Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (15 page)

We’re all seeing him, we’re all laughing at this story we’ve heard a dozen times before. I’m trying to tell it the way Teddy used to. We know he’d have done it better but we don’t care about that, we want it to be like it was last spring. And it’s nice that Rita has invited us over.

Spider is already starting to lose control, his big horse’s head is bobbing up and down and Petey has this look on his face like a contestant on a game show waiting for the next question he’s certain he can answer and Billy and Squirrel have their hands on their beers and there’s something in their eyes, not amusement really and not remembering either, but more a kind of listening to a song you’re sure you know but you can’t name and I go on about how that dog comes into the kitchen while Bernie’s still got his head under the sink trying to stop the leak.

“Little Pepper gets right up next to him and all of a sudden he starts yapping. Bernie jumps real quick, he whacks his head on the cabinet, and
bam!
he’s out cold. Just at that second Louise shuts off the water and she comes up the stairs yelling ‘Bernie, Bernie, is it off up there?’ and what does she see but him laying on the floor naked, his legs under the sink and she starts wailing, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God.’”

Spider’s shaking his head, his eyes are wet, and for some crazy reason I’m so happy that he’s laughing. For a second I think it’s really Teddy telling the story. “And then,” I say, “that canary they used to have that she was trying to clean the cage when all this started, it comes flying into the kitchen all yellow, flapping its wings, singing like crazy.” I’ve always wondered, if one of them was unconscious and the other one was hysterical, who could have been paying any attention to that bird. But that’s how Teddy told it. “And that dog gets real quiet, it must be thinking the master’s dead, and Louise is at the top of the basement steps crossing herself, saying ‘Holy Mary, mother of God,’ and she’s looking at that big naked corpse laying in the puddle on the kitchen floor and she’s thinking, I’m not ready to be a widow yet.”

I glance out the window at the traffic passing by in the early darkness and I’m glad I’m in here where it’s warm. How can it be fall already, I wonder, with winter in the air? By Christmas Rita wants to be out of the house, she wants to move back to that little town where her folks are, and I suppose someone else will be telling different stories here in Teddy’s rec room.

Everyone around the table’s looking at me, as if they’re afraid I won’t go on. I know Teddy would have added something real good about Louise, like she was promising God she’d make Bernie go to church if by some miracle he comes back from the dead, but I just tell about how she’s on the phone shouting at the cops to please hurry, she thinks her husband had a heart attack. My voice runs a little fast on that part and everybody’s eyes around the table flicker a little as if someone just came into the room and walked off with one of the pictures of the old softball teams that are on the wall but no one’s going to say anything about it. Then I’m telling about the dog licking Bernie’s face and all of a sudden he’s shouting “Get that fucking animal off me, what the hell am I doing down here?” and Louise is kneeling on the wet kitchen floor saying “Thank you, God, thank you so much” and that bird’s chirping away from on top of the refrigerator.

Now everybody’s smiling and for a while it seems as if nothing has changed, like we’re ready to go out to the field tomorrow and play softball: you can smell the beer and the cigarettes and the pizza, and we’re happy. I take a swallow of my drink. It feels cool going down my throat, and over my glass I look at everyone. I want to believe all the rest of us are going to be around here for a long time.

T
HE
N
ICEST
K
ID
I
N
T
HE
U
NIVERSE

F
ranky Gorky was the nicest kid in the universe. He always listened to his parents. He shared his toys and candy with other children. Birds sat on his bedroom window in the mornings and waited for him to wake up before they started to sing. Wild animals came up to Franky Gorky and ate out of his hand. Every kid who ever lived on 24th Street heard of Franky Gorky because he was the nicest kid who ever lived.

But he wasn’t the smartest kid.

For one thing he never noticed the moon.

Franky Gorky never noticed the moon till one night in December his parents took him outside on a cold night after a snowstorm just after the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the night Greta and Gary Gorky took him outside and pointed to the crescent in the sky. Franky Gorky thought it was a funny street light. “No,” said his dad, Gary Gorky, “it’s the moon.”

Well Franky Gorky didn’t know what to think about the moon, though he wished it was round, and every night after he got put to bed he went to his bedroom window where the birds waited for him to wake up in the morning and went out and looked at the moon, which, he started to notice, was actually getting bigger, in fact after a while it looked like it was really going to get round. Of course he was a good kid and he knew good kids often got what they wished for, but he’d heard enough fairy tales where people got what they wished for, like King Midas, and it ended up doing more harm than good, lucky for him nobody else seemed to notice that the moon was getting rounder. He wished he could talk to his grandmother who wouldn’t tell his parents and always seemed to know about stuff. In fact as the moon got bigger and bigger and one night got so big and white he thought it would suck his bones and maybe the bones of the whole world, something Franky Gorky didn’t want responsibility for, Franky Gorky remembered that usually you just didn’t get one wish, you got three wishes, and Franky Gorky stared up at the ice death moon and wished it would go away and that he could see his grandmother.

Franky Gorky may have been the nicest kid in the universe but that didn’t mean he always did the right thing, even he realized that, and by the time the moon was about half gone again and he started feeling good he figured out that what he should have wished for was that the moon would go back to normal, not that it would go away completely. Wishing that it would go away completely was a big blunder, especially since he’d used his third wish on getting to see his grandmother who he found out was coming to see the Gorkys on Christmas like she always did.

So it was a sad Christmas Eve for Franky Gorky when the moon went out. He could barely think about his Christmas toys, and instead of lying awake all night trying to keep from thinking about what he was going to get for Christmas by thinking about the baby Jesus and the Wise Men and how the world was to be saved from Original Sin, he kept going to the window and looking for the moon which he’d wiped out with the abuse of his wish, and now all he had left was his grandmother, Grandma Gorky, who was driving in from Buffalo like she did every Christmas, who would listen to him and know what to do.

And Franky Gorky was up like a dart on Christmas morning, waiting at the front window for his Grandma Gorky, and when she came he did the first bad thing of his life, he ran out of the house without permission and headed across the street where Grandma Gorky had parked because Christmas visitors all over the neighborhood had taken all the parking places on the Gorkys’ side, slipped on the ice, and got rubbed out by a drunk driver.

That’s what happens, said my father, when people take other people’s parking places.

That’s what happens, said my mother, when you don’t look both ways.

What happens is, if you’re the nicest kid in the whole universe, then you have to die.

This is what happens when you try to explain something.

T
HE
P
ARENTS

W
e bring our babies, blue-eyed babies, brown-eyed babies, we have come to watch the parade, the marching bands. Young women step high; batons fly, flash against the sky like lightning rods. Oh, spare the child, for next come the floats. See Mickey Duck! See Donald Mouse! Snow White rides in her pumpkin carriage, faster, faster, speeding toward marriage with the prince who will give her babies, blue-eyed babies, brown-eyed babies, like our own babies, who are—lost. Lost at the parade! Where are our babies, our babies? We are looking for them everywhere, frantically, everyone helping and shouting: Find the babies!—when suddenly we see them. No wonder no one could find them. They have grown three feet taller, sprouted whiskers or breasts, swapped spun sugar for Sony Walkmen. We kiss them and hug them, but we are secretly frightened by their remarkable new size. They tell us not to worry. They will take care of us. And sure enough, later, we let them drive us home, because their eyes are sharper, their hands are steadier, and they know the way, which we forget more and more often. They stroke our hair and tell us to be calm. On Saturday, our babies help us to choose the best coffin. They are embarrassed when we insist on taking it home to try it out, but they give in because they don’t want to upset us. After they leave for the cinema, we climb into the coffin and pull the lid over us. The salesman had said one wouldn’t be big enough, then said one would not be sanitary. We laughed: Age has shrunk us. We are small enough to fit in here quite comfortably. It is as dark as a movie house, the kind in which we used to neck in the back row. Now, of course, nothing is playing. The film has completely unwound, and the only sound is the flicking of the loose end, around and around.

W
ATER

S
he touches his hair by the river.

I am in our apartment, working. Her hand moves down his back.

I empty the trash and unclog the kitchen sink. His former girlfriends have turned into lesbians.

I take the key to his apartment, which he gave me so I could water his plants during the summer. He bends his kissing face to hers.

I walk over to his apartment, just two blocks away. Their legs dangle in the river.

I unlock the door and bolt it behind me. The room smells of feet and stale ashtrays. In the kitchen is a gas stove. I turn it on without lighting it.

Down by the river is a flock of geese, which they admire while holding hands. Soon he will take her back to his apartment. Soon they will lie there, readying cigarettes.

I relock the apartment and slip into the street. The air smells of autumn, burnt. In the sky, birds are leading each other south.

I know there is nothing left between us, that she looks at me each morning as if I were interrupting her life.