Featured Flash Fiction

by Hadley Franklin

Thursday November 29, 2007

Note:These are three unconnected stories.

Commuter Train

On a whim, on the last half day of our freshman year of high school, we decided to ride the commuter train an hour out to the beach. The round trip cost twenty dollars for the both of us. He paid, but it was more than either of us could afford. We were still begging date money off our mothers.

The air felt itchy, like wool blanket heat and the sunlight made checkers on our jeans. We shined our noses on the window grease. I leaned across his lap to watch the blur of greenery and New England ranch houses with flaking paint, moldy blue.

We played that game we liked. He held his palms face up, I lay mine flat on his, quivering. He whipped his hands from beneath to slap mine and I jerked them away. If he hit me, we switched places. We played until our knuckles turned pink and I was flailing at the air each time I took a turn on the bottom.

The heat strangled the train car. We peeled and repeeled ourselves off the seats, but the plastic puckered to suction us down again and again. We stuck to each other, too, our skin wrinkling in union.

We were alone in the car. We peered out the window. His breath sprung water from my neck, and his fingers were restless and exploring. We gave up our watching and fell to each other.

I had my eyes closed when he wrenched apart and buried his face. A woman was shuffling down the compartment aisle. She had witnessed us kissing, his hand wrapped around one breast. He groaned, “You should have seen her face. You just should have seen her face.” He huddled against the seat back.

The beach town station was dusty and a pay phone clung to the wall like a black beetle. I called my mother so she wouldn’t worry.
Her voice trembled and escaped in gasps. She had fallen; she couldn’t move her arm, and she was about to leave for the hospital.

“Do you want me to come home?”

“You just took the train? Without calling?”

“I’ll come home if you want me to.”

“To Gloucester? All the way out to Gloucester?”

“I’ll come home.”

“Do what you want.”

We turned around on the next train. He didn’t argue. I watched the ranch houses sweep past in reverse. He walked me most of the way home; we parted at the bridge. I sat in the living room until the light drained from the windows and blue evening flooded the house. All afternoon, I waited.

Flight

There was a moment where my organs took flight and I was just a body, skin clinging to thin bone, tumbling over and over the merciless corners of every stair.

My brother teetered at the top, white and round, a bowling pin about to topple.

“Are you okay? Hads?”

I was a little pile of clothes. Some bone in my arm was shooting fire up to my neck.

“Are you okay?”

I heard all the noises of the house: my father pattering lines into his word processor, my mother murmuring an audition piece, Kurt Cobain moaning about apologies.

I had begged him to play with me. Four years older, he was suddenly popping breath mints before school dances and locking himself in his room with a pair of headphones and a boombox. He refused to make-believe, scorned my troll dolls, and complained of homework daily.

The worst part was how quickly everything had changed. One day we were dinosaurs together, stomping around the backyard, the next he was silent and lost in a private whirl of thought during the car ride home from a friend’s coed party, frowning at the new red shine to his face, the oil creeping from his scalp.

Our vast landscape of common ground had been reduced to a square of sidewalk with grass sprouting through the cracks. We both liked cartoons. Saturday mornings we giggled over mice plotting to take over the world, and spewed milk at the television set. And we played physical, competitive games where I ended up sore or bruised.

We had been racing through the house, starting at the far end of my room’s baby blue carpet all the way to the furthest wall in the laundry room, a damp cave of basement with orange light and a perpetually cold floor. We jostled and shoved each other as we ran, until, at the top of the stairs I lost my balance.

“Hads, seriously, are you okay?”

My brother was now kneeling beside me. He was helping me sit up, he was wide eyed, and the pink, pubescent gleam to his face had vanished under his pale worry. He was examining my arm.

I didn’t answer him. In my head I chanted, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.

Suburban Being

“Are those little bugs out yet?”

A woman I didn’t know approached. Hefty, panting, tan, her hair fanned out from her scalp like black electrical wires from a broken machine.

“You know those little bugs that bite you and make you itch?”

I’m thinking, Mosquitoes?

“Not mosquitoes.”

“I’m not sure.” I was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the park beside my house. The sun was urging itself to a last golden flush before darkness. Parents guided their young children with a single, steady hand across the dangerous terrain of the playground. Older kids tackled one another in the grass. A baseball game gathered in the far diamond. Dogs bounded from tree to tree. Even then, before I took a local retail job and absorbed first hand the demands and dismissals to which these families felt entitled, I was restless with the scene. These were tranquil, happy people. They ate breakfast in nooks, stayed in sexless marriages for the children, and bought well-behaved dogs from highly recommended breeders.

“These bugs are the worst. I bet they bite you good. They like olive skin. Are you Italian? Because I’m Italian, Irish, Lithuanian, German, and Greek. And Catholic.” She articulated the last word with particular pride. “And they love me. What are you?”

“Hungarian, mostly, some French, a little Romanian. Jewish.”

“Romanian! I knew it. The olive skin!” She beamed and bobbed her electrified hair. “So what are you reading?”

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

“Oh boy, that’s adorable. I bet you get straight A’s. You good in school?”

“Pretty good.”

“You’re like me, I got straight A’s in school. I loved reading. My daughter’s not so smart at school, she won’t read unless you make her. But you’re like me, I did real good at school.” She was still smiling, twisting back and forth in her tight t-shirt that mashed her large breasts into a single, pillowy mass.

It was summer, just two days before Independence Day, and around the time when small explosions of color appear without pattern in the night and the military planes fly low and often. Two fighter jets roared over us. The woman threw back her head and screamed, “Thank you! Thank you for protecting our country!”
The planes were too loud for the families in the park to hear her. Only I noticed this ecstatic display, the skin on her arms flapping like small wings as she stretched outward as if to hold the entire sky.

She left me then, said that she would see me soon. We didn’t speak again, but I watched her the whole summer after. She lived next to the park, married to an older man who sat on his front lawn with a cane and a gnarled grin pointed at all the passing high school girls. Once, I watched her follow him across the park, weeping and shouting vulgar names. He didn’t once turn to look at her. Another time, she chased her dog across the baseball outfields in white high heels, wobbling like the clown on stilts who runs after a miniature car.

I sat on the swings between squealing clusters of preteens and bumbling infants in the evenings and watched her tug her hair back or pat her dog, remembering her face flung back, her arms wide, howling her thanks into the air.