New Micro

by James Thomas

  DIANE WILLIAMS

  A Mere Flask Poured Out

  The heavily colored area—it became a shade dingier—after I knocked over her decanter and there was the sourish smell of the wine.

  I saw Mother reaching toward the spill, but the time that was left to her was so scant as to be immaterial.

  The little incident of the accidental spill had the fast pace of a race, hitherto neglected or unknown.

  “Go home!” Mother said. And I didn’t look so good to her she said. “How dare you tell me what to do—when you threw me away! You threw your brother away, too!”

  Within a month, Mother was dead.

  I inherited her glass carafe with its hand-cut, diamond-and-fan design, which we now use on special occasions.

  We do well and we’ve accomplished many excellent things.

  “Don’t do it that way!” I had cried. My daughter had tried to uncork a bottle of wine, but since I thought it was my turn, I took it from her.

  Here are other methods I use to apply heavy pressure: I ask her where she is going, what does she want, how does she know and why. She should increase her affectionate nature, be successful and happy. Mentally, she must show me she has that certain ability to try.

  DIANE WILLIAMS

  Removal Men

  You have people nowadays—the men in general, who were helping the woman—and that which they should not disturb, she had put into a crate.

  She put a yellow-flowered plant into the crate.

  The men’s names were embroidered on their shirt pockets, but truly, there was no need to address one or another of them. A question could just be asked of one—without use of a name.

  The pockets of their garments were needleworks with thread in bright white. But for Marwood, somebody had devised an orange and mustard-yellow embroidery.

  The woman was standing a step aside and didn’t have much to contribute, but she looked at a man—at what he was making ready to take—and she held her hands with her palms turned away from her body with her fingers spread, as if she had dirtied herself.

  At the curb, the woman’s car was an Opel, and the hood was up, and the door to the car was out, and what was its color? It was a butterscotch and a man, up to his elbows, was under the hood. Now and again he’d go back into the car and try the starter engine. Ted—that was that one.

  It could be lovely, the woman was thinking. It was already lonely and there were mountains and mosses and grasses and violent deaths nowadays, and injuries and punishments, and the woman finds the merest suggestion of cheerful companionship and carousal—a bit too dramatic.

  RON KOERTGE

  War

  He comes back reciting the poetry of war. Not that crap from high school, those stupid roads diverging. The real poetry of war. It recites itself to him, and he recites it back.

  He’d like to give a rat’s ass about the night school teachers and bartenders his wife has been sleeping with. He’d like to get all riled up and crash his new pickup. But he’s busy listening to the poetry of war, which nobody else can hear.

  His mother just sucks it up and cooks. His father is fucking hopeless. Crying when those buses pulled up to the Ramada two years ago, and now Dad’s—what’s that word?—baffled. Yeah. Fuck.

  Then one day at the mall, there’s this girl at the Hospitality Desk. Plain. Staring at a book maybe because everybody knows where The Gap Outlet is, and half the other stores are closed.

  And he manages to put together a sentence. “What are you reading?”

  “Something,” she says, “sufficiently sordid to keep me from falling asleep.”

  Sufficiently sordid. Even the poetry of war stopped to listen.

  Her nametag said “Ivy” and he knew, from a life before this one, how ivy could, in time, bring down any wall.

  “Is that your real name?” he asks.

  “What happened to your face?” she answers.

  RON KOERTGE

  Principles of Handicapping

  A periodical called Daily Racing Form publishes past performances of every registered thoroughbred. Gamblers consult these brief histories to see how a horse they are thinking of betting on has performed in the past.

  For example, a filly named Teen Age Temptress prefers weekends to weekdays. Past performances show that she tends to sulk and toss her rider on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Thus no savvy bettor would be attracted to Teen Age Temptress on any weekday afternoon.

  I am a student of past performances, so am not alarmed when Sheila brings her revolver to the breakfast table on Sunday morning. She has done this before and ended up sobbing and penitent in my arms.

  Still, there are always variables in handicapping. A sudden storm, for example, might change the track conditions. Or whispers from the denizens of the backstretch with new and startling information. I begin thinking fast since the grim set of Sheila’s jaw is certainly a new variable.

  ROBERTA ALLEN

  The Beheading

  We are driving through the bush in a jeep. I feel free driving through the bush, especially since I’m not driving. He’s driving. The one his mother-in-law calls “The Dwarf.” She doesn’t call him “The Dwarf” because he’s short. She calls him “The Dwarf” because his body is much too small for his head. I bet his head weighs half as much as his body, though there’s no way to prove that without beheading him, which is not something I’m about to do. But it would be nice and quiet in this jeep if someone here—like his wife for instance—got the urge. His wife would be the most likely to behead him since she’s the one he’s complaining about. Everything she does, or did in the past, gives him cause for complaint. As a nurse, she probably knows the cleanest, most efficient way of beheading him, though that’s probably not something they teach in nursing school. If I were a nurse, and knew how to do it, I wouldn’t be surprised to see his head flying over the banksia and the scrub and the stunted trees growing here in the bush. Then I could concentrate my attention on the scenery. In the distance there’s a sliver of sea.

  ROBERTA ALLEN

  The Fly

  There’s a fly in my ear. I hear it buzzing. It can’t get out. It’s not the only insect I hear buzzing. There are plenty of biting flies and mosquitoes in this tiny room, but fortunately, the others are not in my ear. The flies and mosquitoes come in through the open windows. We have to keep the windows open, otherwise we would die from the heat. I wake him up. There’s a fly in my ear, I tell him at 3 a.m. He turns on the flashlight, takes a pair of tweezers from a case. Carefully, he extracts the insect, shows it to me. It’s bigger than I thought. He goes back to sleep. But I stay awake, thinking about this fly in my ear. What would I have done if he wasn’t here? Somehow that seems to be the wrong question. I have traveled all over the world. Never before have I had a fly in my ear. Why now? If I was alone, surely this wouldn’t have happened. This happened only because he is here. This romance has made my head spin. I have let myself get carried away. Maybe that fly was trying to tell me something. Maybe that fly was trying to bring me back to earth. Do I sound absurd? Did that fly mean nothing at all? Is meaning only something we add on to things?

  DARLIN’ NEAL

  Polka Dot

  Maybe I wore a polka dot dress when I slid over the seat. If my panties showed, I wouldn’t have thought much about it, just pulled my dress down when I got to the front, wanting the radio but we couldn’t run down the battery. The parking lot was crowded with empty cars over gravel. We could see mountains bluish all around. I could hear the announcer in the distance, people cheering on the track. A man walked by carrying a folding chair. He had afro curly hair; he was white. He seemed sort of like a rich man to me, from somewhere else when he leaned to the window and asked me how old I was. I told him. Was it 11? My brother locked the back doors and fell over the seat beside me to lock the front and he breathed so scared as the man walked back by the car. “Don’t look, don’t look,” he said as the man walked by and I glimpsed the man playing with himself
as he slowed down, probably thinking he was crafty, hiding his limp dick from everyone else with that folding chair. It was hot in the treeless parking lot. All I gave him was my profile.

  DARLIN’ NEAL

  Four Hundred Miles

  There was always a coffee cup right there in the cab of the truck. The highway arced on through the endless sky, up toward the mountains. He knew a shortcut. He got out to open the gate, then he drove through and got out again to close it with respect for whoever might govern this piece of ranch land. He kept the radio off, waiting for dawn and all those colors, that feeling of waking up with the earth, and the animals outside. Crows speckled out everywhere, on the fence posts and over the grass. No one traveled the road alongside him except a prong-horned antelope who flew through the open distance and out of sight. Behind him, toward home, his babies were sleeping. His wife didn’t need to worry about the landlord. The coffee cup warmed his hands. The long road took him away over the mountain, to work for a week and then he’d do it all over again. Unless he looked closer and saw the flick of the tail, or golden blinking eyes, the mountain lions high on rocks tricked his eyes into seeing nothing.

  KEVIN GRIFFITH

  Furnace

  For days now, the furnace repair guy has been trapped in one of the ducts. How this happened, no one is sure. One minute he’s inspecting the damn thing, the next . . . and because of the war, a war that never seems to end, I might add, the authorities are too busy to rescue him. Somehow he has positioned himself so that his face looks up through the iron grate of the main intake vent under our couch. Sometimes we slide the couch forward and let the children drop crackers and sliced apples into his open mouth. On certain nights, the children gather around the vent and listen to him tell fanciful stories about wolves, elves, and armless people. He needs to keep mentally sharp, I’ll bet. I suppose that something will have to been done someday. Especially when we need to warm the house. But for now, we just have to get used to it—the smell, the snoring.

  MOLLY GILES

  No Soy for Joy

  Joy can’t find the soy sauce in her lover’s wife’s kitchen. She did not expect to find the nori, the mirin, or the wasabi, so she brought those with her—but soy sauce? Doesn’t every kitchen in America have soy sauce? Her lover, watching with his beautiful hands clasped, doesn’t know, nor can he help her look, because if he gets up from the kitchen stool she has told him to wait on, he will, he says, have to rape her. Joy smiles and shakes her head. Her lover is too gentle to rape anyone. Too gentle, too weak, and perhaps—she is just beginning to realize this—too stupid to make love without giving pleasure. Tonight he will please her in his wife’s bed, but right now, hungry, it is Joy’s turn to please him. She has already checked the cupboards. Still smiling, she slides the family magnets aside and opens the refrigerator door. Barbecue sauce, she mutters, scanning cold shelf after shelf, catsup, chili sauce, chutney, enchilada sauce, horseradish sauce, marinara sauce, mint sauce, pepper sauce, taco sauce, Worcestershire sauce—she stops. Swallows. Who is this wife clever enough to leave out the one ingredient that Joy’s entire dish depends on?

  MOLLY GILES

  Protest

  Two girls lie on their stomachs in the middle of the road, giving the finger to every car that passes. Most cars honk, but a soccer mom stops, parks her SUV, and crosses over. “What are you doing?” she asks the girls. “Don’t you know you could get killed?” Her cargo of little boys stare out the windows. The girls slowly rise to their elbows, eyes blank. Both are thirteen. Both are beautiful. “Fuck you,” the dark haired girl says. “Fuck you,” her blonde friend echoes. A man in a pickup brakes. “What kind of language is that?” he shouts. “Fuck you,” the girls say together, and put their heads back down on the asphalt. “You know what?” the man says. “You deserve to get run over.” A gray haired woman with an Earth First! sticker on her Honda leans out and calls, “Are they protesting? What are they protesting?” “They’re protesting being teenagers,” another woman says as she jogs by. “Drugs,” an old man decides as he and his golf partner roll up the windows of their BMW. “Everything’s drugs,” the golf partner agrees. “Or worse.” The girls roll over onto their backs, arch, stretch, look up at the sky. “Please get out of the road,” the soccer mom pleads. The blonde raises her middle finger. The brunette does the same. The soccer mom walks back to her car, gets out her cell phone, and dials the police. “Don’t ever grow up,” she warns the little boys in the back. But it’s already too late. She glances in the rear view mirror and sees her own son’s gaze slide away from her as he and his teammates sit silently, breath held, eyes shining.

  STEVE ALMOND

  Dumbrowski’s Advice

  All summer long, the summer of Dumbrowski’s dying, you worried whether that waitress would sleep with you. There was always some magic sign. She smiled at you twice, three times if you ordered dessert, and her voice weaved musically through the unwashed forks and spoons. You admired her accent, she was local, a local girl, she knew where the rail tracks ran, swam naked in the stone quarry, held secrets in the hollow of her neck. You memorized her aromas—pie crust and parmesan, that lemony deodorant—you from somewhere else, a shipping clerk in charge of labels, auditioning for adulthood in thrift shop ties.

  At the hospital, you told Dumbrowski: I met a girl, which might have been the truth from time to time, though really you dreamed of the waitress, your waitress, sweet greasy onion rings on her fingers as you lay in a pool of your own heat. Dumbrowski knew nearly everything. For three months he was your cigarette break, your boss, your father and you were his son and now he was surrendering to some absurd disease, gray as an old shoe, weightless, collarbones strung up like crossbows.

  Once, at the counter, you saw her sip a chocolate shake, and it was almost then you worked up the nerve to speak.

  He said you should live. This was Dumbrowski’s advice when you told him about it, the way her tongue curled to capture that last speck of whipped cream. And you told him you would, you promised, as if you might know what that meant for both of you.

  LOU BEACH

  Humanity Services

  Humanity services came around today. They checked on the size of our bed, the quantity of cans in the pantry, the amount of stretch in your panties. I wasn’t home at the time, it was my shift at The Mill, and you were at work, but Angie let them in. They inspected her hair and teeth, measured Buddy’s doghouse. Angie said they were polite. She offered them a glass of water but after testing our faucet, they declined.

  LOU BEACH

  Shot by a Monkey

  Shot by a monkey, Elsa leaned against the banyan, held a bandage to the wound. They’d entered camp just before dawn, made off with a pistol, some candy bars, and a Desmond Morris book. We counted as six shots rang out, one of them finding poor Elsa’s arm. Relieved that the simian was out of ammunition, we packed up. On the way out of camp we noticed a monkey on the riverbank, hammering at a snake with the gun.

  STEFANIE FREELE

  You Are the Raisin, I Am the Loaf

  At 4:22 a.m. she crawls over the soft baby and onto her warm husband’s chest.

  “Am I snoring too loud?” He rests weak hands on her lower back.

  “You snore big then he snores little. Back and forth.”

  He rubs his beard in her hair.

  She tucks her knees along his sides. “Am I squishing you?”

  “No. You’re a raisin.”

  She reaches over to also hold a smooth baby foot. “Then you can’t feel me. I’m so small.”

  “Too tiny. Why are we awake?”

  “Thoughts. Busy raisin thoughts.”

  “You should try being the loaf. The loaf never stops thinking.”

  The river murmurs.

  She hears deeper breathing again and speaks before he can fully fall asleep. “Are you sure I’m the raisin and not the loaf?”

  “I am the loaf. The oaf is the loaf.”

  This must be his apology for earlier. She
lets more of her weight ease onto his chest.

  A few drops of rain drum on the awning. The few beats grow to many, drowning out the river.

  “I don’t need to worry about the big things?”

  His breathing is even.

  STEFANIE FREELE

  Crumple

  It was ridiculous, the back pain, the platinum white flash, the bent at a two-o’clock position, the grunting, the shuffling, the I’m-only-forty-one moaning. Just a Kleenex box I picked up. Only a squirrel I was trying to wave away from the bird feeder when the spine twitched again causing me to collapse on one knee, land on the baby’s bouncy chair and slap my head on the toy basket.

  An hour later they found me unconscious in a crumple. Donna, who stopped by to co-dog-walk, heard the baby screaming and opened the door. The same neighbor, an anti-kid woman—one who grimaced at runny noses—picked up the baby and held him until the ambulance arrived, until my husband showed up, grease-stained and wide-eyed.

  Even though I was out cold, I could hear everything. It was a paramedic who suggested holding the baby to my breast. My husband told everyone to look away while he pulled apart my robe. The taller paramedic said, “This isn’t that weird, it’s not like she’s dead.” The short one said, “Shut the hell up, buffoon.”