Suburban Banal - flash fiction

When Daisy and I were kids, our cousin Carol came to live with us. In thrift shop dresses, with plastic shoes and a crooked clip in her hair, she said nothing, ate little, moved in a kind of shuffle.

We didn't like her. Mother didn't like her, and when Carol left vegetables on her plate or closed a door too loudly or failed to say "please" and "thank you" Mother instructed Dad to punish her. Until Carol came to live with us, we didn't know the word "punish."

"There's something wrong with her," Mother told Dad each time. "She's got something bad in her, just like your sister had."

Carol was told first to remove her panties and leave them on a chair outside the den, where Dad waited. Once the door to the den was closed and locked the world was silent for a time--then the whistle of leather in the air, and the clack of a belt buckle hitting--something. Soon the screams would come, and the voice of Carol--the only time we ever heard her voice--begging.

Daisy and I would sit on the floor in our room, quietly building the next Barbie house. With a solemn sigh, Daisy might offer a new piece of colored cardboard to bend into a miniature sofa. Or she might carefully cut a square of pink cotton and say:

"This would make a pretty curtain for the kitchen window."

Flash fiction: "Flour"

Hannah's homemade dress gave her away. Store-bought meant your parents didn't need ration tickets, or the mortifying bus rides into town and back, hauling the household flour. Avoiding the pitying smiles of grownups.

A big-eared boy sitting on the other side of the aisle--a slap print fresh pink across his neck and scalp--turned to Hannah, grinned and asked:

"Will your momma sew you a new dress when that's empty?"

He nodded at the sack of flour on the floor, not concealed by Hannah's skinny ankles and scuffed Mary Janes. He laughed.

Hannah held his gaze for a second, then two. Her hands were frozen against the dyed-blue folds of her flour sack dress. She would have evaporated, if she could.

The boy wiggled his bare toes, then hopped up and down in his seat, bouncing the threadbare cushions. He stared at her and laughed again.

Hannah's jaw dropped one inch. She was a girl who practiced to perfection everything she undertook. She let out a shriek. High. Piercing. Loud. Long.

The boy clapped his hands over his ears and screamed. Up front, the bus driver eased on the brakes to make sure the noise wasn't mechanical.

Hannah stopped shrieking at once. She smoothed her dress until the soft curves of blue cotton lay as smoothly against her legs as silk.

Flash fiction: "How We Are"

I don't know how it came up. Tequila? Whiskey? In our family it was always one or the other.

We were sitting on the patio. Late in the day, a hot wind kept whipping tiny dust devils in the dry corners of my aunt's back yard.

I mentioned her two unemployed sons--"the boys"--and asked how they were doing. We called them "the boys" from birth to middle age. Hefty, mean boys who smoked and stole ammo from my dad's gun cabinet.

I said: "Maybe you don’t remember it."

She pretended not to hear this and handed me another drink. Whiskey, or tequila.

Three drinks on, I recalled how "the boys" when they were teenagers used to drive their $400 truck around the neighborhood, grabbing stray and perambulating pets for Saturday morning target-practice in the desert.

I mentioned this, too. My aunt chuckled and walked away as if I'd told her a stupid variation on an old joke.

That's how we are. No hope for the loser who admits feelings for a dog. We would laugh such a soft-hearted bastard right down, and shoot the dog to prove we're not suckers.

That's how we are.