Meg Pokrass

Amorous

"No, this time I'm really listening," she said. At least she pretended to listen while her husband talked openly about how much he wanted to sleep with his yoga teacher and why this was better than okay, very life affirming, and very freeing. He was a psychiatrist and considered himself to be "mindful". He drank chia water and ate Buddha bars. He fasted on liquid greenery. He was in tip-top shape.

She imagined a leggy young woman doing a headstand naked in front of him and could not entirely focus as her husband explained to her the benefits of being an active, polyamorous metrosexual.

It was true, she was not very mindful. She didn't really think it mattered. She was forty years old and nothing about her would change. She'd given up trying to be skinny and adorable for him since her foot shattered like glass under a Segway in Golden Gate Park on the Fourth of July. These days, her lips were cracked and her pelvis felt cold.

She tried to imagine what an incredibly flexible young woman might see in her husband, a man with glasses so thick they deserved curtains. A man with hemorrhoids who could not decide if he liked beets in salad, who cleared his throat compulsively at the movies and had trouble looking directly at waiters.

"Let's talk about this amorous thing later, discuss it further," she said. "I'm sorry for making such quick assessments and shit."

"Okay dokey," he said. "Running late now. Be a good girl."

She spooned with her cat as soon as he left. She enjoyed the sensation of her own breathing folded into the deep purr.

CP

The stories of Meg Pokrass have appeared in over 200 literary magazines and numerous anthologies, including Flash Fiction International. Two story collections, Damn Sure Right and Bird Envy are available now, as is her novella, My Very End of the Universe, which is included in Five Novellas-in-Flash from Rose Metal Press. Another collection, The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down, is due out from Etruscan Press in 2016.

Meg Pokrass

Helium

Carbonated Cat is my favorite drink. It’s my sixteenth birthday. This was what Mom and Dad always concocted for my birthdays, this kittie-cocktail. Mom mixes spicy ginger ale with Grenadine and adds plenty of Tequila to Daniel’s drink.

We sit out on the porch and watch the leaves curl under. Mom says we should all toast to me.

Daniel says there is nothing to toast to. Mom is very still.

Daniel says “Let’s toast to the great idea that this young lady may become something some day.”

There are sharp, coughing noises from a motorcycle down the block, and further, down the block, the old guy screaming to his dog a million times as though the dog were possessed.

I throw my glass and it crashes into the weeds. Mom and I are standing and I tell her in a loud voice what he is—what he did in his car. It is not embarrassing anymore.

He says I am full of hateful lies and what a spoiled little tale-spinner I have become.

Mom is taller than I have ever seen her.

“Get the fuck out of here NOW! And get some help! LEAVE!”

Daniel’s face is red and he looks like a fat, old man. He can’t do much about it since I am calling the police and he knows the neighbors are listening.

He goes inside to pack up and we sit there holding hands, Mom and I, tightly knotted like helium balloons trying to stay here on earth.

CP

Meg Pokrass' stories appear in over 150 literary journals and are widely anthologized. She is the author of a novella-in-flash, Here, Where We Live (Rose Metal Press, 2014), and Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011), her debut collection of flash. Her fiction has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and has also been nominated for Best of the Web, Best of the Net, and the Wigleaf Top 50. She serves as an associate editor for New World Writing, and is currently working on an original screenplay with veteran writer/producer Graham Gordy. Learn more about her at megpokrass.com/

Meg Pokrass

 

Sit In Here

A little drunk, we share a cigarette. So cold and clear that stars pop like bugs in the sky and my right ear hurts with a crashing kind of pain.

The sledding hill looks lumpy and it bothers me. He tosses his coat on the snow as though it were a beach towel, plunks down, and says for me to sit.

"You," he says, "Sit in here."

He opens his legs, and I sit up against him like a wall while he warms my ear with those piano fingers curling over. I try not to dwell on my mother's breast and how they will take it off. I let my mind do things and then I stop it from happening but it happens.

He lives in dreams with me but he wants that to end. This feels like a scene in a movie which comes somewhere in the middle, when the popcorn tastes not so perfect.

He hates coming home to this, he says, he's always known how the town cancers and folds around exits. I'll follow him into a deep blue anything to get the fuck out.

CP

Meg Pokrass's first collection of flash fiction, Damn Sure Right, is available at http://www.press53.com/BioMegPokrass.html. Meg writes flash fiction, prose poetry and makes story animations. She serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review). She designs and runs the Fictionaut-Five author interview series for Fictionaut.  You can read and learn more about Meg at http://www.megpokrass.org.

Meg Pokrass

In This Light

John does not own a wall mirror. “Sorry,” he says “we can use each other’s eyes to know we are human, okay?” He does not believe in reflections.

There are drops of semen on my lips when he says he loves me for the first time, and tears. I do not dry them.

*

Twelve hours after my husband David and his bike were destroyed by a truck, people distributed hospital smiles. My cheeks smiled back, bile gathering inside my throat.

Congratulations, you are now a bird with no tree.

They’d thought he was dead, then changed their opinions and had something to say to me when they found me sitting against a wall in the waiting area hallway. He was alive. But not his spine.

“You may have heard it wrong the first time,” the hopeless/happy face of the doctor/nurse said. Someone held my hand, my hands.

*

David had been home with twenty-four hour care for just over one year when I started walking alone in the city in the middle of the night. For some reason I felt an urge to buy milk in the middle of the night, which we were never really out of. I was not frightened under any circumstance.

One of the many nights, walking alone in midtown at two a.m., I was held up at gunpoint. A group of youths with hanging jeans swimming around their knees blocked me, squealing, “who the fuck said that?” They took my money, and one of them poked my nipple. I felt as though I were watching it happen a short, safe block away.

John owned the Ice Mart where I bought the milk. Every night he was there, listening to music on his iPod, talking to the few slumping, tired customers. He always stopped talking when I came in, said, “hello, nightingale”. The night I was held up, John looked at me very hard… but didn’t ask what had happened. He offered me Kahlua, and I cried a little. We sipped from the same small bottle — watched each others lips.

Maybe my cell phone knew something beforehand, because it vibrated often and for no apparent reason.

Now, John vibrates, I vibrate. I crave his lips, his eyebrows, the smell right below his stomach. What it makes my body feel, so stupid, so young.

*

David molds delicate cats and birds with colored clay. He can use his fingers very well now.

“His fingers do the walking!” the day nurse says. This nurse, Jill, a handsome and strong girl, has full breasts. David’s eyes rest on the window.

Behind his wheelchair, on the wall – a photo of us newly married. Goofy, grinning. Redwood trees. I am wearing the felt hat with the little pink cloth rose. David always said it made me look like Clara Bow.

“Okay, well, I’m off to finish up some stuff at the office and grab some supplies,” I say. “David, you take care of this fine girl.” Jill is used to this line, nods.

“Sure thing, and David will be very happy to see you tonight,” she always says.

I kiss him on the head before I leave. He says, “aaaah, aaaaah.”

His lower body is covered with a thin blanket, and this way, I do not have to see.

—From Damn Sure Right, 2011. First appeared in Necessary Fiction, 2010.

CP

Meg Pokrass's first collection of flash fiction, Damn Sure Right is available at http://www.press53.com/BioMegPokrass.html. Meg writes flash fiction, prose poetry and makes story animations. She serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review). She designs and runs the Fictionaut-Five author interview series for Fictionaut.  You can read and learn more about Meg at http://www.megpokrass.org.

Surrounded by Water
Meg Pokrass

"We live in a state surrounded by water," I'm saying to nobody in particular mixing an Amaretto sour.

"And most people never go to the beach," he finishes, as if he were my oldest friend.

Working in this bar for a while, making pretty good money, I'm still thinking one day I'll see him and know his face when he sits down.

"Did you want extra sour?" I ask.

"Perfect," he says, flipping his thick black bangs. "And when you catch a little break, you want to join me?" he asks.

"I don't sit with customers," I say. I always say.

Lou Anderson, deep into the regular shouts, "she's too fucking important, she's a dancer."

"Nope," I say to black hair amaretto. "I'm just a nurse."

He smiles with tight closed lips, salutes. We look at each other for a sec.

His phone rings, the James Bond jingle. I giggle, then stop—his face whitening like a bleach stain.

"Hello... Hello, hello, hello?"

"Wrong guy," he says into the deep, deep phone, "fuck-off, jerk-wipe,"

"Pardon my French," he tells an invisible person sitting next to him, throws his fancy phone into the trash can, our trash can—rimming it, near the register.

"So, you're a real live dancer?" he asks me as though I'm a black phone too, smashing his fist on the hard wood counter.

I look through my eyelids to check who's around. If maybe Tim, the bouncer, sees. Tim's moving toward us in slow-mo, there's enough in my peripheral to breathe now, though I pee a little in my pants anyway. The other guys, my regulars, sit very still, sucking their skinny straws like air.

CP

Meg Pokrass lives in San Francisco. Her stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming here: 3AM, Keyhole, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Elimae, FRiGG, Word Riot, DOGZPLOT, 971 Menu, Thieves Jargon, Eclectica, Insolent Rudder, Chanterelle's Notebook, Toasted Cheese, 34th Parallel, Bent Pin Quarterly, The Orange Room, among others. Meg has recently joined the editorial staff of SmokeLong Quarterly.

Her Bottom
Meg Pokrass

Haley was lovely and talented and it was hard to be her best friend. We were both students in our first year at a small acting conservatory. Her hair shone like a searchlight, had an impossible silkiness. She'd whip it around and make a soft tent for herself when she was feeling low. I used to pet it like an animal.

Every physical feature was doll-perfect—except for her large, round bottom, which gave her character. It seemed to smile, as though proud of being her only flaw. She covered it with long sweaters.

Her boyfriend, Ray, went bowling weekend nights with his friends—and she took it personally. She had her hair highlighted, bought books with titles like, "Foreplay Facts". He didn't believe in self-help books. She'd tell me how much sex hurt with Ray—like it did the night he took her virginity away. She said he was tired of her complaining, was tired of her, and she didn't know what to do about it. Wasn't sex supposed to be pleasant? Was there something physically wrong with her?

I remember saying, "Don't worry. When Ray calms down and can really love you, it will feel different. It will."

"He might be gay," she said. "Gay or bi. Nearly all the men here are."

From personal experience, it was hard to agree—but I did. Persimmons were in season, so we bought one, cut open, and tasted the Fall.

She won every good role, and all the students were jealous. I defended her, saying Haley was the only one of us that had could really pull it off. Wendy in Peter Pan, Liesel in Sound Of Music. Her father knew the artistic director, Byron. She let everyone know where she and Byron dined, how he would nibble cocktail shrimp from her salad. Byron never addressed me, probably didn't even know my name.

She showed me a picture of her father in his movie producer suit, dark glasses, cardboard forehead. Her step-mother, his second wife, a dancer, all golden and tan. Long. It's all plastic, she said, one afternoon, pacing. She said she hated the Jewish act her step-mother put on during the holidays, the phony way she'd say "oy, so svelte!" She begged me to come home with her.

***

Twenty years later, I watch Haley's show in it's fourth season on the Disney Channel. The way she says "gawd" gives her away, though she is a stick now. Without her round bottom, she has no character. I imagine it rising and deflating, snug in a box in her attic, along with our letters. Her forehead is cardboard. She plays the part of the teenage star's sarcastic, hip mom.

She smiles at her daughter, says, "Honey, sex is wonderful, but only when it's time." Her daughter, played by a famous teen actress with blown-up lips, nods. "Or, not," Haley says. The canned laughter cuts like a cake knife. My dog beats his tail near the front door, needing to pee.

Haley kisses the teenage actress on her lustrous head. "When you love someone, everything changes. I promise, it will." She is using my inflection, my voice.

CP

Meg Pokrass lives in San Francisco. Her stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming here: 3AM, Keyhole, Pindeldyboz, Wigleaf, Elimae, FRiGG, Word Riot, DOGZPLOT, 971 Menu, Thieves Jargon, Eclectica, Insolent Rudder, Chanterelle's Notebook, Toasted Cheese, 34th Parallel, Bent Pin Quarterly, The Orange Room, among others. Meg has recently joined the editorial staff of SmokeLong Quarterly.