Nicky's Space

Drew still blamed his mother for his brother’s death.

Every morning, he turned first to Nicky’s graduation photo. Everyone said it would be impossible for someone with Nicky’s developmental disabilities to earn a high school diploma, but Nicky had done it, which was why Drew didn’t believe that Nicky had drowned in the shower, like his mother said. Drew hadn’t been out of the house six weeks when it happened. He would always blame his mother.

One morning, the image of Nicky’s lopsided grin under his mortarboard foremost in his mind, Drew created a MySpace page for his dead brother. He updated it regularly with information about Down’s Syndrome, resources for struggling families, and memorial letters to Nicky, so no one could ever forget. He tried to friend his mom but she wouldn’t add him back. So, he set up a gmail account in Nicky’s name, which he used to send her birthday, Christmas, and mother’s day greetings.

Strength in Numbers

We had to unionize.

After the terror, some had forgotten the old ways, but our family had always been workers, and we knew the power of collective bargaining, knew we had to band together to find our place in the new world. Many things broke down in the days after the comet. The dead rose from the grave, feasted on the flesh of the living, and smashed through the social order. For weeks, there was chaos, fear.

But zombies are simple and mindless. It wasn’t that long before they were controlled, made docile. The process was no different than breaking an animal. And when they were put to work rebuilding, we cheered.

Ten years on, the zombies threaten us in a different way. Who will pay us to toil and carry, when a few undead abominations can do the labor of more men in less time? They work for rotting meat! My brothers and I would starve.

We had to unionize.

postsecret.blogspot.com

It’s supposed to free the human heart. That’s what they say. Everyone has secrets, sometimes silly, sometimes terrifying, but they never rest easy. They leech out into the soul. And you can write them down, and share them with the world, and you are cleansed. That’s what they say.

I have secrets, some silly, some terrifying. I compose the postcards in my mind, choosing my words like a poet, each carrying its perfect weight. I imagine the images, the ransom-note letters, but I do not cut up magazines or produce paste. The secrets stay where they are.

Shame is the stickiest glue.

Red Flags

Despite—or perhaps due to—my education and experience, I did not want to believe. On the days you asked, “Do you think I’m mentally ill?” I tempered my answer, ignored the flags, stroked your ego.

Flag: all the times you laughed wildly at nothing at all, then denied laughing when I wondered what was so funny.

Flag: all the times you gave me the silent treatment, eventually admitting that you were mad about something that happened six months ago and wasn’t really a big deal.

Flag: all the times you sexually harassed my roommate after being repeatedly asked to leave him alone, then told him to toughen up, plus, all the other men you sexually harassed.

Flag: all the times you reported that everyone hated you, even though everyone said they liked you, and all the people you couldn’t get along with, even though they were your friends.

Maybe I’m not a subtle person. Because it took a banner: your forty-five minute audio file explaining why I was a racist, classist, evil, oppressive bitch who never said I was proud of you, and why you never wanted me to talk to you again, because our seventeen-year friendship had run its course.

For the record: I’ve always been proud of you. I know I said it many times. And for the record: yes, I’m sorry to say, I think you’re mentally ill. I wish I could have said it before.

The Edge of Town

Eleventh Street makes a T where it hits KL Avenue, and foamy green retention ponds bask on all three sides. They’re real vigorous, verdant, vital little wetlands, throbbing with life. Colonies of cattails grow erect near the shore. The water beckons with banks of water lilies, their petals spread open wide to the sky.

A blue heron might stand sentry at the far end of the biggest pond, where a cast of ten thousand frogs performs dinner theater every night. At dusk, knobby brown groundhogs sprout like peanuts from the grass. Turtles crawl up from the pond too. They all have yellow racing stripes up their head and neck, and they come in all sizes: some like your fist, some like serving dishes. Some like serving dishes in more ways than one, because they try to cross the street. They’re flattened, the texture of their shells cracked like ancient leather. The little claws never look dead. They’d grab the end of a stick if you poked them.

I saw the driver of a boxy white van stop in time for one big turtle. The passenger jumped out, stood still in the first moment she looked down at the ponderous reptile in its sodden velvet mantle of algae. Then she slipped her fingers underneath and, with arms outstretched, carried the turtle to the other side of Eleventh Street, where it had urgent business: a busy day of eating, mating, and vegetating by the water’s edge as it collected the sun’s energy like an auspicious tessalating solar panel.

Perfection

She descends from the attic room like the Prague Golem: encrusted with clay, prepared to defend her domain from blasphemers.

On landings and shelves, floors and counters, at attention on every horizontal surface of the big house, her own golems stand sentry. Serpentine vases, delicate pots, improbable jars, and the most extraordinary, ambitious vessels of stoneware and earthenware guard the mantels and lintels. She drags herself through a labyrinth of exquisite pottery, a city of Seussian sensibility and Lilliputian proportion.

“I don’t have anything,” she tells the telephone, and listens for only a moment before arguing, “It’s not good enough to show. I don’t have any gallery quality pieces right now.”

From her phone, in the mailbox, over email, the demands weave a stifling blanket. Requests for artwork form the warp; demands for payment, the woof. “I don’t sell anything that doesn’t represent the best of my artistic talent.” On her way back to the atelier stairs, her heels catch on the handle of a tall urn, its workmanship rivaling the greatest of the Ming artisans. It wobbles, steadies. She twists her mouth at it, at its thousand siblings, offensive to her eyes. “Piece of crap,” she mutters, and returns to the workshop to try again.

TBI

We do not curse the circumstance, the o’clock of the morning or the failing of caffeine or amphetamine or pneumatic anti-lock brakes. We do not praise the response, of paramedic or emergency room surgeon or rehab nurse. We do not question the result, a thing growing slowly as a crystal, following a pattern smashed, completing the matrix described by the forgotten past.

There was a man, thus. There was a truck, even so. There was a breaking, followed by a building up. This is theory.

There is a slamming of doors, a throwing of pill bottles, pain that dribbles out under cover of veiled insult and suicidal ideation. There are days of hugs and kisses and apologies, and nights of why and what’s the point. This is reality.

New Format

Funny thing, the Internet.

This blog has been defunct for over a year, and yet it averages a dozen hits a day. Approximately 50% of you are looking for information about "flash fiction," "micro fiction," and "short-shorts." That's OK. I wrote that little essay defining these terms myself. My master's degree in fiction wasn't completely useless! Approximately 50% of you are here because you have Googled "wrestling erections." That's OK, too, My buddy Comrade Kevin wrote the (very short) book on that. Sometimes, terribly straight young men find themselves in a state of tumescence while wrestling. From my understanding, it's a not uncommon occurrence. If you are worried about getting a hard-on during wrestling practice, worry no more. It's perfectly normal!

I'm a hermit who lives under a rock, and maintaining an active community of writers writing for love may have been beyond my ability. But here's this blog, and here's me.

Possibly, I'll forget all about it in a day or so. But maybe Raincoat Flashers has a spark of life in it.

I'm dispensing with the writing prompts and the contest aspect. I'm a-gonna post my flash fiction here. Do you write flash fiction? Send it along and if I like it, I'll publish it too. Want to talk about books, writing, publishing, education? You can contact me at littledragonblue@gmail.com.

Writing Prompt #19

Regrets

Regrets

In the middle of levitation practice, Anya began to regret that she'd polished off a Big Mac, large fries and a strawberry shake for lunch.

Defeat

Defeat

It wasn’t Hera or their children or his jealous brother Hades. When Zeus fell it was finally to Christopher, patron saint of truckers and long haulers.

Seeing

"That tree looks rather like..."

No, I must have been imagining things. My mind plays tricks on me sometimes and makes me see things.

For instance, sometimes I see faces on the bark of pine trees, and these faces resemble the people I have loved over the years and throughout time. In moments like these, best to not read too much into them.

Marked

Marked

Wilkins wasn’t the kind of person who normally quoted cultural theorists. Nothing kills a party like saying, “Well, Baudrillard would say….” If you’re busting out a line like that, Wilkins liked to joke, you better hope you hate getting laid.

Wilkins didn’t like sounding pompous, and he certainly didn’t like quoting things he didn’t fully understand. And yet, ever since working for the internet non-profit, he’d been thinking a lot about Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others.

On Monday morning, Wilkins poured himself some coffee. Then he put on his putty-colored headset and dialed the phone. “Hello Mr. Phelps,” Wilkins said. “I’m calling on behalf of the Improved Life Foundation. Would you like to make a difference in the life of a child for the small donation of only a few hours’ wages?”

A complicated sigh from the other end of the line: agitation, displeasure, guilt. “Listen,” the potential patron said, “I’m on food stamps right now and between jobs. Can you just send me some pamphlets and I’ll get back to you?”

“Of course, sir, thank you for your time,” Wilkins said.

Back when he first started, Wilkins had joked about the people he telephoned. He had called them “marks”: “I sweet-talked this mark and got a grand out of her.”

Now, he just called them “patrons.”

He put a note in the database to send potential patron Phelps a pamphlet that afternoon. After lunch, Wilkins slid the glossy brochure into the business envelope. Before sealing the envelope with his soft, yellow sponge, he removed the shiny, high-resolution brochure and studied it.

There are so many photographs of suffering, but the human being only has so large a reserve of empathy.

After sealing the envelope, Wilkins stepped out to the gray parking lot for a break. He watched the smoke of his cigarette climb upward as he felt the nicotine refuel his body. How big was the world, he wondered, in relation to the size of his cigarette? He could understand the cigarette, but not the size of the world.