Flash Fiction International

by Robert Shapard James Thomas

  “And the third?” asked Abdel Sattar.

  “You know the man who helped me with this one,” Laila answered, “and you will approve of my choice: morality, piety, fasting, pilgrimage, and prayer every time the call to prayer is made. Perhaps our son will inherit some of these virtues.”

  “And the fourth?” asked Abdel Sattar.

  “I’m fairly sure the help came from the doctor,” Laila answered. “I remember he used to make sure that all drugs for me and the children were free.”

  “And the fifth?” asked Abdel Sattar.

  “You and I don’t like a liar,” Laila answered. “I’m at a loss to know who was the father in this case due to all the help I got from ten young men or more, each of them taller than a palm tree and wider than a door.” Abdel Sattar’s fingers let go of the coffee cup, which fell to the ground and shattered, and he squatted against a wall made of rough black stone. He wanted to cry, as he had cried when beaten severely in prison, but his eyes remained dry.

  Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi

  Appears as #22 in Breaking Knees

  AUSTRALIA

  The Vending Machine at

  the End of the World

  Josephine Rowe

  HE MOVED INTO a hotel with my name and called most nights from the pay phone in the hallway. Before that he used to call from a phone box on the corner of Second Avenue and Pine, and I could always hear sirens in the background, and drunks shouting at each other. Fuck you motherfuckers, I can fly. That was when he was sleeping in a park at night, and working during the day selling tickets over the phone for the Seattle Opera. The money he earned selling opera tickets he spent on beer and international phone cards. Then he cut down on beer and moved into the hotel that had my name. That kind of love scared the hell out of me. The kind of love that makes a person cut down on beer and move into a hotel just because of its name.

  When he called it was nearly midnight for me but early morning for him. I lay on my stomach on the ugly gray carpet of the house that I grew up in, the phone cord stretched to the front door so I could blow cigarette smoke through the wire screen. I imagined him sitting with his face to the wall, ignoring the other residents as they tramped along the hallway. I imagined he still looked a little homeless. JFK once stayed here, he told me, Elvis stayed here. But now the cage elevators were breaking down twice, three times a week and it was fourteen flights of stairs to the room that housed his unrefrigerated forties and his stolen desk.

  His two favorite topics of conversation were the Lesser Prairie Chicken, and a vending machine in Fremont that stood alone in the middle of a vacant block. The vending machine had an unlabeled mystery button underneath all of the labeled buttons for the usual drinks. He liked to speculate about what kind of soda would be dispensed if he were to push the mystery button. Would it be Tab or would it be Mr. Pibb? He rattled off a list of dead cola brands from his childhood, most of which I didn’t recognize because his childhood was eleven years earlier than mine, and on the other side of the world.

  I bet it’s Tab, he finally said. He had turned the vending machine into a time-traveling device. He wanted a Tab summer. He wanted it to be 1982 in Atlanta, Georgia, before the methadone trips to Mexico and the minor prison stints for DUI. He wanted to be on his uncle’s farm, raising Lesser Prairie Chickens. He wanted to be anywhere but Seattle, selling tickets for the opera.

  One night he called and told me he’d gone to Fremont. He’d pushed the mystery button on the vending machine at the end of the world.

  And you know what I got?

  What’d you get? I asked.

  Fucking Sprite.

  And Atlanta, Georgia, in 1982 was bleached-out and unreachable and he and I had one less thing to talk about.

  COLOMBIA

  The Past

  Juan Carlos Botero

  HE AWOKE: THE faint sound of tears had finally penetrated the shell of his sleep. He opened his eyes, puzzled. Through the bare window he took in the pale bright night and thought to himself that day would soon break. Only then did he realize she was crying. He rolled over in bed to look at her. “What’s the matter?” he asked. His tongue felt furry and numbed by sleep. In the half-light he could make out her naked back, trembling, the sheet crumpled around her waist. He squeezed her shoulder. “What the hell’s the matter?” She attempted to calm herself. She sat up in bed cross-legged and dried her tears with the corner of the sheet. She looked at him for a long time then finally unburdened herself of the weight of her suffering. “For a year now I’ve been seeing someone else,” she pronounced in a broken voice. “We’re going to get married.” And then she broke down, crying uncontrollably, tearing at her hair and wailing: “It’s horrible. Horrible!” He went cold. He stared at her in astonishment, not managing to pinpoint his feelings. Suddenly, the past year seemed to turn in his memory. The whole series of events rotated as in a kaleidoscope until settling on an inconceivable and yet irrefutable image. So: all the times she visited her mother, the weekends when work kept her away from him, the times she got back late from the office, the times the phone rang and she hung up after saying “wrong number,” began stripping themselves of their innocence and assumed new meanings, ones with cast-iron signs of betrayal. Now, he discovered, his memory was storing another past. He experienced a painful prick to the heart but, before it shattered to pieces, he began to see that the past was not a fixed route, rigid and frozen in time, as he had always believed, but rather quite the opposite, a fragile journey, malleable and, above all, vulnerable. Just one phrase, he realized, could alter the whole past.

  Translated by Jethro Soutar

  and Anne McLean

  INDIA

  Everyone Does

  Integral Calculus

  Kuzhali Manickavel

  AFTER WE LOOKED at the sea, Durai and I turned and looked at the highway. He said the sea would blind us if we stared at it too long. The highway would just make us sad or put us to sleep. We looked at the roadkill and decided to take stock of ourselves. “Let’s retrace the journey, right from the beginning,” said Durai. “What did we do to get here?”

  Durai went first. He said that when he was a boy he sang devotional songs and his eyes would close of their own accord when he sang the word “God.”

  “Sing something now,” I said. “Anything.”

  “No.”

  “Oh come on. It doesn’t have to be about God. Something small. One line.”

  He rubbed his face and looked over his shoulder at the sea. Then he sang softly in Tamil. “You’re just a doll, I’m just a doll, when you think about it, we’re all just dolls.”

  I noticed strings of nits shining like beads in his hair.

  “Well?” he said.

  “You couldn’t think of anything else to sing?” I said.

  I wanted to know why Durai didn’t sing anymore.

  “Something must have happened,” I said. “Someone must have abused you musically.”

  “Okay, your turn. What did you do to get here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Think. You must have done something.”

  “Integral calculus.”

  “That doesn’t count. Everyone does integral calculus.”

  “Not everyone. Not poor people.”

  “Even poor people. If they go to school, they do integral calculus.”

  I thought of picking a louse from his hair when he wasn’t looking. I thought of how it would squirm in the center of my palm like a tiny misshapen star.

  Durai said we were not getting anywhere so he suggested secrets.

  “Okay go,” I said.

  “I got thrown in jail when I was in college.”

  “So?”

  “What so? It was jail. Like jail-jail, with bars and shit.”

  “All guys get thrown in jail when they’re in college. They also become drug addicts and fall in love with prostitutes.”

  “You forgot the motorcycles. We all had motorcycles.”

  “When I was
little I really wanted to be a boy. I wanted to have a name like Sathya and wear hats and sunglasses.”

  Durai scratched the inside of his wrist in slow, straight lines, like he was trying to open a vein.

  “Do you still wish you were a boy?” he asked.

  “No. Once my breasts kicked in I changed my mind.”

  “That’s good. I like your breasts.”

  “I know you do.”

  We were still facing the road but our heads had turned and we were looking at the sea again. We discovered that we had both stolen mercury from our school chemistry labs. Durai had slipped his into his pocket. I had hidden mine in my geometry box. We both had rolled it across our hands and face. I was sure we would get cancer because of this but Durai said it would just make us go crazy. I leaned back and thought about the lice sucking and fucking on his head.

  “My neck hurts. Why can’t we just face the sea?” I said.

  “It’s too soon.”

  “What’s that song? About coming too soon or too early? Tickticktick something something?”

  “No idea,” said Durai.

  “Are you sure? I thought everyone knew that song.”

  I yawned and watched a thick, black louse clamber up through his hair and wave desperately at the sky.

  UNITED STATES

  Little Girls

  Tara Laskowski

  JANE’S DAD CALLS while she is out hanging clothes, his voice staccato over the cell. He had heard a story about a woman, a professional violinist. She slipped and fell on the open dishwasher. She sliced her arm open on a knife. She would probably never play again.

  Jane props the skinny phone between her ear and shoulder and lets her dad’s words flutter, the clothespins pinching her fingertips. One of the pins falls from her mouth and tumbles down the incline to her neighbor’s fence, where it will stay until someone else rescues it. It is sticky for early June, and the grass feels like straw on her bare toes.

  “I want you to be careful, Janie,” her father says, and she pictures him in his car, windows down, speeding with a cigarette in his mouth. He tells her that life is full of danger, everywhere, anywhere. “Watch out for knives and power tools.”

  She laughs, imagining her body vibrating above a jackhammer, her arms wielding a heavy chain saw through the wall of the nursery-in-progress upstairs, the nursery her husband is painting light green. A wave of nausea, common now these past few days, makes her nearly drop the phone. “I have to go,” she tells her father. She takes a break and kneels down, pressing fingers on her belly.

  A girl, she thinks. Perhaps she will be famous—a doctor, a writer. A musician, like the violinist. But the violinist thought she was safe in her kitchen—one second booking concerts over a tasty chicken dinner, then a cat, a skid, then blood, lots of it—hadn’t her parents ever told her never to load the knives blade-up? Someone had to have told her that sometime. People were always eager to dispense advice like gumballs—push, pop, chew.

  Her husband calls to her from their back porch. She shades her eyes from the sun, and he mistakes it for a wave. She sees the hill before her as if for the first time now, so steep, a quandary they had pondered when they bought the place many years ago, when her husband had promised he would build a swimming pool into the side of it, put some steps in to make it easier to navigate. She takes a step toward him, her legs a pair of trembling horsehair strings. She can feel her fall as if it has already happened—the blades of grass pressing into her side, not bending to her weight but stabbing. And her husband just far enough away, his hand still bent in a wave, smiling, likely thinking of pale green and quiet lullabies.

  MALAYSIA/INDONESIA

  Ronggeng

  Yin Ee Kiong

  DARK CLOUDS AND high winds; unmistakable signs of the impending monsoon. Soon sky and earth will marry and bring forth bountiful harvests. But before that there must be ronggeng.

  Ronggeng is in the soul of every Sundanese; they dance it beautifully. But only one would carry the indang of Ki Secamenggala, the spirit of ronggeng.

  Ki Secamenggala had whispered into the little heart of Ratih, breathed his breath into her soul.

  To be chosen “Ronggeng Princess” meant more than just honor for her family. All the rich old men in their vulgar boast of wealth and virility would be vying to buka her kelambu—“to open her mosquito net”—for the first time at the ronggeng.

  Like the meeting of sky and earth it would bring bountiful wealth to Ratih’s family.

  After her ritual bath in the river Ratih was piggybacked home so her feet would not touch the ground till the ronggeng. Kalsom, still a beauty and a ronggeng princess in her day, prepared Ratih for the evening. She painted her granddaughter’s lips vermillion with sirih and applied a concoction of turmeric and coconut oil on Ratih’s face and arms so that they glistened golden. She wrapped her small body with the incipient breasts of a thirteen-year-old in the finest songket, gold threaded to shimmer with every move of Ratih’s body. The child’s hair was done in a chignon held in place with a golden pin.

  Djoko thought his heart would burst with the pounding as he witnessed all this from the crack in the floor from under the house. He had loved Ratih from the day she danced the ronggeng as a little girl, while he and his friends mimicked the various instruments with their mouths. Why should the rich get everything?

  The music started; the other girls danced. Young men who could not afford the bidding took to the floor to try their chances.

  It would soon be Ratih’s turn. Kalsom hurried out of the room to pick the nocturnal-blooming ylangylang for Ratih’s hair.

  Djoko saw his chance. He climbed in through the window.

  Meanwhile the beat quickened with the dancers climaxing to a crescendo of gong and cymbals.

  “Ayo!” Kalsom shrieked when she saw the two as one on the floor. “We are ruined.”

  They would surely be ruined if it became known that Ratih’s mosquito net had been rendered. She had a mind to kill Djoko but there were more urgent things to do.

  Kalsom repaired Ratih’s makeup, wrapped her in the songket again and tended to her hair, this time with the flower crowning her chignon. She breathed a spell on Ratih’s crown as she sent her out.

  A hush came over the crowd as Ratih emerged. Her movements flowed with the music. Delicate fingers waved their magic as her hips swayed back and forth to the suggestive syncopation. Her eyes seduced the bidders, speaking to each alone as she recited lewd lyrics in Ki Secamenggala’s voice. The oil lamps flickered, dancing with Ratih, casting shadows sinuously.

  She danced to the pulsating rhythm in a ronggeng so exquisite none could remember better. The old men nodded their agreement that she surpassed even Kalsom.

  Razak started the bidding with an extravagant flourish of two gold coins. Baginda countered with two gold coins and a buffalo. Khalid upped by another buffalo. Intoxicated by the drinks and the heady fragrance of the ylangylang, Razak decided to end the charade. He threw in another two gold coins and expansively added five buffaloes, to gasps from the crowd and the good-natured backslapping of the other bidders, who gave up.

  While Ratih mesmerized the crowd Kalsom prepared herself. She was almost her granddaughter’s size and discounting the ravages of time was in every way Ratih. Kalsom blew out all the oil lamps except one. She bundled Ratih out of the house as soon as she had finished, to the waiting Djoko.

  Bumbling past the curtains with swagger to spare Razak looked uncertainly at the figure before him. Kalsom looked him in the eye and muttered the mantra the shaman taught her when he implanted the susuk—a sliver of gold—in the middle of her forehead. Blinded by the beauty before him Razak reached for her but she demurred. The blushing Kalsom eventually relented allowing Razak to buka her kelambu.

  Razak was aghast when he woke up next to Kalsom. She smiled. He grimaced.

  But who was he going to tell?

  TAIWAN

  Butterfly Forever

  Chen Qiyou

 
IT IS RAINING. The asphalt road looks cold and wet. It glitters with reflections of green, yellow, and red lights. We are taking shelter under the balcony. The green mailbox stands alone across the street. Inside the big pocket of my white windbreaker is a letter for my mother in the South.

  Yingzi says she can mail the letter for me with the umbrella. I nod quietly and hand her the letter.

  “Who told us to bring only one small umbrella?” She smiles, opens up the umbrellla, and is ready to walk across the road to mail the letter for me. A few tiny raindrops from an umbrella rib fall onto my glasses.

  With the piercing sound of a vehicle screeching to a halt, Yingzi’s life flies in the air gently, and then slowly falls back on the cold and wet road, like a butterfly at night.

  Although it is spring, it feels like deep autumn.

  All she did was cross the road to mail a letter for me. A very simple act, yet I will never forget it as long as I live.

  I open my eyes and remain standing under the balcony, blankly, my eyes filled with hot tears. All the cars in the entire world have stopped. People rush to the middle of the road. Nobody knows the one that lies on the road there is mine, my butterfly. At this moment she is only five meters away from me, yet it is so far away. Bigger raindrops fall onto my glasses, splashing into my life.

  Why? Why did we bring only one umbrella?

  Then I see Yingzi again, in her white windbreaker, the umbrella above her head, crossing the road quietly. She is mailing the letter for me. The letter I wrote to my mother in the South. I stand blankly under the balcony and see, once again, Yingzi walking toward the middle of the road.

  The rain wasn’t that big, yet it was the biggest rain in my entire life. Below is the content of the letter. Did Yingzi know?