Flash Fiction International

by Robert Shapard James Thomas

  She knew the drive to his house. She knew the trees she would pass, the fire hydrants, the dogs barking behind their fences. She knew where she would park, where the tires would hit the curb. She knew the way she would breathe and straighten her skirt, and the feel of the heat that would prickle down her arms and explode in her fingertips when she saw him through the kitchen window, coming to the door. He usually stared her down. Big dark eyes that studied her like a rare specimen. It wasn’t exactly an adoring gaze. It was more one of bewilderment and concern. He greeted her like this the day she came to shave his head. He opened the door very cordially, one hand behind his back like the headwaiter at a French restaurant, bowing slightly. She sensed his hand brush gently against her back as she came in. She moved too quickly for it to rest there.

  “I have everything ready,” he said severely, as if she had arrived to perform some critical operation.

  She sat down at his kitchen table and smiled at him. The cold winter sunlight pooled in through the window and lit her hands folded on her lap, and she hoped he would remember her like this when he was an old man.

  They went down the stairs out of the sunny kitchen and he followed close behind her. The bathroom in the basement was cold and lit by fluorescent lights. He knelt in front of her, and she thought that with him on his knees like this she could either love him or kill him. She could hold his head tenderly against her belly, or break his neck with one quick move. She could do both of these things with her hands.

  The razor looked comical to her when she picked it up, hot pink against the cracked cement walls of the bathroom that were painted a dark fungal green. She ran the faucet. Waited for the water to heat up. Waited for it to be just right. She moved her wet soapy hands gently around his head, soaking his hair, around his ears, across his temples, to the nape of his neck. Some of it dripped down his face and he let it run to his chin and fall to the floor. She took the hair from his head in clumps, trying to ignore his back pressed against her legs, lifting and falling with his breath. And when she had washed the soap away his head was like a smooth ostrich egg. Porcelain white, shining and bare. His eyebrows stood out like black coal marks, alone on his face.

  And she caught her breath when she saw the two of them in the mirror. The fluorescent light made their faces a sickly pale green and their eyes were underlined by dark circles. They both looked so tired. He looked sick and cold, and she looked as if she had been crying for him for a very long time.

  IRAQ

  Prisoner of War

  Muna Fadhil

  FOR MARCIA LYNX

  SAHIRA WAS STANDING in the doorframe, watching her father grow transparent as the morning sun glowed in her bleach-white kitchen. He sat at the marble table, gutting a radio transistor. The sun washed right through him. Sahira reached out for him, but Saleh shrugged away and disappeared like a mirage against the white walls.

  Saleh was constantly amazed by the electronic gadgets around him. They looked nothing like they had when he was first caught by the Iranians twenty years before. Now, he spent most of his days discovering them. In captivity, everything had been the same. Prisoners exchanged the same stories for the hundredth time and pretended to be hearing them afresh. Sahira smiled at him. He looked like a little boy, consumed by the task at hand. She walked to the sink to wash and drain her greens.

  Sahira had been five when Saleh was captured, twenty-three when he was released. Sahira and her mother waited as the first, second, and third round of prisoners of war exchanged between Iraq and Iran, long after the end of the eight-year war. They asked returning prisoners if they had met Saleh, if they had known him. No one had. Sahira’s mother died in 1996. Saleh made it out in 1998.

  That winter, Sahira slept three nights in her car at Al Nusoor Square in Baghdad, where it was promised the last of the POWs would be brought home. Sahira brought an old ID photo of her father, which she’d enlarged and put in a bright gold frame. Sahira hoped that, even if Saleh didn’t recognize her, he’d at least recognize his old self. Sahira slouched down in the seat of her car, pulled her sleeves to cover her cold fingertips, and dozed off. She woke up when her car began rocking as people squeezed past it in the mayhem. The crowds made her car move with them.

  At first, Saleh didn’t believe it when the prison doors flung open and the guards yelled at them in Farsi to get out. Saleh thought, as his cellmates did, that they would be executed. “Do you think they’re letting us go?” one hopeful man asked. “Shut up!” Saleh slapped him. They walked them outside, single file. The outside world was blindingly bright. Saleh was hungry to see sky, but it was brighter than his eyes could handle. When they threw new clothes at them and told them to change, Saleh began to wonder. He tore off a strip of his old shirt and hid it: if this was false hope, he was going to strangle himself. Then Saleh and the others were put in buses that had padded seats. Saleh had not sat on a cushion in eighteen years. He pushed the palms of his hands into the padding and cried. He knew then that they were going home.

  “Bushra!”

  “Daddy! Here!” They embraced and lost track of time. The crowds roared around them.

  “Bushra!” Saleh was about to kiss Sahira on the lips.

  “Daddy, it’s me, Sahira. Mommy she . . .” Sahira hesitated. Saleh pulled his arms off his daughter as though he’d been electrocuted. Sahira, his tiny girl who’d clung to his leg, giggling and shaking her curly hair as he swung his leg up and down, walking across a room. “Sahira.” Saleh placed a kiss on her forehead. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Daddy?” Saleh looked up as Sahira dried her hands on a towel. “Lunch is ready for when you’re hungry. All you have to do is heat it. OK? I have to go to work. Do you need anything? OK? OK.” Sahira had her usual one-sided conversation. She patted his head as she walked past him to grab her coat and purse. “Don’t leave the house, OK? And call me if you need anything.”

  Saleh was too consumed by the radio’s inner workings to be bothered. Saleh heard the sound of the bolt once, then twice, and then his daughter’s footsteps moving away. Saleh carefully reached down to feel if the padding in the chair under him was real. He then got up and closed the curtains to block out the blinding sun.

  MEXICO

  The Waterfall

  Alberto Chimal

  THEY HOLD THE baby above the baptismal font, small and fragile, his head still naked. He’s awake: he feels the moisture, senses the cold that pierces the stone even though he doesn’t know them or know what to call them. But the parents, all of a sudden, seem undecided. Seconds go by. The priest looks at them. And we, piled on top of each other, interrupting each other with trembling whispers, hesitate; speculate. What will they do? Will they name him (after all) Hermenegildo? Will they name him Óscar, Diocleciano, Ramachandra? Piotr? Leonardo? Humberto, Lloyd, Sabú, Carlos, Antonio, Werner, François, Pendelfo, Abderramán, Fructuoso, Berengario, Clodomiro, Florian, Jasón, Guglielmo, Lee, Clark Kent, Martin Luther, Rocambole, Cthulhu . . . ?

  —Mauricio—they say.

  —What?

  —They said Mauricio.

  —Mauricio?

  —And Alberto. As a matter of fact, Mauricio Alberto.

  —Mauricio Alberto?

  —What did they say?—and some don’t want to believe it, they hesitate in their disbelief, but it’s true: the water flows from the bowl over the so very young skin, and we all fall with it, we’re all desperate, all wanting to swim with at least an illusion of tiny arms and legs, with body strength and a real body, and since we don’t have one we have no other choice but to go down, faster and faster, until we land on his forehead that doesn’t understand anything, which only the most detestable Mauricio and the cur Alberto are able to hold on to with the claws the rite gave them, and become a brand on his body, and become the child, and they look at the rest of us while we slide, rejected; while we return, all of us, Óscar, Diocleciano, Ramachandra, Piotr, Leonardo, Humberto, Lloyd, Sabú, Carlos, Antonio, Werner, François, Pendelfo, Abderram
án, Fructuoso, Berengario, Clodomiro, Florian, Jasón, Guglielmo, Lee, Clark Kent, Martin Luther, Rocambole, Cthulhu, Peter, Terencio, Goran, Emil, Cuauhtli, all us names that return to the tiny waterfall toward the bottom of the font, the bottom of memories and possibilities, to sleep until the next ceremony.

  Mauricio means “dark” and Alberto mean “bright”: the choice, we tell ourselves, has its poetry:

  —Even though they sound horrible together.

  —Appalling.

  —They’re going to make him unlucky!—Belerofonte shouts, but the parents and Mauricio Alberto, who are leaving now, can’t hear us. Our voices are the murmur of splashing water. Down, deep inside the darkness, dreams and monsters beat.

  Translated by George Henson

  BANGLADESH

  Eating Bone

  Shabnam Nadiya

  DISHA HADN’T WALKED out of the house in anger, she never did. She waited until some time had passed, wrapped her sari around herself neatly, pulled her hair into the accustomed knot, though tighter than usual, checked her purse and mumbled something about going to see her tailor. Her husband didn’t bother looking up from the television.

  “It’s over,” Disha said aloud. “Shesh.” The juddering movement of the rickshaw made her voice shake on that last word, as if there was still some uncertainty left. Ten years of marriage; ten, a nice, rounded number, ten, without any children. Who knew why. Beyond gossip, complaints and allegations, the childlessness was unexplored.

  As she descended from the rickshaw at a random street corner, she recalled this morning’s taunt. It was a new one. Disha knew all his usual jibes: her fleshy belly and sagging breasts, her barrenness, her dark skin, her unkempt domesticity, her lack of property. What was she good for?

  And now this one: all he had to say was Talaaq, three times, and Disha would be divorced, out of the house.

  She kept silent about the newspaper article that said saying Talaaq thrice wasn’t all it took, these days the law demanded more effort if a man wanted to rid himself of a wife. She kept silent about how the sordidness and uncertainty of marriage for women should be left unsaid in their kind of household, that this was something her maid might hear from her husband, but not someone like Disha in the air-conditioned splendor of her posh neighborhood.

  As she walked, the strong aroma of roasting chicken invaded her nostrils. The smell spoke to her, as if the tendrils of smoke wisping in the air were messengers, entering her head through her nose, leaving indiscreet messages. She salivated as she looked at the glass-cased spit at the eatery. It was set right in front of the café, almost on the sidewalk. The chickens skewered into inert lines by thick steel rods turned relentlessly as she watched, fat dripping from them. A young boy stood next to it, beside him a small table with some bottles and chopping paraphernalia. Stacked in a corner near his feet were plastic boxes and bundles of fabric bags. All the things required to prepare a roasted chicken for a customer to take away without even having to go inside the café.

  He caught her staring and began his litany immediately. “Shall I get you one, apa? They’re beautifully done by now, and I’ll spice them up the way you love. You’ve been here before, you’ve had our chicken. I remember you. Take one; I’ll throw in some extra salad.”

  Disha sat on her bed, naked, her breasts hanging slackly brown, chocolate-nippled. She ripped open the dirty-white box of thin plastic that sat between her spread-out legs, and gazed at the spice-browned chicken as it lay on its back, legs splayed, dead yet inviting.

  The dying afternoon sun directed spent rays here and there, and the golden hue surprised her as one landed on her fleshy thigh. The chicken felt heavenly in her mouth, her taste buds flaring at the saltiness and hotness and the sweet-sour tang of chili sauce. The fat hadn’t completely dripped away during the slow burning, and some dribbled down her chin, now landing on her belly. Disha didn’t bother wiping it off as her jaw moved continuously.

  There was no other food in the house today, Disha had cooked nothing. Her husband stood at the bedroom door, slack-jawed, transfixed at the vision of her. The meat was finished and she stared at the small heap of bones in front of her. She remembered her mother eating chicken: how the woman had loved to crunch the bones! The best chewable bones, she would tell her daughter, were in the bits no one wanted. And so Ma would eat neck, tail, feet, head. But not Disha: she had eaten flesh, now she would eat bone. She picked up one of the bigger bones and licked the knob on the end. She would eat it all. Today she would eat the world.

  POLAND

  Esse

  Czesław Miłosz

  I LOOKED AT THAT face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn’t notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin—but why isn’t the power of sight absolute?—and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

  She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

  Translated by Czesław Miłosz

  and Robert Pinsky

  UNITED STATES

  The Gospel of Guy No-Horse

  Natalie Diaz

  AT THE INJUN That Could, a jalopy bar drooping and lopsided on the bank of the Colorado River—a once mighty red body now dammed and tamed blue—Guy No-Horse was glistening drunk and dancing fancy with two white gals—both yellow-haired tourists still in bikini tops, freckled skins blistered pink by the savage Mohave Desert sun.

  Though The Injun, as it was known by locals, had no true dance floor—truths meant little on such a night—card tables covered in drink, ash, and melting ice had been pushed aside, shoved together to make a place for the rhythms that came easy to people in the coyote hours beyond midnight.

  In the midst of Camel smoke hanging lower and thicker than a September monsoon, No-Horse rode high, his PIMC-issued wheelchair transfigured—a magical chariot drawn by two blond, beer-clumsy palominos perfumed with coconut sunscreen and dollar-fifty Budweisers. He was as careful as any man could be at almost 2 a.m. to avoid their sunburned toes—in the brown light of The Injun, chips in their toenail polish glinted like diamonds.

  Other Indians noticed the awkward trinity and gathered round in a dented circle, clapping, whooping, slinging obscenities from their tongues of fire: Ya-ha! Ya-ha! Jeering their dark horse, No-Horse, toward the finish line of an obviously rigged race.

  No-Horse didn’t hear their rabble, which was soon overpowered as the two-man band behind the bar really got after it—a jam probably about love, but maybe about freedom, and definitely about him, as his fair-haired tandem, his denim-skirted pendulums kept time. The time being now—

  No-Horse sucked his lips, imagined the taste of the white girls’ thrusting hips. Hey! He sang. Hey! He smiled. Hey! He spun around in the middle of a crowd of his fellow tribesmen, a sparkling centurion moving as fluid as an Indian could be at almost two in the morning, rolling back, forth, popping wheelies that tipped his big head and swung his braids like shiny lassos of lust. The two white gals looked down at him, looked back up at each other, raised their plastic Solo cups-runneth-over, laughing loudly, hy
sterical at the very thought of dancing with a broken-down Indian.

  But about that laughter, No-Horse didn’t give a damn. This was an edge of rez where warriors were made on nights like these, with music like this, and tonight he was out, dancing at The Injun That Could. If you’d seen the lightning of his smile, not the empty space leaking from his thighs, you might have believed that man was walking on water, or at least that he had legs again.

  And as for the white girls slurring around him like two bedraggled angels, one holding on to the handle of his wheelchair, the other spilling her drink all down the front of her shirt, well, for them he was sorry. Because this was not a John Wayne movie, this was The Injun That Could, and the only cavalry riding this night was in No-Horse’s veins. Hey! Hey! Hey! he hollered.

  VIETNAM/UNITED STATES

  Man Carrying Books

  Linh Dinh

  IT IS TRUE that a man carrying a book is always accorded a certain amount of respect, if not outright awe, in any society, whether primitive or advanced. Knowing this fact, Pierre Bui, an illiterate bicycle repairman from the village of Phat Dat, deep in the Mekong Delta, took to carrying a book with him wherever he went.

  Its magic became manifest instantaneously: beggars and prostitutes were now very reluctant to accost him, muggers did not dare to mug him, and children always kept quiet in his presence.