Flash Fiction by Cathy Ulrich

The Ghost Haunting You

 

The ghost is only a little boy. He’s told you he was hit by a car while running across the street after his ball.

 

Statistically speaking, do you know how many children are killed chasing after balls? you say, while I rinse leftover oatmeal from my breakfast dishes. It’s more than you’d think.

 

Before we moved here, you never really thought about ghosts. All your family was long-lived and died without regrets. You hadn’t even seen Poltergeist.

 

Didn’t the little girl die of cancer? you asked me after we watched it. I heard she died of cancer.

 

You thought how tragic it was for someone to die like that, unfulfilled, young. You began setting goals. We’d be married by the end of the year. In our own house by spring. You’d cut your hair. You’d get a promotion. We’d have a nice car.

 

Still, you didn’t think about ghosts until we came here.

 

Now you think about them all the time.

 

The creaking on the stairs is the little boy going up and down, you tell me. He had a happy childhood, just like you did. Death came for him so quickly, a blue sedan’s brakes squealing, his head striking the pavement, his ball rolling into the gutter.

 

You have conversations with the ghost of the little boy while I brush my teeth for bed.

 

Oh, I see, you say. Oh, I see.

 

The ghost of the little boy never speaks to me. You say it’s because I don’t believe in him. It’s true that I’ve asked around the neighborhood and nobody’s ever heard of any little boys getting hit by cars and dying.

 

People don’t talk about that sort of thing, is all, you say. No one wants to talk about a little boy who got hit by a car and died.

 

Except you. You want to talk about him all the time. That’s all you ever talk about anymore.

 

Don’t you believe in ghosts? you say, and I roll away from the cold space beside me, where you used to sleep.

 

 

 

Cathy Ulrich writes when she can and works at a funeral home. There are no ghosts there, but she always says good night to the dead people, so they don't feel lonely.

Flash Fiction by Cristine A. Gruber

Give Me a Sign 

  

Boy meets girl. Boy wants girl. Boy gets girl. And thus a life is made…

 

The sign on the lecture hall could be seen from across campus. It was six feet high, twenty-two feet across. The glowing sentiment could be read, word for word, from anywhere in the quad. It was a glorious and utterly over-the-top expression of undying love. And it worked. The boy got the girl and they were married less than six months later. They had two children in as many years and became the proverbial family of four by the time they were both twenty years old. Young but mature, they did just fine, better than most. They raised their children well, one destined to be an artist, the other bound to be an attorney. Life was varied and interesting.

 

The boy went into the I.T. field and did quite well for himself. The girl went into banking and did just as well in her own right. But career successes took a back seat to family life. Days were filled with softball games and karate tournaments, Girl Scout outings and PTA meetings. The children thrived. The oldest, a son, grew up kind and sensitive and full of heart. He married young, as his folks had, and settled down in the same town. The second child, a daughter, left home at seventeen to attend college. She did well, as expected, and later went on to Law School, getting accepted at a prestigious university clear across the country.

 

Empty Nest Syndrome is a misnomer at best, for it’s not a syndrome, but rather a dark, vacuous virus that eats one’s soul and leaves a person a walking shell of his former self. The day they got back from taking their daughter to Columbia, the boy, now a pseudo-man, spent most of the day rearranging the garage. By the end of the day, he was moving half the stuff from the garage to a storage unit across town. By the following weekend, he moved out. Married twenty-five years, over, just like that.

 

The girl never saw the signs.

 

Their son did reasonably well as an artist, but as is common with creative types, he had eclectic tastes that eventually led to his undoing. Late one Friday night, while visiting a bar on the questionable side of town, he struck up a conversation with the wrong sort of fellow. A crushing right fist and a broken beer bottle later, and the son’s body was removed from the premises on a stretcher, sheet drawn over his face. The family never recovered. The daughter excelled in her profession as well. She prosecuted the bad guys and put them away. The media called her The Eliminator, single-handedly removing the scum from the streets. She was in a parking garage when the shots rang out. Hit from behind, she never saw the bullet coming. The family sunk deeper into the pit.

 

Boy met girl. Boy wanted girl. Boy got girl. And thus a life was made…

 

The boy died of a heart attack at 63. The girl outlived him by another 30 years. She never remarried. At the age of 93, alone and delirious with dementia, the one thing she kept asking for was a sign; give me a sign, she kept saying. The nurses thought she was asking for a sign from God. But no, she wanted her sign, the one that had started it all, saved all those years, tucked away in a box under the hospital bed. They never figured out what she wanted. She died, alone, asking for a sign.

 

 

 

 

Cristine A. Gruber has had work featured in numerous magazines, including: North American Review, Writer’s Digest, California Quarterly, Dead Snakes, The Endicott Review, The Homestead Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Miller’s Pond, Napalm and Novocain, The Penwood Review, Pound of Flash, Pyrokinection, Red River Review,  The Tule Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and The Write Place at the Write Time. In 2014, her short stories, "Imprisoned," and "Stash," both received an Honorable Mention in the Writers Weekly 24-Hour Short Story Competition. Cristine's first full-length collection, Lifeline, is available from Amazon.com.

 

 

 

 

Flash Fiction by Heather Heyns

The Chicken Dance

 

When it came down to it, I slept with him because Mom made a dead chicken dance. She hefted it up under its wings as if presenting a child. A trail of pink slime dripped on the counter as it kicked and shimmied its way across. A dead thing, a used-up thing, a pitiable thing, but for two minutes it danced and soaked up a little admiration.

 

I met him at the park, behind a line of shrubs, when my friends and I shared a single cigarette I'd stolen from Mom. I tried to smoke the one he gave me without coughing as he played with the strap of my dress. His skin cracked over his knuckles, like a road map of a hard life. His hair had started to recede, and lines creased the corners of his lips. The years that sat behind his eyes doubled my own, but the way he watched me made me forget to care.

 

He drove me to the end of a dirt road. I stared at the frayed hem of my dress, pulling at a wayward thread when I couldn't bring myself to look at him. The shadows cast by the light of the dashboard made his face dangerous. The anticipation eluded me as it always had. Shame scrubbed away any excitement, leaving me covered in welts like road rash.

 

The weight of the night smothered me like his body did. His calloused hands felt rough and his shadow of a beard scratched my neck. I felt no pleasure, and swallowed down the complaints and refusals that always crawled up my throat like bile. Instead, I closed my eyes and clung to his shoulders as he made me dance, a dead and used up and pitiable thing soaking up a little admiration.

 

 

 

Heather Heyns is a freelancer writer from Southern California. Her work can be found in Howl Literary Magazine and upcoming issues of Literary Orphans, Thick Jam, and Yellow Mama. 

Flash Fiction by John W. Sexton

Mouth to the Sky

The speckled thrush stepped onto the sunlight conveyer-belt to the hedge-depth and was gone into shadow.  Somewhere in there the thrush became a cat, or was eaten by a cat, or killed the cat and wore it as a coat; but out the far perimeter of the hedge emerged the cat.  The cat approached the opened door of the car, the car shining black like a soul, a soul of darkness so pure that the sun turned it white as a flash.  Out the other side of the car stepped a woman in black coat, a coat so black it absorbed the sun.  She opened her mouth to the sky and out came the song of the speckled thrush.

John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent being The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon Poetry, 2013).  He also created and wrote The Ivory Tower for RTE radio, which ran to over one hundred half-hour episodes from 1999 to 2002.  Two novels based on the characters from this series have been published by the O'Brien Press:  The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed, which have been translated into both Italian and Servian.  He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem "The Green Owl" won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007.  Also in 2007, he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.

Flash Fiction by April Salzano

Thundershirt

In truth, she did not bubble OMG! or spit like totally when, in medias res, the teacher skipped into the meeting being held to discuss my autistic son, his progress, inclusion in a regular first grade classroom, but this is how I will retell the story of how the twenty-something teacher paralleled my son to her dog.  Again.

My son had begun wearing a weighted vest at school, a replacement for inappropriate touching, which sounds much worse than it is.  Neck, face, smooth undersides of arms of classmates, teachers, support staff.  Extra feels copped for baggy, dysfunctional skin, deformities.  The vest is designed to help by applying constant pressure, to deliver a hug of sorts.  The weights bring him down from the ceiling where he is not hovering, but zipping above his peers in wingless glory, laughing the kind of laugh that makes everyone want to be that happy, able to forget fact families and bar graphs, the meaning of dipthongs and consonant blends.  The vest had been working, progress noted.

"So," and here I will always insert the word like, "when I first saw this vest, my question was, how long can he leave it on?  I had all these questions about [like] how this device worked and I had to laugh at myself for asking because, well, we got one for our dog" (emphasis mine, mostly).

No, she didn't just say that.

Yes, she did, and she went on to describe how this garment "like, calms the dog," that though it was meant for thunderstorms, they knew, the just knew Fido or Fifi didn't want them to take it off.  "What's even funnier," she went on (and on and on), "was how we decided to order one (no it isn't) and if you tell anyone, my husband will just die" (does that apply to you as well?), "but, [like], we put a Christmas dress on her and she was so, y'know, like happy!  So this vest just made sense . . . "  Wait, it gets better, or worse, depending on how you feel about your child, your dog, or both.

In a separate incident, my son had been sick and after missing three days of school, I emailed this teacher to giver her an update on his progress.  He had been weak and I had to carry him to the bathroom, when we made it at all.  Shit, piss, vomit, covered us for several days.  Toilet, tub, washing machine, an endless assembly line of cleaning.  My mistake was adding any detail to the email I decided to send her.  Simplicity would have been so much better.  This time, she actually did say, "oh my God!" adding praise for the strength it must have taken me to haul this stocky boy to the bathroom.  "I can't even pick up my dog!"  How that was relevant, I am still not sure.

When combined with the autistic support teacher labeling my son more a pet than a peer during an IEP meeting, I feel justified in saying I have had my fill of this metaphor rolling off everyone's tongue like thunder.  I feel justified in ridiculing her epic fail as a small token of a smaller act of revenge on behalf of my son, who knows none of this now, and probably never will, dog willing.

April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two sons.  She is currently working on a memoir on raising a child with autism and several collections of poetry.  Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow and Rattle.  Her first chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is forthcoming in spring, 2015, from Dancing Girl Press.  The author serves as co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press (www.kindofahurricanepress.com)

Flash Fiction by Linda Casper

Hospitality

The young woman offering me water in an enamel mug was wearing a headscarf the colour of marigolds.  I accepted gratefully and gulped it down quickly while she nodded her head, smiling, revealing even, white teeth.  I thanked her both in English and French but she spoke in a language I couldn't understand.  She turned and went swiftly through the doorway into the dark interior and re-emerged with some wet muslin with which she dabbed my cheeks and forehead.  As she did so, I noticed the sleeves of her brightly coloured top were soaking wet and wondered if she had piped water or whether she had used some of her precious supply to attend to my needs.  Three young children wearing coloured beads round their necks and little else peeked out at me but disappeared when I said hello.  I tried to think if I had something in my bag I could offer in return for the hospitality she had shown me.  A crumpled notebook and a few pencils were all I could offer and they would be little recompense for quenching my thirst.  As I rummaged about my hand found a small oblong shape.  Perhaps the children would find a harmonica amusing.  I drew it out, put it to my lips and played one of the few tunes I could manage.  Three little faces appeared once more, hands covering their mouths as they tried to stifle their giggles.  Not for the first time, I thought children are children the world over.

Linda Casper hails from Yorkshire and, after a long career as a high school teacher, she has recently begun to write and has had many short stories, poems and travel articles published.  Linda has a keen interest in gardening and is a judge for Yorkshire in Bloom.

Flash Fiction by Joan McNerney

Where the Lost Gather

"Maintain your perspective just keep going" she thought while waiting for the bus.  The sky resembled an ink blotter drenched in grey and black.  People trekked along avenues attempting to cross over mounds of snow.  Teenagers ganged up huddling under broad awnings.  Their brightly colored jackets spread like rainbow clusters against brick buildings.  She twitched her umbrella awkwardly, its handle was cold.  Where were her gloves?  Would the bus ever come?

Stepping off the curb twisting her head fidgeting . . . "Stay optimistic.  Be brave.  Everything will work out eventually."  The familiar tape played over and over in her brain.  Another appointment, another pill pusher . . . another doctor as healthy as a horse.  How could he possibly understand?  Always the same questions.  What about her habits . . . smoking, drinking, taking street drugs, having an active sex life?  Was she anxious, depressed?  Prying into her life then offering no solutions.  A waste of money with so little cash left.  And a waste of time.  But time stood still now. . . heavy hours pressing down crushing her.

The doctor's office needed a paint job.  There was no coat closet or water fountain.  An old magazine minus its cover curled up next to the lamp.  Lorraine wished she had brought her crossword puzzle.  Increasingly annoyed by the long wait, she realized her turn was hours away.  Looking over the other patients, wondering what was wrong with them.  Finally the doctor had time to see her to listen to complaints about fatigue, shortness of breath, being dizzy.  Promising to run some tests, he left.  A nurse entered to draw her blood filling three vials with a long needle.  The results would be available next week.  Handing her check to the receptionist, that was that.

It was so great to get home, she felt so free, so happy after leaving the oppression of the doctor's office.  Home now:  beating a retreat under lumpy bedclothes where several paperbacks and her eyeglasses were hidden.

Many pages later windowpanes clatter like nervous teeth.  Zillions of icicles etch fine line portraits of frost.  Snow fell and kept falling.  Unleashed . . . storms overtake darkness . . . making all mute.  A storm of light covers the night as she slid to sleep.  Dream sliding to a house of mirrors where countless images surrounded her.  Where is she?  Reflections without number repeat her every gesture.  Somehow she must look for her real self.  Sifting within these icy sheets of glass, suddenly all her fingers began to burn.

Joan McNerney's poetry has been included in numerous literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Camel Saloon, Blueline, Vine Leaves, Spectrum, three Bright Hills Press Anthologies and several Kind of a Hurricane Press Publications.  Poet and Geek recognized her work as their best poem of 2013.  She has been nominated three times for Best of the Net.  Four of her books have been published by fine literary presses.  Three ebooks have also been produced.