Shirani Rajapakse
SHE WAS WALKING down the road minding her own business when the sound exploded in front of her. It shattered the sound barrier and sent off sparks in all directions. She stopped in her tracks; there was nowhere to go. Her feet flew in the air and her hair touched the pavement. Lightning flashed all around her. Thunder roared inside her head. Her left eardrum beat a series of staccatos and strained to pop out as the thunder roared its way down her ears. From the corner of her eye she faintly saw the eardrum roll away along the pavement as if in a hurry to get someplace, any place, other than her loud resonating ear.
Nidisha knew she had fallen to the ground as someone trampled on her hand in a hurry to get to somewhere else. She didn’t see who it was for the brightness of the sun overhead and the million and one flashing lights in her eyes; blue, red, yellow and green like the brightly colored lights hung in homes and along roads during Vesak. Nidisha tried to call out but the road to her voice was cut open and lay gasping on the ground next to her. She couldn’t hear, she couldn’t see, she couldn’t speak. She was like the three wise monkeys all rolled into one. What happened?
She couldn’t move either. Nidisha felt herself lying across the pavement that not so long ago held her feet upright. She could feel something but wasn’t quite sure what it was she felt. Was it her arm lying by her side, the one trampled on? And was that her leg jutting out in an ungainly manner? What was it? she wondered. It was then that it struck her that she was no longer there.
Someone had taken away her right to walk on the road. That someone had strapped bombs to her breasts and exploded herself not so far away. That was the loud noise Nidisha heard, louder than thunder, that shattered her a few minutes ago. She was no longer there. Yet Nidisha still felt herself moving, willing herself to walk to where she was supposed to go. But how, and where?
She felt warmth flowing around her. Puddles were collecting but there was no rain. The bright sun glared at her through the ugly grey smoke swirling, swirling around. The puddles became a small pond and then took on the shape of a stream. It began to flow, flow toward the ocean five miles away. Her juices were flowing out fast and furious down the pavement and all over the road. Very soon it would reach the ocean, of that she was certain. She flowed and as she did others joined her on her way. Tiny streams seeking answers, they flowed in the same direction. They turned into a river. They flowed into the sea waiting to take them in.
And all around her people were screaming their heads off. At least those that still had them on. She couldn’t see, could barely hear but she could sense it all. They had all dropped like flies and there were more to come. And it all happened because she had dared to defy the terrorists and go to work that day. But what was so wrong with that?
UNITED STATES
Bruise
Stuart Dybek
SHE CAME OVER wearing a man’s white shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and a faded blue denim jumper that made her eyes appear even more blue.
“Look,” she said, sitting down on the couch and slowly raising the jumper up her legs, revealing a bruise high on the outside of her thigh.
It was summer. Bearded painters in spattered coveralls were painting the outside of the house white. Through the open windows they could hear the painters scraping the old, flaking paint from the siding on one side of the house, and the slap of paint-soaked brushes from the other.
“These old boards really suck up the paint,” one of the painters would remark from time to time.
“I’ve always bruised so easily,” she said, lowering her voice as if the painters might hear.
The bruise looked blue behind the tan mesh of nylon. It was just off the hip and above it he could see the black, lacy band of her panties. It was a hot day, climbing toward ninety, and as he studied the spot that she held her dress up for him to see, it occurred to him that even now, at this moment, there was a choice. Things between them might not be as irrevocable as they seemed. It occurred to him suddenly as he studied the bruise that it still might be possible to say something between them that wasn’t charged with secret meanings. The direction their lives were uncontrollably taking might be changed, not by some revelation, but in the course of an ordinary conversation, by the twist of a wisecrack, or a joke, or perhaps by a simple question. He might ask why she was wearing panty hose on such a hot day. Was it that her legs weren’t tanned yet? He might rise from the couch and ask her if she would like a lemonade, and when she said yes, he would go to the kitchen and make it—real lemonade squeezed from the lemons in his refrigerator, their cold juice stirred with sugar and water, the granulated sugar whispering amidst the ice, the ice cubes in a sweating glass pitcher clunking like a temple bell.
They could sit, sipping from cool glasses and talking about something as uncomplicated as weather, gabbing in the easy way of painters, not because they lacked for more interesting things to talk about, but because it was summer and hot and she seemed not to have noticed the heat.
Instead, when she crossed her legs in a way that hiked her dress higher and moved her body toward him, he touched the bruise with his fingertip, and pressed it more softly than one presses an elevator button.
“Oh,” her lips formed, though she didn’t quite say it. She exhaled, closing her blue eyes, then opening them wider, almost in surprise, and stared at him. They were sitting very close together, their faces almost touching.
When he took his finger away she stretched the nylon over the bruise so he could more clearly see its different gradations of blue. A pale, green sheen surrounded it like an aura; purple capillaries ran off in all directions like tiny cracks, like a network of rivers on a map; there was violet at its center like a stain.
“It’s ugly isn’t it,” she asked in a whisper.
He didn’t answer, but pressed it again, slowly, deeply, and her head tilted back against a cushion. This time the oh of her lips was audible. She closed her eyes and moaned, uncrossing her legs and running her fingernails up the insides of her thighs. They were sitting so close together that the sound of her nails scraping along nylon seemed to him almost a clatter the painters would hear. Her legs spread and he cupped his hand over her lap and felt the cushion of hair through the nylon, and heat, actual heat, like summer through a screen door, reflecting off his palm.
He pressed the bruise again and again. Each time she reshaped her lips into a vowel that sounded increasingly surprised.
Outside, the house turned progressively whiter. The summer sun dissolved into golden, vaporish rays in the trees. The bruise—he never asked how she got it—spread across the sky.
MEXICO
Love
Edgar Omar Avilés
I’M SURE NOW, Mommy,” the girl said to her mother, breaking into tears. “God is really there, and he’s full of love!”
“Why are you so sure?”
“I’ve seen him and he spoke to me from heaven. It’s the most wonderful place in the world!” The girl answered so assuredly and fervently that all her mother could do was to stab her with the knife she was chopping an onion with.
The girl was so young, still without sin. Her life was so miserable, she begged for change on the streets. Surely, in no time she would start selling her body. Then the glorious heaven and her God full of love would no longer accept her.
For her part she would go to hell, the mother thought while driving the knife in for the tenth time.
Translated by Toshiya Kamei
PERU
First Impressions
Ricardo Sumalavia
IN THE MONTHS before the end of my last year of high school, I began working in the afternoons at a small printing press. My mother was not opposed. I was friendly with the owner as well as his wife, an enormous and attractive woman who visited my house now and then so my mother could cut her hair or dye it in whatever color current style demanded. I learned the publishing trade with the enthusiasm of one who hoped to see his own poems in print one day. For the time being, I was
only in charge of placing letters of lead type, and I was always careful not to get them out of order, so that I wouldn’t have to place them all again, line by line, as tended to happen whenever Señora Leonor, the owner’s wife, came by the print shop. Her presence was always a bit unsettling to me, and she was well aware of this. I suspect she had always known it, even before I did, ever since I was a child, when I didn’t understand the transitory pleasure that came from brushing against her legs or her hips on the pretext of playing with my little cars, before I was sent out to the patio, leaving Señora Leonor and that smile that would electrify me years later in her husband’s print shop. If her visits were sporadic, it only made the effect more disconcerting: an unease that I tried to pour into my adolescent poems, to be transferred later onto an old plank of wood in the composition box that I kept hidden beneath the other work of the day—that is, if my shame didn’t force me to undo it all.
In this way the months passed, and, with the end of the year, my schooling, too, came to a close. It was natural, then, that the print shop should become my full-time job, at a higher salary and with all the respect accorded an adult employee—or so the owner informed me in early January. His wife, with short, red hair and a miniskirt of the kind worn at the end of the sixties—justified by the intense heat of that summer—came to visit more and more often. I should confess that the color of her hair, contrasted with her pale skin, inspired what I considered to be my best poem. And the longest. The only one I was, without misgivings, able to set in type, and the only one I was prepared to show to its muse. Of course, I imagined a thousand ways of offering her the poem, certain that her only response would be to keep me in suspense with a kiss on the cheek perhaps, or with the touch of her fingernail along my chin.
Until the appropriate afternoon came. It was a Thursday, the day of her usual visits, and her husband had gone out to pick up a few rolls of paper. I had used the opportunity to typeset and ink my poem when Señora Leonor appeared, red-haired and wearing a miniskirt, intensely pale in spite of the summer sun. I don’t recall exactly what she said, I only know that she ordered me to close the door of the shop, and then called me to the back. She stood before me, contemplating me for a moment, with a hint of that smile I knew so well, and then she kissed me. She used her hands to guide mine, so that I might caress her body, lift her miniskirt easily, and drop her underwear, which may or not have been fashionable in those days but which shook me the very moment I saw it. In this state of intoxication I pushed her to the worktable, where I leaned her back and climbed on top of her, on top of the impressive Señora Leonor, who received me with moans and tremors of excitement.
We stayed that way for a long while, until satisfaction and good sense separated us. It was when she got up from the table that I discovered, perplexed, the fate of my poem. It was printed on the woman’s back. In truth, the opening, which was on her lumbar region, could be read very clearly, while the final verses, which spread to her expansive ass, were blurry, nothing more than senseless marks of ink. Though I’ve tried to explain it to myself, I still can’t quite understand my silence. I let her get dressed, let her bid me farewell with an affectionate kiss. It was the only time I managed to reshuffle the lead type on the plank that had held my poem. I could reshuffle others, I told myself, in the free moments of some future employment.
Translated by Daniel Alarcón
ISRAEL/BRAZIL
Fire. Water.
Avital Gad-Cykman
THE SON FLIES an airplane over the handrail. The daughter yells she won’t wash her hair. The son throws a bomb at her, into the living room. The daughter looks for the electric heater. The mother washes the dishes. The father walks the dog outside.
The son rides the mezzanine’s half wall. The daughter says she will die, because the day is too cold for a shower. The son, he slips down the handrail, a small skate in his hands. The daughter, she carries the heater to the bathroom. The son piles blankets by the bathroom to build a barricade. The mother washes dishes in the kitchen. The father walks the dog outside.
The son kicks the bathroom door open. The daughter screams she is cold. The son sends the skate into the bathroom. The daughter drags one blanket inside. The son looks at the bathroom mirror. The daughter is naked. The son laughs out loud. The mother washes dishes. The father walks the dog outside.
The daughter shouts she’ll show around the picture with the son’s butt out. The son dives onto the floor for his skate and his jet. The daughter cries he should not see her. The son turns on the water to fly his jet through waterfalls. The daughter shows the finger to the son. The son throws his skate at the daughter. The daughter shouts, “Mother! Father!” The mother washes dishes. The father walks the dog outside.
The son jumps up and down like a monkey. The daughter leaps at the son. The son bumps into the electric heater, and he and the heater fall down. The daughter throws the blanket at him. The son gets up and covers her head with the blanket. The daughter says she is warm and good. The son pushes the daughter at the water. The daughter falls over the heater with the blanket over her head. The son drops the jet, the bombs, the skate and pulls her from the heater. The blanket’s hem turns black. The mother washes the dishes. The father walks the dog outside.
The daughter falls. The son pulls. The daughter rises. Falls, Rises. Throws. Pulls. The son. The daughter. The electric heater. The water in the shower. Fire. Water. The mother washes the dishes. The father walks the dog outside.
KENYA
The Snake
Eric Rugara
THE KID SAW it first. Everyone else was busy talking and sipping tea when the kid suddenly cried out, “Snake!” The father leapt up, swift, like a Maasai Moran. “Where?” “There!” At the end of the kid’s pointed finger was the gray wall and on the gray wall, above the window and next to the door was a long, black thing slithering. Against the wall was a table the father leapt upon with all the young blood pounding in his veins. “Get me a big stick!” he yelled. The mother was out and back in a second holding a long wooden pole and handed it to the father and all the hidden talent for warfare that the father had came out in the open when he handled that pole with utmost skill and a surprising dexterity, driving it into the head of the snake as though it was a part of his arms, like throwing a punch, and the snake fell off the wall and onto the floor and the father jumped off the table and pushed out the snake with the opposite end of the pole and someone said, “Watch out!” but the father was fast and he leapt back as the snake’s head lashed at him and he brought down the pole on the snake’s head and he pushed it out with all his might and it soared through the air, out the door, and onto the ground, raising a small cloud of dust. “Make sure it doesn’t get onto the grass,” someone said. “Once it gets on the grass you won’t see it, it will zip off like a flash of lightning.” But the father was somewhere else: in the zone he raised the pole, with both hands, over his head and commenced to bring it down upon the body and head and tail of the snake even as it tried to lash back, beat it mercilessly till it was battered and dead and the skin peeled off in certain places, beat it till its head was like chewed-up meat. “Let’s burn it,” he said. The mother went back in and came out with a can of oil and a red lighter, the father handled the snake on the opposite end of the pole and everyone followed him to the rubbish pit where the oil was poured on it and the fire caught upon it and its snake skin came alive and twisted and coiled as it broiled and burned and everyone felt very, very good especially the father and the kid who were the heroes of the moment, the kid for his keen eyes, the father for his leap into action and his brilliance with the pole and everyone trooped back into the house and a fresh thermos of tea was brought in and everyone poured it into their cups and chattered about the moment, the emotion, the action and the aliveness that they felt.
UNITED STATES
An Ugly Man
Marcela Fuentes
ON HER LUNCH break, she dumps Luis for Daniel Towens, the ugliest man in the county.<
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She and Luis meet at the downtown café Luis hates. He picks a table next to the window to keep an eye on the parking meter. There’s an old beater truck in the space he wanted and he grumbles that the guy is probably not even a customer. Nothing but hipsters eat here, he says, artsy gringos and uppity high-spanics like her, who like to spend money when they can make a fucking sandwich at home. He scowls out the café window.
Daniel Towens steps out of the credit union across the street. He stands on the sidewalk waiting for the traffic to clear. Daniel is lanky and mercilessly freckled. He wears dusty green coveralls with National Park Service stitched on the pocket. He has an unfortunate arrangement of teeth. They jut from his mouth like fossilized woodchips.
Fuck that’s an ugly guero, Luis says. He thinks it’s funny that Daniel is sweet on her. When she frowns Luis flashes a shark grin, all razor and gleam. Fuckin’ ugly, he says again, and bites his roast beef sandwich.
She doesn’t tell Luis not to be rude. She purses her mouth around her straw and sucks cold lemon water. She pretends she’s not listening, although the couple at a nearby table shift to look at him. Her face stiffens with the effort of indifference, lacquers over, smooth as riverbed sand.
In the desert, Daniel glides over rocky caliche and scrub brush. He leads hikers and artists and anthropologists on expeditions through the chaparral, identifying varieties of lichens and cacti, spelunking for prehistoric rock art. But he crosses the street with his face to the ground, hunching his chicken-thin shoulders, a hank of dull hair splayed on his green collar.
Flash Fiction International Page 4