Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (13 page)

He tried to put this in the poem. It was four pages long and ended:

I want to ride you home, Christine,
and beyond. I want to ride you into
mornings sharp and cold and blue
and never run the same track twice.

He never heard a word from her, not even to acknowledge that she had received the poem. What woman wants to hear she is like the Burlington Northern southbound?

T
HE
C
AGE

A
man stood beside the fence looking pensively through the barbed-wire thicket. He was searching for something human, but all he saw was this tangle, this horribly systematic tangle of wires—then some scarecrow figures staggering through the heat toward the latrines, bare ground and tents, more wire, more scarecrow figures, bare ground and tents stretching away to infinity. At some point there was said to be no more wire, but he couldn’t believe it. Equally inhuman was the immaculate, burning, impassive face of the blanched blue sky, where somewhere the sun floated just as pitilessly. The whole world was reduced to motionless scorching heat, held in like the breath of an animal under the spell of noon. The heat weighed on him like some appalling tower of naked fire that seemed to grow and grow and grow . . .

His eyes met nothing human; and behind him—he could see it more clearly, without turning round—was sheer horror. There they lay, those others, round the inviolable football field, packed side by side like rotting fish; next came the meticulously clean latrines, and somewhere a long way behind him was also paradise: the shady, empty tents, guarded by well-fed policemen . . .

How quiet it was, how hot!

He suddenly lowered his head, as if his neck were breaking under the fiery hammer-blow, and he saw something that delighted him: the delicate shadows of the barbed wire on the bare ground. They were like the fine tracery of intertwining branches, frail and beautiful, and it seemed to him that they must be infinitely cool, those delicate tracings, all linked with each other; yes, they seemed to be smiling, quietly and soothingly.

He bent down and carefully reached between the wires to pick one of the pretty branches, holding it up to his face he smiled, as if a fan had been gently waved in front of him. Then he reached out with both hands to gather up those sweet shadows. He looked left and right into the thicket, and the quiet happiness in his eyes faded: a wild surge of desire flared up, for there he saw innumerable little tracings which when gathered up must offer a precious, cool eternity of shadow. His pupils dilated as if about to burst out of the prison of his eyeballs: with a shrill cry he plunged into the thicket, and the more he became entangled in the pitiless little barbs the more wildly he flailed, like a fly in a spider’s web, while with his hands he tried to grasp the exquisite shadow branches. His flailings were already stilled by the time the well-fed policemen arrived to free him with their wire-cutters.

T
HE
R
ESTRAINTS

E
ven when she was very little her hunger was worth something, hunger taught her to dance, and her father noticed. When his thirst was deep enough he could charm any bartender into clearing the narrow bar for just one dance—see, a girl, and feet so tiny. The patrons would shout for a second dance when they saw how the drumbeat of her bare feet could start such a trembling among the bottles on shelves. By the third or fourth dance, the trembling reached the glasses in their hands: they threw coins and bills at her feet to make her stop. Then her father would let her climb down and be a little girl again, mumbling thanks in poor English for the chair and spoon and bowls of stew brought her by drunken bricklayers and stevedores.

Afterwards, under the stars of whatever field they slept in, she’d dream the same dream: dancing in a dress with ruffles, polka dots. Some nights, still asleep, she’d rise and wander. Once she woke in the middle of a dirt road: an armadillo sniffed her, a train blew in the distance. Another time she woke on the porch of an old white couple. Her English was so poor they guessed she was deaf-mute. They bathed and fed her, aimed to adopt her. She was trying on a dress with blue dots in front of their radio full of Bing Crosby when her father knocked at the screen door. He made her choose between the dress and him. To protect his livelihood after that, he tied a rope from her ankle to his ankle at night. If she rose to leave, she fell.

It is many dances later, now, many dresses, many men later. The nurses who are otherwise kind tie her old-lady wrists down so she cannot rip out the IV again. Some nights her feet drum against the footboard, but weakly. When she can forget the restraints, she goes over memories step by step: the time she was caught dancing in a bar at age ten and jailed for three days. Emerging, she saw her father at the corner holding his hat, which meant he was ashamed of himself. Out of his jacket he drew the most beautiful loaf of bread, which she ate before allowing him to kiss her. She remembers the night her stitched-up knee opened on stage in Chicago: with every spin she flung blood onto the front-row gowns and tuxedos. By then even her blood was famous.

But sometimes when she was ten, twelve, dancing in those bars, she would not stop. Not even after her father’s guitar stopped. She made the coins at her feet tremble and spin, kicked the sweaty dollar bills back at the drinkers and shouters. Having the moment, that was having everything. When she closes her eyes now she knows who it is, tied to her on the narrow bed.

B
LACKBERRIES

J
ust before noon the husband came down the near slope of the hill carrying his cap filled with blackberries. “They’re ripe now. This week,” he said to his wife. “We chose the right week to come.” He was a tall man, slender-limbed but thickening now through the center of his body. He walked around the tent to where the canvas water bag hung, spilled the berries into an aluminum pan, and began to wash them gently.

“There isn’t any milk left,” his wife said. She was blond and fragile, still pretty in a certain light and with a careful arrangement of her features. “We finished the milk.” She sat up from the blanket spread on the ground and laid aside the book she had been reading. “Albert and Mae went to New York,” she said. “It’s a tour. A theater tour.”

“You told me that,” he replied. “We can put these in cups. Cups will make fine berry bowls.”

“There isn’t any milk.”

“I saw cattails,” he said. “You’d think there would be too much woods for them. They need sun, but they’re there. You can slice up cattail root and fry it. In butter. We have butter. It’s good.” He divided the berries into two cups and set one cup on the blanket beside his wife. He rummaged through the kitchen box and found a spoon, then began to eat his berries slowly and carefully, making them last.

“The tour covers everything,” she said. “You only pay once. You pay one price.”

“There aren’t any bears here,” he said, “nor dangerous snakes. It would be different if we were camped in a dangerous place. It’s not like that here.”

The woman smoothed the blanket she was sitting on with small, careful motions, as if making a bed. “It’s going to be hot,” she said. “There aren’t any clouds, not even small ones.”

“We can swim,” he suggested, savoring his berries. “You always liked swimming. You’re good at it.”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m not good at it at all.”

“You look great in a bathing suit. You always did. We have powdered milk.”

“It has a funny taste.”

“That green, silky bathing suit was the first one I ever saw you in.”

“If we went down for milk we could go to the movie in the village. It’s a musical. I looked when we drove through.”

“They’re probably only open on weekends,” he said. “A little town like that. Powdered milk’s okay.”

“You don’t like it at home. You told me you don’t like powdered milk.”

“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “Do you want me to go for the cattail root?”

“It’s margarine,” she said. “We have margarine, not butter.”

“I’ll fry them up.”

“They’re probably protected, like trillium.”

“You can pick cattails,” he said. “Nobody cares about cattails.”

He went to the pile of fire logs and began splitting them, crouching, the hatchet working in clean, economical strokes. She watched him. He was good at splitting wood. The arc of arm and shoulder swung smoothly to aim each blow. “The summer’s almost over,” she said, taking one berry into her mouth. She mashed it with her tongue, chewed and swallowed. The sun passed its zenith and she saw a stripe of shadow appear on the grass beside her husband, a silhouette slim as a boy, tender as memory. She began to eat the berries in twos and threes, picking them out with her fingers, forgoing a spoon. “It’s almost September.” He turned to look at her. “No, it’s not,” he said. “It isn’t, and it’s scarcely noon. We have lots of time.”

A
C
ONTINUITY OF
P
ARKS

H
e had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it down because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again on his way back to the estate by train; he permitted himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations. That afternoon, after writing a letter giving his power of attorney and discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, its back toward the door—even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it—he let his left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters. He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his head rest comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back, sensing that the cigarettes rested within reach of his hand, that beyond the great windows the air of afternoon danced under the oak trees in the park. Word by word, caught up in the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not come to perform again the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close. A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity. Even to those caresses which writhed about the lovers body, as though wishing to keep him there, to disuade him from it; they sketched abominably the frame of that other body it was necessary to destroy. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes. From this hour on, each instant had its use minutely assigned. The cold-blooded, twice-gone-over reexamination of the details was barely broken off so that a hand could caress a cheek. It was beginning to get dark.