Issue May 2011 Flash Fiction Online May 2011

The quick report of a pistol rang through the quiet autumn night. It was no unusual sound in the unsavory quarter where Dr. Chevalier had his office. Screams commonly went with it. This time there had been none.

Midnight had already rung in the old cathedral tower.

The doctor closed the book over which he had lingered so late, and awaited the summons that was almost sure to come.

As he entered the house to which he had been called he could not but note the ghastly sameness of detail that accompanied these oft-recurring events. The same scurrying; the same groups of tawdry, frightened women bending over banisters — hysterical, some of them; morbidly curious, others; and not a few shedding womanly tears; with a dead girl stretched somewhere, as this one was.

And yet it was not the same. Certainly she was dead: there was the hole in the temple where she had sent the bullet through. Yet it was different. Other such faces had been unfamiliar to him, except so far as they bore the common stamp of death. This one was not.

Like a flash he saw it again amid other surroundings. The time was little more than a year ago. The place, a homely cabin down in Arkansas, in which he and a friend had found shelter and hospitality during a hunting expedition.

There were others beside. A little sister or two; a father and mother — coarse, and bent with toil, but proud as archangels of their handsome girl, who was too clever to stay in an Arkansas cabin, and who was going away to seek her fortune in the big city.

“The girl is dead,” said Doctor Chevalier. “I knew her well, and charge myself with her remains and decent burial.”

The following day he wrote a letter. One, doubtless, to carry sorrow, but no shame to the cabin down there in the forest.

It told that the girl had sickened and died. A lock of hair was sent and other trifles with it. Tender last words were even invented.

Of course it was noised about that Doctor Chevalier had cared for the remains of a woman of doubtful repute.

Shoulders were shrugged. Society thought of cutting him. Society did not, for some reason or other, so the affair blew over.

Christopher and Emily Kesley met the old-fashioned way. At least, that’s what Kesley told me. He told me a lot when we served together. About his childhood, his family, his wife.

Dear Mrs. Kesley,

I pause, examining what I had just written. The curve of the M. The sharpness of the K. It seems wrong; not right. After all he had told me about Emily, this just felt too formal.

You don’t know her, I remind myself. You two have never met.

Shaking my head, I crumple the sheet of paper and toss it toward the waste basket. It misses, landing among the other sheets of crumpled paper on the floor. Who would have thought this would be so hard.

“Honey, come to bed.”

I glance up at the doorway. My wife is leaning against the frame, her curly blonde hair pulled back in a long braid. The latest bestseller is clutched in her hands, and I can see that she is almost finished.

When I don’t answer, she walks over and picks up one of the balls of paper from the floor and smoothes it out. Reading over the words, she gives me a sad smile.

“You’ll see her tomorrow, Frank. Tell her then.”

“Tell her what? Hi, I’m Frank Glassman. I’m the reason your husband is dead. Sorry.”

“Now, you know that isn’t true.”

I cradle my head in my hands. “Go to bed, Krista. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Krista sighs and places the sheet of paper on my desk. She knows better than most how I feel. Kissing the top of my head, she leaves me alone with the pen and paper. Pulling a fresh sheet out, I poise my pen to start again.

Dear

He had told me all about her. Her eyes. Her smile. How she hummed when she cooked or cleaned. How she prided herself on her garden. He told me that she wanted nothing more than to be a mother, a blessing that she discovered soon after he was deployed. My hand shakes. His daughter was born just last month. He’d never get to see the woman his daughter would become.

The roadside bomb blew up the first part of our convoy, sending shrapnel and debris into the Hum-vee I was driving. I lost control and we hit something, sending the vehicle into a roll that left me pinned inside. Kesley fought his way over, pulling out Raines and Albright before reaching for me. I was lucky. A couple of scrapes and bruises; nothing major. He smiled, made some joke that I can’t remember, as his eyes gazed over my shoulder. Grabbing my shoulders, he shoved me back and used his body to shield me from the enemy gun fire. He was dead before he hit the ground.

If I wasn’t driving…

If we hadn’t crashed…

He’d still be alive.

Why did he decide that my life was more important than his own?

I crumble the sheet and pull out a fresh page.

Shots ring out, and I clutch the envelope in my hand. I glance up at Emily as they hand her the neatly folded flag. She holds it to her chest, her eyes staring unseeingly at the ground. The priest describes how her husband was a hero, and how their country needs more men like him. Raines and Albright tell stories about him, agreeing with the priest’s sentiments. Krista wraps an arm around my waist, her red rimmed eyes careful not to look at me. Before I know it, it’s over. People are giving Emily their condolences, saying words that are meant to comfort. I look at the envelope in my hands. Words are never enough.

Krista hugs Emily, giving her our condolences and reminding her that she is always welcome in our home. Emily nods, dabbing at her red eyes with a tissue. My heart lurches as Krista steps away and Emily turns her bright blue eyes to me. I shake her hand, hand her the envelope, and quickly follow Krista to the car. I can’t see her face when she reads the truth in my words.

I wait as Raines pulls out in front of me, tapping my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel.

“Frank.”

I look over at Krista and she points out my window. Emily is hurrying over to us, the open letter in her hands, and it was then that I can hear her calling my name. I freeze.

“Go. Talk to her.”

“I can’t.”

Krista glares at me. “You can and you will. Go.”

Sighing, I open the car door and step out. Emily slows down when she sees that I’m not going to drive away, walking the rest of the way over to me. She looks up at me, tears glittering in her eyes.

“Is this true?” she asks. He was right. Her voice is like the birds in spring. She holds the letter out to me.

“Yes.” I can’t meet her eyes. How can I, when it should have been me.

I gasp as she wraps me in a hug, pressing her cheek against the ribbons on my dress uniform. I expected yelling; hitting even. But this?

“What…?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I start to stutter as I try to find the words to convey how I feel. I didn’t understand it; why did Kesley decide that my life was more important than his own?

Emily grabs both of my hands up in hers. “He did what he was put on this Earth to do, Glassman. He saved your life. It’s what heroes do.”

Emily turns back toward the grave leaving me standing by the car. I climb back in the car as the sun peaks out from behind the clouds. Krista is staring at me as I drive out of the cemetery, not saying a word as we get on the interstate and head home.

Vari woke up and did the first thing she always did, the thing she hated most: she looked down.

A second later, she felt to make sure. Thank God. No extra bits today.

It was a good day to be a girl. Smooth legs, soft skin, long brown hair. Excellent. If she got lucky, she would stay a girl all day long, and the kids at her new high school wouldn’t notice anything strange about her.

It’s not a school for the blind. They’ll notice. But maybe….

She hopped out of bed and glanced at her toenails. They were polished in a glittering shade she’d never seen before. Grackle’s wing black. Maybe they would just think she was goth.

Why am I even worried? Vari admired her toenails as she walked to school, her flip-flops slapping the sidewalk. The polish changed from black to red to electric blue with each step. The first day of high school is supposed to be hell.

Still, what fresh hell would public school be for someone like her? Her polish inched up her ankle, looking for higher ground. “Settle,” she hissed. The polish crept back down, a sullen gray.

I can do this. I’ve planned for anything. Her clothes were plain and oversized in case she gained weight in class. Once, she’d plumped up forty pounds in the middle of the grocery store. The buttons on her pants had pinged across the aisle, hitting a lady in the eye. “An allergic reaction,” Vari’s mom had explained. She was good at making excuses for Vari’s strangeness.

Her mom had wanted to homeschool again this year. “Let me try real school, just once,” Vari had begged. “If it’s bad, I’ll quit.” She turned a corner and saw the school. It had all the charm of a meat-packing plant, all the welcome of a high-security prison. Homeschool was looking better every minute. A bell rang. Too late now.

She pulled her sunglasses over her eyes, her scarf over her hair. It made her look like a terrorists’s girlfriend, but it was better than anyone seeing her hair grow in class — or worse, shrink.

Today was a good day, though. Only her skin changed in the first hour, growing slightly darker. Her leg hair, hidden under baggy jeans, disappeared, grew wooly, and vanished again during third period science. Time for lunch.

The cafeteria throbbed with the agony of first-day seating decisions. Freshmen like her bobbed about, loose as corks on the ocean current. No one made eye contact with her. Vari felt her hair begin to shrink, and wished she could shrink, too, grow smaller and smaller until she could creep mouse-like away.

Her toenails vanished under excess denim. She was shrinking.

Had anyone seen? Her breath came faster. What would they do? They would tell their parents, and her life would turn into a B-grade movie like The Fly, with a Jeff Goldblum look-alike starring as the mad scientist who vivisected her.

She felt cold, curious eyes on her. Vivisection couldn’t hurt any worse than the stares that slit her, gutted her, right there on the patchwork tile.

“You new?” A voice at her elbow. A pimpled face, a gangly boy, a t-shirt that read Some days it isn’t even worth chewing through the restraints. One of the social outcasts, the kind who would welcome a new girl without hesitation. He had nothing to lose, right?

Vari laughed at the shirt, but didn’t answer. Her throat tickled, and she had a feeling she would sound like she’d been sucking helium if she said a word. The boy answered his own question. “Yep, new. Don’t know where to sit?”

She shook her head. The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Pretty. You could be ones of the Populars, if you weren’t dressed like that. You got pom-poms in your backpack?” He looked suspicious. Vari didn’t know what to say. Yes? No? What was the right answer? She got so nervous, she forgot to keep her eyes down.

The boy looked… and froze.

What were her eyes doing, she wondered, as the boy’s face grew slack, disbelieving. Were they whirling in rainbows? Flashing strobe-like? Morphing into long oval orbs? From the way the boy stared, it was a distinct possibility.

Vari reached up, pulled her sunglasses back down. “I’m not a cheerleader,” she whispered. The boy didn’t answer, just walked a few steps away, toward a table populated by kids like him: wearing back braces, sporting a few hundred extra pounds, shorter, uglier, stranger than normal. He was leaving her behind.

Not even the social rejects wanted her. Her stomach churned. Why would they? No one understood her condition. Even if she told the truth about why she changed, they wouldn’t believe it. A nineteen-year old hippie mom stumbling around on the outskirts of the Burning Man festival, peyote on her tongue, a baby in utero? That baby born during a lunar eclipse, in the shadows of petroglyph-stained sandstone, her first cry heard by the kangaroo rats in the sands and the old gods of a sacred place turned hospital ward?

Had she been cursed? Blessed? Born… or made? Named in a drug-induced vision quest on a holy night, the baby became what her mother had mumbled: Variation.

“Hey,” the boy called out, startling her. “You coming, Roswell?”

She smiled. She’d worried for nothing. There was a group of freaks in every school, a group that welcomed new outcasts, no matter how weird she was. Or he was, Vari thought, feeling a bulge grow under her jeans.

Some things never changed.

Sammi’s sister sent her a funny email. A funny, funny email, showing crazy Japanese inventions to make things into other crazy things, other crazy shapes they weren’t. All crazy and stuff stuff, like watermelons grown in tempered glass jars, square right off the vine.

She clicked a picture of square watermelons, followed link to link to link from the chainletter her sister forwarded from a forwarded forward to her until it was junked up with blue boxes and sideways carets around names and addresses of everyone who’d sent this thing ever. Forward this email to three friends, the email told her at its nether-end, and you will know happiness the rest of your life.

Staring at the screenful of square watermelons, Sammi wondered if she had three friends. She couldn’t forward to sender, and was a sister a friend, anyway? She had a boyfriend, but wasn’t sure he could properly be called a friend friend. Boy-mate, man-mate, man-meat, whatever he was. If he was whatever, what did that make her?

Deciding to count him as one friend, Sammi clicked: Forward to:.

Good job, yes. Job well done. Happiness will now find Sammi, now stick to her forever like toilet paper to the heel of her shoe.

That evening at supper her manfriend of too many years to count grunted at his computer screen. She glanced up briefly from her lemon-peppered edamame and inbox to watch the light of his laptop screen flicker in his glasses as he shoveled spaghetti between his lips. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

Blinking, Sammi said, “The pasta? It’s from the box you like. With the dinosaurs on it. With the organic vegetable in a little circle with the red line through it.”

He licked his lips, frowned. “No. Square watermelons. Smart. Fit easier on shelves. Much more convenient.”

Late into the night, Sammi lay looking a the ceiling, thinking about convenient watermelons and glass jars to make things the perfect size. Next morning, she dug through her emails, clicking link to link to other links, until she found the page selling square jars to grow square watermelons to fit easily onto shelves. She clicked more links, and shopping carts in modern pictography, and entered credit card numbers, and scarcely had shut down her computer for lunch when the doorbell rang.

After the deliveryman left, Sammi sat staring at the enormous box in her small livingroom. Fragile, it read, and listed a return address someplace in Idaho.

She slit the tape from top to bottom, ignoring the sharp edge of the knife where it shone. Packing foam in small shapes like mangled snails tumbled from box slits, little styrofoam avalanches. The jar itself was surprisingly light, surprisingly easy to handle. It is convenient, she thought.

Thanks to excellent foreign design and mediocre American engineering, the jar stood easily by itself. Sunlight streamed through glass patio doors, only slightly muted by the fraying screen, glancing off rounded surfaces, shining through hollow interior spaces the perfect shape and size of a real, perfect girl.

I will know happiness the rest of my life, she told herself, stripping off her clothes and folding them neatly in small like piles on the arm of the sofa she wouldn’t pay off until 2610. She climbed up onto the sofa, then up onto the arm, placing one hand on the neck of the girl-shaped jar. She eased into the jar one leg at a time, her body sliding into its spaces, filling its hollows. First one leg, then the other, then her torso slipping in like slipping into a tight swimming pool, her arms flowing into the proper cavities of a jar designed for just such a thing.

Breathing was difficult, what with the need for expansion and contraction of the diaphragm and the lungs and whatnot; but never had Sammi felt so perfectly shaped. She’d always been rather too slender here, too full there, concave where she should’ve been rounded and vice versa. But with the firm glass edges of the jar holding her in place everything felt the way it should for what seemed to Sammi like the first time in her life.

She smiled. I’ll know happiness the rest of my life, she thought, glancing at the clock to see how long before her man-person-boy came home from work, ignoring the increasing difficulty of drawing breath within the confines of the girl-shaped jar; Yes… The rest… of my… life.

I enjoyed the sense of change that I got out of this month’s short stories. They capture a lot about change in a very short space.

In Camille Alexa’s slipstream piece “Girl-Shaped Jar,” a woman who needs to change makes a decision to do so and follows through on it. Her choice of changes is not what I would have expected. This is one of those stories that has an unreal premise but feels real in its execution.

Nikki Loftin’s fantasy “Change” contains even more dramatic changes in a young woman — nominal woman? estwhile woman? — for whom doing something normal is the odd part of the story. I really like the heroine, and by the time I’m done with the story I wish her well at trying to be merely mundane.

Heather Kuehl provides a mainstream story that I’m running in honor of Memorial Day (Monday, May 30, here in the U.S.): “What Heroes Do”. I was in the Marines in the early 90s, right after Desert Storm; I never lost a loved one, but we had the continual awareness that our lives could be on the line at any moment. To all you in the service of our country and our allies, Semper Fidelis.

Our Classic Flash this month is from the inimitable and Kate Chopin, “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie”. There’s an intensity in the interaction of these three characters, namely the doctor, the suicide, and society. The use of passive voice at the end might be, for me, the most touching part: “Shoulders were shrugged.”

Bruce Holland Rogers continues his series with “Tea Party Rules.” Don’t worry, he’s not getting political; he discusses the story contract. Excellent, as always.

Please enjoy the stories, and remember, comments are like gold to authors.