Issue 58 July 2018 Flash Fiction Online July 2018

Paige was itching to paint something when she noticed and remarked on the birds—grackles and ravens mostly—that were flitting around carrying bits of copper wire and circuitry. Now that she mentioned it, the others at the garden party became so enrapt with the birds that they didn’t notice her sketching on a napkin.

The parties were her husband Bud’s idea, to distract Paige from her urge to paint, and they worked to a point. When she was with people, she was good, happy, even. But when the parties were over, the emptiness returned, and the happy space that laughter had created inside her lapsed in painful contractions, as with any muscle stretched too far.

“Been that way for a while,” Bud said. “On the way to work, I keep seeing birds gathering scrap.”

George, the biologist, a friend of Paige’s from college, said it was quite natural for birds this time of year. “They get it in their heads that they’re going to wipe us all out,” George explained, “so they gather parts to build a machine, but they never finish it.”

Everyone looked over the fence to the western horizon, where a haphazard pile of scrap and mechanical parts as tall as an office building loomed darkly against the afternoon light. Paige was drawing a monstrous and beautiful thing. Not the catawampus structure the birds were building, but what they wanted to build. Craning swan-like over the land, looming like a showerhead or a scorpion’s tail, a machine of devastating power.

“They’re birds,” said Terry, George’s partner and a philosopher. “Good with tiny details, sloppy with the big picture.”

People laughed and agreed that was true.

“Still, someone should do something about it,” Terry said.

“I don’t think so,” said George. “Because someone will do something about it, so no one needs to bother doing anything.”

People agreed someone would put a stop to it, so they didn’t need to worry.

Looking at the bizarre structure with its many dangling ends, Paige had a powerful urge to find a brush, but painting was too dangerous. She’d been a promising painter, but recently she’d had to stop painting because it threatened her health.

At first it had been the landscapes. She’d paint a dark fairy tale forest and then the next day feel a pernicious itch, as if there were scratchy Douglas firs growing under her skin. Then it was the portraits, who started visiting at odd hours. Never did she answer the door when the eyeless, inhuman figures she’d painted came knocking. Always it was Bud who sent them away with a firm, “That person doesn’t live here.”

Bud had been supportive for a while but made Paige throw out her supplies after her disastrous experiment with Japanese water colors. That had ended in an early morning trip to the E.R., where Paige received an emergency blood transfusion after the doctors drained three pints of paint from her veins. Now Paige had been clean for over three months, but the drive to pick up a brush was always there.

“Maybe it’d be better if they succeeded,” George said. “Ended this whole human experiment.”

Everyone laughed except Paige.

As she scribbled, the din of construction grew ever louder and the party guests fell silent. No more laughter. As the structure rose higher, it blotted out the sun.

Even knowing what was happening, Paige couldn’t stop herself from sketching.

“Getting awful dark early,” Mike said.

Above their heads, beams and cables and wires and solar panels were assembling into something immense, borne into the air by the will of a teeming whorl of songbirds.

And now Paige felt Bud’s hand alighting gently on her wrist. “Should you really be drawing?” he asked. “Isn’t that dangerous for you?”

Paige looked to her husband as the machine’s reactor droned to life, the sound like the blast of a foghorn, followed by a low thrum. How sweet Bud was, this man who’d installed a cat-door in their first apartment so the cats she’d painted could come in and out.

In that moment before the birds’ doomsday machine activated and disgorged its river of golden light that dissolved the atomic bonds of all matter within fifty miles, reducing everything to its native, raw state of disorder and infinite possibility, she wanted to put down her pencil and to unspool herself onto Bud’s lap, to melt into resin and leach into his clothing, his hair, his skin.

The first is a boy of only twelve summers. He smells like rotting fruit, his shirt bruised with blood and bile, and I know from the look in his eyes he intends to kill me. I put an end to his suffering as quickly as I can. A mercy, I tell myself.

Afterward, I smooth over the earth where he dragged the ax behind him, too weak to carry it.

I hope others will not follow.

#

Some claim whole cities wither where I walk, and I have indeed seen the sick laid out in the street, their bodies curling in pain like the legs of a dying spider. But I am not responsible for those events of mass plague. My touch infects, but does not always kill, and whatever else is said about me, I do not spread myself like poisoned cream for others to choke on.

I stay within the forest where it is safe, keeping away from towns and roadside inns, any place I might encounter others. My presence does not harm the trees, though early into my exile, before I learned how to properly wrap myself for sleep, I often woke to some woodland creature dead at my feet, punished for sniffing my cheek in the night. It was a fox the first time. I buried it, unable to meet its black, empty eyes as I dug. And the next animal after that—a squirrel, if I remember.

That is how the bereaved hunter finds me, tracking me by the graves I leave behind. Earlier in the month, I ate a poisonous mushroom by mistake and grew so sick I could barely move. Unable to forage but unwilling to die, I staggered into the nearest village, where the man’s brother, a kindly physician, and his wife cared for me. As soon as I was well enough, I left, but by that time the couple were already sick.

The hunter holds me at knifepoint, telling me all the gruesome details of how they died. I wish I could shut my ears to his ranting, but it would do no good. Death has followed me since infancy, and it manifests unpredictably. One day the sickness sprouts boils on the skin, the next it fills the lungs with blood.

“Why do you think I live alone in the forest!” I scream. They are the first words I have spoken in a long time, and it feels good to have a voice again, even if I sound like peeling bark.

He hesitates to kill me because I am a woman, and I hesitate to stop him because I am tired of being the only one who walks away. But in the end I have soaked in too much of the forest; its strength has become my strength, and I share its desire to live. Before the hunter finalizes his decision, I grab his arm and turn his blade back on him.

When the warmth of the day finally thaws the ground, I bury him, too.

#

The sun is high, but the wood wet and dark when I meet a young man fighting his way through the brush. With a shy smile, he tells me he is a baker’s apprentice, sent into the wood to fetch fruit for a pie; might I be able to point him in the direction of some blackberry bushes?

He is handsome, and I have been alone a long time. I let him get too close, and as I point out the blackberries, he brushes some hair from my face, countering the wind. His fingers linger on my cheek, his expression hopeful, and the damage is done.

I should run, but instead I lead him to my blood-red mouth, and let him take me there on the ground, the grass slashing my thighs. After, when he is struggling to thank me, I start to ask him his name, but he raises his arm, coughing brutally into it, and I flee as he is begging pardon.

#

I never knew my mother.

All the stories agree she was very beautiful, but stories always say that about queens. I think she must have been very stupid. She laid this curse upon me unwittingly while I was still in her womb, half-formed and vulnerable to dreams purchased at needlepoint. Three drops of blood. That was all it took. Give me a daughter of unapproachable beauty. Her lips crowd with blood, her hair grow raven-black, and let no one ever harm her.

The forces of magic in my kingdom are not the same as they are in other lands. Here, magic only rots. My mother should have known better than to say such a prayer, knowing how easily spells fall from royal lips.

Within a week of my birth, my mother died, and although my father always maintained that she reached out to me in her final moments, I have never shared his conviction that it was in longing. Far more likely, she meant to smother me.

Unfortunately, the sickness took her first.

#

I know I have made a terrible error in judgment, just like my mother, but I make it again with the next man whose knife-sharp eyes catch me alone, trading on his ignorance to save my life. I barely understand my growing need for company, and certainly fail to anticipate what it might mean to have someone to love, that revelation coming months later.

The labor is long and hard, but I am determined to do it alone, unwilling to sacrifice any more innocent lives, even if it means my own survival. At labor’s end, I lie back against a damp patch of earth, holding the first life I have ever created, my mind still scabbed in doubt.

I dare not speak my hope for this child aloud. The magic is too close. Listening.

My daughter takes her first breath, and I wait, holding my own, to see whether she will scream or choke.

We have two more installments before the GASP third anniversary of FXXK WRITING here at Flash Fiction Online! All I can say is that next year I will try a more considered approach. For the past three years I’ve written largely reactionary pieces, though some with deep time and thought behind them. But I wanted to try something different for year four. So let me get my ramble on before the door closes in September.

I love this video by Larry Brown, author of grit lit novels like Joe, Father and Son, and the collection Big Bad Love (turned into a cool movie with a Tom Waitsy soundtrack). He discusses his ignorance and naivety as a young writer: learn to write novels, get checks from New York, be a big deal. Did NOT happen that way. If you’d read the first novel and hundred short stories he wrote, “You would have to say I had no talent. You wouldn’t have had any other choice. They were that bad.”  And yet with the grim determination that helped him survive as a firefighter while working seven days a week doing hard labor, he put in the time to get better. When he died in 2004, he was considered among the best of his peerage. In the video, the phrase he and his wife had for success was “making it.”

That hit me.

My phrase for the porn dream of financial success is BIG TIME, a phrase born out of vaudeville and associated with the amount of actual stage time you had in the show: big time had a lot; small time little. Me? Prefer a bombastic performance term? MERCY!

At first blush, “making it” is less dramatic and more economical. But it’s the other definition that strikes me as most profound. Unlike Big Time, Making It involves the act of creating something. Making It depends on definition of success. And between the two lies the heartstrings of most writers, pulled taut as a trapeze. They want to make it (the work) and have the work Make It (be successful).

Success is a fickle creature that suffers from mission creep in daydreams. So when HEX-RATED was released, I kept my ideas of success humble. Yes, I attached a number to it. And for a long time I didn’t know if my and Night Shade Press’s efforts would lead to that success.

Last month I got my royalty statement.

I exceeded my success by a factor of two, and within the first six months.

I’m almost as pleased of that metric as of making the damn thing itself.

Almost.

I’m promoting the sequel, BLACK LOTUS KISS, and am hopeful for the future.  Whatever comes next, money, marbles, or chalk, I made the book and I made my success.  I hope it continues. The series is a blast, and as much fun as HEX-RATED is, I think BLACK LOTUS KISS raised my game. Because I subscribe to a particular view of writing pulp fiction.

There are authors who work in these genres who give 110% and try to rise above the pale, folks who found freedom in the gutter and then chose to elevate it even in their roughest work. Patricia Highsmith. Charles Willeford. Dashiell Hammett. C. L. Moore. David Goodis. I remember an interview with Philip K. Dick, where he discussed his earliest and quickest hack work in science fiction. He admitted that it was garbage, but, and I’m paraphrasing (since the book I read with this quote is sitting in the stacks of Scott Library at York University and you’d have to cast a spell or pay a mint to have me drag myself back to that stoney lonesome of an alma mater) . . . “Yes, it’s crap, but even in the crap I’m giving you 100%! I’m doing the best to make crap good! I’m giving it everything I have!”

Dick, Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich and others in the SF and Crime Genre took the freedom of subject matter in the lurid pages of degenerate fiction and tried to make art. The best of them did so with aplomb. They’re the target for me. No matter how bizarre or dark or lurid or vile or insipid the subject matter or standing, I’m daring to use it to make really good art. I think that’s important. I don’t subscribe to the idea that all art is the same or all of it is subjective. I think, like Larry Brown said, no one is born to be a writer. But if you’re willing to suffer and put in the time, you can figure it out.

While the fates tussle with the Brimstone Files, I go back to the first version of “making it.” In off-hours, when no one is looking, I’m making the next book.

It’s different from Brimstone in many ways. But I could not have written it without it. Lawrence Block noted that all books take your entire life to write, including the previous books. And that every book that comes out is the one that is meant to be next, whether it’s brilliant, shit, or a success despite its weaknesses. Since that theory is hard to disprove, I’ll run with it.

My next book is a product of Brimstone, my four Kindle novels, the six I wrote to learn, the three I wrote to start (the kind that would have you say I, too, had no talent). It’s full of my favorite things, themes, and ideas. It is the hardest and easiest book I’ve written yet. I’m breaking new ground for me and trying to build a better career by being a better writer. For some, that’s career suicide. For others, it’s a recipe for success. My goal is to make the book and then make as many fans as I can from those who love Brimstone and those who don’t yet know me.

Will it be Big Time?

Will I have my Porn Dreams Crushed Again?

Will I Make It?

Will it Make it?

You can only make it if you make it.

 

BLAM! MIND BLOWN!

Join the Brimstone Revolution and support Jay’s desire to continue writing for a good payday by buying HEX-RATED and Pre-ordering BLACK LOTUS KISS today! Order now and receive a thank you the next time Jay runs into you at Denny’s!

Grandpa measures our heights every day against the hallway markings. Rhiannon and I stand flat as we can, afraid even breathing will subtly lengthen our spines.

We can take care of everything else—bite our nails to nubs every morning, snip the ends off any hair growing past our ruler’s edge—but we can’t alter height, and we can’t argue with the writing on the wall, marks dating back to Grandpa’s childhood.

“Growth spurts again, Mabel.” Grandpa scowls, etching another dark line. Our marks run so close together they bleed into a black streak. “Awful lot of growing overnight. My family never—”

“Well, my sisters grew like weeds.” Grandma pours our other morning ritual—the one Grandpa never monitors—tall mugs of coffee, another pot already brewing. “Come for breakfast.”

Rhee and I slump into our chairs and scald our tongues, praying for stunted growth.

None of us look at the calendar, where Grandma circled today’s date and jotted “Catherine’s b-day” before remembering.

Some days I think she forgets on purpose. She was out when it happened. But we saw Grandpa throw Mom out. He tossed a half-zipped suitcase onto the lawn—one he packed—waving an opened letter from Towering Estates. “You slept with one of those freaks? You dated one?”

Before, he’d just talked about Giants the way he talked about raccoons or deer. Saw one walking right through town. Broad daylight!

“Not very long.” It was the first time I saw Mom cry like me and Rhee. Choking. Gasping. “I knew you wouldn’t—”

“When?” Grandpa’s narrowed eyes caught me and Rhee hiding on the stairs. We slid down enough steps for him to look down at us.

I don’t think Mom saw us from outside. “He wasn’t their father. I swear.”

“Can you be sure?” I’d never imagined him sneering so ugly.

I’d never imagined Mom leaving and not coming back.

After that, the measuring started. Just occasionally. Grandma said it meant he was thinking of Mom. Then Grandpa read somewhere how Giants have a lot of twins, and the measurements turned weekly. We got a long letter with a picture of Mom and her new/old boyfriend all curled up to keep his head in the frame. Grandpa deleted it from Grandma’s inbox, and the measurements turned daily.

We are the tallest kids in our class.

When the group picture comes out, we practically look like teachers towering in back, and we know—we know—it’ll embarrass him.

We beg Grandma to lose the picture, even though none of us need it to know the truth anymore.

“Even if you are,” Grandma says, holding us close, “someday you’ll grow to the ceiling, to the sky, and your grandpa won’t be able to—”

“If we live that long,” Rhee whispers.

Grandma makes a noise like she’s been kicked in the gut. “What kind of man do you think your grandpa is?”

We don’t answer. Neither does she.

Around two a.m., she finds us in the hallway. Maybe our flashlight beams seeped under their door, maybe she smelled the wet paint—Grandpa’s dead to the world when he’s asleep, but Grandma’s always shown up for puke or tears or growing pains since Mom left.

We’re frozen, brushes held to the hallway measurements. Ours, Mom’s, Grandpa’s. All gone under a thick bar of sky blue paint leftover from our dollhouse. The color’s off under our flashlights, and there’s still a shadow of black marker.

She’ll get Grandpa. I know it like a splitting seam, a loose tooth finally giving way.

We tense to scatter like roaches, grabbing the duffels we packed with food, clothes, toothpaste, but Grandma grabs Rhee’s strap and I can’t leave her. Grandma holds us down by one shoulder each.

“You don’t have to run,” she says. “I’m sorry you ever felt like you had to run. We’ll talk it through in the morning, and it won’t come to that. I promise.”

She helps us add another coat, until the strip is nothing but sky blue. She pushes our duffels into the hall closet, hugs us, and sends us to bed.

We wake early to Grandpa’s loudest kind of shouting.

He and Grandma are yelling in the yard, a paint bucket tipped over between them. She tries to push past him toward the house, and Grandpa shouts, spits, red-faced. He’s no giant and he’s frail, but he’s still much bigger than Grandma.

It ends with her roaring away in the spare car, fast as a teenager leaving school—fast as Mom left—and Rhee and I are stuck at the window watching the dust settle when we hear Grandpa at the foot of the stairs.

He’s slow.

We grab our duffels and barely have to jump to push up the attic trapdoor. Once we’re up, we drag an old hope chest over the panel. This was our worst back-up plan. The one with no exits.

“Should’ve left last night.” I curse softly as Grandpa calls for us.

The attic stifles us. Rhee’s sweaty hand finds mine in the dark. “When I said that before, I never thought we’d actually—”

“We won’t.” I cling to her. “He would never…”

But I’m not sure.

I’m not at all sure.

After hours of listening to Grandpa yell, he gets too hoarse to hear, and we fall asleep by the small, dirt-curtained window.

We’re woken later by the moon and a car horn.

We smear the dust away, and outside is Grandma with the car, and Mom—grim-faced, high heels sinking into muddy lawn—and a man who takes a long time to unfold from the backseat, like the feet and inches of him will never stop stretching.

Until they came back, I hadn’t realized how sure I was they were gone forever.

“So,” Rhee whispers, “he is our father?”

I smash the windowpane with a dented baseball bat, then shrug.

“Is now.”

And his long arms scoop us out through the window.

Previously published in Fireside Fiction, 2017. Reprinted here by permission of the author.