Issue 66 March 2019 Flash Fiction Online March 2019

I hate how the chemicals took the hair from his head and the color from his cheeks, leaving the freckles around his nose to look like blood splatter on whitewash.

And the machines that tick and beep. Tick and beep. Over and over.

His eyelids flicker open momentarily.

I cross my arms, lower my head, watch my tapping foot.

“Isn’t there someplace else you’d rather be?” he asks.

I force the smile he expects, knowing that’s my sign, my cue, to leave the scent of the sickness the antiseptics can’t dispel.

* * *

Where I would rather be is in that hospital room with my younger brother. Not crawling through the broken back window of this empty and derelict building where dust snows down to clog my nose and make my eyes water.

But I find a spot in a dark corner, sit, and press my back into it. I rest my pack next to me. There, in the gloom, I sit.  I smoke a hitter or two and wait.

Wait for something to go bump or bang or boo in the fucking night.

* * *

“Rewind it,” he says and points at the computer screen on his lap.  He’s afraid to rewind it himself because of the needles in his arm, because of the tubes under his gown.

He’s better today, excited by what he sees in the videos of the old building. He chews at his bottom lip. Sometimes his mouth falls open in wonder—like it did that time we camped in the backyard and watched the stars fall—and I can see the small gap between his bottom front teeth.

Remember, I want to ask him, when we would skip rocks across the river? Remember how you would make UFO sounds as the rocks bounced and then how hard we would laugh?

* * *

Another building like all the others I’ve spent countless nights in for him. Dust swirls, beams creak and settle and all I can see is whatever the night vision on the camera allows me to see.

And that is nothing.

I have a voice recorder on my lap. I hit the button.

“Give me a sign,” I say, “of your presence.”

Speak into the red light. Let me know you are here. Make your voice ring out through the static. Blah and blah and blah.

I squeeze my hands into fists. I hate it here in these places. I don’t want to be here. I want to be with my brother, remembering the blanket castles we used to make, and how we would hide in them and pretend nothing else existed.

* * *

He can’t sit up today. His eyes are drowsy, red-rimmed. His irises float back and forth, and I am scared. Terrified.

“Play it again,” he whispers.

Enough, I want to say to him. Please. Enough.

But I play it again.

“Did you hear it?” he says, and then his eyes roll closed.

I heard nothing.

Nothing but static.

His eyes open again and he stares at me.  Into me.

“Danny?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“I’m scared.”

* * *

Another building. Another broken window. More dust. More dark. Another corner. A sip from a bottle. Tears.

“Show yourselves, goddamn it!” I yell. “Show me you’re here.”

Show me.

Please.

He needs to see you. I need to see you.

To see something.

Something other than nothing.

Last year, you published two books. When they arrived, freshly minted from the press, covers pretty and sharp, your friends and family cheered. But you? Your emotions vaporized. All that was remained was an autumnal sadness and a sense of failure. If you’d been alone, it would have been worse.

This year, you sold another novel. And a short story to a prestigious noir series. Peeps online and close to you cheered. A blip of joy tapped through you, then retreated into the storm.

These are moments to celebrate. Good things. Reminders of accomplishments that will endure when you are dead. The gifts younger artists dream about and early pros still find sweet. But just now, seeing the covers, the physical embodiment of your imaginative and analytical efforts, what hangs around you is the dirty haze of despair.

Now, this is a pattern. And it’s not just the sharp edges of a cynic’s eye.

What must be done?

Remember.

You made these things.

Often times, you made them when things were awful, when the depression toiled with your fight for survival.

Other times, you stopped making things completely, and that is just as good as not making them at all.

You are starting to see depths of a truth whose surface you skimmed, about artists and their art, about identity and success, about process and personality.

But there is no conclusion, no insight, no galvanized moment or battle cry.

There is only a gnawing sense that time is fleeting.

And a question to ask about love, for that is all that really matters.

Are you worthy of it now?

When you are silent?

When art is still?

Yes.

And yet the tendrils remain.

Thanks, depression, for bleaching the color out of joy.

Shall we go another round?

Yes. Even if its only to get back here, this nothing time, when the weight of the mountain crushes the spirit like a jawbreaker in a vice. Even if you do nothing but endure until the time is right to strike. Rope-a-dope, like Marcus Aurelius and Muhammad Ali.

Hit the lights. Cue my theme song. Ring the bell.

When we hear they are coming, we bury our music in the backyard, deep underneath the roots of the sycamore tree where the forbidden music cannot break through the earth. We know the punishment for carrying music inside of us. We know that if we are caught with music, we will be sent away to have it erased from our bodies and our minds until we are limp, compliant, useless; we will forfeit all we own, for who knows if it will be there when we return, and there will be no one to protect it for us. We do not wish to face this. We do not wish to lose what keeps us alive. This is what we think as we dig our fingers into the ground and drain the slurs, shake out the staccatos, force our chords through our toes and into the hidden soil.

We go back inside and wait. When we hear the three knocks on the door, equally spaced, we know it is them and we know it is time. We check our pinkies for any missed sixteenth notes, any codas attached to the insides of our ribs, any arpeggios snaking up our spines, and, finding nothing, we open the door.

They tell us they have received a report from a neighbor. The neighbor has heard our walls leaking concertos; they have seen quarter notes imprinted in our windows; they have tasted the hint of a sonata in the air. Is it true? they ask, eyes blank, mouths impassive.

It is not, we tell them.

If we search this place, we will find no crescendos, no diminuendos, no sforzandos?

You will not, we tell them.

We shall see, they say, and take out their long fingers. We sit on the couch while they run those fingers over every surface, drill them into every nook and cranny, pull our books from the shelves, and leave their prints on every page. They leave our photos on the floor and our furniture pulled six inches from the wall. We imagine what will happen to our possessions if we are taken away, who will dig through them and claim them for their own. We sit. We breathe. We wait.

The search is a fermata that lasts forever; when at last it cuts off, they step back into the center of the room, brush off their hands, fold their arms. We have not found anything, they say, and we smile. We relax.

This is our downfall.

From somewhere within one of us, a grace note flutters down, almost undetectable. We feel it slip down skin, come to rest between the cushions. We will them not to have seen it, not to have heard it, but they can sense the change in our demeanor. They know what we have concealed.

Please stand up, they tell us.

We do.

They slide their fingers into the couch and pull out the wriggling grace note.

Tell us what we have here, they say.

We do not.

Please come with us, they say.

We do.

We are taken to their prisons, thrown in their cells with padded walls to ensure everything is kept out except silence. We endure our sentence by keeping the music alive inside, singing nocturnes and humming requiems inside our brains, trying as hard as we can to transmit them to one another. We can feel one another’s presence in the walls, sense the hints of what lies beyond, but we cannot break through.

The days turn to weeks, turn to months, turn to years. We scratch songs into the walls to track time, but we lose even this after a while. What we have left seeps from our brains and into the dirt, and as the years pass, the music fades. The difference between major and minor dissipates; the semitones blur together until they are indistinguishable.

We can sense it, the moment the last bit of us flees. We thought we had emptied ourselves in our backyard, but we did not know what that word truly meant until now. And it is then that they come and open our doors. They inspect us to make sure we are no longer threats, and we are too weak to resist. Satisfied, they send us on our way.

We stumble through the streets, delirious. We pass people we do not recognize and people who recognize us, or if not us exactly, the air of people who have been returned. This happened to my son, one whispers to us. It will come back to you. We do not believe him.

We walk through places that once were etched into the walls of our brains but no longer are. We make our way toward what once was home, and it is not until we are halfway there that we remember it might no longer be ours. We press on regardless. We do not know where else to go.

When we get to our home, we can see that it is in fact no longer ours. Children’s toys litter the lawn. The walls are a different color. The atmosphere is colder, and the joy that once filled the air is gone. We peer into the backyard and see the children playing under trees. “Listen,” we whisper, and if we are quiet and the children are quiet, we can hear the undertones of a prelude in the breeze wafting from the bright green leaves dangling heavy with fruit. The music we buried, fully grown. It is not until we feel the cool wind on our cheeks that we realize we are crying.

And later that night, when the children have gone to bed and no one is watching, we will jump the fence, climb the trees, bury our faces in their bark and inhale their songs. We will sink our teeth into the fruit of our minds. And we will welcome the music back into our bones.

When you were a child, white skulls used to follow you through the woods. You tried to catch a glimpse of them, but when you turned your head, their skeleton bodies would disappear, fading into the canopy. Only their bone-voices remained, clacking through the trees, knick knack, knick knack.

And then how you ran! Not because you were scared but because running made it easier to see them. With the trees blurring and the wind in your ears, they were like stars in a velvet-green sky, their empty-eyed faces tilting sideways in comic curiosity. How you used to laugh at their songs and sing along, your child-voice making a sweet harmony with their bone drumming. Then, at night, how they climbed down to the lowest branches and watched you sleep through the window. How they shone like shadows of the moon.

You were always a smart and fierce child, but you were also half here, half there. Their world was never that far from you.

You can’t help but remember as you drive the familiar old path, laughing to yourself in the silent car at your memories. Now the woods are just woods. You’ve put away your castles in the air, your Ferris wheels, puppet strings, and sealing wax. It’s so hard being responsible and knowing when to stand up for yourself or when to let go. But you’re still strong.

Your mother’s house is a bit of a burden now, all rattletraps and dust, tucked between the oaks and Spanish moss. You are tasked with emptying out this old witch’s hut, folding blankets between papers and placing them in trunks, packing spell books in boxes where their charms will lose their enchantment. Words are powerful, but without someone to read them their beauty diminishes. Rolling scrolls with careful fingers, you slip them into tubes to send to local historians. Perhaps you don’t have the heart to throw the scrolls out because they’re written in your mother’s handwriting. You open the aviary to the elements and all the chickadees, sparrows, and cardinals stare at you in wonder. They’ll come back anyway, silly things, for years to come, looking for the old witch who loved to feed them. You shake the herb jars out the window and not a single thing sprouts in the earth where they fall, not a single snake or rosebud-child. They’ve lost their potency, those old gray herbs. You used to wonder over their jeweled delights, the star-stout, fish scales, mushroom ghosts, and river rocks. You’d run your finger over the glass, asking what each one did, begging to be let into the locked cabinet where the skull-and-crossbones jars hid. Now their labels are faded and the jar-tops dusty, the cabinet half-empty.

The furniture’s not worth keeping and there are few things which come to rest in your rental car’s back seat. A little doll, white-faced and round-bellied, made of carved bone. That’s all you take back with you.

It pleases me, this last thing you keep for yourself.

You were supposed to be a witch’s daughter, but I see how wrong it was to want you to take my place.

It’s lonely out here in the woods.

I taught you all the spells but you don’t need them now. You lock the door, placing the key in your purse. The house gets one last long look as you memorize the bell beside the door, the crooked windows, the gingerbread-lattice roof, the silent feeling of the woods.

Do I imagine your eyes flick once more to the treetops? Do I imagine you drive a little faster, take the turns a little harder, so you can catch the spirits on the wind? Do you see us, our white faces a thousand and one?

We watch your car wind its way through the trees down the birch path. Your face is hard and you never look back.

I tilt my head, not confused but pleased. I call out to you in my bone voice.

knick knack, knick knack.

I love you. I love you.

Previously published in Fireside Fiction, February 2018. Republished here by permission of the author.