Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction Read online

  She climbs up on one of the only two vacant stools at the bar. Behind the bar hangs an elongated, faded black-and-white photograph of old-time buckeroos lined up on their horses, the buckeroos and horses long since dead.

  Rick, the bartender, sets a mug of beer in front of her. Rick: brownish-blond hair, a lean build, eyes a lighter blue than her own. Good-looking, but he doesn’t seem to know it, and she’s not about to tell him. She’d met him briefly at the school’s open house. Divorced, the father of a twelve-year-old daughter who was one of her students. A part-time bartender, a part-time rodeo rider, runs a few cows on his five acres. A horse for himself and one for his daughter.

  The band is off its break, launching into the “Tennessee Waltz,” the male singer with a lived-in face to match the voice, singing in a heartfelt way. Lost loves, lost dreams, lost chances. Rick moves up and down behind the bar with fluid movements, drawing beer, wiping spills, bantering with the customers.

  “Do you know what a cowboy breakfast is?” he stops and asks her.

  “No, what?”

  “A pee and a look around.”

  “No thanks. I’ll stick to bacon and eggs.”

  They watch an elderly couple step out onto the dance floor. The other dancers step back to give them the floor. The man is rawboned-handsome, well over six feet, broad shoulders, a little stooped, blue eyes with a gleam of mischief. Levi’s, a blue shirt. A head of unruly white hair. A little stiff in the knees and movements, bending forward to accommodate the shorter stature of his partner. The woman has a soft body, her face with fine features and wrinkles, permed gray hair, a peach-colored pantsuit, earrings flashing.

  “Who are they?” she says to Rick.

  “Tess and Angus. Both eighty-eight. Married since they were eighteen. The fourth generation on Angus’s ranch. Angus likes to tell people he’s sleeping in the same bed he was born on.”

  He fills her in on some of the history of Angus. Angus’s father lost the ranch to the bank in the Depression. His mother and father had to move into town, live in a tiny one-roomed shack. Angus, just a kid, hired himself out to ranches, saved his wages. People back then stuck together. No one would buy Angus’s father’s ranch. With no buyers, the bank let Angus buy the ranch back with easy terms. Angus went to town and brought his parents back to the ranch, where they lived the rest of their lives.

  She envies family; her parents and sister were gone way before their time.

  On the dance floor, consciously aware of their respectful, reverential audience, Tess and Angus dance with the practiced ease and grace of partners who’ve been dancing together almost a lifetime. They add a few theatrical flourishes to their act, a modest dip, an out-turned foot. Angus’s elbows held high in a courtly manner, his weathered, veined hand placed gently on Tess’s back as though cradling a precious gem.

  Tess and Angus, Rick tells her, lost a son to the war, a beloved grandson to a drunk driver. As Angus gives Tess a twirl, he winks at the onlookers in a self-mocking way as if to say, Aren’t we the cat’s pajamas? But Tess is serious-faced, with rigid posture, square-shouldered, her moves mannered and exact as though she were taking a typing test for a secretarial position.

  The song ends, and the couple’s waltz with it. They stand with flushed faces, friends and family crowding around them, talking and laughing. Tess and Angus, with losses, yes, Rick tells her, but with a son and daughter and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to carry on after they’re gone.

  She feels a little buzz and not just from the beer, but a buzz of happiness to have found a home, here in this peaceful place with these down-to-earth, kind people.

  She thinks of her little rental cottage facing the river; her cat, Max, lying on the back of the sofa, watching for her out the window. She sees Tess and Angus, leaving, hanging on to each other, each other’s crutches.

  She’s had her one beer, time to leave, students’ papers to grade.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” Rick calls after her.

  She steps from the porch and out onto the dirt road, a lemon-slice-of-a moon above, night-air smells of freshly mown grass, the river, and the slight hint of manure.

  Nothing

  Douglas Smith

  It’s nothing,” he says, not for the first time.

  She watches him straighten his tie in the hall mirror. So he doesn’t have to make eye contact, she thinks.

  “I fear nothing?” she says. “Then I must be fearless. I don’t feel fearless.”

  Leaning on the kitchen door frame, she hugs her faded blue dressing gown around her as if she’s holding the universe together. She’s staying home. Again.

  He shakes his head. He does that a lot lately.

  “I mean there’s nothing out there to be afraid of.” He picks up his briefcase, ready for another day.

  But she knows that it’s not just another day.

  “Nothing out there,” she repeats.

  “Nothing.” He stands by the front door of their little bungalow. “Are you going in to work?”

  He knows I’m not, she thinks. But not asking would mean he accepts what’s happening. And then he’d have to believe it.

  “No,” she says.

  She watches his jaw muscles tighten, enjoying the clarity of predictable stimulus and response.

  “Fine,” he snaps, and leaves.

  She hears the car pull away, feeling no more alone than when he was here. She’s sorry he’s angry, but he doesn’t understand.

  He doesn’t understand that he’s right.

  She is afraid of nothing.

  She makes toast and coffee, taking comfort in the routine. Mundane remnants of the way her world used to be.

  At the kitchen table, she savors the smell of the coffee, the heat of the mug in her hand, the sharp edges of the toast in her mouth, the sound of its crunch, the sweetness of the jam. Each of her senses has become a lifeline, snaking out from her, seeking something tangible in a fading reality to which to anchor herself.

  Later, sitting on the sofa, she holds the phone in her lap and sips her coffee even after it’s cold, delaying.

  Finally, she dials her parents, punching the area code that is a plane trip away, and then their number as if it were a combination to a lock. Slowly, carefully. She listens, then hangs up.

  Yesterday, it rang and rang. Today, it didn’t even do that. Silence.

  Nothing.

  A sense of loss fills her, but it tastes old and stale. She realizes that she lost her parents long ago, when the aura of protection they once gave disappeared. They can’t save her. They couldn’t even save themselves.

  Planning to distract herself by cleaning the house, she turns on the radio for some music, but can’t find her favorite station. She picks another and starts to dust. The station fades out to nothing. Not even static.

  Three more stations. Same thing. She turns the radio off and stops cleaning.

  She thinks of sleeping but decides against it. Even her dreams are empty now. She sits and waits.

  He comes home at the usual time, but something has changed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks over a dinner of leftovers and silence.

  “Nothing,” he says. She waits. She knows. Finally, he speaks again. “I visited my client.”

  She knows the one. On the outskirts of the city.

  “Yes?” she asks, knowing what he’ll say next.

  “They’re gone,” he says.

  “Out of business?” she says, playing the game for his sake. Pretending that the world is still normal.

  “Gone. There’s nothing there.”

  “Nothing?”

  She looks up when he doesn’t answer. He puts down his knife and fork, and she enjoys the solid click-click they make on the kitchen table.

  He meets her gaze finally. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. Picking up the knife and fork again, he studies them as if unsure they’re real. He shakes his head and goes back to eating.

  He’s pretending it didn’t h
appen. But she is beyond pretending. She saw his eyes. He knows.

  He goes to bed early. She stays up, watching TV, flipping channels as, one by one, the city’s stations stop broadcasting.

  She keeps flipping. The last station disappears. No test pattern. No static. Just a slow fade to a blank dead screen.

  She turns the TV off and sits in the dark. Sleep is not an option. She fears what she will wake to. Or that it will come while she sleeps.

  The clock shows that it’s morning. She doesn’t open the curtains. The gray that creeps around their edges is not sunlight.

  He should be awake by now. She listens for his morning sounds.

  Nothing.

  She rises and walks upstairs, feet silent on the worn carpet. Up here, the floor, the ceiling, the walls seem thin, insubstantial. A paleness oozes under their bedroom door, more a rejection of both darkness and light than an actual color.

  Leaving the door unopened, she backs away. It is too late for him. He is gone.

  He is nothing.

  She goes back downstairs and sits on the sofa. To wait. Alone. Now she is truly alone.

  It comes, first eating through the corners of the room, then devouring walls and ceiling, crawling across freshly vacuumed carpet towards her. She realizes, as it consumes the very space around her, that she is the center of a dwindling ball of reality. Or perhaps, she thinks as it draws closer, this world is simply escaping to join with it.

  It touches her. And she knows.

  He was right all along. About what she feared.

  It is nothing.

  Nothingness. Void. Nothing exists here. No light, no sound, no smell, no taste. Nothing to touch or be touched by. Only her thoughts exist here, and even they begin to flee her, not to escape, but to join with the void.

  As they leave her, she feels herself joining with it as well. Soon there will be no identity, no separation from it, no her.

  Her last thought forms, departs.

  She…

  is…

  noth…

  Long Tossed Like the Driven Foam

  K. G. Jewell

  Ms. Hamilton drew the blinds for the last time. Fifty years of teaching, at an end. On her desk were her handbag and a silver-plated apple—her good-bye gift from the PTA.

  A farewell verse to her class sat on the blackboard. Emerson. She considered leaving it on the wall, graffiti of sorts. But no, that wouldn’t be fair to Ponce.

  Ms. Hamilton picked up the eraser, pausing over the last line—Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home—then erased it all with a flurry of energy that left her breathless.

  As she stood clutching the chalk and holding back her tears at the symbolic end of her career, the door opened. Ponce stuck his head through the doorway. Ponce had been there as long as she had, maybe longer. But the parents didn’t complain about his hearing. Dressed in the same janitor’s blue coverall he’d always worn, he looked tentative at his interruption of the moment.

  “Miss Hamilton?” Ponce was the only one she let get away with that language. After all, when he’d started calling her miss, she’d felt one.

  “Yes Ponce?” Fifty years working together, he still was the politest, most timid man she knew. Not that they’d talked much in those five decades—the building staff and the teaching staff didn’t mix much, and he was a quiet fellow.

  “I have a gift for you, if you want it.” He held a grocery bag in his hand.

  “Of course. Come in.”

  He entered, closing the door softly behind him.

  “Do you ever wish you could be young again?”

  “Young?” She was confused.

  “You know, fifteen again.”

  Ms. Hamilton looked over the empty chairs where her students sat.

  “To what end? To revisit the follies of youth? When you have all that time in front of you, you don’t value it. I’d rather have a day valued than a day wasted. Only when each day might be your last can you can really live life. No, I don’t want to be young again.”

  Ponce looked thoughtful. “Do you really mean that?”

  “Of course I mean that.” She had no desire to go through that all again. Not to mention the acne, the disrespect of your elders, the immature judgment of your peers.

  “Because I have something that can bring back your youth.” Ponce removed two glass jars from his shopping bag. They were old wine bottles, recorked.

  “Ponce, I would have never taken you for a drunkard, much less a bootlegger,” Ms. Hamilton scoffed.

  “This is not alcohol. This is water from a special seep in the janitor’s closet. This one is for me.” He picked up a bottle and removed the cork. “The other is for you, if you want it.”

  Ms. Hamilton shook her head. Ponce had lost it. He was drinking leaking sewer waste.

  Ponce raised the bottle. “To Ponce. He is retiring today. But the building manager has promised to hire my nephew when he arrives. I told the manager I’ve taught him all I know.”

  Ponce raised the bottle to his lips and chugged. As she watched, his hair changed from grey to jet black and the wrinkles smoothed from his face. His back straightened. His thin frame filled.

  The years lifted from Ponce’s body, and it was not a metaphor.

  The changes slowed, and then stopped, but by then she wouldn’t have recognized him in a crowd. Nevertheless, she could see the family resemblance. The man—could she still call him Ponce?—tightened his belt on his newly loose jeans.

  “Well, since you don’t want the rest, I’ll have to find another use for it.” Ponce reached for the bottle.

  Ms. Hamilton set her hand on top of his.

  “Shut up, you young fool. Give me that.” She twisted off the cork and lifted it to her lips. The water tasted flat, with sour flecks of sediment.

  The room grew brighter, colors shifting towards reds she barely remembered. Her shirt grew taut around her shoulders. The whine of the ancient AC squealed in her ear.

  Miss Hamilton tossed the bottle into the trash beside her desk. She ran her tongue across her lips. They were soft and plump.

  “Let’s go make out behind the football stadium.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to waste your days?” The youthful Ponce smirked as he spoke.

  “Don’t trust anything old people tell you about life. They’ve forgotten what it means to live.”

  She grabbed Ponce’s arm and went out to learn it all again.

  The Boat

  Steve Cushman

  Martha told you not to buy the boat. But you stand at the front door on Saturday, just past noon, holding an anchor keychain in one hand and a white sailor’s cap in the other. Behind you, the boat, a twenty-foot white Regal runabout, is big and beautiful.

  She says, Goddamn you. You say, We can afford it; it’s not that expensive, forty-five hundred dollars, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal. Just look at it, you say. If she’d look, she’d understand. I told you, she says, this is what I’m talking about. Then she moves past you and out the door.

  Good riddance, you say; married twenty-four years and all you wanted was a damn boat. You fill a cooler with beer, grab a bag of pretzel rods, and head to the boat, which sits in the strip of grass between your driveway and your neighbor’s front yard.

  You climb in and settle into the captain’s seat. As a car passes, you flash them your red and green running lights. It’s a childish game, just the kind of thing Martha would nag you for, but you enjoy it nonetheless.

  We don’t have anything, you say, not really. A house, a little retirement, and two cars. But so what? The children are gone now: One is married, the other soon. You’re a grown man. You work hard. Hell, you deserve things. We need to get out, you say, enjoy nature, learn to water-ski before we’re too old.

  After drinking two beers, you start the engine, which grumbles like a giant with an upset stomach, then turn it off quickly, hoping no damage was done. Floyd, your neighbor, opens his front door and you duck under the high sides of the boat
.

  Binky, a little black cat one of the girls brought home from college, jumps up on the bow of the boat. She looks at you and meows until you give her a piece of pretzel. She takes it, crunches it in her mouth, so you pour some beer in your hand, which she laps up with her rough tongue. You laugh, thinking, Man it doesn’t get any better than this.

  Martha will be back, you tell yourself, easing the captain’s cap over your eyes for an afternoon nap. Binky sleeps on your chest and though there’s a dull ache somewhere deep in your head, you dream of taking the boat out: you at the helm, cruising over blue water, sunburned and smiling, laughing, a beer in your hand, and Binky perched up at the bow as the water and wind brush her fur back.

  The muffler on Martha’s ‘85 Volvo wakes you, reminding you it’s one more thing on the Honey-do list you haven’t gotten around to. But you stay low. Damn boat, she says, as she slams the door. The bright Central Florida sun weighs you down. Asshole, she says. I’ve always wanted a boat, she mimics, smacking the side of the boat with her purse.

  She’d better knock it off. You’re trying to be civil about this. She goes into the house, and you lie back down. You could get up and go inside and try to convince her of the boat’s merits, tell her all the things the two of you could do in a fine boat like this, but she’s a stubborn woman, so you decide to wait until she comes around. She always has in the past.

  You sit up when you hear the front door slam. Martha’s carrying the black suitcase you bought her for her birthday last year. She throws it in the trunk, then goes back inside for the thirteen-inch TV from your bedroom. You are surprised how easily she handles the TV; she’s not a big woman. She yells, I’ve had it, so loud you can imagine Old Lady Peters three doors down looking up from her garden, then slams her car door and drives off.

  You decide to take the boat out for a quick spin around the lake. After hooking it up to your car, you go inside and get more beer and pretzels, and a white towel. You want to take Binky out onto the water, but she jumps out the passenger-side window and hides in the blooming white azaleas by the front of the house.