Issue 76 January 2020 Flash Fiction Online January 2020

Only the desperate follow the trail of rumor to my grotto beneath the marketplace, hidden behind a curtain of thorny vines. Glossa is a witch, they say. An enchantress.

But, eventually, they come.

Purple shadows ring Siopi’s eyes when she seeks out my den. The purple might be weariness, save for the sickly yellow mottling of old bruises.

I poke the glowing embers. “What brings you, Siopi?”

Her hands clench in the folds of her wrap. “The crows. They steal our crops. I’ve made mannikins, but the birds don’t fear them.” She avoids my eyes. “My husband says we’ll starve. It’ll be my fault.”

I point a crooked finger at the old leather satchel in the rocky alcove by the entry, shielded by vines from easy view. “Bring that here.”

She obeys, skittish as a fawn.

I fold back the flap, releasing a musty stench. “The crows wish you no ill,” I say, rustling through the satchel’s contents until I find the small jar I seek, “but your mannikins mean nothing to them. You have to speak to them in words they’ll understand. My grandmother knew this.”

I release the stopper and shake the jar until a small, black, withered thing falls into my waiting palm.

“What is it?”

“A crow’s tongue. Harvested by my grandmother’s hand and imbued by the creature’s blood with the power of its speech. Eat this and the crows will obey you.”

Siopi glances at her hands. “I have no coin with which to pay.”

“I ask no price in coin, but magic will balance its own scales in time. The choice is yours.”

Siopi shivers, but squeezes her purpled eyes shut before nodding and stretching out her hand.

* * *

Nearly a year passes before Siopi returns, her arm pinned to her breast by a sling, purple spreading over her wrist, fading to yellow along the fingers.

“You spoke true,” she says. “The crows fled at my command. Our storehouse overflowed with grain. A blessing, it seemed, until the rats came. Our little boy Orien tried to keep them away, but now he lies abed, burning from the inside out.”

I was already reaching for the satchel before the word rat escaped her lips. “Your husband says this is your fault.” It’s not a question.

Her lashes flutter as she blinks away tears. “Please. Did your grandmother know the language of rats?”

“Rats were her first.”

It had pleased her to pluck them, then watch their legs twitching in pain until their last blood flowed, drowning their tongues with power ready to be consumed. Her eyes had flared–cheeks flushed red, breath quickening–while I hid behind the vines, watching those wretched creatures suffer, powerless to save them.

I tip the open jar and a hard, twisted tongue falls free.

Wariness flashes across Siopi’s face. “Maybe this is my fault. Magic balancing its scales. What price will it ask this time?”

I empathize with her hesitation, but rats spread pestilence to all, regardless of status, age, or virtue. “Not even the wisest can know the ways of magic. Yet more may sicken if you don’t dispel the rats. Do you want others to end up like Orien?”

Siopi accepts the tongue with a trembling hand, then swallows it whole. A shudder wracks her from tip to toe. She winces when it shakes her arm.

Anger throbs within my breast, the same anger I felt watching Grandmother at her work.

I glance at the sling and speak with a carefully detached tone. “How often does your husband fault you with his hands?”

She backs a step away, cradling her injured arm.

“What about Orien? Does fault fall on his small shoulders, as well?”

Her headshake is sharp. “He’s only a child. How could anyone fault him? It doesn’t matter. I’ll dispel the rats. No more vermin, no more blame.” She backs through the vines guarding the entry. “I must get back to my son. Goodbye, Glossa.”

Then she is gone. But she’ll be back. They always are.

* * *

A fortnight later, the sound of footfalls and heavy breathing wake me. The last banked coals of my fire reveal Siopi leaning up against the stone, a heavy bundle clutched to her chest. The sling is gone, but even in the dim light fresh bruises darken the side of her face.

“Siopi?”

She rearranges her bundle, revealing a mop of pale hair, then grabs the satchel and staggers toward my bedroll.

“I did what he wanted. I banished the crows. Banished the rats. But tonight he tried to fault Orien. Because he’s too weak yet to work.” She lays the sleeping boy beside me. “We’ll never be free of vermin. Not while my husband holds power over us. But there’s nothing to be done. I already speak his language.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken.”

I dig in the satchel and pull out the largest jar. The stopper comes loose with a pop, releasing the smell of iron and rot. I pluck out one of the thin slivers of hardened meat and hold it up between us. “Do you want to be free?”

“What tongue is this?” Her voice trembles.

“A bit of the only tongue I harvested myself. From one who took pleasure in inflicting pain.” My grandmother’s disbelieving eyes and wordless screams bathed in blood will haunt me waking and sleeping to the end of my days. I cannot keep that memory from etching itself across my face. “A price has already been paid for this bit of magic. A price that I chose to pay.”

Comprehension gleams in Siopi’s eyes and she bows to receive my offering. “For Orien. And for me. Thank you.”

Grandmother’s shrieks echo through my skull as Siopi tastes the shred of tongue, her hand resting on Orien’s hair. She’ll not bear the purple again.

I stopper the jar, muffling the memory.

Only the desperate follow the trail to my den. For them, I pay the price gladly.

Eventually, they all will come.

The ad-soaked magazine behind the bookstore register claims the way I sleep—on my right side, curled into a ball, fists shoved between my legs—means I’m eager to please. Bullshit.

The door flies open and this retired guy speed walks to me. He’s gripping his right index finger with a red napkin. “Miss, you guys have a band-aid?” Then I realize it’s not a red napkin. It’s a bloody napkin.

“Yeah, hang on,” I say, reaching under the counter. “What happened?”

“Slammed my finger in the car door. Stupid.” He raises the napkin and blood cascades down his hand. A third of his finger is missing, gone. I imagine it sheared clear off by a sensible compact sedan.

We have band-aids for paper cuts, not for this shit.

“You oughta call an ambulance,” I say, rifling through the first-aid kit.

“No, I’ll be fine, stupid thing. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Hey, maybe you got gauze, too?”

There’s no gauze. I duck under the register and pull out a roll of paper towels. A spilled latte is no match for these things, but blood pouring from a chopped finger?

“Really, I think we should call an ambulance,” I say, bristling at the we. I’m involved now, procurer of bandages and paper goods.

He leans onto the counter, rests his full body weight on his elbows, winces. Is this guy in shock? What are the signs of shock?

“Maybe,” he says through gritted teeth. “Maybe you should call.”

I call, give them the address, all the while patting this guy on the shoulder as he becomes one with the counter. “Hold it above your heart,” I tell him, just as the dispatcher instructs me.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he repeats. Yeah, we’ve established that.

I’m not prepared for the next question.

“Do you have the finger?” asks the dispatcher.

“It’s on his hand.”

“The tip. You said the tip was missing.”

I did say that. And it is.

“Hey, do you have the missing bit?” I can’t bring myself to say finger.

“The car,” he says. “It must be by the car.”

The dispatcher hears him. “Ma’am, you have to find the finger.”

Ma’am? Really? “No, I can’t do that. I can’t leave the bookstore.”

“Ma’am, the finger can be reattached. You need to find it.”

“I’m the only one working today.”

“What’s his name, ma’am?”

“Who?” Oh, the guy with the finger. Or, more accurately, without the finger. “Hey, mister, what’s your name?”

“Frank. Frank Dumas.”

“He’s Frank.”

“OK, ma’am, give me to Frank while you look for the finger.”

Damn it, there’s no way out of this. I put the phone on speaker, grab a plastic bag and ask Frank for his keys.

“In the ignition. Why I grabbed the door.”

“Where are you parked?”

“To the right. Navy sedan. Dented quarter panel.”

Dented. Of course.

Seagulls flock our parking lot, diving, swooping, pecking sandwich entrails out of garbage cans, shitting everywhere. Someone forgot to tell them the ocean is a hundred miles east. Maybe they see an expanse of dark, flat space, and assume it’s paradise.

I hold onto the side-view mirror of Frank’s car and bend down, looking around the driver’s side. But what am I looking for? What does a finger look like, detached from the body? Would it roll under the car? Would the slamming door catapult it ten feet away? What if someone drove over it?

The gulls caw and circle above. I flip up my hoodie and, not seeing it on the pavement, open the driver door. Which makes it obvious. Not a bite of hot dog with ketchup. It’s unmistakably a man’s finger, salt & pepper hair above the knuckle, plastered to the door jam.

I handle it like dog poop, my own hand protected by the plastic bag. Damn, I should have gotten ice. Don’t these things need ice? And a cooler with a red cross? I have so many questions.

Why is a college graduate working part-time in a deserted strip mall bookstore? Why do I sleep in the fetal position? Where the hell is the ambulance?

The birds swarm like gray shadows around me. I hear the faint warning of a siren as it slowly rises in volume and pitch. Eager to please, huh? I hurl the finger over my head and a gull swoops down to pluck it from the sky.

When I swing back into the store, Frank’s not at the counter. He’s below it, lying flat on the linoleum in front of the new releases.

“Jesus, Frank, are you OK?” I ask. Dumb question; of course he’s not. But his eyes are open, so at least he’s still conscious.

“Did you find it?”

I give a heavy sigh. “Nah, Frank, I didn’t see it. Sorry.”

“Damn gulls, I bet.”

“Damn gulls.”

* * *

A week later Frank strolls into the bookstore with a bow-topped bottle of wine.

“I have to thank you for taking care of me that day. Much appreciated. I was a little out of sorts but you were a calm presence through it all.”

He uncoils the bandage and shows me the finger. “Frankenfinger,” he says. “Get it?”

I say it’s healing nicely. It doesn’t look too bad. For a stump.

He buys the new James Patterson, leaves with a wave of the good hand, the door tinkling his exit. I flip open my magazine and it lands on that damn sleep position article again.

Sleeping on your left side marks the pensive. Facing a lover signals a healthy relationship; turned away suggests tension. Falling asleep on your back means you’re content. On the stomach, the opposite is true. In the fetal position, eager to please.

Oh come on, anyone can make this crap up.

LESSON 5: READ, MUTHAFXXXER, READ!

September 2019 marks the twentieth anniversary of Jay’s decision to become a writer. His gift to you all this celebratory year is DO IT – Twelve hard lessons on learning by failing, succeeding by accident, never giving up and saying FXXK WRITING all at the same time. You’re welcome!

* * *

Writers who don’t read are shit. Writers who only read shit can be good. And writers who are shit often read well. Bottom line – no matter what kind of shit you write, you must read to feed your imagination and see how 4000 years of brilliance, mediocrity, and hackwork in human communication have done the job.

I was a late reader. Like, nineteen years late. I’d suffered school stuff, plus a handful of books with titles like THE FROST GIANT’S SUMMER LAIR and YOUR CODE NAME IS JETTA, plus a couple failed attempts to read Lord of the Rings (my sister promised that if I got to the Prancing Pony and met Stryder, I would be hooked . . . I never got past a drunken birthday party for little people).But reading as lifestyle? Nah. I was a music junkie during my formative years. But when the band broke up and I hocked my guitar for rent, books became the new drugs. Each reading-era taught me something about the craft I would later hold on to and try and apply.

NEWB

There was the initial love of anything recommended to me – Jim Thompson, Margaret Atwood, J. G. Ballard, JRR Tolkien (I skipped everything before Stryder and the book became a fun D&D adventure with less dirty jokes), Clive Barker, Orson Scott Card, Judy Blume’s serious books for kids, Star Wars novelizations, Star Trek history texts, and more. During this tasteless period., I’d learn that cool fiction could kinda be anything, so long as the characters were interesting and doing neat shit.

CRUSH IGNORANCE

Then came my self-imposed crash course in literature during undergrad, when I tried to kill my ignorance of cool books by reading tons of Dashiel Hammet, Joseph Conrad, Isaac Babel, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, George McDonald, Mariano Azuela, Albert Camus, Tolstoy and Goethe, Octavio Paz, Mary Shelly, E. Nesbitt, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Richard Wright, more Jim Thompson, among others. I learned that books are cultural documents and, as Charles Wilfeord called it, case histories of the writer. They capture the mind of a time and a place as well as a story. Also, themes fucking matter and great artists suck the life out of their themes from a a zillion angles.

STARS THE WRONG DESTINATION

When I thought I’d become a science fiction writer (HAHAHAHA!), I pushed myself again to turn the 2 hour commute to my job as a cemetery groundskeeper into a lab for the imagination with Brian Aldiss, Alfred Bester, William Gibson, Lisa Tuttle, Ursula Le Guin, more Philip K. Dick and Jim Thompsn, etc. I learned . . . that I had a smaller appetite for science fiction than pop culture had led me to believe…that outside of the people already mentioned I didn’t give a shit about world building, or thought experiments, or extrapolation as much as the people in this world who suffered and struggled.

HORROR IS MY CO-PILOT

In 2000 I found much love for the work of horror and dark fantasy fiction from Joe Lansdale, Richard Laymon, Gary Braunbeck (he wrote a messy masterpiece, THE INDIFFERENCE OF HEAVEN, which is a mindfuck of a great read), Steve and Melanie Tem, Poppy Z. Brite, Gemma Files, Tim Waggoner, Tom Piccirilli, Norman Partridge, Brian Keene and even MORE Jim Thompson (the dude fits almost everywhere in my imagination). It was in horror, more than any other genre, where I found a full and unflinching (if often ugly) freedom of the imagination – here was the worst and best of humankind, cruelties and courage, ugly emotions and uneasy truths. There was also lust, sex, and various strains of mysogyny that sucked, but I preferred the raunch and unflinching reality (ugly, sexy, liberated, oppressive, violent, sensous, rotten and sweet) of horror compared to the puritinical and sanitized world of science fiction and fantasy, and started taking chances with such subjects in my work. I also read two Stephen King books. They were okay.

KITCHEN SINK SHORT STORY TIME

In 2003-2009, as I finished doctoral work, I read exclusively short stories (since that was all I had time to write). My only goal was to learn as much about form and style as well as substance as possible, and to champion an eclectic approach: I aimed for one-story-a-day from authors like Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Bernard Malmud, Roger Zelazney, Haruki Murakami, Charles Grant, Elizabeth Hand, more Patricial Highsmith, Robert E. Howard, collections like Alberto Manguel’s Blackwater books of fantasy fiction from across the world. I learned deeply about form, theme and structure, and how most writing rules are for beginners before you take risks and make your own decisions.

THE ABYSS

Then, slowly, reading fell away into the disaster years of my existence, when I largely abandoned writing with the same drive and abandon of my first decade, then stopped for a blip.

And that’s the important part. Reading is active. Much media is passive. Reading is a laboratory experiment in your mind with other people’s worlds and your own imagination as the duall engine of creation and entertainment. Without it, part of your imagination starves. It may feast in other quarters, and that can be a good thing (especially if you’ve avoided autobiographical material).

Without reading, something in my creative heart dies.

THE FELLOWSHIP

In 2014 I won a fellowship and was able to focus on researching and writing a history book for a whole year-and-a-half! While history books dominated my shelves, my love of improv theater burned hot for about five years. I read bios of Steve Martin, Marc Maron, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Martin Short, Patton Oswalt, as well as works on the history of theater. It taught me TONS about hidden sources of creativity and storytelling

THE ISLAND OF BETTER SCHOOL BOOKS

I only realized this truth very recently. For about a year, my reading life was tied to teaching material, mostly Alexander Solzhenitzian, William Goldman, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yevegny Zamyatin, Donald Westlake, Zora Neale Hurston, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Anthony Burgess, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Truman Capote, Langston Hughes and Sandra Cisneros. Teaching these works taught me just how crazy good they were with language alone, and how near perfect their work could be because they’d cracked the code of the right combination of words for masterful impact on character and structure.

THE PIT

But when I was free of teaching, burned out and depressed, reading lost its luster. Then, when I was 60K into a new novel, I got injured. Part of recovery meant sitting and doing nothing for 30 minutes.

And here, I started reading again. Nelson Algren. James Ellroy. Philip Caputo. Yes, still too dude heavy, but the gift they gave me was something I didn’t expect.

Glimpses of the future. Not the false-promises of science fiction futures which are almost always about the horrors and fascinations of the present in different kinds of costumes, but a real imaginary future.

My own.

I rarely think of the future. Trauma, depression, learning challenges, poverty, defense mechanisms, and predilections of personality have crippled part of my ability to project and plan and maintain events into the future outside of rigid structures and clear pathways. When suffering from severe hardship, especially the past year, I largely lost the ability to picture a future with me in it. Everything was about surviving the present.

And the future became a fabled land, a lost civilization, an Oz I would never see.

Then I started reading. And writing.

And dark holes in my psyche were lit.

I thought of novels I wanted to write. Three of them. All different. One a crime/mystery. One a horror and nostalgia piece. The last a historical suspense. Books that would take years to finish. Books that I could only write with the skill set I had now.

Books that only existed in the future. Ones that required my continued existence.

Viktor Frankl, psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, noted that in the death camps many died from a lack of “why”, despair consuming them because there was no thing they could yearn for in that industrial purgatory of death and malice. But many endured because they had some “why” to keep going – a wife to return to, a clock they built in their mind that they would one day see in reality, a song, a friend, anything that swam in their mind in the present that promised a future.

That observation has stuck with me throughout twenty years of hardships far more insignificant than the death camps. But it was no less true.

To be a writer, one must live, one must write, and one must read. None are a substitute for the other. They are the trinity that holds up your work.

So, read, mutherfuckers.

READ.

They are one of a kind, both of them. Both want to build the future, attend MIT for the resources and connections. While other people date, they Skype with engineers at the LHC. Afterward, people say they’re glowing like they’ve screwed all night.

“Multiverse Theory is like screwing—” Miguel says.

Juniper finishes, “—always splitting zygotic universes.”

There’s a blackboard, a whiteboard, a giant easel, and still they draw all their models cuddled around her tablet. Sometimes he falls asleep with his head on her lap in the middle of doodling schematics. One Monday their portal frame flickers. A Saturday later, they are two human silhouettes in front of a wall of blinding teal light. Almost ready.

She says, “It’s Music Theory. Listen to how particles sing—”

“—and coax them into harmonizing with other universes.”

Miguel never lets her slow down. That’s why she loves him, and why they came this far. They’re two silhouettes against the furious teal light. The silhouettes of their faces become one.

* * *

They have a corner apartment, with two windows. Her desk faces the east window, facing the highway because the patterns of distant traffic calm her. Equations whiz by.

They whiz so fast that, in a matter of Saturdays, the whole lab is teal with the portal’s light. They flip a coin. Miguel calls Heads, and it comes up Heads ten times in a row, and since Juniper hates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, she goes first. They have thirty seconds of power and he still kisses her good-luck for five of them.

As she approaches the portal, she sees a silhouette, one with a side-pony and blouse like hers. It’s reaching, she’s reaching, and they don’t flinch away soon enough. They touch, push through each other, and abruptly she’s facing the wrong direction.

Her back is to the portal, and Miguel stands slack-jawed in front of her. It’s not her lab, and though her tablet is exactly where she left it, she knows she’s never touched it. She looks at a Miguel who is not hers.

“Were you working—” she begins to ask.

“—on a portal, too?”

That’s when the converters blow, the portal frame cracks, the room goes dark. They have a lot to discuss in the dark.

* * *

Juniper stands in Juniper-2’s room. The desk faces the north window. Juniper (she refuses to be “Juniper-1”) never noticed this window afforded a view of student foot traffic through the tulip garden. Juniper-2 has the same Grimes and Sleigh Bells playlist, most of the same blouses, and heterochromia. Left-blue and right-green, with one blue contact lens to hide it, the same as Juniper. They aren’t mirror-alternates. They’re closer than that.

In defiance, Juniper stops wearing contacts altogether.

“It’ll help you remember—”

“—which you are. That’s something you’d do.”

“Don’t do that,” she says, a deliberate complete sentence.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get you back to him.”

Miguel-2 sits too close to her as they work, or she sits too close to him. He smells like sawdust even though their lab is spotless. He still has that garbage goatee, the same wardrobe of vest-shirt combos because he’d found one thing that flattered him and clung to it.

They bump elbows again. Maybe they both sit too close to each other at different times. They put in more hours than ever, reinforcing conduits, triple-checking micro-variables. He’s always there with the coupling she’s turning to look for. Miguel-2 orders Thai, and doesn’t ask, knowing to get her Som Tum with extra papaya.

He’s never there when she’s crying. He knows her well enough to see it coming, and be gone. She can’t fit in their bed alone. She’s forgotten how to take up that much space while falling asleep.

* * *

It’s her third month here, and it’s stupid not to establish boundaries.

She says, “We share the bed—”

“—but I stay on top of the covers.”

“You can have my leftovers—”

“—after you announce you’re done with them, your majesty?”

She laughs until she hiccups, and he leans over her lap, fixing equations on her tablet. The work’s going faster now. They replace all the damaged wiring with new, better materials. Most of the old parts don’t even look burned. They look the same as the new.

* * *

She pokes a cherry tomato and asks, “Are we that alike?”

“We always were. We were one of a kind, both of us.”

“I meant her and I.”

“I can’t remember.”

It hurts to hear because she can’t remember either. When she thinks of a Miguel, she remembers him smelling of sawdust, and maybe he always did and she never noticed.

Then the portal frame flickers teal. Almost ready.

She finds him crying in the stairwell. They bump elbows as she sits beside him, and she comforts him with a palm between his shoulders. It’s always worked. She sits on the stairs with him for three hours. She doesn’t want to leave him again.

* * *

Miguel says, “If we just—”

She finishes his sentence by powering the portal on, and abruptly they’re two silhouettes in front of a bright teal wall of probability. She searches his shape for any curve that doesn’t belong to Miguel. There isn’t one.

Miguel backs away and stumbles over a power cable. She grabs his vest, and his hands find her shoulders, and their silhouettes come together. Juniper can’t remember his lips ever feeling different than this. A tear streaks between their cheeks, either hers or his.

A black silhouette lingers in the teal portal, his outline wearing a tacky vest-shirt combo, watching them. Juniper can’t see his expression and she knows what it is all the same. She feels it, like shrapnel in her chest.

She and the silhouette away from each other, and turn the portal off together. As the room goes black, she turns to Miguel. They have a lot to discuss in the dark.

Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, September 2017. Republished here by permission of the author.