Reunion
Edward Mullany
JACK AND I were at the department store, and, as usual, Jack didn’t want to be there, only this time he’d come with someone else.
I sat with him on the edge of one of those nice-looking beds. I’d been shopping all day, so in a way I was able to rationalize it.
From a nearby fitting room came the voice of a woman who evidently believed Jack was the only one who could hear her. We looked at each other with raised eyebrows. I knew who the woman was. But Jack and I had been divorced long enough to know that speaking of each other’s mates when those mates weren’t there to defend themselves inevitably led to suspicions of jealousy, even if what was said was meant to be funny, so we’d made it a rule to keep our mouths shut.
“You’d better go see what she wants,” I said, and lifted one of my shopping bags in her direction.
Jack got up, but not before looking inside the bag. It was Christmas, and old habits die hard.
“What’s going on?” said the woman from the fitting room. She’d come out in a silk nightgown that looked better on her than it would have on me, but when she’d seen us she’d stopped, as if the sight of us together had made her forget why she was here.
“It’s all right,” said Jack. “You look great, sweetheart. Is that the one you want?”
The woman looked at me. Jack’s hand was still in my shopping bag. He took it out slowly, like a child caught in the act of something insidious. I didn’t say anything. But I did something I knew would communicate what I wanted to tell her, something that, even though I despised myself for it, I found myself unable to help. I smiled in a way that was suggestive rather than friendly, and arched just one of my eyebrows. The woman turned away in tears.
Later, when I met my husband in the mall, he tried to peek inside the shopping bag like Jack had done, but it wasn’t the same, and I snapped at him.
SOUTH AFRICA
The Interpreter
for the Tribunal
Tony Eprile
I WAS HIDING IN my friend’s garage, a place no one would think to look. I had my informants, you see. We were boys together and I knew he’d never betray me. I waited until the time they usually brought him food and when he opened the door to my whistle, I was on him like a pack of wild dogs. He ground my face into the concrete, shouting horribly in my ear. The pain was terrible. I did not know what was happening. The trick is to disorient the prisoner right away. Get him off guard and he’ll tell you anything you want to know. My arm was twisted behind my back and I could feel the ligaments tearing. I did not struggle but he kept twisting, his knee my knee in his back you bastard you’re done now he screamed I was thrust from the darkness into the light, then into the darkness again like a sack of potatoes I threw him into the trunk of my car, I’m that strong. I could hear him thumping in the trunk as I drove and hit the brakes taking the corners hard I bashed my head against something hard and was thrown helplessly into the light of a two-thousand-candlepower torch right in the eyes hitting him all the time the fists coming from nowhere and I felt a rib breaking, my nose breaking. The blood ran down his face and he didn’t even lift a finger to wipe it off my glasses had come off when they got me and I had no idea where I was on the ground of that hut, and yes I sat on his back and pulled the sack over his head, the wet sack like I was drowning I could not breathe. He could not breathe, I pulled it off now you will tell me what I want to know because otherwise I could not breathe I told him everything it did not take long to get the names my friends who betrayed me the friends I did not know what I was saying what he was saying those were hard times and we had to be hard to live in them I just wanted the pain to stop but I have to live with who I am now who was I then it is too terrible to speak of it at all is to go mad.
IRELAND
The Gutter
Ethel Rohan
HE ARRIVED HOME from school and slipped into the dead feeling. As usual, the hallway was littered with purple Post-its, so old they’d lost their stickiness. The first of his mother’s notes read “EAT,” followed by others with inked arrowheads that pointed to the kitchen.
On the fridge, a new note read “Milk’s off, only good for tea.” On the stove, the usual note in red marker, “Don’t touch.” He sat at the kitchen table, and lined up crackers and the jar of peanut butter. He moved aside the note on the napkin holder that read “After snack, homework.”
In the living room, the yellow Post-it on the TV screen read “Don’t you dare.” In his bedroom, on his desk, she’d written on a ruled sheet of yellow paper, “Check your homework, twice.” On his DS game, “Only if you’ve done everything else.” In the bathroom, on the toilet, her faded scribbles, “Flush. Wash Hands.” Stuck to the front of the soap dish, “Count to 25 50. Slowly!”
On her bedroom door, “Stay Out.” His father had walked out on his mother when she was pregnant, hadn’t even waited to see what she’d given him. Lately, she’d taken to calling the boy the man of the house. Under his bedcovers, pinned to his flattened Paddington Bear, another new note, “Toss.”
He returned to his mother’s bedroom door, sniffed at its cracks and inhaled the traces of her face powder and spicy perfume. At six o’clock, when he heard her car pull into the driveway, he reached for the stack of orange Post-its.
He waited inside the front door, Paddington Bear clutched to his stomach. His mother stopped short. He had stuck the Post-it to his forehead. “Free—Please Take.”
He pushed out past her, and took up his position on the street.
CANADA
Three-Second Angels
Judd Hampton
THE CANYON JUMPERS reject your currency. They speak a progressive language, a language you mistrust and fear. The boys come dressed in deep baggy jeans, pre-soiled and studded for your displeasure. The girls reveal too much stomach, various degrees of chub, bellybutton ornaments, and jeans too low-cut for safety. The boys experiment with toothpicks wedged between their teeth. The girls snap ultra-cool-mint gum.
The canyon jumpers already know your ways to fall. They have their own ways. You suspect their ways are suspect.
They come after class, feet clapping the pavement with exaggerated goose steps they learned from twentieth-century history films. Cars pass them leaving wide berths. The canyon jumpers have nothing to say so they speak the words they hear at home.
They come with unexpected names. Keshtin, Bradleshaw and Wristen. Cholena, Marisitomia and Pirthenily. No Jacks and Jills go up these hills anymore. It is as if their parents named them expecting their angels to take flight. Before reality was realized. Before expectations expired. Their mothers scrub toilets. Their fathers smell of gasoline.
“Why bother?”
“Why try?”
“Who cares?”
These are just words they speak at home.
“You’re selfish.”
“You’re a disappointment.”
“You’re a goddamn waste.”
These are just words they hear at home.
The canyon jumpers elbow through tour groups whose pullovers and heavy backpacks smack of gift shop ambush. The tourists speak a language of mediocrity the canyon jumpers abhor.
The canyon is their religion, a spiritual thing. The tourists are infidels. The canyon jumpers worship in endless pews of spruce and Douglas fir, a steeple of blue sky and sunlight, the rising spray from the canyon like a moist halo. They follow a footpath to emerald-green holy water and they anoint themselves. And then they climb.
When they reach the overhanging ledge, they bow their heads in reverence. “Remember Avery,” one of them says. “Remember Charlene.” In turn they step to the edge and spit. Fifty feet. One hunded feet. What does the drop matter?
They are quiet. Anxious. Fear is involved. The girls embrace the boys.
“Tighter, I can’t feel you,” one says.
“Well, you know—” says another.
“I wish. I wish. I wish.”
These are just w
ords they speak.
The canyon jumpers have learned to hold no faith in expectation. “See you at the bottom,” they say, for luck. And then they soar. They fly like angels. Three seconds.
Three seconds to undo.
ZIMBABWE
The Lament of Hester Muponda
Petina Gappah
AFTER HESTER MUPONDA lost her first child and she turned her face to the heavens to pour out her grief, her church people said to her, find your strength in God, they said to her. After the second child followed where the first had led, she bent her face into the folds of her Zambia wrapping cloth. The Lord gives and He takes away, blessed be His name today, Hester Muponda said. But when the fifth followed the fourth who had followed the third, she kept him in her second bedroom until he began to decay and smell and they forced the door open and still she refused to bury him. Her closest neighbor and best friend MaiNgwerume whispered something about Hester Muponda’s midnight ways to her closest neighbor and best friend MaiMutero and MaiMutero said to MaiNgwerume, it is a mad chicken that eats its own eggs, but shush now.
He does not give us more than we can bear, Hester Muponda’s church people said to her, look to your grandchildren, they need you now, they said to her. Then first, the first grandchild died and then second, the second and Hester closed her bedroom door against her husband. And when Hester Muponda opened the door again, it was to show a beard on the chin of her disappearing face.
Only women with evil tempers grow beards, her husband’s paternal aunts said. Hester Muponda’s husband woke up in the night and reaching across the pillows, brushed his hand across her chin. He moved to the spare bedroom, and the day after the memorial service of the first dead grandchild, he moved out of the house and Ashdown Park altogether and moved in with Gertrude Chinake his woman from Bluff Hill who had no beard or grief but smelt only of sweat and sex and the Takatala sauce in which she marinated all their food.
Hester Muponda took up her large pots, her black pots she took up, her funeral pots in which had been cooked the meals that fed the mourners that cried her children and grandchildren away. She took up her pots and set up three three-stone fires at the corner of Eves Crescent and Ashdown Drive next to Gift Chauke who sold individual cigarettes and sweets and belts with shiny buckles and the Financial Gazette on Thursdays, the Independent on Fridays, and the Herald on every other day but Sunday when he sold the Standard and the Sunday Mail. In her pots she made sadza, thick and white, and chicken stew and vegetables that she sold to Gift Chauke and to the drivers and to the conductors of commuter omnibuses. And even though her cooking smells reached into the neighboring houses along with her pain, Edgar Jones the only white person left in Ashdown Park did not complain about property values as he had when his neighbors first started to grow maize in gardens meant for flowers and to park the heads of long-distance haulage trucks on the narrow strips of lawn outside their houses.
She is mad, Hester Muponda’s neighbors said and crossed the street when they saw her coming. Mad, mad, echoed the drivers and conductors and Gift Chauke as their teeth tore into the chicken that Hester Muponda cooked with onions and tomatoes. And when the time came, and Hester Muponda took up the blanket that covered her in the darkness that her children had found, the only people who felt her absence were those drivers and conductors who missed the firm but soft sadza and the chicken stew that Hester Muponda cooked over three three-stone fires at the corner of Ashdown Drive.
UNITED STATES
Farewell, I Love You,
and Goodbye
James Tate
OUR LIVES GO on. Our fathers die. Our daughters run away. Our wives leave us. And still we go on. Occasionally we are forced (or so we like to say) to sell everything and move on, start over. We are fond of this mainly because we have so few left. The Starting-Over-God is, of course, as arbitrary as the one who took father before his time. But we have to hang onto something. So we start over. There is a little excitement to spice the enormous dread. Not again, I can’t, I don’t have it in me. I’ve seen this one before and I can’t sit through it again. But we do, just in case. In case we missed some tiny but delicious detail all the other times we saw it.
Can you recommend a dentist, a doctor, an accountant, a reliable real estate agent, a bank? And before you know it, a life is beginning to fall into place. You have located the best dry cleaner, the best Chinese food. A couple of the shop owners have remembered your name. How long have you been here? they ask. And here is the opening, the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.
“I was born here,” you reply, “lived here all my life.” Rooms full of pain, lawns of remorse, avenues of regret, whole shopping malls of grief begin to detach themselves from you, from the person, from this husk, this shell you call simply Bill.
“My name’s Bill, I live just down the street, it’s funny we haven’t met before.”
“Nice to meet you Bill. My name’s Carla. I just opened the shop a week ago. I moved here from Chicago last summer. Divorce, you know.”
She was an attractive woman, slight, fine-boned, and had a pleasant manner, and Bill couldn’t imagine why anyone . . . He stopped himself. Let it go, let her previous life go. And why had he lied to her automatically? He wanted to clear it up right away, but what would she think, telling lies to a stranger, what kind of behavior is that, anyway?
“Carla, I have to apologize to you.”
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“I haven’t lived here all my life. I’m new in town. I just . . .”
“That’s all right, you don’t have to say anything.”
“Well, then, can I buy you a drink or something when you close up today or some other day?”
“That’d be nice. Can you come by about five past five?”
“Great.” And so it was starting again. Some single-minded agent of life was stirring, was raising its perky head, and Bill smiled and waved goodbye to Carla.
On the short walk back to his house Bill found himself humming an old Billie Holiday tune, “God Bless the Child that’s got his own,” and he laughed at himself and shook his head. Here he was in his new place, his new life, so much blood and ashes under the bridge. But it wasn’t under the bridge. It was his, all that pain was not washed away, it was his, and suddenly he was proud of that. Carla, he said the name several times out loud. Carla, wow, who would have thought.
SWITZERLAND
The Most Beautiful Girl
Peter Stamm
AFTER FIVE MILD, sunny days on the island, clouds started to mass. It rained overnight, and the next morning it was twenty degrees colder. I walked over the reef, a giant sandbar in the southwest, which was no longer land and not yet sea. I couldn’t see where the water began, but I thought I had a sense of the curvature of the earth. Sometimes I crossed the tracks of another walker, though there was no one to be seen far and wide. Only occasionally a heap of seaweed, or a black wooden post corroded by seawater, sticking out of the ground. Somewhere I came upon some writing that someone had stamped in the wet sand with his bare feet. I followed the script, and read the word “ALIEN.” In the distance I could hear the ferry, which was due to dock in half an hour. It was as though I could hear its monotonous vibration with my whole body. And then it began to rain, a light and invisible shower that wrapped itself around me like a cloud. I turned and walked back.
I was the only guest staying at the pension. Wyb Jan was sitting in the lobby with Anneke, his girlfriend, drinking tea. The room was full of model ships, Wyb Jan’s father had been a sea captain. Anneke asked me if I wanted a cup of tea. I told them about the writing on the sand.
“Alien,” I said. “It’s exactly how I felt on that sandspit. As strange as if the earth had thrown me off.” Wyb Jan laughed, and Anneke said: “Alien is a girl’s name in Dutch. Alien Post is the most beautiful girl on the island.”
“You’re the most beautiful girl on the island,” Wybjan said to Anneke, and kissed her. Then he tapped me on the shoulder and said: �
��When the weather’s like this, it’s best to stay indoors. If you go out, it might drive you crazy.”
He went into the kitchen to get me a cup. When he came back, he switched on a lamp and said: “I’ll put an electric heater in your room.”
Anneke said: “I wonder who wrote that. Do you think Alien’s found herself a boyfriend at long last?”
Translated by Michael Hoffman
ARGENTINA
The Ache
Elena Bossi
LETHARGIC, LOOKING WITHOUT looking out the window of his fourth-story office, he longs for an adventure that would take him away from this place that has become unbearable.
This afternoon a boy is cleaning the big windows down on the street front. Whitish froth sprays out from the glass and spreads across the pavement, the way the pain in his shoulder does; it travels through his vertebrae to his feet, which are flattened by the weight he’s accumulated over recent years. “Go to the doctor,” his wife reproaches him. “Walk every day, eat less, and most of all, rest. Don’t work so much.” But if he stops working even for a moment, the pain is there. He doesn’t really know where it comes from or even where it hurts. He wonders if its deep source is his conscience, his back, or his neck because in the end they might be the same thing. For years now his head and shoulders have seemed frozen into one block, which also makes it hard to distinguish mind from body.
The boy is cleaning the windows with frank, confident sweeps, putting joy into each one. This work is pleasure to him; but not so absorbing that he doesn’t check every moment up and down the street. He’s expecting someone.
Flash Fiction International Page 12