Flash Fiction

A DOUR SAINT (if saint she was) originally appeared in RUMBLE.

8/30/2016

A Dour Saint

Pru, my grandfather’s dreadful second wife, saved him from drink. She told him that if he ever after touched a drop, she’d leave him flat. She was seventy, he eighty. She was the one paying the rent. He had lived a wild life, exuberant and generous in flush times, desolate in poverty and the DTs. Pru’s dour regimen gave him seven steady years, sober and happy. He repaid her. Then he got out.

At his funeral Pru told me she didn’t know what sin she’d committed to be so punished. “I worked all those years in the needle shop, never married, never bothered anybody. Only two pleasures I allowed myself—reading and embroidery. Now arthritis forbids the one, blindness the other. I don’t know what I did for God to punish me so, but it must have been terrible.”

I said, “You’ve been a good woman.”

“Yes,” she said. “That must have been it.”

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I Know You (perhaps he doesn't) originally appeared in Amoskeag

6/19/2016

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I Know You
“Are you going to pay for your gas this time, Pauline?” the store manager asks me.

I’d just walked into Williams’ E-Z Buy.

“Pay for your gas upon entering store,” he reads his little sign to me.

“What’s the difference?” I ask. “You get me coming—you get me going.”

“It makes for extra work.”

“You’d rather ring up my gas, and then later ring up my dozen eggs and gallon of milk?”

“It’s the way we do things, orderly, efficient, honest. It’s the right way.”

“I pay every time, Bill,” I say.

“It’s William,” he says. He points to his ID badge.

“William Williams,” I say. “Were your parents drunk or just planning to fun you the rest of your life?”

“I know you Hutchinses,” William says. “You’re all thieves and liars.”

“I ain’t a Hutchins,” I say. “I married one.”

“Then you’re a fast learner.”

I hated that. I hated the whole deal. I’m no thief, and I’d be better off if I lied more, but I know how to light a match, orderly, and efficient. And maybe honest too.

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The Mayor's Wife (a young officer with judgment) originally appeared in Beat the Dust

5/15/2016

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The Mayor’s Wife

She came into the police station, one o’clock in the morning, the mayor’s wife, dressed like a chippy.

“I want you to find me a room,” she says.

Still living at home, I knew nothing about renting rooms or where to look when talking to a half-dressed woman old enough to be my mother. It was one of those May nights where after the sun goes down, clouds hold in the warmth and everything feels damp, earthy and smells of growing.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, saying “yes” only because I was afraid to say no. “What’s the matter, ma’am?”

“The matter is I need a room, to stay in—why are you asking me? You know what a room is for. Now, get me a room!”

“Please calm down,” I said, not having the courage even to be offended. “Do you want me to call your husband?”

She shrieked liked an angry rabbit. As I started around the desk, she grabbed our ink bottle and hurled it. Stupidly, I turned to watch the black spot stretch down the plaster.

She beat her fists on my back. “Oh, you men! You stupid, stupid, men!”

The sergeant came out with an old horse blanket, and we chased her all the way to River Street before we could wrap her in that sweat-stunk blanket. I hated doing it. I argued not to take her home, but the sergeant would have none of it. Two o’clock in the morning his honor opened the front door. I heard him lock it just before her screaming began.

A year later he sent the sergeant and another cop to Florida to bring her back.

“Not on your life would we do any of that today,” this young beat cop says after I tell him the story. I don’t know him, don’t know his father or his uncle. City of twenty-five thousand, you knew everyone on the force. This kid, he knows me. “You’re a legend,” he says.

I listen carefully, but I don’t hear a snicker. At eighty-five, my hearing’s a bit of guesswork. “A legend?” I say, and laugh.

“Just between you and me,” he says, “take an officer with judgment, like yourself, sir, why the old ways may have worked better. Only now you can’t choose, not if you want to stay on the force and not have your picture resting on half the citizens’ cereal bowls.”

I let him know how it was sixty years ago. You got on the force, and there you stayed, doing your job, getting respect, collecting a few bottles of whatnot come Christmas, and hearing only the occasional lip from young ruffians, who thought breaking a couple of windows made them bigger in the pants.

I keep the rest of the story to myself, how two years after Florida, the mayor’s wife called me, midnight, and her husband dead on their parlor carpet. She helped me tumble him down the cellar stairs. Then I poured booze on him and reported the tragic accident.

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A Thousand Miles (better to have left...) originally appeared in Night Train.

4/17/2016

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A Thousand Miles

In the summer of ’64 three eighth grade friends from Newfound, N.H., Butch Welcome, Joe Tinker, and I, met again. We were twenty-one. Neither Joe, nor I had seen Butch since he was sent to the State Industrial School, accused of molesting some rich girls out in the woods when he was thirteen. We’d all played post office and spin the bottle, but the girls liked sweet, quiet, muscular Butch. They believed since he lived in a slum, he must know more about sexual wonders than table manners, and they were full up with table manners. They persuaded him to play dirty until Cindy’s father caught her.

I hadn’t seen Joe since he’d dropped out of high school and spent three years in Germany as an army scout. He was hanging around Newfound driving too fast and drinking too much. Sitting in the Newfound beer joint, I told Joe he’d become dissolute. “You even look dissolute,” I said.

He was on his second mug. “I work at it,” he said. “I earn it.”

Not dissolute, Butch, stronger than ever, was short dark, and handsome. His smile proved no juvenile facility, no years in the Navy, could steal his spirit. He said he was going to look up Cindy. “Like you, she’s back from college,” he told me.

“She’s not like me,” I said.

After calling her, Butch said, “Cindy wants to see me this weekend.”

“You going to re-up?” Joe asked Butch.

“Hell, I just want to tell her, ‘no hard feelings,’” Butch said.

“I meant the service,” Joe said. “An army buddy wanted me to take the bonus and go back overseas, but I had all I could stand of sirring and saluting.”

Joe’s parents had moved to the West Coast, where he was headed. I dropped him at the bus station the next morning and didn’t see him again for thirty years.

When he looked me up, I was living a thousand miles from Newfound. “The longest thousand miles on earth,” I told Joe.

“Thank God, I found you,” he said. “Everyone in Newfound was either in jail, drunk, or dead.”

Starting on the floor in an Washington equipment factory, Joe had risen to plant manager. He and two partners had bought the business. Half the year Joe traveled from China to Germany selling huge machines.

“So,” he asked me, “how’d Butch make out with his reconciliation mission with Cindy? They get to playing house again?”

I told him the police claimed Butch broke in the French windows in the back of Cindy’s house and in a drunken rage tried to rape her. Her father said Butch raved and smashed a glass table, so frenzied he ignored his own blood and pain. “He was like a wild bull,” the father said. “It took both barrels to bring him down.” All lies, of course, but justifiable homicide, the county attorney determined. A closed casket for Butch and a vacation in Europe to help Cindy get over her trauma.

“You never told them she wanted to see Butch?” Joe asked. “Welcomed him?”

“I live a thousand miles from Newfound for a reason.”

“We were lucky,” Joe said. “We got away. Twenty years to get out of Newfound. Twenty more to get Newfound out of us.”

“I don’t know as it’s out of me yet,” I said.

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She Knew Better (when sheep revolt) originally appeared in Annalemma

2/23/2016

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She Knew Better

No Effective Antidote Is Known, But Symptomatic Treatment May Be Effective

In the morning she found Ray at the kitchen table cleaning her fecal matter from the barrel of his .22-250. He didn’t look up. Last night he’d rolled his sleeves to his elbows revealing the long tendons, powerful muscles, deep blue veins. Now the cuffs were bottomed tight around his wrists.

“You’re up early,” she said. She felt as if she’d tumbled in the dryer all night.

“Five hundred dollars for this varmint rifle, I have to keep it clean,” he said. Then he looked up, eyes as small and dark as the end of his gun. “I’m disappointed. I expected my coffee by now.”

In the grinder’s whirling whine, she watched him fill the magazine with bullets from his shirt pocket. Never clean a loaded gun. A Ray Rule. She didn’t have to tell him. She knew better than to tell him anything he already knew. Another Ray Rule.

Bringing his cup, she walked carefully to avoid showing her pain. “That’s my good girl,” he said. He took the cup, drank most of it down hot, and pinched her butt.

She flinched. Ray smiled at her and licked his full lips, reminding her how hungrily he’d kissed her that first night, all over. All over.

“Today’s our anniversary,” she said. “It’s—”

“You know better. Five years.”

When they’d moved to the old sheep ranch. Ray had bought the rifle to keep the coyotes from killing sheep. But they raised no sheep. Ray hated animals.
“Ray,” she said as she poured coffee in his insulated cup for his drive to work, “I’m going to finish cleaning in the barn today. Is there anything you want to keep?”

“Ray rule: you know better than to bother me with women’s work.”

A bookkeeper, she finished the pharmacy accounts by noon, put on dishwashing gloves, and went to the barn. She slit the plastic pack on a Livestock Protection Collar, like slicing chicken breast from the bone. Yesterday, she’d found the dusty box of the collars labeled, For use on sheep to kill depredating coyotes.

She took the collar into the kitchen. So as not to ruin her good kitchen knife, she pricked the black rubber pouch with a needle and squeezed the Compound 1080 into a cup. It was, as she had read online, the color of strong coffee and amounted to a tablespoon, enough for six men, sufficient for Ray.

When he came in the house at five-thirty, gripping a bottle of Bordeaux by the neck, she poured him his hot coffee. She knew he wouldn’t kiss her, so she waited until he’d drunk half the cup before she led him to the barn.

“Why didn’t you chuck that old box of poison sheep collars?” Ray said.

She put the two white straps of a Protection Collar over her head and secured the Velcro. The black, rubber pouch sat at her neck like a broach. “These collars wouldn’t protect the sheep who wore them because the depredating coyote would bite through the pouch to the sheep’s throat,” she said.

“What the hell are you up to?”

“I want you to know I’m pregnant.”

He leaned against a pole, vomited, and slid to the floor.

“Ray rule,” he said. "You'll pay--"

“It’s undetectable,” she said.

He vomited, fouled his pants, and twisted like a broken-backed snake. She took his coffee cup into the house to rinse it. She opened the wine. She’d let it breathe, then drink a glass, just one, with the baby coming and all.

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In The Tavern (ah, sweet mysteries of life...) originally appeared in Rumble

12/28/2015

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In The Tavern

On Friday nights in walks Lionel, pompadour in pure white waves. Salesman-quick, he shakes your hand, pats you on the back, and lights your cigarette—or his if you don’t smoke. It makes no difference to him. He’ll tell you he used to be worth $300,000 until the company went under, taking with it his entire retirement. He drinks Manhattans while he waits for the kitchen to put up his wife’s shrimp dinner. Or maybe vodka tonics. One week martinis, just for the hell of it. The regulars call him a sport, and he smiles.

As usual he buys drinks for the bar. They buy back. He downs half a dozen, or maybe just three. The divorced waitress he wants to bang whispers in his ear. Sitting in Styrofoam on the stool next to him, his wife’s shrimp grow cold, tough. He knows how his wife is, the waitress says. Lionel fits his hand in the small of her back.

Yeah, he knows how she is.

He has to clean the house tonight. Laundry tomorrow. Grocery shop on Sunday.

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At The Senior Meal Site--3 flash fictions from the point of view of a woman who may have been my mother. They originally appeared in The Legendary.

11/26/2015

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"At The Senior Meal Site"

Today I had that lying Julie for a dinner partner at the senior meal site. Julie went to the meal site dinner just because Harold was there putting on a birthday party for Dot. Dot’s eighty-four, though you wouldn’t say she’s a day over seventy-five. Dot’s an old maid and proud of it.

Julie said, “You know they used to tell us to eat the potato, skins and all, but now they say those skins are toxic.” She talked loud so that Harold would hear her.

“Not if you wash them,” I said. “Just like cukes or anything like that. You wash off whatever they spray on them to make them grow.”

She said, “You can’t wash this off them. They’re toxic.”
She was talking about the skin itself becoming toxic, not something they’d added to it—well, how was I was to know that?

“Then don’t eat them,” I said.

She looked at Harold, but he wasn’t paying the least attention to her. So that ended the conversation, plain and simple.

Harold drives in from Eden every morning to have breakfast at the senior housing, and Julie’s always inviting him up to her room for a drink, no matter how many times he says he doesn’t drink in the morning. Today he wouldn’t even have a drink in the afternoon. He just sat and talked to Dot.

Julie’s going to be eighty next week and not a peep out of Harold. She can’t stand it.

"Sharks"

I had my family at the senior meal site, and that Harry that I want to kill sat at the table just as I was telling how my family couldn’t get their son to go into their hot tub.

“He’s afraid of water,” my daughter says.
My son-in-law, a lout with heavy muscles all covered with fat and hair, doesn’t peep.

Harry says, “My folks took me to a beach in Norfolk, Virginia, and a big wave knocked me down and swept me out to sea, but that didn’t bother me.”

“I had a similar thing happen in Mexico,” I said. “I was scared because—”

Harry goes right on. “You know where I wouldn’t swim? I wouldn’t swim in Monterey. You know why? They have more shark attacks there than any other part of the US. No, sir, I wouldn’t go in those waters. It’s because California protects the seals. There’s a big seal population. The sharks mistake people for seals. You see these seals with gashes down their sides. There was this piece in the news recently where a surfer—you know what surfing is?”

The arrogance of these men.

Harry goes right on. “This surfer had his surfboard bitten—you know a surfboard? fiberglass, about this thick.”

Just high and mighty, Harry is.

“Took a chunk right out of it.”

Like a ninny my daughter asks, “Was the man hurt?”

“A bite in his side,” says Harry.

And all the time my son-in-law sitting right there.
How could they do that— mistake a person for a seal? I jabbed a fork in Harry’s leg.

"Screwing Donald Trump"

“I screwed Donald Trump on that gambling trip,” I told Harriet during dessert at the senior meal site. She hadn’t gone, and I was going to gloat. “On Saturday the bus took us to Atlantic City, to that Trump Place. This hostess, or whatever she was, came onboard the bus and handed out two coupons: one good for ten dollars in quarters right there, the other if you came back a month later.”

“How long did it take Trump to take those back—and more too?” Harriet asked.

“Donald Trump may have thought he was going to get those away from me, but I fooled him. I walked. I walked until the bus came back at two. There wasn’t a place to sit except in front of the machines and every one of them had a tape right across it—IF YOU SIT, YOU MUST PLAY. Even at the vanities in the bathrooms, there weren’t any seats.”
I set that roll of quarters right next to my Jell-O.

“Ten dollars in four hours is two-fifty an hour,” Harriet told me. “That’s about half the minimum wage.”

“It’s not just the money. It’s the screwing I gave that Trump for it.”

“What’s that make you?” Harriet asked me. “And for ten dollars.”

Oh, how I wished Harriet had gone, and now I’d fixed it so we could never go.

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"Angels" They may not be what you think they are.

10/12/2015

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"Angels" originally appeared in Foliate Oak.

“He’s going to be with the angels,” Mama told me. I was just a little girl, but I knew it wasn’t the right time to ask about the angels because all through our whole house everybody was breathing slowly, like it would be wrong to show off all the breaths you had when Uncle Bill could barely wheeze in the narrow bedroom off our kitchen.

Mama sent me outside to play, so I couldn’t hear if Uncle Bill still breathed. I wanted to be inside to see what was going on, but I was mostly curious about the angels.

A black car drove down our driveway, which was just two ruts where grass didn’t grow. The men who got out of the long car wore black suits with white shirts and black ties. I thought they were funny looking angels, but maybe the angels in our Bible were just old-fashioned angels, and these were modern ones. Course I couldn’t remember a picture of man angels, just lady angels with long blonde hair. Could be I mixed them up with queens and princesses and fairies from my fairy-tale book. I didn’t know, but anyway these were the angels Uncle Bill got.

I walked to the back corner of the house outside Uncle Bill’s room. It used to be my room, until February when Uncle Bill came to be sick with us. Mama put my bed at the end of the upstairs hall. At first it was cold even under Mama’s extra blanket, but this was May, and I didn’t mind sleeping there anymore. Now I heard talking from Uncle Bill’s room and no wheezing. I couldn’t tell what Uncle Bill’s angels said because they hid their voices.

I stood on an old crate to look in the window bottom, and Uncle Bill’s angels had him by the feet and shoulders. He must have been asleep because he sagged when they moved him. And for a long time, I didn’t like angels because I never saw Uncle Bill again. I don’t like them now either.

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Our CEO short and sweet(?)

9/12/2015

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("Our CEO" originally appeared in Knock)

A thug in a three piece suit, he scares the wise guy, new v-p. He scares the head of sales. He scares the receptionist, who keeps a simple look on her face. He doesn’t scare the in-house attorney, but she quits the company in a year. The comptroller says he worries about the CEO without fearing him. Still, we smell the sour stink of fear on the comptroller.

Our CEO claims he doesn’t scare his wife. He tells us he doesn’t threaten his kids, but he lies. He beats the hell out of all three of them, and they wish he were dead. When she turns eighteen, the daughter mis-ties a belay rope and watches him fall eighty feet down an ice wall. We hug her at the wake and leave smiling.

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Follow the Balloons

8/3/2015

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"Follow the Balloons" originally appeared in Night Train. A kicker at the end...

“Just follow the balloons,” Warren, the son and heir to the Judkins pennies, told me. My wife’s brother married into this stump-humper family, whose patriarch of fools finally fell victim to better living through chemistry. “Oh, but Daddy knew how to party, bro.” Warren told me. “He ain’t really dead. He’s just lying back, waiting for the drugs to kick in.” And he laughed and called me “bro” a few more times, though he’s the whitest man in New Hampshire.

I knew they’d all be laughing when I saw the red balloon with a smiley face marking the turn off Route 3. I’d half expected it to say PARTEE, but no, they’d kept the proprieties and written JUDKINS FUNERAL in black Sharpie.

Blue, green, yellow, the balloons guided my wife and me through the twisty roads from asphalt to gravel to dirt. I’d never been to the Judkins estate, but I told Louise they’d probably hired a bright striped, hot air balloon to hover over the shack.

“It’s not a shack,” she said.

I tried to think of smart answer but she was right. We arrived at a long, split entry with a lawn full of swings, slides, and trampolines, and a drive loaded with oversized pickups fit for hauling the ocean going liners and condos on wheels all Judkins aspired to.

Starting in the entryway, a line of purple balloons led downstairs where the family room had been turned into a roadhouse. Warren Judkins, in open flowered shirt, pressed white pants, and black safety shoes, grabbed my hand like he was snatching a t-bone off the grill.

“Hey,” he said, “did you come to have a good time or did you bring your wife?” He grinned, pushed me aside. “Oh, hi, Louise.” He hugged her just long enough to piss me off.

“Don’t stand there lonesome,” his mother, the Widow Darlene, told me. “Grab a drink. I paid for top shelf liquor. Like my new ‘do?” Although she was sixty, she’d had her hair frizzed and frosted. She hung a pointed finger above her head and twirled. “I feel as fresh as the night Daddy picked me up on the Bennett’s Barn dance floor.”

Harold Judkins, the guest of honor, sat partially propped, a bottle of 151 on one side of his folded hands, a panatella on the other. His pompadour flared white across the casket pillow.

“Between Daddy’s d.a. and your dome, we could turn the lights off,” Warren told me. “Do you wax it or does your wife polish it with her—Hey, Cuz!”

His shout and quick stride across the room, as if he might tread mark the tile, saved him from a dressing down. When Louise stuck a drink in my hand, I said I’d suffered enough of the boorish Judkins. “Harold’s the lucky one,” I said. “He can’t hear these buffoons.”

A gaudy collection of Judkins, their followers and hangers-on, filled the basement, each shouting above the other, joking, cackling, preserving only enough dignity to keep their clothes on and their snot and saliva in their head. Louise said something, which naturally I didn’t hear.

“Too damned noisy,” I said.

The Widow Darlene tapped my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “Wait till the D.J. arrives.” A swirl of alcohol and tawdry perfume watered my eyes. I sneezed and coughed.

“Need a drink, bro?” Warren slapped my back.

“We’ve paid our respects,” I told Louise. “Which is more than these louts know how to do. Tick, tock.”

Bang! Bang! Bang! All around the room Judkins armed with needles popped balloons.

I pulled Louise outside to our car. She yanked her hand away.

“You,” she said, “are an ass.”

Even the sun seemed garish.

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Author

A native of Northern New England, Merle Drown is the author of Lighting the World, Plowing Up a Snake, and The Suburbs of Heaven. _

Previously published stories from a work-in-progress Shrunken Heads, Miniature Portraits of the Famous Among Us

A DOUR SAINT (if saint she was) originally appeared in RUMBLE.

I Know You (perhaps he doesn't) originally appeared in Amoskeag

The Mayor's Wife (a young officer with judgment) originally appeared in Beat the Dust

A Thousand Miles (better to have left...) originally appeared in Night Train.

She Knew Better (when sheep revolt) originally appeared in Annalemma

In The Tavern (ah, sweet mysteries of life...) originally appeared in Rumble

At The Senior Meal Site--3 flash fictions from the point of view of a woman who may have been my mother. They originally appeared in The Legendary.

"Angels" They may not be what you think they are.

Our CEO short and sweet(?)

Follow the Balloons

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﻿Previously published stories from a work-in-progress Shrunken Heads, Miniature Portraits of the Famous Among Us﻿

Author

Archives

Categories

Previously published stories from a work-in-progress Shrunken Heads, Miniature Portraits of the Famous Among Us