Some old flash fictions I feel I should share

A Deep Breath


Death smelled wet and panicked. It made slapping sounds on the linoleum floor of my kitchen—the echoes of millions of knuckles cracking in simultaneous tension and release. The glass remnants of a fish bowl created a mosaic around McGee, my Chinese fighting goldfish. I dove and cupped him in my hands. His small vertebrae twisted in panic. I sprinted into the kitchen, crying, whispering Hail Mary’s.
My hands felt dry against McGee’s amber scales. I could see his pulse threading, losing momentum. The air I breathed was choking him. His mouth gaped, but there were no words. We looked at each other. The golden rims around his pupils burned urgent in the morning light. His eyes shifted focus.
I fumbled with the kitchen cabinet to get to a bowl. He slapped his fins against my palm. I maneuvered the cabinet door open with my elbow. His gills opened and closed like a waning heart valve.
His eyes were fixing on the ceiling. The cabinet opened, a flood of Tupperware drowned my feet. With my pinky and ring fingers contorted like scissors I grabbed a Pyrex measuring cup. McGee remained cupped in my hands like a prayer. He gasped less and less. At the sink, the morning light reflected on his scales in an orange the shade of warning. The water from my faucet wouldn’t run fast enough. McGee tumbled into the water, weaving through it like a feather falling. Spinning with the current he rose slowly, his body arched and he surfaced, limp at the top of the bowl.



- .- .-.. -.- .. -. --. / .. -. / -.-. --- -.. .
(Talking in Code)



Two summers ago my boyfriend taught me how to play cribbage. We sat adjacent to one another in cracked plastic lawn chairs, his grandmother’s old wooden board between us. We would have been out at the bars like any other normal twenty-something’s, but we were both unemployed and broke that summer, we lived like grannies. He taught me how to play using rhyme schemes: Fifteen-two the rest won’t do, fifteen-four, there ain’t no more, fifteen-two I guess I’m screwed, fifteensix the rest is nixed, and so on. He told me that it was mathematically impossible to get a hand that had nineteen points. One time my hand didn’t have any points so I told him it had nineteen. Nineteen became code for zero. We spoke in code a lot of the time. He told me he loved me when he bought me my own toothbrush for his house. That night I told him I loved him by tapping it in Morse code between his shoulder blades when he was sleeping. .. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-. My Uncle is the fastest living Morse Code typist in the world. He can type seventy words in a minute. The fastest anyone has ever typed in Morse Code is 75.2 words per minute, and that record was set in 1939. I guess people’s fingers just can’t move that fast anymore. Later that summer I drove south to Charlotte to visit my family. Mom was pleased that I had learned to play cribbage. Your grandmother taught me how to count by playing cribbage, she told me. We went to Hobby Lobby and walked through the aisles of silk peonies, scrap-book stickers, and grandma-scented potpourri towards the game section of the store. We found a board of our own and purchased it for less than five dollars. Playing with Mom wasn’t as fun because she didn’t know the rhymes and was much better than me. She had strategy. By the time that I got back to his apartment in Greensboro a week later I was much improved. I also had tons of new rhymes. Mom’s first language was French, and it’s a lot easier to rhyme in French than English because of the way verbs are conjugated. Anyway, he freaked out a little the next time we played and I said things like fifteen-two-et le repos est pour vous, or fifteen-two-ne peut pas croire vos yeux, or fifteen four-blesse mon couer. He wouldn’t say that he was mad, but I knew he was because of the way his mouth dissipated to a squiggly line and the way he cracked his knuckles every few minutes. The next day he came home from his summer class with a French-to-English dictionary from the library. By the end of the summer he was almost as good at French as me, and we would practice speaking it during our evening walks. Sometimes walking down the empty sidewalks and speaking French was more intimate than being naked together in his bedroom. We would cross Aberdeen Terrace hand-in-hand, without looking both ways. Sometimes we would dance in the middle of the street and sing Edith Piaf songs to each other with great vibrato just because we could.