This Human Condition: A Collection of Flash and Micro Fiction
Various Authors
Published by
Petal Pusher Press
© Copyright 2010
All rights reserved. Copyright for each story included within this anthology remains the sole possession of the individual contributor. No part of this book may be reproduced without prior written permission from the author, with the exception of brief quotes used for purposes of reviews.
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This book is dedicated to the talented members of SheWrites.com, where it all began.
Special thanks to Kathy Tarbox, Victoria Donaldson and the entire staff of Petal Pusher Press.
A note from the editor:
If you enjoy the stories you find within this book, please take the time to visit the author websites and let them know.
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Part One
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LOVE
When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
Kahlil Gibran
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May I Help You? – Bridgid Gallagher
If I wasn’t so pissed at my Dad, I wouldn’t have minded watching his coffee house.
Sure, I’m stuck in the Rainy City--alone, broke and one step above unemployment; but I prefer to look on the sunny side. Some girls have dads who pick up 25-year olds and red convertibles. Instead, my Dad disappears without a trace for two months, leaving me in charge of a derelict house he likes to call a café.
That’s better, isn’t it?
It all started two months ago, when I got The Call from my wayward father. Gran handed me the phone straight away. She’s drawn the line when it comes to her son, and I can hardly blame her.
After less than two seconds of pleasantries, Dad got right down to it: “Janey, I need you to cover the shop.”
I gave the usual protests: I have job already, I love Florida, you’re crazy, blah, blah blah. He wasn’t in a listening mood.
“You’re the only one who can help me. Can’t you do this for your old Dad? It’ll be a breeze, just like when you worked at Kendra’s café.”
“That was a deli, Dad. And I didn’t run the café, I worked there.”
“Then this will be an opportunity for you to use your imagination.”
Dad’s approach to life involved liberal amounts of imagination. So far, his creative ways have caused Gran to banish him from Florida and Mom to run off with a straight-laced accountant. “Come on, Janey. It’ll be fun. Just give me one week. Only one. Please?”
At this point in the conversation, Gran rolled her eyes and mouthed something foul about Dad’s tendency to use me. I ignored her. I know that dad uses me, but what can I do? No matter what he does, he’s still my dad.
When my boss asked why I needed the time off, I told her that it was a family emergency. And it was. Some people’s parents get sick, my Dad gets ideas. It’s the same thing, really.
That was two months ago. Not the week Dad promised me, but two months. I tried to explain it to my boss, but she fired me over the phone. Turns out, the holiday season is not the best time to go AWOL.
So, here I am, stuck in a rainy Seattle winter with no friends, no income, and no way out. I’ve read every book I could find on running a small business. I taught myself how to pull a mean shot of espresso, scalded my arms more than the milk, and spent the majority of my time wading through Dad’s bills--a collection of papers stuffed into garbage bags.
The ceiling leaks and the floor boards are rotting. I know that there are at least two rats living in the basement and I’m pretty sure there are cockroaches in the kitchen. I’ve ignored these pesky little details for as long as possible, but it’s starting to build up. I’m beginning to wonder if Dad will ever come back.
I wish I knew where he was. If I knew what he was doing, I wouldn’t be so upset. Then again, I’ve been wishing I had the kind of Dad who mowed the lawn on Sundays and gave my boyfriends grief since I was twelve. It hasn’t worked so far.
The shrill ring of the phone interrupts my orgy of self-pity, and, for once, I am happy to play barista.
“This is The Sip. How may I help you?” Go customer service, go.
“Janey!”
My breath catches.
“Dad?”
“Hey baby doll!”
I get over my shock and switch to royally pissed off.
“What’s going on? Are you okay? When are you coming home?”
He gives a little chuckle, and I swear I can hear mariachi music in the background.
“Always in such a rush,” Dad says fondly.
“I need answers. Now.” I try to sound firm. “Or I’m going back to Florida, for good.”
Dad takes a breath and lets it out. Five years ago, I lent dad a thousand dollars for an essential visit to a specialist. I thought he meant a doctor. Later, I found out that he used it to pay some guru who taught him how to sigh like Eeyore. “You wouldn’t do that,” Dad tells me.
I want to scream any number of obscenities at him, but he’s right; I can’t just walk away. I hate it when he’s right.
“Tell me what’s going on.” I say, defeated.
“My business down here has hit a…snag. All you need to know is that I’m safe.” He takes another cleansing breath. “You can tell the police that you had nothing to do with it.”
“Police? Dad, what did you do?”
“Janey, I’ve got to run,” the line sounds choppy. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise--”
A screech of static swallows his voice.
“Dad?” I click the receiver, rapid-fire style. “You there?”
Nothing.
I throw down the phone, and then proceed to throw down a stream of cuss words, the kind that would do Gran proud. I’m just getting to the good part when the bells above the door jingle.
Two men in trench coats push their way inside and everything about them screams cop.
Oh. My. God. I freeze, sure of their purpose. The timing of the phone call and their appearance can’t be coincidence.
The men level their steely glances my way, and for a moment I toy with the idea of screaming guilty, just to get out of this mess.
But, like my Dad said, I wouldn’t do that.
Instead, I pull on my quirky barista smile. What could my Dad have done that a fresh cup of coffee wouldn’t fix? I take a deep breath, and then speak the first words that come to mind: “May I help you?”
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Gone – Gabrielle Mitchell-Marell
In this case, she left. As in could not give him what he needed in the way a mother must. Maybe at the heart of neglect is the sense of what ought to be given, that mark from which to fall short. This boy who is now a man is always a boy where this story lives. Was it her absence as she stood in front of him, or was her body not even where it needed to be? Either way, relatives, neighbors and later his father saw that she could only make things worse. For it is not in the absence that a child is broken, but in the having and losing, the suckling then pushing away.
I ask him if he’ll still like me when I’m in a bad mood. I quiz him on his past: why a relationship ended, when he moved from here to there. And what was he thinking again stealing the neighbor’s car? Even if to return it with donuts on the seat by mo
rning. Father, stepmother, neither bring good news. I think I best get out before devotion turns its lock. Too late. “Your sister,” I plead. “Yes, my sister,” he says. I grab his hand and pull him in with relief. He has no phone, no lease. He tells me he likes it here and wants to stay a while but they start anyway. When he’s over I dream that he’s leaving, sometimes just for work in the morning. Gone to chop vegetables or grind nuts into cream, slicing off bits of his fingers as twelve-hour days turn one over the other. As stealthily as a cat takes a roof, that’s how easily he slips from me. When morning comes for real he rolls onto his side and props himself up like an artist’s model. “I dreamed you packed up and moved back to Jersey.” “It’s not that far,” he reminds me. “Just let me know before you go?” I ask. He smiles and leans in to kiss my cheek.
I don’t tell him about the close calls of my childhood. When I stepped on a needle in a saw-dusted bathroom and it sunk down deep. They put me under to get it out, clamped me down kicking with thick strips of Velcro. The fire in our house while my parents were out of town. They came home early because my mother had a premonition.
This is a son who visits his mother in the country where he was born, but they don’t share a common language. Whichever words his eight-year-old brain latched onto and carried are long gone. The essential went with the poisonous, the quotidian with the unrepeatable. How do you throw language out and make sure it doesn’t come back. As if tossing a ring from a moving train: one piece is the whole, no part can return.
Picture his brown eyes, lightest at the edges. So he happens to have the face of an angel. It doesn’t make it better or worse. He was just one always waiting, reaching up to let her in. And just before his father takes him away for good, she tells her son how she sees it. And his eyes looking up into hers, his senses flowering because she is still the earth, are shot through with salt water.
After more of my questions, trying to pin down what happened, (because the facts may be the only defense against the untreatable) half in a diner with me, half in another room, another country, he says, “One day I want to ask her if she knows why I don’t speak Portuguese. If she remembers what she said to me that day? But I know she doesn’t remember. She’ll say, ‘No, I didn’t say that. I didn’t. No, no.’”
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Summer Candle – Virginia Farrington Hinchey
Was not the room enlarged by jeweled incandescence, kindled by rubies and warmed with topaz, the night she returned to me? Maybe never so opulent save in the storehouses of remembered pleasure…
Still and yet, it was a wondrous moment. Due to the rarest of circumstance, father and brethren had left together for several days, my only daughter gone for a week’s vacation with a friend. I was alone. I had been advised to revel in this extended respite, but, in truth, I found silence unnerving and presiding over inanimate good order, left me desolate. So it was that with heightened maternity, I received my daughter and offered her the fullest of my undivided attention.
She made her entrance with flourishes, draped in newest finery -- sunflower shirt, loose-fitting jeans and a golden bag -- clear departure from last week’s wardrobe and a certain pronouncement of change. While away, something or someone had quirked her cautious adolescent course, and I was about to hear the tale.
But first, “I brought you a gift,” she exclaims. Digging into the bag, she fishes out a dark blue, pyramid-shaped candle. “This candle burns down and in the middle are all these gems. Guess how much it cost?” (Customary not to reveal the price of a gift, but I know in this case, ‘the thought that counted’ is in the cost). Happily, my proffered bids are low and the real, higher price given with satisfying astonishment on my part. The gift is sacrificial, bought with her own hard-earned money and reflecting the esteemed value of our continuing alliance.
And then, oh my:
“I met a boy.” (Be still, oh clanging mother heart, the face before me bears no guile. So pray proceed). “He was so different his hair was long, blonde; his clothes so colorful, comfortable. He skateboarded, and it was exciting. He liked me. His friends told me that he did. We just talked and then he went away for three days. I was so depressed. I wanted to come home, but on the last day he came back and skate-boarded past the house. He fell, and I went out to see him. I gave him a necklace and a kiss and everything’s changed.” Her words spill out in breathless glitter madly sketching a be-knighted and noble soul. Whether or not the boy resembled in part or at all the romantic vestures bestowed upon him, I was able to grasp the finished piece--young prince, idling on the boardwalk; his foot rocking the skateboard with professional ease; his clothes a mastery of stylish disregard; a townie in a tourist town with the sagacious bearing of one who knows his way around—a swashbuckler, a pirate by the sea, an adventurer whose fierce and charming gaze had settled on fair maid with ardent affection. In an instant, in a look, he pierced the oyster shell and cracked the world asunder.
A memory, stirred by similarity and rising by comparison, wriggles up through layers of time and surfaces as recollection. I remember back, back to summers when I was woefully adolescent; to time away by a river where I escaped the weighted continuum of me and became a momentary light being. I remember a boy, a boy by the bank of a river. I remember a first kiss in late afternoon, the warmth of sun wrapping us around as we spun crazy and suddenly shattered into a shower of sparkling, colored motes, swirling and spilling between earth and sky. That is all. I cannot remember face or name, only a kiss vivid and uncorrupted in the storehouses of remembered pleasure…
And now my daughter has come away with such a bit of summer sand slipped under the skin, a pleasant discontent itching her forward to create pearls in time strung in a profusion of fresh dreams and hopes.
And then she is off to share her adventure with a friend. Once again, I am alone. I light the candle, the candle full of gems. A fan whirring useless against the summer heat whips the flame high threatening the waxy vessel with premature consumption. Suddenly, any desire to see jewels is extinguished by fear of losing the candle before its time. It does not seem right. Candles should burn slowly, on and off, retaining their integrity for a respectable period and only then melt away to reveal the inner part. I blow the candle out.
My daughter, my only daughter, burns like this candle. Every day there is a fanning of flames and a rapid course of burning. She spits and sputters and wafts away from me. I catch her in minutes now, often with heated words, trying to track the smoky trails to a burning heart. I worry.
Only when she comes to share, lounging with me on the bed, am I comforted. She speaks wisely, without secrets, and I am still her friend.
And I am grateful for young princes who inspire in brief encounters. And I celebrate the procession of events yet to ornament her life.
But time enough for adventures that continue in sorrow or in joy. Time enough for discovering the pains of love, the duties of love, the length of love. I sigh – her candle is burning, I cannot blow it out. I must wait in fearsome hope to see jewels spill out into an uncertain world.
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JOY
Juan seem’d To her, as ‘t were, the kind of being sent, Of whom these two years she had nightly
dream’d A something to be loved, a creature meant To be her happiness, and whom she deem’d To render happy; all who joy would win Must share it -- Happiness was born a twin.
Lord Byron
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Overcome – Tamara Dourney
In the fetid darkness of the basement of despair, there is yet the promise of light. Like the last inhabitant of Pandora’s box, shining moments of time, perfect capsules of emotion and events illuminate the darkness as they glitter in my mind. Memories as fine as sand spill forth, the broken hourglass of a life laid bare for all to see.
My breath is held as the awe, as powerful as a thousand pinpricks, consumes my being. I am assaulted, and in the attack I find joy. Here, the birth of a daughter,
her tiny wail piercing my heart. There, the embrace of sisters, tears on their faces as they bring comfort to one another. A thousand moments envelop me, whirling and dancing as if driven by a feverish beat I cannot hear.
Faster and faster they spin, a tornado of life’s simple pleasures and sharpest joy separating me from the evil tendrils of despondency and gloom. Their friction ignites a spark, the spark a tiny flame. I suck in air, desperate for the feel of its burn against my struggling lungs, hopeful as it feeds the fires within. And with the hoping, the flame bursts forth, banishing the darkness. The demons retreat, their sulfur scent only a faint remembrance drifting across my mind.
The sun is shining through the window. A smile creases my face as I bask in the warmth of its rays.
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PRIDE
The highway of the upright turns aside from evil; whoever guards his way preserves his life. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
It is better to be of a lowly spirit with the poor than to divide the spoil with the proud.
Proverbs XVI 17-18
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This Human Condition: A Collection of Flash and Micro Fiction Page 1