30 Days of Birthday: Day 10 - (More) Flash Fiction

This is yet another very short story I yanked out of my laptop and dusted off and put in the summertime rewrite bin, an eternal snapshot of my New York City life.  When I say that I should write a book, MPB says I already have -- I just have to organize all of it and give it a good edit. Now that I'm finding pieces like this, I'm starting to believe he's right.

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                                                            TRAIN RIDE

Run for the train.

As you stand at the top of the stairs, you feel the blast of warm air, like the subway is gasping.  You start down the stairs and the whole world starts up the stairs, at you.  It is a tidal wave of people, an endless barrage of old people and baby strollers and small children being dragged around by the wrist that leaves you wedged against the wall, close enough to the train to see it leave you breathless.  The teller tries not to laugh at you and fails miserably.

Wait for the train.

Find yourself staring down that long dark empty tunnel as though you and everyone else on the platform staring with you were attempting to will the train to appear. Know that when you see those headlights, you and everyone around you, with your collective pacing and complaining and the tension that is bouncing around inside all of you, had something to do with it finally showing up. You tell yourself that you can keep this up all day.  And you do. 

Get on the train.

Every detail from every train ride melts into each other until one ride is indistinguishable from the next, and then somewhere in between switching to an express or catching the cross town shuttle, all of it becomes one long ride to nowhere.  You may not be wearing the same clothes but it’s the same train ride,day in and day out. The clean seats.  The screaming babies. The vomit.  The obnoxious tourists. The businessmen. The intimate conversations you didn’t want to hear. The foreign languages you don’t understand.  The walking sickness next to you dying and then in front of you begging gradually becomes the same gaunt homeless faces passing you by with the same story, bony arms outstretched for anything you’ve got, like death on holiday. By midday, you look up at someone in a cheap suit sitting across from you inhaling a gigantic hoagie absentmindedly and you realize you haven’t had anything to eat all day.

Your one constant is the book you are reading.  When you read, you are elsewhere.

Get off the local and transfer to the express line.

It’s an unspoken rule that everyone reads over everyone else’s shoulder.

You give your seat to a pregnant woman and glare at the guy next to you. More confirmation that chivalry is dead. You check that subway map next to the door, the one you think you know like the back of your hand, because you’re not sure which stop is yours. The tangled mass of train lines at the lower end of the city spangle the map like the back end of some wierdo’s psychedelic rainbow trip, As you lean down to get a closer look, the plumber in front of you readjusts politely.  You know that you just gave him something to wank off about later because your blouse fell open for a moment longer than it should have and he saw more than he was supposed to.  You sigh and let it go. 

You know that’s all the action you’re going to get for a long, long time.  For a moment, you are grateful to him for not smirking at you.  You look at him for a moment.  Older. Stocky.  Strong.  A touch of gray.  Pale watery blue eyes.  Filthy hard working hands, the kind you were raised to believe that a real man ought to have.  He looks Czech. No, you think to yourself.  Polish.  You are rewarded for your unfailing powers of observation when he pulls out a Polish newspaper from his back pocket. A moment passes.  You stand over him and lean in, pretending to read over his shoulder.  His friends who are sitting nearby stop talking and watch you.  As he attempts to turn a page, you stop him and pretend to finish a last paragraph, then indicate that yes, now he can turn the page. Everyone laughs. You laugh, too.  He offers you his seat. When you refuse, he insists.  Surprised and grateful, you take it. As he leaves, he pretends to give you his Polish newspaper.  You pretend to take it. You both laugh again and wave goodbye. You will never see him again.  You think to yourself, I love New York.  And you mean it.

Flash Fiction: "Last Call"

Whenever I say that I should write a book, MPB says I already have -- within this blog. He's probably right. Until I get organized and publish something substantial, here's a short, swift, flash-y idea that I've been working on, in spurts.  Enjoy.

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Last Call

          Every night, the same scenario.  Last call happened along unexpectedly.  No music.  Bright ugly lights. Big ugly bouncers, moving through the bar like human cattle prods, whistling and shouting obscenities. When only a select few remained, someone would pull the grate down and lock the door, signaling the moment when the evening shifted gears into a higher octane world. Candles were everywhere.  Soft music drifted through the air like chiffon. There were plenty of drugs and whatever else anyone wanted.  It was beautiful and morose.  And then it was over.  Eventually the grate went up again so everyone could stumble back into the full-fledged sunlight and the traffic and their day jobs and the rest of their lives. 

          This was the pit-stop I made on my way home, sometimes several times during the week. It was my way of unwinding so I'd be able to relax when I got to my apartment, which was no Shan-gri-la.  I just got a roommate, a skinny French girl named Claudette who apparently had never heard of deodorant.  Instead, she would douse her armpits with expensive perfume and wonder aloud as to why Americans bathed so much.  The funk that followed her out of the bathroom whenever she bothered to take a hot shower was enough to make my face twitch involuntarily whenever I thought about it. 

          Of course, Claudette didn't smell a thing.  Lucky girl.

          It wasn't just the smelly foreign white girl.  It was everything.  My life had glazed over into a series of hapless misadventures that left me feeling restless and unsatisfied.  I didn't know how to undo any of it so I numbed myself out with cocktails and dead-end relationships and waited for some kind of an upheaval.  A cool guy.  A new job.  A decent haircut.  The Lotto.  Something that would change things so drastically, my present scenario would be a distant memory, like things that happened to me when I was very young.  Something to think back on and remember with such clarity, it's almost as though it happened to someone else.

          The bar was clearing out as I arrived.  I bumped into one of the regulars on my way to the backroom.  She was bobbing back and forth gently, buoyed by a steady stream of drunken freaks who were making their way towards the exit.  She had a pink dress on and she was so high she just stood there in her strappy sandals, her eyes rolled back in her head, her yellowy hair all over the place.  If she had been lying down, I would have assumed that she was dead.  Nice shoes, I thought and I began to wonder if they were my size.

          I slid into a booth and put my feet up, exhausted. 

          The DJ cranked into that song "American Woman".  In my head, I turned up the Butthole Surfers' version and began to sip my first drink.

        Bouncers laughed and exchanged war stories.  Some guy across from me was smoking something that was making him cough violently.  Two girls in the corner were making out and giggling.  That blonde junkie was standing right where I left her.  Some guy had come along and put his arms around her, at first it seemed to steady her, but then as it turned out, to steady himself.  They both began to sway slowly to the rhythm of an invisible metronome, lost in the clicks that seemed to emanate from their bodies.  When the clicking noises fell out of sync with their movements, I realized that the sound was real.  Somebody was doing it in the bathroom.

          Somewhere in between the coughing and the clicking, someone let Jake inside.  He was pale and dark, a writhing tangled mass of bucolic imaginings, of venom and sickly sweetness and vomit and flowers. Jake liked me but he didn't know what to do about it.  Neither did I.  We'd been having a kind of Mexican stand-off of a relationship for awhile now.  No commitment.  No emotional responsibility. The fact that we were deeply in love was a big secret to everyone, especially to us. It seemed to augment our friendship and make us abnormally happy.

          Jake was drunk and he was high and in high spirits. He made his way toward me, spewing one rollicking non sequitor after another, filling the place with spontaneous combustions of laughter.  He paused in the flow of action that swirled around him to slide into the booth and kiss me intently on the mouth. Wide-eyed and startled, I pulled away. Although he smelled like a bar of soap,  his clothes had a slight odor to them that I recognized instantly.  It was my roommate. Clearly, she had been all over him. From the smell of it, she still was.  I could barely stand to share an apartment with her and now she was in my bed, putting her smelly body all over my precious Jake.  And there I was, squished in between them, fully dressed and unable to escape.

          As he held me in his arms, I felt the weight of time and familiarity between us.  It frightened me.  He was a dead end. And yet I clung to him, struggling to hold on to something that wasn't really even there.  He was my situation personified: the day job I wouldn't leave, the roommate I wouldn't get rid of, the myriad of issues I wouldn't face. I saw the world I created in his heavy-lidded eyes, beautiful and arcane, making love to my worry.  Did I know him at all?  How could I.

I knew that he'd have the smell of that girl on him, no matter how clean he was.  That was the last straw. It was over.  Somewhere in me, the night had finally ended. Instinctively he held me closer but I was already gone--out the door and into the sun that was waiting to shine on me.

Flash Fiction: "Chicken Lips"

  

This month's NaBloPoMo theme is RISK. I've been revisiting some flash fiction that I'd written some time ago and I found this one that seems to have a bit of risk in it somewhere, so here you go.
 

Chicken Lips

 

It was their first date and it was a blind one, rabid with good intentions and interesting talk.  A mutual friend had set them up and Dana figured, why not, it'll be fun.  They both put on a mock game face when they met--for Marion's sake, they laughed--but there was a mutual attraction that neither of them could deny.   After awhile, they were chatting as though they'd known each other for years.

Unfortunately, something was killing her buzz. 

Every time Jason smiled at her, what little was there in the way of a mouth disappeared into the rest of his face, revealing two rows of gleaming whiteness. Dana smiled at him warmly and tried not to think about it but as the night wore on, it was all that she could think about.  The words glowed as they hovered around his head, in neon: chicken lips. After she watched him talk through the main course, she was ready to politely excuse herself and go home.  But to tell the truth, she was having a good time.  And besides--she never skipped dessert.

A question loomed over her thoughts like a cloud: Would he kiss her?  No sooner did this query appear than another floated along behind it, listlessly: If he did kiss her, what in God's name would it feel like?

That she was unlike anything that he had even remotely expected was enough to knock the wind out of Jason's Nantucket sails.  The details she gave him about herself and her life made him sputter with a mixture of bewilderment, confusion and pleasure.  He had driven his car past quite a few, locking the doors carefully as his vehicle came to a complete stop at the red light.  Perhaps there were one or two in his classes at his alma mater that he hadn't really paid any attention to.  This was certainly true at work.  And he'd certainly seen plenty in the movies, on television and those videos--music, sports, porn and otherwise.  But to have an intelligent insightful conversation with one--and a beautiful one, at that--this had never happened.

Jason, on the other hand, was exactly what Dana had expected. 

Jason was wonderful in a New England white guy kind of way.  The kind that can trace his family tree all the way back to Old England.  The kind that likes to go rock climbing on the weekends. The kind that walked through this life with the patented swagger of privelege and entitlement.  Jason had no need to stand up and demand whatever he wanted out of life. He understood from a very early age that clearly, it was already his.  An all-American birthright, if you will.  Somewhere down the line, whether they had any money or not, didn't they all come off like that to some degree?  Doing whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, with society condoning them all the way?

If my brother behaved like that, Dana thought, the cops would shoot him in the back 41 times.

As he excused himself and disappeared to the men's room, she sighed and wondered what she'd say to Marion the next day. Dana could visualize the look of disappointment on her face so easily.  How could she get out of explaining this one?  She'd have to think of something.  She always did.  Only someone who'd been in a situation with someone like this would truly empathize. As Dana nibbled on her dessert, she began to count the days leading up to the next night in with the girls and thought about how she'd describe this encounter.

Suddenly, she felt a slight pressure on the embankment next to her.  It was Jason, sliding towards her in the booth.  Here it comes, Dana thought and for a moment she closed her eyes to clear her thoughts.  When she opened them, he was very close to her.  Too close.

"Have you ever seen that movie Annie Hall?"

"Yes."

"You know that part about how they kiss each other at the beginning of the date to get the kiss overwith?  Because if they don't, Woody Allen will be thinking about it for the whole date and then the evening will be ruined?"

"I remember that scene."

"That's how I feel."

Dana looked into his face.  She could see the freckles that speckled his eyelids so delicately, so faintly, she had to resist the urge to touch them.  She wanted to tell him that they were beautiful but nothing would come out of her mouth.  She waited for the words to say and as she did, she held his gaze.

"I feel like if I don't kiss you now, I never will."

As he spoke, he came closer gradually, lowering his eyes to look at her mouth, stained with berries from her half-eaten dessert.  She held his gaze and readjusted, smiling faintly. All at once, she knew. That's why he noticed her.  That's why he harassed Marion into a blind date set-up. That's why he persued her all this time, polite and unassuming and direct.  He wanted a kiss, a real one, from big soft lips like hers that would taste like everything he'd ever wanted.  He got everything he ever wanted, didn't he?   Isn't that why this should be the one thing he doesn't get?

In that moment, Dana felt like the most powerful woman in the whole wide world.  And for a moment that seemed to last an eternity, she was.