“The Madonna can stay there for these two days.”
And he did as usual. He remained silent. Unnecessary arguments annoyed him. But that evening, in the house named “In-Nann” (after his grandfather), strange things began to occur. First the lights went out. Theirs only in the entire street. And as soon as he tried to flick the circuit breaker, it spat out a flame which very nearly roasted his hand. It was too late to call Ġużi the electrician, so they decided that just for that night they would go to bed early. And, with a slowly smoldering candle on either side of the queen-size bed, he lay down and began to stare at the ceiling, and at the strange shadows forming before his eyes. Amidst them, a large shadow began to take shape. It was the form of an arrow. No, actually, it was more like a Christmas tree. No. And then, clear as crystal, a woman appeared . . . with a veil. The Madonna under the stairs! Then began the nightmares. The fires of hell. The screaming. The chains. The sobbing. The devils and who knows what else.
The following day, when Evelina came in from her bike ride, she was greeted by the statuette of the Madonna on the commode at the front of the house.
“What the fuck is this?”
That day, for the first time, they quarreled fiercely.
Translated by Antoine Cassar
IRAN/UNITED STATES
My Brother at the
Canadian Border
Sholeh Wolpé
FOR OMID
ON THEIR WAY to Canada in a red Mazda, my brother and his friend, Ph.D.s and little sense, stopped at the border and the guard leaned forward, asked: Where you boys heading? My brother, Welcome to Canada poster in his eyes, replied: Mexico. The guard blinked, stepped back then forward, said: Sir, this is the Canadian border. My brother turned to his friend, grabbed the map from his hands, slammed it on his shaved head. You stupid idiot, he yelled, you’ve been holding the map upside down.
In the interrogation room full of metal desks and chairs with wheels that squeaked and fluorescent light humming, bombarded with questions, and finally: Race? Stymied, my brother confessed: I really don’t know, my parents never said, and the woman behind the desk widened her blue eyes to take in my brother’s olive skin, hazel eyes, the blonde fur that covered his arms and legs. Disappearing behind a plastic partition, she returned with a dusty book, thick as War and Peace, said: This will tell us your race. Where was your father born? she asked, putting on her horn-rimmed glasses. Persia, he said. Do you mean I-ran?
Iran, you ran, we all ran, he smiled. Where’s your mother from? Voice cold as a gun. Russia, he replied. She put one finger on a word above a chart in the book, the other on a word at the bottom of the page, brought them together looking like a mad mathematician bent on solving the crimes of zero times zero divided by one. Her fingers stopped on a word. Declared: You are white.
My brother stumbled back, a hand on his chest, eyes wide, mouth in an O as in O my God! All these years and I did not know. Then to the room, to the woman and the guards: I am white. I can go anywhere. Do anything. I can go to Canada and pretend it’s Mexico. At last, I am white and you have no reason to keep me here.
IRELAND
Skull of a Sheep
James Claffey
YOU ARE IN a car speeding through Dublin toward the West year after year the journey uncoils past the same landmarks Kilmainham Jail strapped to a chair bullet to the brain on by the Rowntree Mackintosh factory where the black and yellow and orange and red fruit gums and sugar-covered pastilles spit out of humming machines through the streets by the Deadman’s Inn where in the last century the cellar was a makeshift mortuary for corpses carried in from stagecoaches and a little further up the road the Spa Hotel perched on a hillside like some angular magpie on a branch and out the road we whizz by the Hitching Post and the Salmon Leap Inn into the country the green sward dotted with black-and-white cows cudding the grass tripartite stomachs long-lashed eyes lulled creatures the spire of the church in Kinnegad visible well before driving into the narrow-streeted town and Da stopping to wet his whistle at Jack’s Roadhouse and Eamonn’s butcher’s shop next door where we bought beef and lamb and turkey at Christmas and on toward the West through pastureland with the distillery and the castle and Da’s cry of “Goodbye Ireland I’m off to Kilbeggan” and Horseleap aptly named as in a blink the town disappears and with it the hillside graveyard where our ancestors’ bones lie and into Moate of the widest main street in Ireland site of our family’s bitterest defeat at the hands of bank manager and solicitors aided and abetted by the Sisters of Mercy later reputed to be torturers and abusers in habits and all wringing hands and uttered prayers Hail Holy Queens and the family business on the right the long low building and Da’s mutters of regret and Mam saying bad luck go with it and out past Morgan Lane the vet’s house on the left and the sight of him with his bordissio ready to geld the lily-white testicles of young boys through tree-lined arbors into Athlone—Mam’s town and the narrowed streets houses falling in on one another the Prince of Wales Hotel and across the road Uncle Tom’s shop and the room where you remember seeing Granny in the bed the lights dimmed camphor and mothballs and the mutinous Shannon out the window at the bottom of the slipway and off across the river by Custume Barracks and Lough Ree where Mam as a small girl waited in the rushes for swans and salmon and Lecarrow and Castlerea until the day stretches toward evening and tired voices recite Hail Marys and Our Fathers and the Rosary beads clack in the stuffy car and Da berates Mam for not teaching us our prayers and is it heathens she’s raising and the air of summer full of ire and Castlebar turns toward Westport and the Wild Animal Park we never visit disappears as the Atlantic coast gapes in front of us and Rosturk fades behind us and over the humpy bridge where Loftus the postman will take flight years later on his Honda fifty and wind up dead in a ditch the motorcycle bent in half six children fatherless and the cottage by the dirt road owned by people named Coughlan awaits us without television and the fields lead to the edge of the water and the place where you find the sheep’s skull and Mam won’t let you take it inside and it rots on the window ledge and beneath the thatched roof Swallows and Amazons and Famous Five and Hardy Boys mysteries mark the long days of summer until once more the Rowntree Mackintosh factory and Kilmainham Jail appear and Da declares there to be “no place like home.”
UNITED STATES
Arm, Clean Off
Cate McGowan
THE IRRIGATION MACHINE took it, slashed his arm off, a thick gash and a click of bones as it sliced right through. He’d dropped the wrench, reached into the engine to retrieve it. His dad had always said not to, but who would know? No one was around.
He jabbed his hand in for the tool. But then the fan blades cut his left arm, clean off. Clean through. Just above the elbow.
He took a header off the top of the engine into the wet field, green clumps swallowing him up. Skeins of sweet-smelling alfalfa grass danced in rhythm to the pulsing hoses. As the irrigation machine spasmed water, grinding wheels rolled by, oblivious to the fourteen-year-old’s crisis.
He licked the salty corners of his mouth, gazed up and saw crimson on the plants where he’d toppled. Think through this, shape a plan. Other people have emergencies, everybody does. Everybody takes a look up at the sky and faces it sometime. He thought of people in other places, lying in rocky soil, watching the same sky. Beautiful girls pouting in parks, kids homesick at camp. Flat on their backs.
The cut decided on a dull throb, which droned in tempo—“one-and-two-and . . .” He grabbed at something sticky by his knee as he pushed up. It was his cut-off arm. He clutched it, then set it down gingerly.
“A tourniquet’ll save your life, son,” he remembered his dad once saying when they were watching a Western.
The belt came off easy, even with one arm. He held the leather in his teeth and lay down to wiggle his left stub through the loop, then grabbed and cinched the strap, gripped it with his incisors. Groping around, he found a thick twig and stuck it in the buckle, twisted and tightened it over his wo
und. He swiped his gooey red hand along the leg of his jeans.
Down the slope, he could see the family farmhouse. He was alone—he’d been left to work while they shopped in town. No one would hear him call. The field was empty even—only the fierce, excited din of birds and bugs calling from far off, the occasional bark of a dog at some distant farm. Think through this, shape a plan.
Two fields and a tree-stand away was the Potters’ farm.
He’d walk. With his arm. The field was spinning with the irrigation. Water was in his boots now. The dark, rich soil made an oozing, bubbling sound as he stepped.
His cut-off arm was dead weight like a cradled football; he touched the dead fingers, so strange. One foot, then the other. He pushed ahead, water from the machine still trickling down his cheeks.
The day burst with changing light, and he walked in and out of cloud shadows. The mottled purple shade volleyed back and forth. Trees danced in the distance, and the grass parted, a groundhog zigzagging through it across the pasture.
Up past a clearing, he stumbled between two crabapple trees. A flurry of gnats swarmed his wound. The raw calls of crows—CAW, CAW—accused him.
Down the ravine, a few more steps. It was hard to see it. A few more steps. He twisted the tourniquet again.
In the stream, the bottle-green water trickled over pebbles and rocks. And then he was there.
Mrs. Potter appeared out of nowhere, an apron around her waist, her open mouth spinning in an orbit of orange lipstick as she hollered for her husband, for everybody. Mr. Potter came running.
“Here’s my arm,” was the first thing the boy said. He offered his severed limb like a package.
They fetched him up as if he was a hog-tied goat. Then Mrs. Potter was beside him on the porch, little glistening beads of sweat on her upper lip fur as she shakily held a glass for him.
The boy lay back, scanned past sparkling motes to a silhouette cutting its way across the yard; Mr. Potter loped to meet the ambulance, and his long shadow spread and opened like a pair of scissors.
The boy’s gaze then went farther up where a cloud in the west formed a big hand, the forefinger pointing like that famous picture he’d seen of God and Adam. He knew he’d have to tell his parents, Don’t cry, Mom. Dad, you stop your crying.
GUATEMALA
Finished Symphony
Augusto Monterroso
AND I COULD tell you,” the fat man interjected in a rush, “that three years ago in Guatemala an old organist in a neighborhood church told me that in 1929 when he was asked to catalogue the music manuscripts in La Merced he suddenly found some unusual pages that intrigued him and he began to study them with his usual devotion and because the notes in the margins were written in German it took him a long time to realize they were the two final movements of the Unfinished Symphony so I could just imagine his feelings when he saw Schubert’s signature written clearly and when he ran out to the street in great excitement to tell everyone of his discovery they laughed and said he had lost his mind and wanted to trick them but since he was a master of his craft and knew with certainty that the last two movements were as excellent as the first two he did not lose heart but swore instead to devote the rest of his life to making people admit the validity of his discovery and that was why from then on he dedicated himself to methodically visiting every musician in Guatemala with such awful results that after fighting with most of them and without saying anything to anybody least of all his wife he sold his house and went to Europe and once he was in Vienna it was even worse because they said no Guatemalan Leiermann* was going to teach them how to find lost works least of all ones by Schubert whose scholars were all over the city and how could those pages have ended up so far from home until almost desperate and with only enough money for his return passage he met a family of elderly Jews who had lived in Buenos Aires and spoke Spanish and listened to him very attentively and became very agitated when God knows how they played the two movements on their piano viola and violin and at last grew tired of examining the pages every which way and smelling them and holding them up to the light that came in through the window and finally found themselves obliged to admit at first very quietly and then with great shouts they’re by Schubert! they’re by Schubert! and began to cry in despair on each other’s shoulders as if instead of finding the pages they had just lost them and I would have been amazed at how they continued to cry although they calmed down a little and after talking among themselves in their own language tried to convince him as they rubbed their hands together that the movements excellent as they were added nothing to the value of the symphony just as it was and on the contrary one could say they detracted from it since people had grown used to the legend that Schubert tore them up or did not even try to write them certain he would never surpass or even equal the quality of the first two and the pleasure lay in thinking if this is how the allegro and the andante are what must the scherzo and the allegro ma non troppo be like and if he really respected and revered the memory of Schubert the most intelligent thing would be to allow them to keep the music because besides the fact that there would be an endless polemic the only one who would lose anything would be Schubert and then convinced he could never achieve anything among the philistines much less the admirers of Schubert who were even worse he sailed back to Guatemala and one night during the crossing under a full moon shining against the foaming sides of the ship with the deepest sadness and sick of fighting bad people and good he took the manuscript and ripped the pages one by one and threw the pieces overboard until he was certain that now no one would ever find them again”—the fat man concluded in a certain tone of affected melancholy—“while great tears burned his cheeks and he thought bitterly that neither he nor his country would ever claim the glory of having returned to the world those pages that the world should have received with so much joy but which the world with so much common sense had rejected.”
Translated by Edith Grossman
* organ-grinder
NORWAY
When a Dollar Was a Big Deal
Ari Behn
HE LET HIS beard grow and traveled to America, read Arthur Rimbaud, and wrote poems. On the bus from New York to Los Angeles he met a girl who was on the run. The girl said the childcare people were after her. Her mother was a junkie and her stepfather hit her. He stroked her crotch. When she got off next morning in Knoxville she gave him her father’s address. He stayed on the bus until late the next morning holding that little note in his hand. He flew home from Los Angeles after losing all his travel money in Las Vegas and hitchhiking across the Mojave Desert. Back in Norway he sent a letter to the girl who had got off the bus in Tennessee. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he wrote. “Maybe we belong together . . . ?” Three weeks later the letter came back. ADDRESS UNKNOWN was printed in capital letters across the envelope. The American postal service paid the return postage. This too was written in capital letters. As though a dollar was such a big deal.
Translated by Robert Ferguson
SLOVENIA
Amerika Street
Lili Potpara
IT’S BEEN QUIET in the apartment for a week with Daddy and Mama not talking. Today, they are both working and the girl has been alone, playing a game where she talks to herself, asking questions and answering them in a different voice. Mama comes home early and calls, “Alenka, come into the kitchen.”
Alenka apologizes to her toys and tells them she’ll be back quickly.
“Alenka, I have to tell you something,” says Mama.
She has that look that scares Alenka, as if it were drawn on the wrong face.
“Daddy got you a birthday surprise,” she says. “A bike. One of those Rog Pony folding bicycles.”
Alenka doesn’t say anything, but something makes her heart tighten, and she’s angry. She’ll be eleven years old soon, not a child anymore. Of course she wants a Pony. She’s wanted a Pony for a long time, so that she can go with Silva and Katarina to “Amerika,” a lit
tle side street. It’s been too far away for her, without a bike. They talk so much about it, how the slopes are steep, and how you have to brake hard at the bottom, that she wishes that they’d talk about something else.
Mama continues with that look, the one drawn on the wrong face, “Alenka, you should look happy because Daddy even took out a loan to buy it.”
She says, “Yes, Mama,” and goes back to the window and her toys, “I’m going to get a bicycle as a surprise,” she tells them, and the toys bounce up and down.
When her birthday arrives, Alenka has a tummy ache. Still, she goes to school, and in class she wonders whether the bike is red or blue. All the Ponies are blue or red, only Silva’s is pink because her daddy painted it.
At home Daddy arrives after lunch and tells her to come down to the basement. Alenka goes down and the bike is there. Light blue.
She glances at her father. She knows that she’s supposed to be happy, but her tummy starts to hurt more. She touches the bike. It’s just right—the metal so cold it slightly hurts.
“Thank you, Daddy,” she says and wants to go upstairs to her toys as soon as possible.
“You’re not going to go for a ride?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Alenka says, not knowing what to do. “In a little while.”
The basement is narrow and the light is poor; Daddy is big and Alenka is small. She can’t move. In her head, she hears the word “loan.” She wishes Daddy would leave, so Silva and Katarina can come, so she can escape to Amerika.
Translated by Kristina Zdravič Reardon
Flash Fiction International Page 10