Issue 82 July 2020 Flash Fiction Online July 2020

I dream about you and the train all the time.

This is how it ends:

There is the train and there is you and then there is only the train.

1.

Sometimes we’re on board the train, together. (This is my favourite dream because I’m next to you.) You have the window seat and you’re sleeping—your face bereft of all defenses, eyelids shivering with secret visions, hidden nightmares. Outside the dirty glass, the darkness unfolds itself while the train rocks us, softly, like I would rock you when you were still small enough to be held. Our reflections are superimposed on the world outside, afloat, like sky and clouds in water. We are uncertain apparitions, and, for a moment, I fear we are nothing but reflections. Maybe there is no me, no you, no us, only these images floating across the world without being part of it. And if I were to try to touch you in that moment of dread, my hand would dip into cold water, marring what I thought was us.

Then you wake up and look at me and you smile and I know who I am again, that I am real, that you are real, that this is the world as it is supposed to be.

2.

Sometimes, I’m driving the train. I’m the engineer. It’s night and I’m coming down the tracks at high speed, traveling through that narrow section where the vines and bushes hang over the concrete edge from above (where the sparrows nest; you know the place). I’m used to the smell of diesel and metal, the thunk of wheels on rails, holding on to my insulated coffee mug, humming some old tune to myself. And there you are: just a kid, shoulders too slight to carry the carcass of the world, stumbling along the tracks. It’s as if you don’t hear the train bearing down on you with all its steel and rust and rain-streaked dirt. As if you don’t feel the thrum of its approach through the soles of your shoes, the rumble of it in the chill night air, rattling the spikes and sleepers, shuddering through the sharp gravel and rocks beneath you. Maybe you’ve got your headphones on. Maybe you’re drunk or sick. Or maybe you chose to walk here, knowing the train would come.

When I see you, I do whatever an engineer does. I make that whistle blare. I pull the brakes, but the train is too heavy, too long, one hundred cars (give or take), boxcars and hoppers, centerbeams and tank cars, carrying coal, ore, lumber. Or maybe it’s a passenger train, full of people, containing all their love and their loneliness. Or maybe the cars are empty, the contents already unloaded, the spray-painted graffiti on the sides of the boxcars vaguely luminous in the starlit dark.

It doesn’t matter. You are in front of the train and I can’t stop it.

3.

Sometimes, you call me in the middle of the night.

“Hey,” you say, and the sound of  your voice is a silvery thorn of suffering, like those tiny spines on a cactus that hurt even though you cannot see them, much less pull them out of your skin. Although I’m muddled with sleep, I get out of bed.

“Where are you?” I ask, and you are silent for so long I fear you’ve hung up on me.

I put on my clothes, fumbling for my purse and keys. My glasses fog up in the cold when I get into the car. I drive through the dark, past the 7-Eleven and across the train tracks. My car is a mess and so am I, but there you are, waiting on the sidewalk. You don’t smile when you see me, but you get in the car and that is all that matters.

When we drive away, I hear the bells clanging at the railroad crossing.

4.

Sometimes, I go through all the trouble of building a time machine and I travel back to stop trains from ever being invented. But it’s hard work to stop an idea when it is determined to become real.

5.

Sometimes, we are train robbers you and I, characters from an old pulpy western. We wear snakeskin boots, faded denim, and bandanas. We rob the train. We ride away. My horse is a steady old bay. Yours is a showy blue roan. You ride so fast across the golden grass of the prairie it makes my heart shudder to see it. Leaning low over the neck of your horse, urging it on, your long hair streaming like a banner behind you, and I know you’re smiling even though I cannot see your face because you’ve left me so far behind.

I don’t mind being left behind. You were always moving through this world with the quick grace of a sparrow’s wing, or soaring high, like a spear point piercing starlight.

6.

I don’t like the sixth dream.

In the sixth dream, I sleep through it all, safe and warm in my own bed, unaware that you are walking the tracks. In the sixth dream, I don’t see you, I don’t hear you, I can’t help you. Maybe you called and I didn’t answer. Or maybe you never called, because you thought I didn’t care or love you enough to come for you when you needed me.

This is how the sixth dream goes:

There is the train and there is you and then there is only the train.

* * *

When I open my eyes, I can’t hear the train. I still feel the thrum of it beneath my feet, but I don’t know if it’s approaching or receding. Standing outside your bedroom door, I listen for the sound of your voice, the shiver of your breath, the flutter of sparrow wings. Hoping you’re here, hoping you’ll stay, hoping we’re both awake.

That night, I bring home buckets of rocks plucked from the shore and spread them across the driftwood table in our dining room.

“Earth bones,” I say, when Jo, my partner, asks what they are. “Secret keepers.”

I remember reading to her from a book about local history when we first moved to this part of the country, her head on my lap, my fingers entwined in her hair. I recited from the page that when people in the scattering of small villages and hamlets nearby had secrets that were too overwhelming to keep, they would whisper them to the rocks, safe in the knowledge that those silent grey listeners would guard their darkest passions, their secret shames.

“Let’s open them up,” I say, fidgeting like a child on Christmas morning. I imagine them as cockles, ready to be pried open, the delicious meat within quivering, soon to be devoured.

Jo rolls her eyes, tells me I’m wasting my time and that she’s going to bed. I wait for her to add that I should come too, a coda which always assured me any bed lacking the other was somehow incomplete. But she has already turned away.

I say I’ll be up in a bit and doggedly make my way to the tool shed to fetch a hammer and chisel while she, quietly sighing, climbs the stairs.

We both mumble I love yous, a habit that neither of us has yet dared to kick.

* * *

I hold one of the rocks in my hand, a giant ostrich egg of dappled black, lay it down, and with a swift motion drive in my chisel, gouging a wound from which words long kept silent might escape.

The rock blanches, scarred for life, but nothing emerges, not a peep, not a whisper.

I repeat the act with all the stones until they resemble a brood of hungry birds, yearning mouths upturned to me, craving a secret I’m not brave enough to speak.

I stare at them for a long time. After a while I concede that yes, it’s late, put down my tools, and retreat to bed.

* * *

I find Jo softly snoring, the ridges of her spine and shoulder blades tracing the gentle undulation of the Pennines where we used to walk, it seems, a very long time ago.

The us of then would have stayed up all night together, cracking open rocks to hear their secrets, she indulging me perhaps, but enjoying my folly, enjoying me. How long have we been broken beyond repair? How long has she known this truth but, like me, been unable to admit it.

I place my hand lightly on the contours of her bone-house, imagine the rocks within her, imagine their secrets, wonder how long they will remain silent.

* * *

A light sleeper, she wakes before me. There is a noise downstairs, something unearthly and yet rooted entirely in earth. The rocks in the dining room are shouting.

Together, we boulder down the stairs and through the door.

Voices like the grinding of millstones clamour to be heard; long-forgotten diction dancing from quartzite older than the dinosaurs.

—Moira Green’s got a third nipple. I seen it when she was changing and she begged me not to tell no one or else they’ll call her a witch.

—Captain Bright never died at sea. He ran off with the barmaid at the Hind. Poor Doris. It’s better she thinks he’s dead.

—My husband didn’t drink himself to death; I put arsenic in his coffee and that done him in. He deserved it, the devil!

—Lucy Beynon. Good God, I’m in love with Lucy Beynon and she’s marrying my brother. What do I do? What do I do?

The old secrets flow, finally free of their silica cages. Jo looks at me, eyes shining, like she used to when we were adventurous and new, and together we listen to the secrets the rocks spill, laughing at some, gasping at others, wondering if the names we hear are still alive or long dead, now bones of the earth themselves.

When the rocks finally quiet, murmuring their last words like the tide retreating over shale, we sit together at the table, eyes lingering, quietly pondering if we too can be as open as the rocks, tell each other how we really feel, what we really want to say.

She yawns. “I’m going back to bed. It’s late. You should come too.”

“I’ll be up in a bit,” I say.

She stands, pushing her chair backwards, and the sound of it scraping on the floor as she rises is like a chisel hitting the rock inside me.

My hand shoots to hers, halting her retreat.

I open my mouth and speak.

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!

* * *

What are the rewards of being a writer?  Continued and exponential success are rare,  so, over twenty years I’ve come to find other aspects of my vocation as joys unto themselves. For many, these would be consolation prizes, the bronze medals, the participation certificates. What losers collect and celebrate to hide their failures. But most of our losers in this game, so it may be more honest to view these victories as unexpected gifts in a career that was doomed!

DIRECT CASH: I’ve made direct money from writing, including a five buck check that bounced (fuck you, Pill Hill Press), as well as thousands of dollars for novels and five-figures with fellowships. But most of my publishing projects ranged in the 50-1500 buck zone. I’ve done dozens of interviews, articles, short stories, and more to generate pockets of cash. When I was below the poverty line, they helped feed me. When things got better, they helped me support others.

FRIENDS: While most writers are misfits, not all of them are like you. So I count myself lucky that I’ve discovered so many great and talented and bizarrely well-read nuts in this field who I can laugh with about the joy of Godzilla soundtracks and shitty contracts and weird agents and the good, bad, and ugly of the industry – all while still loving fiction. Becoming a writer led me to friends who have saved my more than once. I’ve done my best to return the favor. These are gifts worth more than a six-figure deal and a movie option, all of which can vanish with a phone call or pandemic. As Tricky Dick Nixon knew -when you when, everyone calls. When you lose, only your friends call.

ENEMIES: You can’t be friends with everyone, though. And within the writing community are a thousand different flavor of shithook: narcissists, racists, misogynists, predators, bullies and con-jobers who prey on the young and naive; morons who give advice that will aggrandize their singular experiences as gospels for success; and, lest we forget,  sales and marketing bullshitters who convince people their dreams will come true with one more workshop, elite workshop, secret elite workshop, private workshop, etc. Recently I’ve had friends turnout to be abusers and dropped them and spoke out against them. Cost me a book deal. I have zero regrets. Following your “dreams” requires swimming in shark infested pools with those who feed on the desperate. Know your enemy, know yourself, and don’t be a shit.

OPPORTUNITIES: Because I had a professional skillset and moderate success, I received opportunities to teach writing and to edit. This has created a much more successful wing of my career. I’ve taught writing to adult audiences, high school students, corporate clients, and for years I’ve taught creative writing for the good folks at Google. I’ve edited manuscripts and been hired to be a beta reader for a New York Times bestseller. I’ve also written for educational products, role playing games, and video games from time to time. I’ve also edited beginner novels so bad they’d rot your gums. I enjoy all of it!

EXPERIENCES: While reading about writing is boring, being a writer can take you into weird and freaky experiences. There was the gentleman at one of my lectures who really wanted me to read his novel about a race of groovy cat-people who all lived on a planet called Poly and had sexcapades quests all night and day (sadly, I had to decline due to total lack of interest). I received a fan letter from Harlan Ellison for a review of mine that trashed his early porn novels (where the late Ellison lamented, “great writing, but did you have to be so cold?”). As a slush reader I was able to buy a story quickly to support a colleague grieving the loss of a loved one.I’ve found my novels in the Mall of America, and signed them without anyone asking to see my identification. As a guest instructor at a conference, I watched in horror as a NYT bestseller bemoaned how 9/11 had ruined their debut book tour (the POC in the audience and a Vietnam Vet in my class all cast their gaze at the floor until this idiot speech was done). I’ve applied to dozens of bizarre writing gigs, like creating scripts for a hologram club show in Vegas about the Rat Pack (my script focusing on Sammy Davis Jr., the most talented member, was so hated the contact replied like a toddler, “My boss has told me to stop talking to you”). I’ve watched three of my biggest influences fade into death, illness, and obscurity while I continue to champion their work. I’ve had a mentor who gave me hardcover copies of his collections and provided a blurb for my own work completely ghost me. A student who served in Iraq came home broken, racist, and traumatized, and used writing to try and make sense of it – until he found meth worked quicker and deadlier to kill his suffering and troubles and vanished.

PURPOSE: I wrestle with writing as a part of my psyche. When it dominated my identity I almost went mad. But negating it completely has also been destructive. I keep circling back to the idea of vocation. While I am not religious, I have felt “called” to create stories my entire life – with music, with improv, with history, with fiction. Right now, the fiction-side of my vocation is singing with a clarity I have not felt in years. In a desperate time of so much suffering and hate, it has provided a lodestar to follow in mornings plagued by bad news and crushing mental health concerns. If you read the autobiographical works of Henry Miller, Charle Bukowski or Dan Fante, you find moments where their artistic output roars out of them, and when it whispers. In my life, the roar jumps from history to fiction to performing, and without warning. Right now, it is firmly entrenched in fiction and novels and both are giving me a joy and purpose I’ve greatly missed.

Cash. Colleagues. Adversaries. Adventures. Vocation against the hardship of reality.

These are consolation prizes worth fighting for.

James saw the feather Monday morning, after Lyla had gone to work. Just one black feather, long as his pinky finger, lying half-crushed on the pink sheet on her side of the bed.

It took a few minutes for his brain to catch up with his eyes, and then he looked again and really saw it, lying there like blood spatter, like a knife, like a smear of shit. It was cold and heavy as lead in his hand when he picked it up.

They’d been doing so well. She’d been doing so well. It had been almost a year since anything, so much longer than that since the bad times, since weeks of barely leaving bed and calling him a liar when he said he loved her.

It could be nothing. Just a stressful weekend. Lyla would be fine. She’d drink coffee, and get her work done, and they’d curl up with Netflix tonight, and she’d be all right.

He put the feather in the trash.

In the morning, black down littered the sheet where she had lain, each little feather dimpling the sheet with its weight. More were sprouting along the lines of her shoulder blades and the inward curve of her lower back. She put her shirt on quickly over it.

He didn’t say anything about medication or an extra meeting with her therapist. That would be money not paying down debt, making it that much longer until they were free. He didn’t need to have that fight again. Things would be fine again, soon.

He felt the silence like a collar pulled too tight around his throat.

Lyla spent Tuesday evening reading, curled on the bed while her new feathers rumpled her shirt and poked black barbs through the thin cotton. She looked like a doll dripping stuffing at burst seams.

James pressed close on the couch while they were reading. He wished he could take care of her, like he would when she had a cold or something, but she always got so angry at being fussed over when her wings grew. He was always afraid she’d make him stay away if he pressed her too much.

In bed that night, Lyla shifted to give him space when they were half-asleep, and he pulled her close and held on tighter. The feathers rasped him, but he knew they would hurt Lyla no matter how much space she had. At least he could be warm for her.

Wednesday morning, Lyla curled, fetal, in her nest of feathers. Her wings were coming in, a limp cape down to the top of her thighs, bedraggled from the bed. They were so much blacker than a bird’s, no sheen of oil or deep iridescence, flat as fake carbon-fiber paint on a cheap car.

She was still curled up when he came back from the bathroom.

“Are you going in today?”

“No.”

“Good. Call out, and we’ll do something fun.”

Whatever they could do with those wings weighing her down.

“No, I can work from home.”

It got worse as the day went on. Lyla curled into her dark wings, tapping at the computer in fits and starts. She kept her headset on even when she wasn’t on a call, folded her wings around herself to make a wall between them.

The weight dragged her down, a distraction and a drain, making her tired and lizard cold, stealing blood and brain and brightness. She said they always made her think of flying, but they weighed her down so much she could barely walk. Like a bad joke at her expense. All they were good for was hiding.

All he wanted was to rip them out of her, but the roots went in too deep, and him trying wouldn’t make her hurt less.

Lyla clocked out and sat staring at the blank screen of her shut down laptop.

They’d been invited out for drinks with some friends tonight, but of course that was before.

“I’ll just call David and tell them…,” said James.

“No,” said Lyla, before he could finish. “You go.”

She went into the bedroom and slammed the door.

He tried to go. He should respect her choice, not treat her like a child.

He knew what the wings whispered to her, about what she was worth, about how she should always be alone.

He took a deep breath, and a second, and he pushed the bedroom door open.

Her wings had grown through the day, and she was wrapped inside them on the bed like the dome of a little tent, nothing to see but black and raggedness.

“Lyla, are you sure you’re”— no, she’d just say yes.

“Lyla, you’re not okay. I’m coming in.”

He parted the curtain of her wings, black feathers dragging rough over his skin, leaving little trails that faded white to red to nothing.

She had been crying, just a little. He eyes were wet, but not the red of real weeping, and there were only a few sluggish trails down her cheek. She didn’t have the energy to sob.

He put his arms around her. She shrugged.

“It won’t work. I still can’t fly.”

He made her look at him.

“I don’t expect you to. But you don’t get to be miserable alone.”

She looked away.

“We’ll be alright. We’ve gotten through this before.”

Lyla said nothing. She didn’t have to.

James buried his fingers in the base of her wings, and combed black feathers to the bed until she relaxed into his hug and let him lay her down. He pulled her wings back to let in a little light.

The hours had passed with the miraculous rapidity which tinctures time when one is on the river, and now overhead the moon was a gorgeous yellow lantern in a greyish purple sky.

The punt was moored at the lower end of Glover’s Island on the Middlesex side, and rose and fell gently on the ebbing tide.

A girl was lying back amidst the cushions, her hands behind her head, looking up through the vague tracery of leaves to the soft moonlight. Even in the garish day she was pretty, but in that enchanting dimness she was wildly beautiful. The hint of strength around her mouth was not quite so evident perhaps. Her hair was the colour of oaten straw in autumn and her deep blue eyes were dark in the gathering night.

But despite her beauty, the man’s face was averted from her. He was gazing out across the smoothly-flowing water, troubled and thoughtful. A good-looking face, but not so strong as the girl’s in spite of her prettiness, and enormously less vital.

Ten minutes before he had proposed to her and had been rejected.

It was not the first time, but he had been very much more hopeful than on the other occasions.

The air was softly, embracingly warm that evening. Together they had watched the lengthening shadows creep out across the old river. And it was spring still, which makes a difference. There is something in the year’s youth — the sap is rising in the plants — something there is, anyway, beyond the sentimentality of the poets. And overhead was the great yellow lantern gleaming at them through the branches with ironic approval.

But, in spite of everything, she had shaken her head and all he received was the maddening assurance that she “liked” him.

“I shall never marry,” she had concluded. “Never. You know why.”

“Yes, I know,” the man said miserably. “Carruthers.”

And so he was looking out moodily, almost savagely, across the water when the temptation came to him.

He would not have minded quite so much if Carruthers had been alive, but he was dead and slept in the now silent Salient where a little cross marked his bed. Alive one could have striven against him, striven desperately, although Carruthers had always been rather a proposition. But now it seemed hopeless — a man cannot strive with a memory. It was not fair — so the man’s thoughts were running. He had shared Carruthers’ risks, although he had come back. This persistent and exclusive devotion to a man who would never return to her was morbid. Suddenly, his mind was made up.

“Olive,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied quietly.

“What I am going to tell you I do for both our sakes. You will probably think I’m a cad, but I’m taking the risk.” He was sitting up but did not meet her eyes.

“What on earth are you talking about?” she demanded.

“You know that — apart from you — Carruthers and I were pals?”

“Yes,” she said wondering. And suddenly she burst out petulantly. “What is it you want to say?”

“He was no better than other men,” he replied bluntly. “It is wrong that you should sacrifice your life to a memory, wrong that you should worship an idol with feet of clay.”

“I loath parables,” she said coldly. “Will you tell me exactly what you mean about feet of clay?” The note in her voice was not lost on the man by her side.

“I don’t like telling you — under other conditions I wouldn’t. But I do it for both our sakes.”

“Then, for goodness sake, do it!”

“I came across it accidentally at the Gordon Hotel at Brighton. He stayed there, whilst he was engaged to you, with a lady whom he described as Mrs. Carruthers. It was on his last leave.”

“Why do you tell me this?” she asked after a silence; her voice was low and a little husky.

“Surely, my dear, you must see. He was no better than other men. The ideal you have conjured up is no ideal. He was a brave soldier, a darned brave soldier, and — until we both fell in love with you — my pal. But it is not fair that his memory should absorb you. It’s — it’s unnatural.”

“I suppose you think I should be indignant?” There was no emotion of any kind in her voice.

“I simply want you to see that your idol has feet of clay,” he said, with the stubbornness of a man who feels he is losing.

“What has that to do with it? You know I loved him.”

“Other girls have loved —  ” he said bitterly.

“And forgotten? Yes, I know,” she interrupted him. “But I do not forget, that is all.”

“But after what I have told you. Surely — ”

“You see I knew,” she said, even more quietly than before.

“You — knew?”

“Yes. It was I who was with him. It was his last leave,” she added thoughtfully.

And only the faint noise of the water and the wistful wind in the trees overhead broke the silence.

Originally published in The Best British Short Stories of 1922. Public domain.