One Sorry Mess

More flash fiction. I posted this to Mader's blog again tonight, but honestly, I think this is worthy of an instant rerun, purely because not only does it bleed atmosphere and mood, but it also has a plot—the one area as a fiction writer I need to especially keep working on.

I realise lately I've been attempting to capture the music of American dialect. Its rhythms and melodies, its odd cadence. Not claiming to have gotten it right yet, but each time I do this I hear something new and feel something that frees up my language.

In case anyone's wondering, the setting for this tiny tale is a place called Big Timber, Montana. I stayed there one night, in September 2011. It was actually magical in its low key way, got under my skin. Here it is:

"Supposed to be a rainstorm tonight."

Heading west somewhere past Billings, the only light from a mostly cloudless, deepening ink-blue sky showed up like neon contrails on the railroad tracks. We sat in a diner that squatted like a timid brown bug between those tracks and the interstate, our immediate view a patchwork of choked grass and fast-food trash and signs saying shit like "For Sale 13+ Acres 2 Homes" while dry lightning played in the Crazy Mountains way off. People oughta know something: desperation, like ozone, has a smell.

Those booths were the worst damn booths I ever sat in. Might as well sit on old rusty machine parts wrapped in thin pleather. Or dry bones cold inside ancient skin.

"Well I don't see no storm."

"Then let's keep going."

We paid the squint-eyed girl at the register, even tipped her an undeserved single. Way she looked at Casey made me smile. Like she wanted someone—may's well been him, may's well been Charlie fuckin' Starkweather—to take her out of that town for all eternity and not ever look back. 

Turns out we shoulda stayed, even in a fleabit motel the kind you barely ever see no more, since the storm come in after all, and if we hadn't been where we were, we also wouldn't been on I-90 some twenty miles east of Butte when that oncoming 18-wheeler with the sleeping trucker crossed the median in near-slow-motion and took out the RV right in front of us. As well as us. Buncha others too.

My last memories are a compact import pumping blood like a profane heart over a blacktop artery and a violent Montana sky alive with benjamins, fluttering like grey moths, hoping against hope to find some porch light somewhere and maybe settle.

What a waste.

One sorry fucking mess, to tell you the god's honest truth.

Friendly Enough

Low-slung motel's silhouetted against a stand of broken cedars, No Pets sign mocked by cats in windows, most stalls filled by cars belonging to last-minute flyers out the local airport. Has some name like Shamrock or Lookout, on some street named Bakerview, perhaps, and the late afternoon egg-yolk sun's dropping fast as autumn mercury while a raucous carful of crackheads from north of the border pulls in, looking for a place for four, maybe five hours so they can get royally fucked up this night, two boys two girls equally. While we all glance, pace sticky carpets, warily share our pets, or at least their shadows, lend our corkscrews and local knowhow, act friendly enough.

Emily

Via Jo-Anne Teal, I happened to catch a short fiction challenge featured on Laura Jamez's blog, Office Mango. I was too late to enter it, but I was inspired to write an unpleasant little flash fiction piece based upon the photo of a thrift store doll, and I offer it here. Definitely going to revisit Laura's blog, though.

Since flash fiction seems to be all I have time to write these days, I figure it had better be good. Or at least have some kind of emotional heft, kick like a short-lived mule on a sunbaked, fly-swarm August afternoon. Oddly enough I kept adding words, thinking I must be below the two hundred minimum. When I finally checked the word count, it was actually dead on the maximum of three hundred! Weird. I usually have nothing but difficulty with word counts, so this made me think it was an omen and I'd gotten something right for once.

Anyway, try not to hate me for the content of this dark little tale. It doesn't come from me; I'm merely the pipeline not the well. Or something.

Emily

If it hapens agen, this is what I will do to my baby brother. Mommy was about to make me my favrite milkshake—banana and strawbry—when the sound of my brother wailing like he'd been locked in a room full of bees came from upstares.

While Mommy left the ice cream and fruit on the kitchen counter and went to check on him, I went to my room, got out my doll, Emily, took all its stupid cloths off and did this to its leg and its arm. I will do it to Carl next time. Break one leg and pop out one sholder. I saw on a hospital show my daddy was watching how babies sholders are easy to… I can't remember the right word. Begins with a "D." But I know it means to pop it out because it hapened at preschool when Maddy yanked Sophie's arm out of its sock-it and that's what I heard a teacher say: "it just popped out." It was a aks-i-dent, they said. 

I love my brother and he's very cute but he doesn't come first; I came first, and he needs to lern that. If he lerns it, we'll be a good brother and sister, very hapy in are famly to-gether. But if he ever stops anything good hapening to me agen, this will be how it starts untill he lerns. Not only that but I'll make shore I do it at the bottom of the stares so it looks like he felled. May be give him a few bruses first. Like a aks-i-dent. 

Looking at my doll with that leg all sticking out and busted makes me wonder if it would make a sound like when Daddy pulls the leg off from the thanksgiven turkey. Gess I'll find out.

Addiction

Soccer fans have a saying: "it only takes a second to score a goal." But that has its flipside. Sometimes the moments that end up changing our lives, utterly refashioning them, and not always for the better, also occur within a heartbeat of time. We might only recognize them in hindsight. I realize I am becoming addicted to flash fiction, which is another level of irony given the latest one I wrote for Dan Mader's Friday flash fiction challenge is titled Addiction. Why? I wonder. I think it's partially the brevity, the minimal time commitment in a crowded, busy world filled with deadlines. Honestly, I don't know if I'll ever get to my abandoned novel, and even traditional short stories are becoming increasingly daunting in terms of time, but flash fiction? Especially timed (although I admit I often play pretty fast and loose with that part, and since Dan is a good guy he doesn't give me too much of a hard time about it). Surprisingly, you can say a hell of a lot when everything's pared down to a moment, whether it be a moment of comedy, a moment of fear, a moment of transcendence, a moment of horror, a moment of pure loss. This short piece is a nod to noir, of course, with its femme fatale and smoky barroom setting, but it's also a moment. A moment in which... Okay, that's enough. I shouldn't need to explain it. Plus, it doesn't even matter what I think. I hope someone gets something out of this. I very much enjoyed writing it, how it emerged like slow ribbons of smoke from a cigarette held between slender fingers.

Addiction

The bar is dark in daylight. What paltry light there is moves sluggish, thwarted by dust motes and smoke.

"I can't help it if I have an addictive personality." Liv leans forward and presses one slender finger into my sternum. "And you don't exactly help, my lover, my partner, my significant other."

"How so?"

"Indulgences. Temptations. Urges."

I have no idea what she's talking about, so I decide to enjoy the view down the front of her shirt. Significant other. Ha. She's being an asshole, albeit a flirtatious one. I don't believe in addictive personalities; I believe only in strength or weakness. I smirk at her. She raises one perfect eyebrow, a brunette Lana Turner. Like she knows what I'm thinking, like she knows this postman will not only ring twice, he'll keep on ringing until somebody damn well answers.

"I can quit them all, you know."

I can feel my smirk stretching my face.

"Fuck you," she says, as if she's telling me about the weather. Her face is placid as Arctic ice.

All of a sudden I'm scared. She's out of her chair and at the door before I can think. Confused, I look down at the table.

"Wait! You forgot your cig—"

The Last Debrief

Again, Dan Mader's weekly flash fiction exercises provided a kickstart for another short piece last week. I had his permission to upload this clearly-longer-than-two-minutes excerpt. And I mean excerpt, as it feels like it could be a part of some vast space opera... not that I'll ever probably write it. It's like a brief farewell transmission, a threat whispered along the interstellar dust highways, something ominous lurking far beyond any conceivable future. Yet it's there.

Seriously. Go read Unemployed Imagination; follow the link above. Every Friday there are some excellent pieces of writing on there. Anyway, here's mine:

The Last Debrief

Perhaps it's because you have two of everything. Two lower appendages, two upper. Two mammaries. Gonads. Binocular vision. You are obsessed, bound and determined, to choose this over that, the far over the near, the left and the right, the up and the down, the purest dark and the damnedest light. 

And because we're many-limbed and multivisioned, a field of possibility so much more complex than your stark binaries, we don't need to make your kinds of choice, between faith and nihilism, release and execution. We can live beneath the layered greys, comforted by those rings of lambent light against charcoal backgrounds our generations have always dreamed under, a space less void than some firefly twilight.

Your rage is inevitable given you can only dwell in either the birth agony of sunfire or the raw, biting negation of interstellar cold.

In the banal, prosaic spirit of all your kind's doomed couplings, especially when one party finally grasps the pure harm they've so recently undergone, at the tail-end of a tarnished tryst, we would like to say this: we wish we'd never met you. We wish that fervently and, in terms you yourselves will understand more than most, eternally, with profound revulsion.

As we recoil from you, we realise how ironic it is the extent to which our chance encounter has unsettled and perhaps damaged our own historic, even genetic, equilibrium.

We hope and expect to recover from this after the passing of millennia. We're a long-lived people. If after eons of reflection and purification it so happens that we can't shake your taint, can't scrub away the stink of you, we will return to your skies and, from a sense of both mercy and vengeance, we will obliterate your kind from this universe, for good and for all, and most likely for the good of all.

The final appalling irony being that, in the act itself, we will ostensibly have become you.