Flash Wind & Rain

There is no beginning or end. It starts in the middle, when she collides into him on the sidewalk one hot summer day, and he looks at the damp Alice & Bones shirt hanging off her chest and says, You know, they’re playing at the Den on Friday. She arches her brow. She says, I know, barely moving her lips. When they meet later that week in the thick sweating crowd, bodies pulsing around them like a rabid metronome, they barely exchange three words before they find themselves in a darkened closet behind the stage, broom hairs and dust motes falling into their hair. It’s not a beautiful courtship. They bruise their legs and lips, drawing blood from their skin. She trips on a bucket, spilling water on their shoes.

When it’s over, they hold hands awkwardly and mumble apologies, their voices muffled by the screams of the crowd, their faces lost in darkness. They can’t hear each other—can’t understand. They exit, and it doesn’t take long before they’re separated in the dark invisible mass, strange bodies grinding against them, new sweat mingling with their skin. Just as quickly as it begins, it dissolves—a middle that leaves nothing behind. 

-M

When you were nine months old, I dropped you on your head and you didn’t make a sound. Momma tucked you in later that night, not noticing the slight dent in your skull, tucked behind your left ear. I played with you the next day. I tried to make you laugh, but you just stared at me with those big glass eyes of yours and dribbled spit all over the floor. You didn’t make a sound. 

After she left for work, I took you into her bedroom and pulled out her makeup, the crumbling powders and crusty tubes of liquid getting all over my hands. I found a peach-gold power, held it up to your face. Carefully, with my tongue sticking out, I painted it over the dent. I did this every day for 3 years. 

-M

Lenny sleeps for fourteen years. He sleeps with his eyes closed, crusted shut from dust and dried tears, and doesn’t wake up. His chest rises up and down—he’s alive, they say—but he doesn’t move his arms or legs. He lies like a corpse that’s been left out too long, warm and cold, depending on what time in the day you visit, heart beating at a low, almost indiscernible pace.

In his dreams, he is alive. He is meeting Linda for the first time, they are having their child, at last, and Sammy (he names the child after his grandfather) grows up to be a baseball player. Lenny comes home from work at 4 in the evenings, just as the sky is darkening by shades, and tosses a ball with Sammy, back and forth, back and forth. He never realizes that this is a dream. That he never catches the ball. That it always slips through his fingers at the last moment.

-M

He forgets the day his little brother died. He thinks it was the sixteenth or seventeenth. Or was it the eighteenth? Well, it doesn’t really matter in the end, he thinks. He’s dead, and that’s that. No fighting the inevitable. He grips the brown curly-haired teddy bear, now starting to mold, in his hand and squeezes it. The left eye pops out. He smiles and throws it across the room. Die, he thinks. Go on, die. Leave me too, you prick. 

-M

The burden came in the form of chocolate cake and pretzel sticks and tipping numbers on the scale. The burden came in the form of hot tears in the shower. The burden came in the form of bloated ankles and stomach folds, sagging breasts that got lost in the wide expanse of her clothes. 

Really, the burden was invisible, a seed of anger hidden deep in her chest, pushed so deep she could barely feel it. But it snaked outward and manifested itself so visibly, so extensively, it became something else altogether—a monster she could not control. This was her life. She bowed down beneath the weight of a forgotten fear.

-M

When Mike chokes on the carrot, Susan doesn’t waste a second. She jumps behind him and wraps her thick arms around him, squeezing his soft pouch. “C’mon, Mikey, spit it out,” she hollers, grunting with each squeeze. “1, 2, 3, c’mon, help me out. 1, 2, 3.” Mike’s face turns red and he grasps his neck, wheezing, struggling to breathe. After a couple more heaves, a small wedge of orange shoots across the room. “Good job, pal,” Susan says, patting him on the back. “Now stop eating carrots. That’s the third time this month.”

-M

The alcohol is wearing off. I’m stumbling outside in the wet grass and the stars are burning holes in the sky. Except they’re not really stars but comets. They said there would be 100 comets heading our way at midnight, and here they are, coming right for us in the middle of this dingy field in this godforsaken town, and I’m drunk as hell. Oh, it’s a party. It’s a dream. C’est la fucking vie. 

-M

The classroom is hot and sticky and no one can breathe. 4 rows of 6 students in a 20 by 30 foot space. Zulu likes to think of it as a special sort of prison where he is forced to count numbers all day. He wants to be an accountant, so a part of him is okay with that. The other part of him is as reactionary as the Black Teeth gang and wants to run away carrying a torch, screaming, Burn it down. Burn it all down. 

-M