Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (18 page)

S
NAPSHOT,
H
ARVEY
C
EDARS:
1948

M
y mother touches her forehead, throwing her green eyes into shade. Her mouth is pink, her hair blond like wheat. She is tanned. She is the best-looking woman on the beach, only she will never recognize it. She wraps her long body in an aqua sarong and winces, believes her hips are a bell. Even now she is counting, waiting for the camera to flicker shut.

My father’s arm weights down her shoulder. He is muscular, his stomach flat as a pan. He looks full ahead, pretending he is with my mother, but already he is in Florida, developing new cities, pumping dead mangrove full of sand. He sees himself building, building. He will be healthy. He will have good fortune. And years in the future, after his Army buddies will have grown soft and womanish, all his hard work will pay off: people will remember his name.

Their shoulders touch. Their pose says: this is how young couples are supposed to look—see, aren’t we the lucky ones? But my mother’s head is tilted. What is she looking at? Is she gazing at the tennis player by the outdoor shower, the one with the gentle hands, the one who will teach her to unlearn things? Or can she already hear the gun which my father will press into his forehead, twenty years away?

A
UGUST
E
VENING

H
e drives a new-model metallic-blue Cougar with all the accessories including air conditioning and a tape deck and beige kidskin interior plus some special things of his own for instance a compass affixed to his dashboard, a special blind-spot mirror, extra strips of chrome around the windows and license plates, a glitter-flecked steering wheel “spin,” and, in cold weather, a steering wheel covering made of snakeskin. In warm weather he likes to cruise the city as he’d done twenty years ago or maybe more except now he’s alone and not with his friends as he’d been back then. As if nothing has changed and the surprise is that not much really has changed in certain parts of the city and off the larger streets and he’s drawn back always a little expectant and curious to the old places for instance St. Mary’s Church where they’d all gone and the grammar school next door, the half-dozen houses his parents had rented while he and his brothers were growing up though he couldn’t name their chronological sequence any longer and one or two of them have been remodeled, glitzy fake-brick siding and big picture windows so it’s difficult to recognize the houses except by way of the neighboring houses which are beginning to be unrecognizable too. There’s a variety store close by the school hardly changed at all where he parks to get a pack of Luckies and just as he’s leaving he runs into this woman Jacky he’d known in high school back before she was married and he was married and she’s in tight shorts that show the swell of her buttocks and her small round stomach and a tank-top blouse like a young girl would wear looking good with her fleshy smiling mouth and her eyes shadowed in silvery blue and her legs still long and trim though a little bunchy at the knees. At first it almost seems Jacky doesn’t recognize him then of course she does and they get to talking and laughing and it’s clear she likes him looking at her like that asking him questions about his job and where he’s living now since the divorce and what’s his ex-wife doing, and then they get to talking about old friends and high school classmates, guys he hung around with, some of them they haven’t seen or heard of in years so you’d wonder are they still alive but better not ask. And gradually they run out of things to say but neither wants to break away just yet they’re smiling so hard at each other and standing a little closer than you’d ordinarily stand, Jacky’s the kind of woman likes to touch a man’s arm when she talks, and he’s thinking a thought he’d had before and probably she has too that the marriages by now are more or less interchangeable like objects blurring in a rearview mirror as you speed away but also it’s the warm lazy air smelling of soft tar from the streets and sirens in the distance or is it a freight train like those childhood sounds you’d hear at night . . . melancholy and sweet-sounding with the power to make your eyes fill with tears. And they see themselves off somewhere hurriedly undressing . . . and the frantic hungry coupling . . . and the orgasm protracted for each as in slow motion . . . and the sweaty stunned aftermath, the valedictory kisses, caresses, stammered words . . . All that they aren’t going to do but they’re locked together seeing it and Jacky’s eyes look dilated and he’s feeling the impact of it as if somebody were pushing hard on his chest with an opened hand so that he almost can’t breathe.

Honey was that
sweet
are the words he isn’t going to say and Jacky can’t think of what to say either so they back off from each other and she says “Take care” and he says “Okay—you too” and he gets in his car and drives off sad-feeling and excited and eager to be gone all at once—knowing not to bother looking for her in the rearview mirror, he’s accelerating so fast.

T
HE
F
ACTORY

I
have always hated the factory. It has a gaunt steel frame like a skeleton. I’ve often imagined it without its red bricks, just an etching of black against a red sky.

Of course, I’ve never said anything about this to anyone. Especially to Eric. You see, he loves the factory. He would like to put up his sign in those flashing neon lights that the city firms can afford. He saw a rainbow once over a petrol station there. I think he would have sold almost anything to have one of those on his roof.

Every day he is up early. He sings in the shower and eats his breakfast quietly. He always reads the business section of the newspaper, then quarters it neatly.

His days are like that. In four parts.

The first is the morning, which I’ve mentioned. Then there’s the day at the factory. That’s in two: the morning and the afternoon.

He uses the telephone to tell me when it’s time for lunch. Just two rings. That’s his code. Then five minutes later he’s at the door, letting himself in.

He reads at lunch, usually one of the classics. He didn’t have much education.

In fact, that’s why I met him. We worked at the same factory, ten miles out of town. It manufactured shoes and boots. I was the boss’s secretary, and Eric worked the floor.

I’ll always remember that first day. He was nervous, tried not to show it, but his hands shook. His hair was brown, his eyes were brown, and the factory overalls were brown. He almost faded into the background of brown leather shoes. Which was quite funny at the time.

But I was describing his day. And he’s not brown any more. Streaks of gray and a balding patch which he rakes over, spreading the hairs thinly across it. And he wears a suit. Usually gray, with a red handkerchief in the pocket. I suppose his eyes are still the same color, but I can’t tell you. If you asked me, I just couldn’t tell you. I did notice they were red tonight, which was unusual, but then the whole day was different. As though the four quarters came together and just rolled away.

I could draw the second half of his day with my eyes closed.

In the afternoon, he has a cup of tea in his office, then he works until six o’clock.

Two rings on the telephone mean he’s coming home for dinner. He has a good appetite and enjoys his food.

In the evening he likes quiet. He always says that after such a busy day at the factory, he needs to sit and think. Which he does, with his eyes closed, his elbow on the chair, and his thumb and one finger pressed against his forehead. Or sometimes he just sits and stares into space.

Eric always goes to bed early. He feels fresh then for the next day.

But now the next day won’t come. It won’t be Eric’s day, and his eyes are red. I’ve never seen him cry before.

I said this day was different. It’s night now, and soon the dawn will come. In the night, the sky was red. A brilliant red. That was beautiful. Black against red. Like a devil with horns or the final crashing chords of a great concerto.

I loved it. Black skeleton of steel in a fiery night. Of course the fire brigade came. I didn’t call them. It was beautiful just watching the sky burning. I don’t think I will ever forget it. Eric was asleep.

They came to tell us as soon as they arrived. Eric knew straight away it was all over.

I love the night. Sometimes I stay up for hours, savoring it. The stars and that great arc of sky. The immense pattern, the changing moods of wind.

Tonight it was special. It was different. And I feel very tired. But happy. An exhilarated feeling, a prickling right down my spine.

Nobody knows how the fire started. Accidental, they say. It happens all the time.

T
HE
S
EWERS OF
S
ALT
L
AKE

“L
et’s taste each other’s bodies now without pleasure,” Martha says.

The living room is full of our dogs. It’s evening and the young men from the gas company are lined up in the street singing a Jerry Lee Lewis medley. They’ve got the grand piano strapped on the back of a flatbed truck parked under the maple trees. They sing like fallen angels.
Breathless. Great Balls of Fire. Hang Up My Rock ’n’ Roll Shoes
.

“Touch me here,” Martha says.
High School Confidential. There’s a Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On
. They’re all castrati, with those thin pure high voices that specify otherness and absence.

“Baby, baby, baby,” Martha says.

I accuse her of bad faith. “You said without pleasure.”

“It came over me like a big wind,” Martha apologizes.

She looks skeletal without her clothes on. Ribs like an anatomy lesson. I love her, but what can I do? This morning I made
fajitas
and she picked out all the bits of chicken, sailed her tortillas like Frisbees to the grateful dogs. Toyed with a piece of green pepper, satisfied herself with slivers of onion.

Tomorrow afternoon it’s the Utah Power and Light people doing Janis Joplin. Big women in meter-reader uniforms singing the blues.

On the far side of the room, under the moiling dogs the twins play. One says “Mama.” The other answers “Mama. Mama.”

T
he dogs have dug a complicated system of tunnels in the backyard. They hide during the day in the cool underground dark, and pop up at unpredictable intervals like small hairy Viet Cong. This morning the twins disappeared in the labyrinth and Martha put on her camouflage fatigues and went down after them. It’s been three hours now, and I’m waiting for her to return. There’s a light rain falling all over Utah; the state is damp and almost uninhabitable. Martha took the rechargeable flashlight and a box of Ritz crackers in case she had to stay past lunchtime. Mishka and Mishka, the twins, have always loved to explore dark places; I’m not worried. The dogs will look after them until Martha arrives.