.”

She doesn’t know what to say.

“You wanna join me sometime?” he asks.

“Join what, crying?” Here you go. She squirms in her seat. She searches for the right words, just like when she brushes off someone at the bar counter after getting a free drink from him.

A green sign comes into sight, a heads-up for the junction ahead. “I live in Oakville, actually,” he says.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says, relieved on the changed topic. “I feel bad. Oh. You’re going all the way to—”

“Not a big deal.”

“It’s a pretty little town, isn’t it? Oakville.”

“Yes, it is.”

She wants to say something more about it, but actually she doesn’t really know Oakville. “The lake—”

“You know what it’s like at the end of Trafalgar?” he speaks over her. “Trafalgar’s like Yonge Street to you guys, the busiest street in town. You drive down south on Trafalgar and pass Lakeshore, and it dwindles and dwindles until it gets to the lake, and there,” he says, going back to the right lane, “is a bench. Just a tiny little bench at the end of Trafalgar, looking down at the lake.”

“And there you cry.”

“Sometimes,” he says. “Toronto’s skyline makes me cry.”

“How come?”

He muses for a while. “I guess I just want someone to take me out for a drink.”

* * *

In front of her apartment, she half-turns to him, his face lit orange by the streetlights. “Thank you,” she says.

He gives a small nod.

“Maybe I’ll join you sometime.” She opens the door of the passenger seat. “One of these Sundays.”

Careers in the arts are tough. So much so they are actually a series of part-time freelance gigs wrapped in the word “vocation.” Ones with no employee benefits, and retirement is whatever you can save when not eating Ramen.

I’m at a weird place in my career as a writer, teacher, and historian. For four years I’ve tried to do EVERYTHING to make money and generate opportunities. It’s led to amazing stuff happening. New book series with rave reviews, with the sequel coming out in the next year. Major history project completed and debuting this summer. I also secured a contract gig teaching Creative Writing classes for Google employees! Yes, that Google.

So, how the hell did that happen?

Simple! Fear, imposter syndrome, and poverty.

Easy to replicate, no? Okay, here’s the story.

The Gutters was all about the seventeen years I spent trying different stuff, pursuing interests, and living a life of failures, stupidity, success, and achievement. But within at least one of my professions (history) there had been the allure of stability: academia. When I got my doctorate, however, the academy had changed. I won’t bore you with common knowledge, but a sustainable living with benefits as an academic in the USA is for the 1%, primarily those from the top five schools. I wanted that stability. I wanted to write big, contextually rich, detailed and depth-oriented books on esoteric topics that pushed human knowledge a smidge. I wanted to teach big and small classes and advise on grad theses. I wanted to fall asleep in faculty meetings.

That was the map my mentors had given me. And it was fifteen years dead in the water when I graduated. I got part time, no-guarantee adjunct work. But not enough to live. The old map would kill me.

I had to make my own map to survive America.

This map was part lottery, part strategy, and part saying “yes!” to everything (riffing on Chris Hardwick’s Confidence Theory). I’ve talked about all the jobs I had before my life calmed the hell down, but among the most important and the one I resisted the most was teaching writing.

See, in 2013, I considered myself a failure as a writer. No career. No book deals. Just a bunch of ebooks and short story sales. What the fuck could I teach anyone? I couldn’t even teach history! Imposter syndrome, depression, and grief stained my thinking.

But when you’re running out of canned goods to eat, you can’t be precious. You need to try. My only rule in life is if you do nothing, nothing will happen. I didn’t want to fail, but I also wanted to eat.

So an adult-learning annex gave me a shot when they didn’t have to, thanks to having history teaching experience and being vetted by a friend, Nick Mamatas, who is a far better writer than I. Lots of mistakes were made getting that class running, but I also discovered I had a knack for giving students intensive and helpful feedback on themes, symbols, and motivations in their work.

Writing from the Heart became my flagship class for four years. It helped keep me alive. I used everything I’d learned reading shitty writing books, going to Odyssey, doing improv, living my own personal experiences, and listening to the experiences of writers whom I loved and some whom I hated (a common phrase I use is “X wrote a writing book, which is shit but had this nugget of wisdom”) to make this class special and valuable. I turned it into the kind of class I would have loved if I’d just been starting out. And I give my students everything I got as a teacher. I never phone it in. I look pretty ragged when it’s done, but I want to give my students all I can!

And one day, one of my students tossed my name in the hat of his employer as someone who is a great teacher for beginners. That lead to a chance to teach at Google for their employees.

This is the gift of unintended consequences. Of making connections because you bust your ass and give folks the best of what you can offer. And done with zero expectation that it would lead to anything beyond the task at hand. And it would never have happened if I’d kept listening to that black static in my head that I wasn’t good enough to teach a class I was clearly born to teach (because I made the sumbitch).

That voice was stymied because of the harder reality of being poor in America. I had to be cool with failure. I had to be cool with shame, embarrassment, and worse. And I had to keep hustling, in case it burned out. But I couldn’t afford to not try. My ego wasn’t important. It didn’t matter an iota. I needed to eat.

Creating this class was not on the old map I’d made for myself. But when the BE-AN-ACADEMIC map turned to dust, I had to make another. My own. It doesn’t look like anyone else’s because how could it? How many left-wing military historian, creative writing, pulp novelist, improv-and-sketch comedy performers do you know?

I had to make my own because the circumstances of my life have no single model. I’ve had to follow a dozen paths to make my own. Thus, my map has shifted and changed over the years. It must change. Nothing is certain in a freelance life, and my successes have allowed me to close off some sections of the map (like teaching high school and some online learning) to make room for others.

I’m keeping this in mind because I feel the same kind of fear emerging as I try and grow another part of the map. When my life crashed, I was an unemployed historian and short story writer. Right now, I’m a published novelist and popular historian who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and Google.

Yes, that’s a brag. But unlike most who succeed, it doesn’t prove the system works. And it could vanish in a heartbeat or an earthquake. So I want to make it better before another wave of uncertainty crashes. And my old tools and strategies might be getting in the way. When you’ve got nothing to lose, you have no choice but to try everything. But when things find purchase, how do you keep good stuff happening?

How do you grow when all your guts and instincts are still in survival mode, demanding you work until you pass out? How do you pick your battles, rather than fight a nine-front war of five jobs? How do you review the data of four years of successes and holy-crap-failures to make things better?

You make a new map.

And that scares the shit out of me.

Help Jay sleep at night by buying HEX-RATED, the debut novel in his new series THE BRIMSTONE FILES, or FXXK WRITING: A GUIDE FOR FRUSTRATED ARTISTS

The hole where Andy used to be came downstairs and sat at the kitchen table. I served him a plate of eggs before I remembered the hole never ate. As I took it back to place in the fridge, I felt like a fool.

Not much later, I found the hole where Andy used to be at the front door. Rex heeled beside the hole and whined. Still, the hole made no move. So I took Rex for his walk instead.

The hole where Andy used to be ended up outside, where Bobby followed. Our son had a ball and glove, but the hole made no move to play catch. So Bobby tossed the ball into the air to himself, all while he stared at the hole where his father had once been.

We ate that day at Sally’s Diner, at our usual table. The hole where Andy used to be took his customary seat. The hole said nothing, so Bobby and I kept our own awkward silence the whole meal.

The car made unusual noises on the way home, so I parked and opened the hood. The hole where Andy used to be stood over it, but the hole had no solutions.

At bedtime, I found the hole where Andy used to be at the side of Bobby’s bed. The hole made no move toward the worn copy of A Wrinkle In Time, with the scrap paper bookmark. So I read in the hole’s stead, and I pulled the Iron Man sheets over our son.

The hole where Andy used to be followed me to our room. I cried as quietly as I could manage, so as not to upset Bobby. The hole never offered to hold me.

My sisters told me I should date again, that enough time had passed. I told them I couldn’t, and I gave them every reason save the real one: I still lived in the same house as the hole where Andy had once been. I didn’t know how the hole might respond.

Still, they arranged for Dan to meet me at a party. I shook his hand and pretended to smile, while the hole where Andy used to be stood at my elbow. I practiced excuses for the inevitable asking out, but he disarmed me with charm and common interests. When he asked me to dinner that first time, I looked over to the hole for a handy excuse, before I managed to answer that I supposed I could.

The hole where Andy used to be accompanied us on every date. He was always there, but sometimes the conversation distracted me enough and he made me laugh enough that I didn’t notice the hole’s presence for a while.

Now Dan plays catch with my son sometimes. And he reads him stories, if not at bedtime. He walks Rex with me, too. The hole where Andy used to be is still there, a physical presence. Dan hasn’t filled it. But he stands beside it, and that’s good enough for now.