Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (9 page)

The months grew cold, November, December. It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school. One morning as I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the ones Sister Zoe had drawn—random at first, then lots and lots. I shrieked, “Bomb! Bomb!” Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.

But then Sister Zoe’s shocked look faded. “Why, Yolanda dear, that’s snow!” She laughed. “Snow.”

“Snow,” I repeated. I looked out the window warily. All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below. Each flake was different, Sister Zoe said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.

E
VERYTHING
I
S
G
REEN

S
he says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I feel like I know.

She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette through a wet window, and I can not feel what to say.

I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more. But there is things I know. I know I am older and you are not. And I give to you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart both. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you. I have been keeping it together and working steady every day. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do. I have tried to make a home to give to you, for you to be in, and for it to be nice.

I light up myself then I throw the match in the sink with other matches and dishes and a sponge and such things.

I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty-eight years old. It is time I have got to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try to make every thing feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to. In me there is needs which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs in you in the way.

She does not say any thing and I look at her window and I can feel that she knows. I know about it, and she shifts her self on my sofa lounger. She brings her legs up underneath her in some shorts.

I say it really does not matter what I seen or what I think I seen. That is not it any more. I know I am older and you are not. But now I am feeling like there is all of me going out to you and nothing of you coming back any more.

Her hair is up with a barrette and pins and her chin is in her hand, it’s early, she looks like she is dreaming out at the clean light through the wet window over my sofa lounger.

Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when everything outside is green like it is.

The window over the sink of my kitchenette is cleaned off from the hard rain last night, and it is a morning with sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But every thing is not green. The other trailers are not green, and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ashtrays is not green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the Big Wheel toy that is on its side under a clothesline without no clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.

Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.

I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.

She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.

D
RAFT
H
ORSE

W
hen he was a kid growing up in Fargo, he used to walk from the barn to the house, thirty below, his breath steaming out and then flowing past his face. On those mornings he could hear the way the cows seemed to brush together in the cold, and imagined he could hear them at night when the temperature dropped even lower. From his bedroom it sounded like their hides were made of metal, how each hair had frozen on their backs and was rasping against the others.

And he remembered the way the sun used to look coming in through a quarter inch of frost on the single pane window. It would break up, splashing into a prism on the walls. He would wake and hold his finger to the cold window, then come back later in the day from school and find his fingerprints perfectly preserved in ice.

Each day in the cold, each month when it never got above freezing, he wondered how the sun could shine and not warm him. He would stand for as long as he could and watch his shadow move in an arc in front of his body. The cold would begin in his shoes then work its way up the inside of his legs. Then his fingers would go numb and he would be dancing in the January sun, his shadow cavorting on top of the snow.

Each morning he would have to go to the cows. There would be the smell of heat rising from their bodies mixed with the smell of hot manure, steaming below them. He shoveled the warm odor sifting like mist into his nostrils.

Sometimes when he shoveled, he remembered the old stories about the cold. Men freezing in their sleep. Or how the water would freeze in mid-air after you threw it out of the bucket.

After he washed the manure smell from his skin with pure castile soap, he would always go back into his room and look for a long time at the photograph of his grandfather on Rogers Lake. It was 1925. There were several men standing around a burning horse carcass on the ice. The flames rose black and thick into the February sky. The horse, a huge Belgian mare, had slipped hauling ice on the lake.

He remembered the way his grandfather described bringing the horse down. How he slipped the barrel into her ear as if it were a finger, he said. He had wanted to leave her on the ice, let the cold take her but his brother had insisted she be shot and burned on the spot where she failed.

So they put her down. One shot. Then Uncle Ike doused her with gasoline. Someone, perhaps his grandfather, had touched the match to the mottled hair and the horse rose in flame like a storm. When they all stepped back someone took the picture. In the right corner of the photograph near the wagon you could see small icicles beginning to form on the ice blocks piled four high, the men holding their arms to shield them from the heat.

For many nights he had a dream of walking to a black spot in the ice, poking through the remnants with a pitchfork, how the silver bridle ornaments still glistened somehow. He could hear the sound of hooves, which sounded like ice breaking up. Now, every spring, when he drifts over that spot where they did the burning, he looks down over the edge of the boat and imagines the bones resting on the bottom, the horse in full gallop, her breath streaming out like clouds of snow underwater.

C
ORPORAL

O
nce I had visions of being a general. This was in Tacoma during the early years of World War II when I was a child going to grade school. They had a huge paper drive that was brilliantly put together like a military career.

It was very exciting and went something like this: If you brought in fifty pounds of paper you became a private and seventy-five pounds of paper were worth a corporal’s stripes and a hundred pounds to be a sergeant, then spiraling pounds of paper leading upward until finally you arrived at being a general.

I think it took a ton of paper to be a general or maybe it was only a thousand pounds. I can’t remember the exact amount but in the beginning it seemed so simple to gather enough paper to be a general.

I started out by gathering all the loose paper that was lying innocently around the house. That added up to three or four pounds. I’ll have to admit that I was a little disappointed. I don’t know where I got the idea that the house was just filled with paper. I actually thought there was paper all over the place. It’s an interesting surprise that paper can be deceptive.

I didn’t let it throw me, though. I marshaled my energies and went out and started going door to door asking people if they had any newspapers or magazines lying around that could be donated to the paper drive, so that we could win the war and destroy evil forever.

An old woman listened patiently to my spiel and then she gave me a copy of
Life
magazine that she had just finished reading. She closed the door while I was still standing there staring dumbfoundedly at the magazine in my hands. The magazine was warm.

At the next house, there wasn’t any paper, not even a used envelope, because another kid had already beaten me to it.

At the next house, nobody was home.

That’s how it went for a week, door after door, house after house, block after block, until finally I got enough paper together to become a private.

I took my goddamn little private’s stripe home in the absolute bottom of my pocket. There were already some paper officers, lieutenants and captains, on the block. I didn’t even bother to have the stripe sewed on my coat. I just threw it in a drawer and covered it up with some socks.

I spent the next few days cynically looking for paper and lucked into a medium pile of
Collier’s
from somebody’s basement, which was enough to get my corporal’s stripes that immediately joined my private’s stripe under the socks.

The kids who wore the best clothes and had a lot of spending money and got to eat hot lunch every day were already generals. They had known where there were a lot of magazines and their parents had cars. They strutted military airs around the playground and on their way home from school.

Shortly after that, like the next day, I brought a halt to my glorious military career and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them.