Issue 62 November 2018 Flash Fiction Online November 2018

The neighbor’s house is covered in ivy, and the children who live there are covered in ivy too.

Well, the child who lives there. There was a miscarriage. There is only one child. The mother told her daughter, You are a big sister, even though the aunt called her brother “a fistful of unviable cells.”

The child does not have a container big enough for the idea of “unviable cells.” She does, however, understand fistful.  She clenches. She fills her fists. Can feel all the blood rushing there, and when she opens them, the first leaves appear, a small stem rooted to the palm.

* * *

The neighbor’s house is covered in ivy, was always covered in ivy. Even the door: totally ensconced. Even the windows. One had to part through the ivy like curtains to lean out, wave hello. There she was–the little girl–pushing out her window waving and waving. We (in the neighborhood) were waiting for her to fall out. To have two tragedies in the ivy-covered house instead of one. Even though the aunt said one didn’t count, wasn’t viable.

The aunt lived in a picket-white house on the edge of the block, rows of red and yellow tulips lined up equidistant in the window-boxes. The aunt had lived there forever, it felt like. Had white furniture, white carpets, white pillows, white clothes. So that one, peeking in her window, would see what appeared to be an empty house, a woman’s head floating somehow in the air, a severe neck, and if you squinted, you could make out a vase full of clear water and thin-stemmed white roses. A woman with sharp features who, turning a corner you couldn’t tell was there, was suddenly disappearing.

* * *

What’s ivy? our kids used to ask, and we used to point to that house that was more a living thing than a house. That, we’d say, and point. And her, we’d say, and point. The little girl covered in ivy pushing through the window, pushing her hand through the ivy that ensconced her.

* * *

The girl went to school and was sweet. Wrote in cursive. Was terribly disorganized and very athletic. She liked to run and the ivy ran with her. It made her faster. It was like having extra legs. She was quick as a dog, that girl. The children at school always called her Ivy but we (in the neighborhood) called her “her.”

“That girl.”

“She.”

* * *

She always said she had a brother, even though what she had was a tombstone in the backyard beneath a willow. We heard her singing songs to it: moon songs and sun songs and songs about chewing gum and happy birthday on his (not-birth)day every August. There she was making a wreath of flowers and sticks. There she was playing a ukulele so hard the strings snapped. That yard was swarming with ivy, swathed with leaves.

The aunt in the white house was petitioning that the neighborhood begin an HOA, have standards, make ourselves shine.

Some of us were into it. Some of us had dog prints through our backyards, shoved broken stoves and cracked microwaves into the corners of our porches. We (in the neighborhood) were nosey, sure, but hands-off-y too.

But the aunt. The aunt! So pointy, she seemed. We saw her catch the little girl by the arm one afternoon and start snipping the ivy out of her eyes. Snipping the ivy off of her arms. Snipping the ivy and snipping the ivy until the girl underneath was exposed and screaming.

* * *

We saw her fall out the window once, you know. Heard the bone break. It was so quiet: just a little grunt of her body hitting the yard, the crack, the bone sticking out of her arm like an idea had just occurred. We (in the neighborhood) were watching. We saw her shove the bone back in through the skin flap, watched the ivy exhaling and exhaling, wrapping firmly around it.

* * *

After the aunt incident, the ivy grew back, of course, and we’d expected it to, but we hadn’t expected the spread. Our houses were covered in ivy, our roads ivy, our mailboxes and chimneys choked, our car tires slashed, our doors bunched closed, our sunlight sucked up: it was ivy, it was ivy, it was ivy.

* * *

Some of us were into it. Let the ivy curl around our ears and cinch into our belt loops and spiral up and around us until we were photosynthesized into something new.

Some of us set fires. Used pesticides, chainsaws.

The aunt, though. The aunt! Last seen wielding a white rake, white shears. Disappeared into the ivy and was never seen again.

Well. The ivy was of course the girl.

“Disappeared into” is of course the euphemism.

The way we (in the neighborhood) picture it is something like this. A girl covered in ivy knocks on that white-white door. She is bigger than she used to be. The ivy around her makes a hissing sound. The aunt bolts the lock, but the ivy is already pressing like liquid through the cracks, the ivy already is creating a fishnet of vines on the floors, the ivy already angry, angry a long time, and the white shears can’t help this time, and the white rake gets sugar-snapped, and the girl beneath, the part-ivy-girl goes inside, and the windows darken, and the vines wrap around that neck, and ivy fills the mouth, and we imagine the carbon dioxide those leaves of hers drink up. We can hear a drinking sound, a choking sound. We imagine the aunt doesn’t make it, isn’t viable.

* * *

We (in the neighborhood) don’t really talk about that sunken-in, cracked apart white house at the end of the road anymore.

The neighborhood kids are curious, sure—go creep in there on midnights, on Halloweens, on nights when they’re in love. We know this. But we also know some of them come back. And some of them don’t.

Beware advice that feeds your worst attributes, the advice that sounds easy and seductive and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: that revisions are for idiots and the best draft is the first draft; that giant word counts reflect giant talent; that something you spent ten years on is better than a story created quickly; that all art is subjective and thus you cannot train yourself to improve within your craft; that chance alone explains things.

Have you seen that in other arts? It’s bullshit. Training, joyous or grind, makes better sculptures, dancers, comic book splash-page visual mavens. No one would say study would make a bad actor. And all arts are in some fashion a combination of reckless abandon and considered polish. Each artist travels between these poles at their own speed.

We are all prey to listening to advice that soothes. In the arts, it’s rooted in desperation, poor odds, bad money, and big dreams. And depending on where we are, the seductions come in new guises. And soon, they become excuses to not consider changing how you make art.

And the problem? Sometimes sticking to what you’re doing is the best thing. But for others, it’s a recipe for mediocrity.

Someone once told you that every work has its own method. Yes, yes, some generalities endure, but every work is its own experiment, built out of the others but still unique. You have chosen to balance yourself between keeping your competency and trying to improve in antic ways. This, you think, will lead to the next stage of your craft.

And no one really talks about that, do they? The moment where you have to shake up what you’re doing, knowing your skill set for the new is not as sharp as the old. There is risk. You may not write with the same facility as you did, but without this test you will never get better.

There are sirens (mostly dude sirens) who say to just do the same thing over and over and improvement will happen de facto from production. This is true, until it’s not, and the only judge that matters is yourself.

And if you lie to yourself, your art will suffer. At least to you.

So avoid the Siren Dudes.

Improve. Let the mistakes be the scars of battle that teach you new things, instead of just doing the same-old same-old and hope the world will notice. Be bolder. As Steve Martin said, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

And if they do? You’re still better off than when all you did was all you knew and never stepped outside of your comfort zone. And you’ll be even more accurate when you take the next shot and kill the Siren Dudes.

“Mark.”

Joe slowly declares my name, as if to confirm that it really is me who arrived with the order; that it’s his partner standing there in the hallway. He’s as surprised to see me as I am him. He’s half naked, though this isn’t our home. I’ve never even been to this apartment.

I clutch the delivery bag to my belly: it’s a defensive move, though the insulated pack stuffed with meals offers no protection.

“Mark, I’d no idea.”

He’d no idea I’d snatched this job, that I’d donned helmet and jacket, then hopped atop a borrowed bike. It was to be a surprise: as an artist I’d dwindled; as a food courier I could contribute rent, bills, gifts. Now we were both exposed–I in bright corporate colours, he with nothing but a scarlet bedsheet wrapped around his waist.

A man with beard-shaggy face and hair-furred belly joins us at the threshold. His bedsheet is burgundy.

“Is there a problem with the order?” the man asks me. He wears a friendly grin. “I can go get my wallet.”

By Joe’s look I can see this is no flippant fling: his eyes shimmer with fear.

“There’s no problem,” Joe says. “The delivery guy was just leaving.”

It takes whole seconds before it sinks in. He’s dismissed me. The worker in turquoise, the man he’d said he loved.

Anger rises from my stomach until it chokes my throat, because in truth monogamy was his idea. It was he who’d insisted on exclusivity, and my hands start to shake because I would have shared–I would have–and my skin burns because there’s neither explanation nor apology in this paint-peeled hallway. There’s just the liar and the lover and the delivery guy.

My rage boils over; I can’t control this fury, because though I’m not as rich as Joe and not as cool as Joe and not as successful as Joe. I know I deserved better. And now he’s dismissed me.

“Of course, sir. Let me just get your food.”

I strain the words through an artificial smile and unzip the delivery pack. The curried scent belches from the bag, mingling with the smell of sweat and sex.

Joe watches me with careful terror.

“If you could just step aside.” I warn the cheerful bearded man because this isn’t his fault, not really, and though he looks confused, he vanishes from the doorway.

“Mark–”

First I throw the korma. The tub hits him in the chest, spluttering lurid orange sauce over his shoulders before it clatters to the floor. The scarlet sheet falls, exposing him whole.

“Stop,” he cries, but now I grasp the jalfrezi. I hurl it as he screams, as curry soaks his hair, and I can hear the beardy man behind the door, on the phone:

“–I’m calling to register a complaint–”

But I’m not done. I pop open a carton of sushi; I squeeze balled rice between my fingers.

“Stop this right now,” barks the orange-spattered man–the one who’d stroked and soothed and insisted I move in, the one who’s naked and drip-drip-dripping with sauce. “You put those down!”

“Is this not your order?” I ask as sushi rolls sail through the air: an avocado maki; a mushroom maki; an egg nigiri.

(That last one sticks and slides down his chest.)

“–completely unprofessional behaviour–” Mr Beardy’s voice quakes from out of sight.

I reach to the bottom of the insulated pack and clutch bundles of fries. Deep down I know it’s not only Joe. I know I’m angry at myself, outraged that he had wanted ownership and I had surrendered. I throw them all the same.

Greasy potato strips scatter like confetti: they cling to Joe, to the curry sauce on his head, to his arms and legs and torso. The floor is a puddle of jalfrezi-korma. Rice mushes beneath his feet as he slips, as Joe topples and falls.

Mr. Beardy screams.

Now Joe doesn’t look so superior, not now he’s sprawled about the floor, orange and sticky, with fries in his hair.

“Mark–”

The delivery pack has one more order: I stand, poised, strawberry milkshake in hand.

It’s only then that I realise Joe is crying, not only crying but snatch-breath sobbing. That he’s been defeated. Yet whether I’ve won or lost, I just can’t know, and when he looks up at me through bleary tears, I’m no longer angry. I don’t know what I am–

–but I’m no longer a delivery guy. With Joe slumped and splattered, and with Mr Beardy still screaming from the door, I turn and leave the empty pack behind.

The man stood in the cafe’s doorway staring openly and with no expectation of recompense at a girl who sat three paces away from him. His monochrome, leonine face, bracketed between curly hair and beard of that shade called red only because it is not what is usually called brown, was covered so contiguously with freckles that the places where flesh tones broke through were the real freckles. It was a face puzzled, stymied, suddenly decisive, wrongly decisive: a face full of error, of error simple and compound, error seen and missed, error mourned and error dreaded, error unerased. A single heavy Cyclopean eyebrow bore down on his eyes like a frown. He wore a collection of baggy, bulbous, but untorn plaids.

He had a regular table in the window of the cafe where he would sit for hours, never reading. Nobody who worked there had ever seen him with anybody.

The girl, about twenty, raised to him a well-arranged and blank white face. The man pointed to his sternum and lofted that bar over his eyes as high as it would go. Pushing against the thick brunt of shock, he began toward her in small slow steps, anxious not to disturb whatever delicate balance in the atmosphere made pretty girls look back at him today.

“Are you Horst?” she asked him.

“Horst?” He squeezed out the word on a long exhalation, an exhaustion: his chest caved, his shoulders folded in around it, and his clothes seemed to loosen as he shrank inside them. “No, I’m not Horst,” he said, almost inaudibly. “But I’d like to be.”

His hand fell away from his chest, as if it could no longer resist the pull of gravity; he broke at the waist and sagged into a chair. From there, ten feet away, he watched the girl steadily, his fingers spreading and contracting on the marble tabletop. Presently a man came in, introduced himself to the girl, and sat down with her.

Horst was a striking young man with dark brown hair, tanned olive skin and blue eyes. In or around the eyes was a weary ease that did not change when he saw the girl: he knew—approached her with the knowledge—that he could have her if he cared to. The eyes said, Hello, I am tired, Try to wake me up, I may be awakening, No, I am sorry, You tried, It is me, I cannot feel, I am a wanderer, Hello, I am tired, Try to wake me up.

The red-haired man’s eyes moved from the girl to Horst and did not move from Horst. He was imagining what it might be like to be Horst. He could taste the drink that Horst drank, could see what Horst saw, breathe the air Horst breathed. He had forgotten entirely about the girl: she was merely a Horst-induced mirage; a manifestation, a byproduct, a proof of Horstness in a universe of Horstlessness; she was just one of many things that would happen to him in a life, the life ahead of him, of being Horst. Horst was the answer; the girl had been only the question. He stared inquisitively, to penetrate the mystery of being Horst; acquisitively, to wrench from Horst all of the Horstian secrets; he stared as if receiving an encrypted radio signal, as if this stare, so close by, could not possibly intrude upon the privacy of Horst, as if Horst, returning the stare, would look only into a mirror.

Horst into Horst equals Horst: something seemed to take hold of his nose, jerk it Horstward; something gently pinched the skin around his eyes into small weary crinkles. He held himself absolutely still as a sort of carbonation foamed up along the surface of the table and etched new whorls and eddies into his fingerprints. As his eyes changed, a smile stole into them. Soon now, very soon, the admirers would begin to come.

Previously published in Sudden Fiction (Continued); originally appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review and also appeared in MQR’s collection The Male Body. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Her first gift was palm-sized and heavy, wrapped in black silk and tucked into my hand as she passed. I’d seen her before, her face always hidden behind cheap sunglasses, and she’d ignored me the way everyone ignores overweight, anxious men having a cigarette before work. As though they might catch my appearance like a disease. But she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses that day, and her eyes looked puffy and red, as though she’d been crying or drinking or both. I was too surprised to speak, and she didn’t say a word. Her hood rose from her jacket in piled layers, like a hive of bees, and as she turned the corner it was the colour I was left with. It was the purple of a chemical spill, lightning behind a poisonous cloud. It seemed viscous and fluid in the gloom of the alley.

I check my phone. Eight-thirty. Not long to go. Out on the street, past the scalpel-edge marker where the sun reaches the ground, people pass on their way to work. My office is in the building beside me, and I keep myself against the wall, invisible. I called in sick an hour ago. My cigarette’s the third of the day; it burns my throat and my fingers are yellow again.

When I opened her gift I found a pocket-watch, its silver tarnished with age. There was an inscription on the back; I couldn’t read it. The spindled hands were translucent and watery, like spun glass, and I should have known then that something was up, for they were moving backwards.

I saw her again a few days later, and stopped her. Her eyes were very dark beneath the hood, like spilled ink.

“It’s for you,” she said, when I held out the watch, and her voice tore something in my stomach. Why? I wanted to ask, but my tongue was dry and then she was gone.

I was given a raise that day, for the success of a project I’d all but forgotten. There’s more about you than meets the eye, Tom, Big Rob said and squeezed my shoulder.

The gifts came frequently after that. Sometimes she would give them to me herself, place them in my hand without a word, drop them in my pocket as she passed. Sometimes they would be waiting for me when I arrived, a neat little parcel beside the storm drain, never stolen. I wanted to give them back, but when I saw her, my arguments died in my throat; I wanted to leave them there, let her take the hint that way, but I always took them.

A pocket-book, filled with pages of handwritten French, with dates and dried flowers.

A coin in a scarlet purse, bronze with a hole in the middle, that turned to tar on the kitchen counter.

Half a photograph, once, of a girl in a yellow sundress, that was creased and stained as though it had been carried in a wallet or thrown out with the trash.

A dog toy that had lost its squeak.

A child’s palm-print, inked on white paper, which grew and spread and faded, turning to dust before a week was out.

Twenty to nine. I light another cigarette. My hands are shaking a little.

I have never trusted the neatness of stories, nor do I believe that correlation is causation. Umbrellas do not cause the rain. When I won an award for my work, prestigious and with a tidy cash bump, I told myself I’d earned it. A promotion came, and then another. My sister found a publisher for her novel. My father’s cancer went into remission. The eczema on my stomach disappeared, the stubborn pounds shifted themselves from my gut with barely an effort. I felt good, better than good, and it made me nervous. Umbrellas may not cause the rain—but, in a way, rain does cause the umbrellas.

The gifts began to pile and collect in the corners of my apartment, my coffee table, my kitchen counters. Friends would ask questions that I had no answers to. I brought home a packing box one day, intending to store them all at the back of my wardrobe or leave them out on the street. I never did. They littered my windowsills and my dressing table; my books went into the box and gifts filled the shelves.

Like a museum, my friends said. A mausoleum. I stopped inviting them round.

Ten to nine. I light my last cigarette.

The rest seemed inevitable, unsurprising, extra minutes when the game has finished. They started speaking to me, of course, and each of them told a story. Small lives and forgotten moments, lingerings for people who have moved on. It was difficult to sleep, with that murmuring in my ears, so I drank coffee. It was hard to eat, and food made them envious, so I smoked instead. I burnt one, once, the French diary and flowers, and my sister’s book deal fell through. When the hand-mirror (black pewter, ringed with black stones) showed me a face that was not my own, I raised it up to smash it on the corner of the table, like killing a venomous snake, but then I thought of my father, his PET scans and his oncologist’s confusion, and I placed it down with care.

I began to study the hours on that first gift, and it would stop the voices, for a little while. The hands held their own pattern, ticking backwards, but never coming together. And with the ticking came a suggestion, a suggestion that became a certainty—I’d had my blessing, and it was soon the time to pay for it. To pay it forward.

I pull it out now. The hands are all at twelve. Almost. A few seconds to go.

I should have called my father.

As I hear the footsteps approaching I stamp out my cigarette, wonder what gift I’ll provide, who I’ll be given to.