Flash Fiction: Salty, Fishy, Metallic

They buy sushi and eat it under the squid.

They like to eat the raw fish and pretend they’re underwater. The squid above them slowly comes to life. A tentacle twitches as a piece of salmon is devoured in two bites.

The smell here, in this often over-looked food court, is a little salty, and a little fishy, and a little metallic. If they ignore the whining toddler at the table behind them it’s easy enough to imagine this is the scent of their deep sea kingdom.

Pickled ginger is sucked behind a row of blisteringly white teeth, disappearing like a worm down a gullet, and the squid clacks its beak. They laugh, wondering if anyone else can hear the wires that suspend the squid groaning.

The toddler’s stopped whining and if either of them turned to look they’d see the identical looks of petrified terror on his and his father’s face. One of them picks at the fallen grains of rice; eating them like so many eggs of an as-yet-undiscovered eel or anemone.

The air is thickening around them and by the time they go to throw away the empty container they can swim to the trash can. The last few bubbles of oxygen escape the toddler’s nose.

The cables holding the squid have rusted through and they snap. It gathers them up in its tentacles. The suckers tickle a little.

Reading Telegraph Avenue on Telegraph Avenue

Sometimes it feels like I’m traveling just so I can learn the context for more stories, my own–I want to collect as many things to weave into the stories I’m going to tell as possible–and other people’s as well. 

I remember what a difference studying abroad in Ireland had on my understanding of The Dead and how the second time I read it–after having been there–felt like reading it for the first time because there were so many new layers that had been hidden to me before. I remember reading the line “The gentle rain was trying not to fall” in Murphy and being blown away by how exactly it described something I’d experienced there many times. If I’d read that turn of phrase before I went to Ireland it might have pleased me but I wouldn’t have understood it nearly as completely.

It’s for that very reason that I waited to read Michael Chabon’s latest book, Telegraph Avenue, until I was in Oakland.

Flash Fiction: The Dragon in the Megabus Lot

It grows throughout the day, reaching out toward the rolling blue behemoths that thunder past it. Some days it’s stronger than others. Some days the light isn’t quite right and it feels faded, weak, insubstantial. It grows nonetheless, hoping one of the giant, mobile creatures will pull a little closer than usual and maybe it’ll be able to stroke the behemoth. Just run itself along the shiny blue skin and soak up some of that sparkle. That’s all it wants, just to rub itself against that shine for a moment, a second, an instant.

The monsters never pull that close. And at the very end of the day, when the dragon’s grown as much as it can, it still can’t quite reach the brilliant blue. Then the day is over, and even though the beasts keep rumbling by it curls up and disappears for the night. Resting, so that tomorrow, just maybe, it can grow a little longer, reach a little farther, and brush against the brilliance.

It knows that dragons are supposed to fly, but all it can do is float, hover, hang. Though it’s not bound to the ground it’s fixed to the point it grows from. As the year moves through its cycle the dragon grows in slightly different ways, twists, shapes. But none that lets it feel what that sparkle would be like, popping against the dragon’s form.

There are people that ride the behemoths and sometimes bits of them shine, sometime bits of them even shine blue. Usually they don’t come any closer than the rolling creatures. Once someone did. A slim stripe around his arm sparkled. He came and stood right by the dragon, so that it could wrap itself around him. And the dragon did. It twisted its whole form around this person as he leaned against the wall and waited to get inside one of the beasts. It felt the sparkle pop, shimmer, fizzle. It was only the tiniest sensation; just one spot of the dragon was tickled and teased by the shine.

Then the person left; climbed inside yet another one of the beasts that stopped moving before it came within the dragon’s reach. The dragon saw the person with the sparkling stripe run his fingers along the side of the behemoth as he went inside it, and almost, for a second, the dragon thought it could feel the chilly blue shimmer, too.

A Bottle Episode on the Way to New Orleans

The cessation of the bus’s forward momentum woke me up about an hour into the trip from Atlanta to New Orleans. We were pulled over to the side of the highway and the bus was making a variety of grumbling noises as the driver tried and retried the ignition and did whatever else a bus driver does when his vehicle breaks down on the highway. After the whole gamut of groans had been run through the driver got off the bus to peer underneath it. I fell in and out of sleep while the driver continued in his struggles and the next thing I knew we were being told that we were going to drive back to Atlanta to switch over to a working bus. I managed to wonder how we were going to get back to Atlanta if the bus wasn’t working before I fell back asleep. When I woke back up we were back by the side of the highway and about half the passengers had disembarked and were standing around in the dark smoking and talking. I guessed we never made it back to Atlanta after all and fell back asleep.

Flash Fiction: Cheaper than a Movie

She can ride the train from Greensboro to Burlington and back for the same amount of money as it costs to take herself to a matinee. Today she was bored, so she would do just that.

Flash Fiction: Ghosts in the Steam

Pittsburgh is a city that billows steam from everywhere. He thinks it’s ghosts. After all the town is filled with skeletons of buildings that used to be alive, their boarded up windows staring like the empty eye sockets of a skull. There are husks of factories lining the three great rivers that converge and give the city its strength. It doesn’t bother him. He likes seeing tangible remains of the past in the present. Pittsburgh is proud of its past and he thinks it should be. He wonders if he visited other cities if they would display what they once were as unselfconsciously as Pittsburgh does.

Flash Fiction: Window Feeding

On his way home from school he’d stop in front of Dumpling House and watch the cooks fold balls of meat in dough. They worked behind a window facing the street, but they never looked out, never looked back at him. With precise flicks of their wrists they would bundle up the dumpling filling. They set each completed one on a plate, where it waited to be cooked. Each one looked exactly like the others, as if they’d been made by a machine instead of human hands. He’d stand there watching the cooks–there were always two working away–and his hands would flick at his sides as he tried to capture their motions for his own.

Then he’d move on to the restaurant half a block down and watch food being created there. This place made soups mostly, the broth coming from a huge vat of constantly murky boiling water set right next to the window. In the colder months when the glass would fog he wasn’t sure whether the condensation came from his breath or the roiling water. The cooks here never looked out the window either, and it made him feel invisible in a powerful way. He didn’t know what any of the food they were making tasted like. He imagined the fine noodles they dunked in the water and tossed in sieves were gummy, and only slightly salty. The strips of meat were probably spicy, like they’d been rubbed down with pepper, and when the two were combined in a bowl, with that steaming broth, they would please his entire palette when he slurped the first spoonful.

One of the cooks behind this window methodically stretched and sliced and stacked dough. Then it was fried. The rods were golden when the cook pulled them from the oil and just as uniform as the dumplings. The boy was sure these fried creations were the lightest, flakiest, sweetest things he would ever eat, if he ever did.

Eventually he turned away from the window and walked the rest of the way home. There he collapsed on the couch and finished the potato chips from on top of the fridge.

The Next Travel Narrative

Having finished The Lord of the Rings on the bus ride in to Canada I was trying to decide which of the absurd number of books I was carrying around with me I would read next. Don Quixote because it was one of the largest and finishing it would lighten my load the most? Heart of Darkness because it’s a slim volume and I could probably finish it quickly, sending it safely home so it wouldn’t continue to get dogeared in the duffel? Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because it has recently been brought to the fore front of my attention once again? But before I could make this decision, life intervened.

Flash Fiction: Fog Orchestra

When it was foggy she made music. If she woke to a curtain of gray outside her window she put a coat on over her pajamas, grabbed her bassoon, still in its case, and walked down to the shore.

Flash Fiction: Directions

The only way to identify the stand is to look for the display of cheap pewter charms. If there is a row of badgers next to a grouping of stern looking owls then that’s the one. It moves around the neighborhood so you’ll have to check every stall. You can’t go back to where you found it before, if you’ve been lucky enough to find it in the past. Don’t get distracted by the woman with the slicked back hair perusing the over-ripe avocados. Watch out for the screaming two-year-old who’s grabbing anything close to hand in his rage.