Cath Barton

 

Dollies

There was, even now, a strong smell of chicken shit in the shed. It caught me in the throat. But the creatures in the shed now were not chickens. And I could not see them. All the wooden pegs had been scattered on the dusty floor. Looking now, with my eyes of all the years, I finally understood why my sisters had called them dolly pegs:  faces blanked, bodies naked and defiled. Now the half-made dress on the old iron dressmaker’s dummy was torn, the stuffing was bursting out and something was moving in there. I held the chains on the door tight and the cold metal froze my fingers. I heard shards of laughter beyond the chains, between the slats, and I knew I would fall, just like the little disemboweled pottery owl lying there by the pegs. I would be on the floor, naked and squirming like the rest of them. Until I fell still. Unless. Unless you arrived, and you wouldn’t. You had gone with the chickens and the harvest, which had been late that year. I had the flavour of you in my mind, just that. A frill of something underwater, receding.

CP

Cath Barton lives in Abergavenny, South Wales, where she sings, writes, takes photographs and grows unusual and delicious vegetables.

Suzy Devere

 

Tulips and Tourniquets

And you are before me with a twitching eye and something else that tells me you aren't comfortable...haven't been comfortable for a hundred years. Since the dogs stopped fucking next door and bit the ear off the little girl who was picking the tulip in the yard while your mother was boiling water for tea. Since the stars were constellations you wanted to know the names of, you haven't been comfortable with me. Because you know I ache. It starts when I open my eyes and realize we are still together, and that the day will bring minutes that we'll spend together. Our lives will be about taking my medicine on time and getting the insurance forms filled out right so the adjustments don't come back to us over and over again, like Australian boomerangs. You want me to feel loved. I want you to go away because my body aches from ills too numerous to list and my heart aches from falling out of love with you. Our long night—another in a string of many that will last until you become too tired to care for me, or I die—will start after Charlie's Angels re-runs and Dairy Queen, because a shake is all I can get down. We will never again be lovers, and I want to be small so you cannot see me in this bed of white bleached sheets and spit towels. I ache. And I don't want you to watch it.

CP

Suzy Devere appears and disappears seemingly at will. She could be camping in the underground right now, or back in Pattaya, sitting in a rattan chair at a bar overlooking the harbor, having drinks with some old ghosts of Vietnam.

Robert Vaughan

Fling

“Poor little me,” she mused. She is dripping with sweat while the rain spits bullets. She feels like flinging coffee at the Pope. What could be worse than an abortion in a Boston alley, the doctor a stranger. The father stranger still.

The Wedding March

The congregation whispers, fidgets, and breathes like bellows. The wedding party are running way behind schedule. Tensions mount as the ceremonial time passes. The bald pastor rearranges his papers. Checks his watch, the lines deepening on his face.

Her wedding party fixes, adjusts, makes last minute preparations. She can't seem to get her ringlets to behave, to twist in the manner they did at her run-through. “Do something,” she pleads with her maid of honor. Her panic mounts. She grabs the curling iron, snaps, “You're just making it worse!”

To calm her, dad leads her aside, into the narrow hallway. He wants to savor these last moments with his sole daughter. His pride and joy. He takes her hand, opens it face up in both of his. Says, “When I was your age, we could fit everything we owned right here.” Traces a circle in her hand with his finger. “We had nothing.” He sighs, thinks of his own failed marriage. He asks her, “You're sure you wanna do this?”

It takes her by complete surprise. The one question she wishes he might have avoided. She glances outside to steel herself, into the churchyard. The sun gleams on the gravestones. It feels like she's wearing ankle weights as the organ barks the wedding march.

CP

Robert Vaughan’s plays have been produced in N.Y.C., L.A., S.F., and Milwaukee, where he resides. He leads two writing roundtables for Redbird- Redoak Studio. His prose and poetry have been published in over 150 literary journals such as Elimae, Metazen and BlazeVOX. He is a fiction editor at JMWW and Thunderclap! Press. He co-hosts Flash Fiction Fridays for WUWM’s Lake Effect.  His blog: http://rgv7735.wordpress.com.

Randall Brown

 

Chorus

They flooded the valley and made the lake, left the houses intact, not knowing, hidden in the cellar, tied to the supporting pole as if to the mast was my grandfather. They didn't know what he said until it bubbled to the surface amid the motorboats, lake houses, water-skiers, jet skis, until it died under that endless roar.

Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.

In the walls of my father's apartment, they discovered nothing but millions of pellet holes. Him, they found wandering in the back parking lot. No one was there, they told him. But he didn't believe. He saw disembodiment, limbs afloat. The shotgun, tapping like a cane, sounding like a song. He raised it. There was nothing else they could do.

Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.

Every night, starting at seven, my son cried. He said he could not live with knowing he'd awake one day to death, with not knowing what happens during sleep. I told him he wasn't missing much. One night, we stayed up all night, waiting. The night could barely be heard, like a faraway past. Near dawn, they turned on all the sprinklers. Now I know,
he said.

Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.

Each day, after the stroke, fewer words become available. Finally, only "stroke" remains. An image of a boat, its wake like time, its prow pointed toward the end of the world. As the boat makes its soundless way forward, a tiny, damp hand strokes a father's cheek. A son hums a tiny song through that endless roar, beyond that nothing else they could do. Now I know, he says. The world gets washed.

CP

Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live. He teaches at and directs Rosemont College's MFA in Creative Writing Program. His short and very short fiction has been published widely, and his essay "Making Flash Count" appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field. He founded and currently manages Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.