Microfiction Monday – 215th Edition
Really
by Laura Shell
Your name is Really because it was all I could think to say as you marched across my lawn. Your pitted, black scorpion body. Your gray wolf head with drooling smile. Your stinger tail you swivel in all directions and snap like a bullwhip. I filmed you on my phone that day, and then I said, “Really?” The video went ultra viral. You stand by my front door—an alien sentinel. Do you have a crush? You let me stroke the gray hair on your wolf face. Just below your ear. If you were a cat, you would have purred.
Problem Child
Dolly knew only the rules of her game and did not notice the other games being played. She thought she had a home, an annoying little sister, parents who could sometimes be persuaded and who sometimes must be obeyed.
But her parents were divorcing. The court would decide with whom she would live. The market assigned a portion of the asking price to what had been her bedroom. District boundaries led to a new school and no friends. The clinic determined a diagnosis and prescribed a medication.
Years later, newly sober, she confessed she’d made some bad life choices.
Restless
by Sara Merkin
Is it creepy to stare at him while he sleeps? You’re not sure. Still, you lay there, counting each blackhead-filled pore on his crooked nose. Fourteen–wait–seventeen on the tip. His breath smells like bourbon, but you were the only one that drank. Up the bridge makes twenty-two. Was he still mad? No, his sleeping body was too still, too relaxed for anger. Thirty-eight. You mimic his breathing, an attempt to drift off. Forty-seven total. At least he kissed you goodnight. Your eyes shut but your mind doesn’t. He might still be mad. Damn, pores are a sorry replacement for sheep.
During an Overdue Oil Change
by Tom Gadd
The undercarriage of the car floats in the oil pan. Breaks into ever expanding circles. Reforms and breaks again. Like our lives, he thinks beneath the car they bought together that he visits now only when she phones about a strange ticking sound or another stall that made their child late for school.
And here are her feet. Just her feet. Toenails flaking pink paint. The daisy chain tattoo circling her ankle. And an opened beer she’s placed on the garage floor.
How does it look?
Looks like heaven, he wants to answer but he says good. It’s all good.
Marital Gratitude
by Sam Anders
In winter he makes soup for my dinner while he’s working at the restaurant. The eggplant creaminess is dark, satiny, subtle, and surprising, like my husband. He might flirt with butternut squash risotto or seduce with the aroma of roast duck. On the day of our son’s birth, I arrived home to feast on his gift of gratitude: lemony sautéed soft-shell crab. I am more fluent in words than in actions, but he understands how much I love him when I make his tea or walk the dog on a cold night, though it’s his turn.
Microfiction Monday – 214th Edition
German Trains
First it was the beer. Uncorrupted beer. The commandment: Water, barley and hops. Simplicity.
Second came these ingredients, nailed to the church door: Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura.
Third was that spud, Philosophy, pared down to Pure Reason.
Fourth, the Reich and those immaculate weapons. Purgation and flames.
And now, a hair shirt and a stringent orthodoxy. A secular temple to correct thought, correct action. Perfectly sorted trash.
Why is it that every time we board a train for Jerusalem, we end up in Munich?
Bye-Over
Benny and Jenny float back to the start like defeated, sputtering balloons. What now? Benny says, and Jenny shrugs. What now? Jenny says, and Benny shrugs. Together, with sordid reluctance, they shrug their way through seasons they never expected to see. Benny’s azaleas bloom, and Jenny gets promoted. Rain runs rogue from willing gutters, forms a puddle in their yard that soon becomes a lake. Neighbors call out the obvious, hey, you’re still here, feign cheap ignorance. Benny and Jenny kiss each other’s hesitant lips because duty calls, and moths fly toward the light, igniting death like paper and match.
Dine and Dash
by Char Rennes
You never know when someone will fuck your whole day. They came five minutes to closing, ordered a lot and ate slow – thanks, dudes. Can’t close, guess I’ll scroll my phone and get high. When they split you wouldn’t believe how fast I locked up. But I was frickin high cause I didn’t see them behind the counter with their guns but I was done. “You couldn’t, like, do this when you walked in?! You know what? I quit.” I stomped out, drove home and told Dad I lost my job and sat through his bullshit all night.
Mom
by Laura Shell
Mom had stopped bathing, had developed a rash beneath her right breast that looked like measles. She’d stopped curling her hair and wore perpetual bedhead like a hat. Her makeup bag remained at the bottom of a bathroom drawer instead of on the bathroom counter. No more dressing up, just the same three outfits, all pajamas, usually inside out and backwards. No more healthy meals, only fast food burgers via delivery, and bedtime snacks of cookies and gummies hidden in her nightstand drawer with her Oxycodone.
Did she know the end was near?
Why didn’t she tell me about it?
Poughkeepsie/Persephone
by Matthew Schultz
Slow steam rises from a perfect circle carved into crumbling asphalt beneath blinking yellow traffic lights that flash staccato warnings like the beacon of a north shore lighthouse shouting madly through the brume. The heavy steel water works cover has been removed and set to the side as if the moon about to slide before the sun. Traffic lights blink a brief solar eclipse and she appears ascending from beneath the avenue wearing a reflective safety vest and a golden helmet. She holds a wrench and ratchet like a queen brandishing sword and scepter, like Parmenides returning from the underworld.
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