Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (8 page)

Translated by Helen Lane

I
G
ET
S
MART

I
tell him I’m thinking about getting a new cat.

“No way,” he says, like this is not negotiable. As if I haven’t paid half the rent since grad school, and all the cat costs, including the spiffy new cat door installed next to the fridge.

I say I’ve been to the Animal Rescue League and they have seventeen adorable kittens—all colors. “You get to pick the color,” I say.

“Hold it,” he says. He lines up his sharp accountant’s pencil across the top of his crossword, cracks the knuckles of his right hand. “I do not want another cat. What’s wrong with the three we’ve got?”

The three we’ve got hear our voices rising and pad into the kitchen to see what’s going on. The Persian, Jeanette, threads back and forth through my legs, her long hair flying, while gray-striped Fitzhugh leaps onto the fridge and blinks down at us. Sweetpeach, the calico, jumps into my lap and kneads my chenille stomach. Not a cat goes near Roy.

“There’s nothing wrong with the three we’ve got,” I say.

“So forget a new cat,” he says, and turns back to his crossword.

I scratch behind Sweetpeach’s ears to make her purr, and finish my Sunday morning pot of real coffee. I’ve already finished a Xerox of Roy’s crossword and I know just which word will hang him up.

Next Sunday during crosswords and coffee I make the introductions. I say, “Well, we now have three new cats.”

Roy gets macho, points his pencil at me. “Where the hell—I told you . . .”

I tell him, calm down, don’t get all riled up before you meet them. But his voice rises in spite of my attempts to keep the peace. So my voice rises, too, as in any proper duet, and sure enough the cats come by.

“This is Savannah,” I say as Sweetpeach appears, her tail whipping the air, weighing my distress.

Roy snorts and I try to remember if he ever called the cats by name.

“And that is Joe Namath.” I point to Fitzhugh eyeing us from the top of the fridge where he is poised in a three-point stance. “He never acted like a Fitzhugh,” I say. “Parents should change their kids’ names every few years for just that reason. Or give them nicknames.”

“It’s the other way around,” Roy says. “Kids named Moonbeam, Taj Mahal, and Free are now calling themselves Susie, Pat, and Jim.”

“You see,” I say.

“No,” he says. “I don’t.” His eyes refuse to focus on me or the cats. He lets his coffee get cold.

Jeanette springs onto the counter and highsteps over the stove to the window where she watches the action at our veggie neighbor’s high-tech cat-proof birdfeeder. I tell Roy he’ll be sure to remember her name. “You’re always saying ‘what a pill.’ So that’s Pillow.”

“Don’t do this,” he says.

“So we have not one but three new cats,” I say, burying my nose in Savannah’s spotted fur. She’s as limp as her new name and warm. Her cat’s eyes seem to remember hot African grasslands and prey ten times larger than she is.

“We have three cats—period,” Roy says. He has a way of making syntax dull.

“Three new cats,” I say.

“Bull!” Roy’s pencil bounces high like a cat toy.

Joe Namath jumps from the fridge onto the table and skids into Roy’s crossword. Roy’s tackle is rough and Joe Namath spits as Roy tosses him into the dining room. Pillow, the bird-watcher, cantilevers one ear around to hear when to abandon her post. Roy scoops his pencil from the floor and taps it on his crossword in disgust. Three words earlier he went wrong, but he won’t know this until I tell him. I shiver Savannah off my lap and leave to shower.

During the next two weeks, Roy gets mad every time I call the cats by their new names. But he is more mad that Savannah, Joe Namath, and Pillow take to their names so quickly. It’s all in the tone of voice, I tell him.

I get happy with my new cats.

After a couple of months I get smart. Come Sunday breakfast it isn’t Roy filling in the crossword; it’s a new man—better with words and cats—named Ralph.

T
RUE
L
OVE

T
hey met at a national entomology conference. To his eye, she was a woman of extraordinary physical grace and beauty, the last thing he expected to find at a professional conference.

He was struck by her slender, hairless forearms, the delicate curve of her neck, the proud way she carried her rather small head.

His tall thin frame and slightly bulging eyes reminded her of the subjects of her first highly successful entomological research project. It was a strong and fond memory. The project had established her reputation for creative insectology.

He approached her during the cocktail hour after the first day’s papers.

“Hello,” he said, “I’m Lloyd Gaynor.”

“Gaynor? Oh, yes. Termites.”

He was pleased.

Her name was Phyllis Turner and he knew and admired her work on fire ants. Fortuitously, he was seated next to her at the dinner. Their mutual attraction was very strong, so strong that their exchanges took on a quality of escalation, advancing their intimacy in a series of minute but rapid steps, a breathless spiral like a ritual dance.

An attraction strong enough to evoke real fear.

A revelation occurred over the mocha bombe and espresso that excited her more than she cared to show. She realized that as part of the research he was describing in termite neurobiology he had developed a computer model that could save her six months in her statistical analysis of fire ant brain function. She expressed her interest in a low key, oblique way. He was encouraging but noncommittal.

Shortly after the dinner, by unspoken agreement, they ascended in the hotel elevator to her floor and entered her room. They undressed without speaking, he in the bathroom, she in the bedroom.

He entered the bedroom and paused, standing beside the bed. She stood naked across the bed from him. They examined each other’s pale, slender, almost hairless bodies.

He spoke first.

“The female praying mantis is nearsighted and dangerous. When the male is impelled to mate, he approaches her slowly and with great caution, sometimes waiting motionless for up to twenty minutes before the next short advance. When he finally summons the courage to dash forward and mount her from the rear, she typically responds by twisting her upper body around and biting off his head. This act quite literally removes his innate fear of her, since it removes the neurons and ganglia in which that fear resides. He then copulates to a successful conclusion and dies, presumably as happily as any creature can without its head. After he dies, she eats the rest of him.”

He paused and looked at her expectantly. His long thin penis extended out and upward with mute pink urgency.

When she spoke, she used the same light didactic tone as he.

“The female empid fly also has a nasty habit of eating the male when he approaches her during mating season. To divert her from this purpose, the male typically finds a morsel of food and wraps it elaborately in a silk balloon formed by his glandular secretions. The time it takes the female to unwrap his gift is often long enough for him to copulate successfully and escape unscathed. But in one empid species, whether through cleverness, laziness, or just bad faith, the male fails to put any food inside the balloon. The female is hoodwinked into copulation with an empty promise.”

These things they said to each other were well known to both, as indeed they were to any first-year graduate student of entomology.

There was a pause after she spoke. They continued to stare at each other. It could have gone either way.

Then they fell upon each other.

T
HE
C
OLONEL

W
hat you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

S
NOW

O
ur first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I liked them a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class how to pronounce it.
Yo-lan-da
. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly, she enunciated the new words I was to repeat:
laundromat, cornflakes, subway, snow
.

Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba. Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home, explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. At school, we had air-raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we’d file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home, Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary:
nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter
. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen. She drew a picture of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a flurry of chalkmarks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all.