Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction Read online

  “Ricky studied the occupants of the other cells and noticed that, diabolical as they appeared, each was hideous in its own way. He figured it must be one being per planet, and he was Earth’s representative. It made sense when he considered the years of TV signals that had radiated into space, all showing him besting his foes and wearing that gold belt embossed with WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT WRESTLING CHAMPION. The only part that strained credulity was that intelligent beings had apparently thought our storylines and match choreography were legit.

  “Don’t look at me that way, Dutch, that’s what he said.

  “Well, when the guards finally came for him, he tried to explain, but they either couldn’t understand him or didn’t care. They shoved him out into an enormous arena whose floor and walls were already stained with blood of every hue. Big video screens everywhere, and seemingly infinite grandstands receding up into the dark, filled with all kinds of aliens raising all kinds of hell. Weird-looking cameras every ten feet.

  “Ricky had observed the winners living to fight another day. The fate of the losers remained a mystery. Ricky’s a logical guy, and he saw one logical course of action: fight to win.

  “And he did. They stuck him in there against some blue, shaggy, yeti-looking character, and Ricky wore himself out beating on the guy, looking for a vulnerable spot. He finally got in a lucky genital shot, and it was nowhere near where you’d expect.

  “Afterward, he sat in his cell, nursing his wounds, and concluded that the straightforward approach couldn’t work forever. He regarded the menagerie in the other cells, each creature a distinctive product of its native environment. Ricky’s only chance was to exploit what made him unique. His potential opponents sported all manner of natural weapons: horns, spikes, tentacles, fangs. But only Ricky possessed an Ivy League biology degree.

  “Against insectoid opponents, he dragged the combat out as long as he could, counting on their inefficient oxygen diffusion to do them in. For amphibian opponents, he used grappling techniques, seizing them in complicated holds and letting the constant dermal stimulation dehydrate them. For beings who lacked eye structures, he covered himself with blood from the prior combats, to fool their olfactory senses, and hugged the walls so the crowd noise masked his movements.

  “I don’t really understand this stuff either, Dutch, but he wrote that part down for me. Here, see? And it’s not important, anyway. The point is, he won. The whole enchilada.”

  Dutch interrupts me to theorize, reasonably, that I’ve flipped my lid. He’s determined to humor me, though. Where’s Ricky now, he asks.

  “Well, he’s kind of a celebrity, you know, out there.” I point upward. “But not his own man, by any stretch. He had trouble just getting permission to come back long enough to tell me what happened. Still, he has it pretty good, all things considered. As champion, he only has to fight in the final round of each tournament.

  “You know, like in Karate Kid Part III.”

  By now Dutch is sizing me up for a straitjacket, but at least he accepts that I believe what I’m saying. His last-ditch strategy for restoring my sanity is to poke a hole in my story. So if Ricky’s tenure as galactic champ is ongoing, reasons Dutch, why should I ditch my title? They wouldn’t need a second earthling, so I’m in no danger, right?

  “Ricky came back to warn me. Apparently they want to change the format, freshen things up.” This, Dutch understands. As entertainment, wrestling, real or fake, gets stale easily.

  “For the next tournament, they’re switching to tag teams.” And I drain Dutch’s untouched vodka in one swallow.

  Shoot for Jesus

  Courtney Walsh

  When Sister Agnes first set up her mission north of Pyongyang, she didn’t know what to expect, only that she wanted converts to the Lord Jesus and that she wanted to train members of the first North Korean biathlon team. After graduating from Notre Dame, she had enrolled as a novitiate at the new Sisters of Mercy athletic convent in North Bend. There she earned her habit and her rosary beads and her Karhu 10th Mountain Mountaineering skis and her Walther P22 with back strap. She trained and she trained until she could recite the New Testament from memory and get four out of five bull’s-eyes shooting from prone, sitting, and standing positions.

  The first to approach her when she got off the plane were twelve of Kim Jong’s Happy Girls in their olive-drab uniforms, each with a tiny red rose in her hair. They bowed and chanted in unison, Great Leader send high regard and greeting to Poopy-San.

  Poopy San? That was her, apparently. She bowed in return, and one of the Happy Girls put a lei of red roses around Sister Agnes’s neck. Then they all stepped back and admired her.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Agnes said. “Now I have something for you.” She reached into her rucksack and took out a dozen little New Testaments bound in red leather.

  Oh, no, said one of them, her eyes wide with shock, Chairman Mao!

  No, no, no, they shrieked. Against fatherland. Against Great Leader. Total nuclear wah!

  Agnes laughed good-naturedly, “These are Bibles, dears.”

  They glanced at one another, their anger subsiding. Bible? one of them said tentatively.

  Jesus? another suggested. There was a murmur among them. Matthew, another one said. “Good,” Agnes said. Mark, said another. Luke, John, said yet another. Agnes clapped her hands in glee, and then they put the names of the Gospellers into a chant, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.

  “Very good,” Agnes said, and one of them tittered, which caused the others to giggle, too, until they sounded like delighted hamsters.

  The one who had put the wreath around Agnes’s neck told her, Great Leader say you teach us to be Olympic billiard champions.

  “Billiards?” she said.

  Six ball in side pocket, said one.

  I shoot mass shot, said another.

  Suddenly, Agnes had a brainstorm: Suppose, instead of targets, pool tables could be set up at intervals along the ski course. They would race to the first table, run a rack, and then race to the next one.

  Did they have pool tables when Jesus was growing up? She pictured Jesus with his beard and his long white robe, walking around the table as he chalked his cue, calling, Combination off the six. Wump, wump, wump: three balls in one shot.

  It would be like the Stations of the Cross.

  Or cross-country billiards, an entirely new Olympic event.

  Agnes clapped her hands. “Take me to your leader!”

  Headhunter

  William R. D. Wood

  Everyone remembers where they were the day magic returned. Personally, I’d been at it all day, sitting in the little conference room, interviewing applicants for the one opening down at Mega Pest Control. Times were tough and the competition was heavy.

  The television in the corner was full of impossible images. Unicorns wandered around Times Square. A dragon batted at airplanes on a taxiway at Reagan International. Huge serpents swam Nessie-like down the Mississippi. And a swarm of fairies—freaking fairies—chased children in a schoolyard in Topeka.

  I thought it was an elaborate hoax, like the one in the pretelevision years by that fat radio guy, but as the day wore on, the news coverage continued on every channel. Whatever force borrowed or stole the magic eons ago had paid it back with interest.

  I scratched at one of several nasty bites on my neck and shuffled applications and legal pads on the table. The day had been long and I was ready to pack it in when Sue leaned in the door, her faced scrunched in an expression I didn’t quite get. “Oscar, you have one more…applicant.”

  Oh, well. I deal mostly with the trades: HVAC, plumbing, extermination, and the like. A little overspecialized, maybe, but I’ve got a knack, I’ve been told, and that’s why they hire me again and again. I’m just good at matching hardworking applicants with eager employers. Call it a gift. Not rocket science. You just have to watch for the signs and trust your gut.

  I sighed and settled back into my chair, swattin
g at another of the monster flies that had been pestering me all day. Biggest bugs I’d ever seen. “Send ‘im in.”

  The floor shook once, then twice. Good God. Were those footsteps?

  An ogre stepped into room, his head hunched to avoid the drop ceiling.

  I scrabbled to my feet, almost falling backwards over my folding chair. My heart pounded. Something programmed deep into my genes wailed at me to flee high into the trees or into a dark hole too small for it to follow. When he didn’t attack immediately, I forced myself to breathe slowly, gaining my composure. These were different times. Aside from being big as a gorilla on growth hormones, he could have passed for a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Except for the tusks.

  He’s just another applicant, just another…person…looking for a job.

  He looked down at me, eyebrows raised over his big green eyes. He tilted his head to one side, and I was reminded of the distorted cats and dogs on the calendar in the corner. I hate those things. Another bug buzzed by, colliding with my forehead and spiraling off wildly across the room.

  “Okay,” I said, straightening my tie and easing down into my chair. “So, uh, you’re looking for a job?”

  The ogre grunted.

  “Excellent, excellent.”

  Wood creaked as he sat on the floor just inside the room. An odor began to grow, like wet puppies and moss. The bugs sure liked it. A dozen flitted around the ogre’s head, but he was oblivious.

  “So…this interview is for an exterminator. Mega Pest covers the whole range of vermin. Until today, I suppose.” I chuckled, but the green eyes just stared. “Yes, well. Mister?”

  The ogre grunted.

  “I see. How do you spell…” I let the question trail off and took out a blank application. “What are your qualifications?”

  He reached into a leather bag at his side and flopped a heavy object onto the table. I flinched. A grimy rope threaded through the eye sockets of a dozen animal skulls. The big one in the middle could have been human. He followed my gaze and casually tried to turn the bony stare facedown on the table. But nothing with hands the size of holiday hams can move casually, and I had to fight the urge to leap through the privacy-glass window behind me.

  “I see,” I managed.

  Some of the bugs had grown bored with the ogre and resumed dive-bombing me, zooming in, snatching at strays hairs on my head, scratching at my ears. One hovered, bouncing in the air in front of my face like a hummingbird. A glint caught my eye before I could smack at it.

  No way.

  She was a tiny woman by shape, with dragonfly-style wings, her body covered in glistening, glitter-size specks. Cute, except that the head was wrong. Bulbous eyes, faceted like a fly’s, and a wide grin filled with needle tips. The bites on my neck and arms throbbed.

  Well, I’ll be.

  The ogre grunted.

  I snapped my attention back to the hulking creature and his macabre collection of endorsements strung across the table. “You certainly seem able to handle the, uh, larger varieties, but the world of pest control is always changing—vermin of the day, you might say. What unique qualities do you have to meet the needs of Mega Pest?”

  The bug-girl nipped at the back of my neck, drawing blood, and flitted away beyond my reach. One of the ogre’s eyes tracked her for several seconds. A tongue flashed from his mouth, snatching her from the air and into his waiting maw with a satisfying crunch.

  I dabbed at a bleeding bite with a Kleenex. Worse than any wasp sting.

  I looked into the applicant’s eyes. He stopped chewing, the corners of his mouth attempting a grin and almost succeeding. “You’re hired.”

  The ogre grunted.

  My First Foreign Woman and the Sea

  Robert Perchan

  There was a blind woman who fell in love with a stout sailor from a distant land. He was a good man and did not touch her, though she wished him to in her heart. He was a stranger to her city, but he took her out to various eating houses and described for her blind eyes the rainbow colors of the food set on the table before them. But it was an exotic culture to him, and the hues were subtle and beyond his range of language, for the blind woman and the sailor spoke to each other only haltingly in a crude lingua franca.

  Sometimes they returned together to her narrow room above the seamstress shop where she made her living stuffing scraps of colored cloth into pillows for the rich. He drank beer there and snacked on the dried fish and dark sausages that she prepared for him from memory. The sailor was a fat man, a man of the gut, and did his thinking and feeling down there in the labyrinth of the guts. He broke wind one evening, leaning close to her as he provided a sluice for the gas to escape. (You know what I mean.) The blind woman smiled and he saw her smile. “What was that?” she asked, knowing full well. “That is the sound of a man who loves you, when he is near,” he answered. The blind woman liked the pure idea of the sentiment and invited him to lie down with her. He followed, both thinking: What is there to lose?

  But he was a sailor from a foreign land and soon would be gone. This bothered her, of course. He would be gone, perhaps forever. She would miss him and his flatulence that announced, in its abrupt clarion way, the making of love. So she pursed her lips and began practicing explodents and susurruses against her encroaching abandonment. She mastered the squeal and the thundering bassoon. As the final day grew near, she cooked up a good pot of red beans for him, the kind packed with molecules of blue methane aching for release.

  On his last night in port he climbed the creaky stairs to her room and she fed him well, spooning the purplish mash in the direction of his mouth with mother love. Giddy, he began to break wind like there was no tomorrow, which there wasn’t. She followed his lead, blindly, matching him vibration for vibration with her practiced lips. He was a breezy old seadog and taught her more in that last evening than any landlocked blighter could ever hope to know.

  Then he sailed. A storm rose out of the east, his hermaphrodite brig splintered and sank, all drowned. Perhaps a pool of bubbles gamboled on the surface of the ocean for a moment, she thought when she heard the report. But she had learned her lessons well and recited them over and over in her room. Phoo-oo-oot. Phleesh. Shuh-kuh-kuh. Vleen. Brap. High-pitched farts and low-pitched farts and farts that tromboned in between. Sometimes she forgot herself and left her window open. A blind woman living alone in a room above a seamstress shop doesn’t much care what the neighbors think.

  I too was a sailor, in my youth, and had heard all the tales about foreign port cities young sailors hear on their first voyages. One evening, while the rest of the crew luxuriated in the local fleshpots, I stood in front of a seamstress shop leaning against a wall, a Players dangling from my lips, a tableau of solitude and dreams adrift. The strange and foreign port city at night was ablaze with torchlights in its cocky, smirky way, as foreign port cities always are. It was then that I heard him, above me, a sound I had listened to a hundred times late at night when the Dansker and Jenkins and Kincaid squatted and plotted in the lee forechains drinking watered rum and dicing away their pay: the song of the legendary Drowned Farter. (It was said a pool of bubbles gamboled perpetually on the surface of the ocean at the exact spot his ship went down.) This, of course, was Adventure. I climbed the creaky stairs and entered the blind woman’s room. She sat cross-legged on a mound of rich pillows at the center of a web of colored threads connecting her fingertips to various corners of the room, like rigging on a ship, her haunted blind eyes long ago emptied of longing, a weathered figurehead on a bowsprit.

  But she was kind and understood my loneliness. She took me slowly, knowing that I was young and that my heart was crowded with all the useless baby furniture of young hope. On her pillows farts exploded overhead like rockets, rattled below like grapeshot at the waterline. Ripped and snapped like sails in a gale, canvas that billowed and sagged and filled again. Hot musket breath raked the poop. I boarded her. She boarded me. And when she pulled me under for the third time and I felt my br
ief life spent before me in a few seconds, I was grateful for the foretaste.

  You never forget her, your first foreign woman in a port city, regardless of the men she’s had ahead of you or will have later on. You board your ship the next morning and when the wind kicks up you want to turn back. Standing on the wooden deck you see your first foreign woman’s blind eyes in your own mind’s eye, and then you hear the crew scrambling up the ratline rungs of the shrouds, stinking of last night’s beer, farting their early morning farts and singing in chorus of their own first foreign women and the sea.

  Buttons

  Edward Palumbo

  It’s not for sale,” said the tiny gray woman as she clutched the black device with both hands. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Oh,” I responded glumly.

  “Of course, I could rent it to you.” Her Shih Tzu barked at us from the living-room window, apparently displeased with the notion. “You look as if you could be trusted to bring it back, a nice, young, professional man like yourself. I don’t really need the money, but every little bit helps.” She paused. “No, no, I’d better not.”

  “How much to rent it for one day?” I inquired.

  “My husband, God rest him, bought it at a dusty old camera shop. But it’s not a camera, no sir, even though it looks like one.” She held it up as high as she could, and it shimmered in the sunlight. “Look at that workmanship,” she continued, “not another like it in the world. And look at the buttons: blue, green, yellow, and here on the side, red. But never touch the red one.” She laid it back on the table. “The red one cannot be touched. That is why it is separate from the others. You would not want to click it by mistake.”

  “Yes,” I replied, “blue, green, etcetera, don’t touch the red. Got it. Tell me again how you make it work.”