Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction Read online

  Duder went to lunch first, followed by a few of the other guys from grocery side. Russ kept stocking. What was the point of a break when he couldn’t eat what he really wanted? He couldn’t slap a pack of brain down on the lounge table and dig in with a spork. He didn’t even know how to cook brain or, heck, why his store even stocked it. He just needed it.

  His side of the store a bit emptier, Russ ambled to the meat case again to check on things. That’s when he saw the woman.

  Her thick curves and sassy bobbed hair would have earned her a double take any night, but at that particular moment she held up one of those packaged brains, studying it and licking her lips.

  Some mutter or moan must have escaped his lips, causing her eyes to jerk up and meet his. The fluorescent lighting cast her skin in a pale blue sheen.

  “So, you work here?” she said, appraising his vest.

  “Yes, but not in the meat.”

  “I was wondering, what kinds of brains do you stock here? I mean, it just says brains. They’re in the beef section, but are they cow brains? Or sheep? Does anyone know?”

  Russ shook his head. “I don’t got a clue, miss, but I’m sure they’re good.” A long, gooey string of drool oozed from the corner of his mouth, and he wiped it away with his fist.

  She studied him for a moment. “You like brains?” She didn’t speak with revulsion.

  “I’d like them very much,” said Russ, yearning in his voice.

  She smiled without showing her teeth. “You know what you are?” she asked, brushing a fly off of his forearm.

  He blinked. “I’m a Wal-Mart stocker. Russ is my name. What more do y’mean?”

  “How long you been wanting to try brain, Russ?”

  “All night,” he said with a drawl. It felt like a very long night.

  She shook her head as she laughed. “You poor boy. You don’t have a clue, do you? Tell you what. I’m going to be making some brains for breakfast. Done up in a skillet, with hash browns and gravy and maybe some eggs. Do you want to come over when you’re off shift? Maybe we can talk a bit, you know, about things.”

  “You…you know how to cook brains?” Russ’s eyes welled with tears. All those years he looked for a girl, and for all the wrong reasons. Here before him was the perfect woman, one willing to make him brains for breakfast.

  Life was good, Russ thought. Life was really good.

  Clueless

  Eric Pinder

  When the Widow Jones screamed, her mouth rounded into a horrified little “o.” “Another guest dead! And at dinner, too!” As a proper hostess, she knew that dead people belonged in the ground, not at the dinner table—not even when dressed in a suit and tie.

  The butler and Mrs. Jones’s two surviving guests fidgeted in a corner of the room, equally alarmed.

  Detective Joe Thicke stood over the body. He lifted off the bloody toupee, studied it carefully. “Hmmm,” he said. “This man appears to be dead.” Quickly he verified his hypothesis by failing to find the dead man’s pulse.

  Next, he scrutinized the four suspects. Of the four, the white-faced widow and her butler appeared the most upset. But the two young men in blue blazers seemed quite relaxed. Too relaxed. They had already consumed a fair share of liquor, and both still sipped from their glasses.

  “Lady and gentlemen,” said Detective Thicke. “And you too, butler-boy. Today—” Suddenly the two gentlemen clinked their glasses together. “—today a murder has taken place! One of the people in this room is a killer!”

  Joe nudged the corpse over with his foot, revealing a long, bloody, yellow pencil buried almost up to the eraser in the dead man’s throat.

  “You know,” mumbled one of the intoxicated youths, “I always thought there would be less crime if nothing were illegal.”

  Joe paused, blinked, and rubbed his masculine jaw. “Yes, quite.” Could one of these drunks be the criminal? No, their faces were just too honest.

  Joe studied his third suspect, the widow. Not bad, he thought, but a little too plump. And her aristocratic nose wasn’t to his taste.

  The bald butler was next in line. The old fellow held a box of eleven freshly sharpened pencils in his white-gloved hands. Joe observed that the box had room for one more pencil. Hmm, what could have become of it?

  Aha! Suddenly Joe saw a clue. Two bloody splotches stained the Persian rug near where the young gentlemen stood. Joe scratched his chin and wondered aloud, “Hmm, two bloodstains…”

  “To bloodstains!” toasted the young men. Clink went the glasses.

  “Yes,” said Joe. “Two bloodstains right there on the carpet behind you. Can you explain them?”

  All four suspects stared at him, blinking in bewilderment. “You’re crazy!” screamed the widow.

  She must still be in shock, thought Joe. “People,” he said, “this case is solved. The butler did it, in the study, with the revolver…I mean the pencil!”

  Finally the shock wore off Widow Jones and her guests. But the butler spoke up first. “But…but…you killed that man,” he sputtered, pointing a bony finger at Detective Joe. “You walked in, asked to borrow a pencil, then stabbed that poor man in the throat. You’re insane!”

  The others nodded in cautious agreement. “Far out,” said one of the drunks.

  “You could be right,” Joe told the butler. “The only way to prove your story is to check the pencil for fingerprints. I shall do so.” Joe reached down to pluck the pencil from the victim’s throat. With his other hand, he pulled a silk cloth from his vest pocket and used it to wipe the pencil clean. Then he examined the pencil.

  “No,” said Joe. “I’m afraid the killer was smart enough to wipe the pencil clean. And since you, butler-boy, are wearing gloves, only you could have done that.”

  The widow protested. “But you just wiped it with that cloth!”

  “What cloth?” asked Joe, putting it back in his pocket.

  “But we all saw you kill him!”

  “Well,” said Joe, “four eyewitnesses. Five, since in all honesty I did see myself commit the murder.” He strode across the room toward the widow’s musical instrument collection, where he nervously began to open and close a violin case. “It’s an open and shut case,” he said. “As an officer of the law, it’s my duty to arrest this dangerous killer, me. I should be considered armed and dangerous. Do you?”

  “What?” said a chorus of four voices.

  “Do you consider me armed and dangerous?”

  “Oh, certainly, sir,” said the butler.

  “Good,” said Joe. “I shall now take the defendant to jail. Good day!” With a curt nod, Joe fled through the open window.

  Mr. Agreeable

  Kirk Nesset

  When your wife says she’s leaving, you do not object. You don’t even let her know you’re insulted—you’ve already foreseen the foreseeable, quaint as it sounds, and the business no longer shocks you. Politely, agreeably, you tell her to do as she pleases, watching the suitcases open and fill. You tell her to call when she can. Does she need any money? She says you shouldn’t be so agreeable. You nod. You tend to agree.

  In a world so rife with contention, why disagree? Some people you know—neighbors, in-laws, people you work with—home in on discord like heat-seeking missiles. They blast great holes in your life, thriving on willful, blood-boiling chaos. This is not you—agreeable, peaceable you. Ready-made hardened opinion, you feel, goes quite against nature. It defies this Earth we breathe and traverse on, which is fluid, they say, and constantly shifting, alive at the core.

  Last year, before this business began, you saw your daughter committed. Foreseeable, foreseen. Your daughter, who wasn’t ever quite “there” in the first place, thinks she’s a cipher, that she is turning into the wind. Better that, of course, than a cavegirl out of Ms. What’s-her-name’s novels, those books your daughter drank in to enter prehistory. When you visit, you don’t debate her absent identity. You agree to the terms. You offer your fatherly best, as it were, fresh-
shaved, patient, mildly heroic, compact, and trim, if a bit frayed at the edges; no need to let her know you’re depressed. You bring her the weight of your affable nature, your humor, your unswerving desire to accept and agree, along with a snack of some kind, some candy, a bag of almonds or unsalted peanuts.

  The visits increase once her mother is gone. Three, say, or four times a week. The house has grown strange, to be truthful, and you like to get out. Your once-agreeable furnishings, the sofas and tables you decided to keep, have taken on auras, gray hazy outlines, which tend to unsettle. The bedroom exudes a disagreeable air. You hang around late at the office, rearranging your files; you visit your daughter. You sit in cafés on the weekends skimming the paper, thinking, deciding which movie to see. At night you awaken sitting upright in bed, discussing strange things with your curtains.

  One Sunday, at an outdoor café, a man sits down at your table. He’s thirty years younger than you, wide-shouldered, black-haired, bucktoothed. A fading tattoo on his hand. You come here a lot, he declares—he says he’s seen you before. You do, you agree; he probably has. You’re fond of the scones, you tell him. You glance at the crumbs on your plate.

  Your agreeability, alas, makes you the ideal listener. People seem to sense this right off. You have a compassionate face, a kind face, you have heard. Like a beacon, your face pulls people in, strangers out of accord with good fortune, survivors and talkers, victims of the shipwreck of living.

  The man has led a colorful life, as they say. He is funny, almost. You hear of his days as a kid in a much larger city, of all the hitchhiking he did, how for years he zigzagged the country, shacking up here, camping out there, he and a spotted castrated dog, a dog with one eye and one ear, a dog he called Lucky. You hear about his most recent romance.

  He entertains, you have to admit. His problems, so vivid and real, draw you away from your invented anxieties. You lean back and listen, agreeably nodding, sipping your tea.

  So I blow into town, he says, fully into his story. I go up to the apartment and open the door, and guess what?

  You raise your eyebrows in question, unable to guess.

  My girlfriend’s in there with Eddy, he says, this guy from downstairs.

  Delicacy forbids you to ask what were they doing, what did he see. You wipe your mouth with your napkin. You look at your watch. The story’s growing less and less pleasant; you’re afraid for the girl; you don’t really like speaking with strangers. You take a few bills from your wallet and lay them down on the table.

  He asks if you’re leaving, teeth extended out past his lip. You tell him your daughter is waiting. You’ve had a nice chat. He asks you which way you’re headed. You tell him. He says he’s going that way. You need to hear the rest of the story.

  Down the block by your car he says to hand over your billfold. The billfold, he says. You feel the nudge of the gun at your kidney.

  You are no crime-drama hero. You hand over the billfold, agreeing in full to his terms. He opens the wallet and scowls. You’ve never carried much cash on your person. Move up the street, he says—removing your bank card from its niche in the leather, tucking the gun in his pocket—we’ll stop at the bank. You move up the sidewalk. Nervous, giddy, you ask what became of his girlfriend.

  I forgave her, he says, hands in his pockets. The she skipped out.

  He slides your card in the slot at the bank. You stand side by side. He asks for your PIN, which you promptly reveal. He taps in the code.

  Silence. The street seems strangely deserted. You ask if he’s found a new girlfriend.

  Shut up, he says. He stuffs the cash in his pocket. Story’s over.

  Half-joking, you ask if he’d mind if you kept the receipt.

  Shut up, I said, he exclaims.

  You begin to say that you’re sorry—you don’t quite shut up in time—and then the hand is out of the pocket, there’s a blur of tattoo, and you’re down on your knees in the flowerbed, there among nasturtiums and lupine and poppies, reeling from the shock of the blow.

  Don’t be so shit-eating nice, he says, his shadow looming over like Neanderthal man’s. He says you remind him of Eddy, that two-faced adulterous creep. Lay flat on the ground now, he tells you. Don’t move for five minutes. Down, if you ever want to get up.

  You lie in the dirt on your belly, no hero, purely compliant. In a while you touch your scalp where he hit you, fearing there’s blood; there isn’t. You’re lucky. The soil, barky and damp, clings to your fingers and hair. Your eyelashes brush against flowers—poppies, you think. Petals as vibrant as holiday pumpkins.

  How long is five minutes?

  People step up to get money. You hear them push in their cards and tap on the keyboard. You feel the individual discomfort, the dismay they endure to see such a sight, outlandish, right here out in the open, a man flung down on the ground in broad daylight, mashing the orange and blue flowers.

  It seems you’ve been here forever. You’ve been here in dreams, you believe, in piecemeal visions—even this was foreseen in a way, if not quite clearly foreseeable. You should get up, you suppose, but you feel fine where you are. Sprawling, face in the black fragrant mulch, burrowing, digging in with your fingers, digging in like the wind. You press into the earth. The street grows quiet again. Ear to the ground, you hear plates trembling beneath you, weighty, incomprehensibly huge, aching with age and repeated collision, compelled by what is to agree and agree and agree.

  The Secret Ingredient

  Rebecca Roland

  Will MacLeod left the office early on Friday, a welcome surprise thanks to a gas leak in the building.

  He stopped to buy flowers for his wife, Laura, as an apology for the night before when he commented on how tacky he found the ceramic gnomes she’d recently placed all around their garden. As he picked out orchids in pink, her favorite color, he thought about how fortunate he was to have her. She had done a wonderful job raising their family and now, every night, he came home to a hot meal and a clean house. Part of his mind, as it had done before, wondered at how she could manage the house and frequent visits from the grandkids and still have energy for salsa lessons, but, as always, he shoved those thoughts aside.

  Flowers in hand and two hours earlier than usual, Will eased the door to his house open, wanting to surprise Laura. As he stepped in, the sound of grunts and giggles came from the kitchen. A long female sigh followed.

  The bottom fell from Will’s world. Could Laura be having an affair? He argued with himself even as he slipped out of his loafers and laid the flowers on a nearby table with care not to rustle the plastic around them. He adored her and let her know it all the time. Why would she turn to another man? No, his Laura would never do that. He reached for the flowers.

  But then her voice, husky, reached his ears. “Mmm, that’s amazing.”

  Will’s hand fell to his side. He did not want to witness his wife with another man. He didn’t want that image burned into his mind. His right hand curled into a fist. He had to know—who, how long, why? Above all, why?

  He shuffled across the oak floor through a living room dotted with patched leather furniture and the grandkids’ tiny, plastic racing cars and stuffed dolls. He glanced at the family pictures on the wall and choked down a cry at the pang of loss that tore through him. At the other end of the room, he sidled next to the wall. His pulse raced. Will took a deep, fortifying breath, then peeked around the corner.

  On the kitchen table stood a half-dozen gnomes, each one about ten inches tall. They all sported beards and expansive bellies. Pointed black caps covered their heads, and they all wore dark pants, although each one had a button-down shirt of a different color.

  Laura, wearing a pink tracksuit and her gray hair in a ponytail, handed a wooden spoon to one of them. A cutting board acted like a gangplank between the table and kitchen counter. The gnome trotted up the board to plop the spoon into a pot simmering on the stove.

  “I think Will is going to love this stew,” Laura said.

&nb
sp; “Who wouldn’t, with all the wine in it?” a gnome replied.

  Laura waggled a finger at him. “You can’t tell me the recipe calls for an entire bottle of wine. I caught you sneaking some.”

  The gnome laughed. “I can never get anything past you.”

  Will remained frozen in place for half an hour as the gnomes scurried about, preparing the meal and cleaning up after themselves. A couple of them washed dishes at the stainless-steel sink. Others scrubbed down the white cabinets and dark granite counter. The remainder waxed the tile floor until it sparkled beneath the late-afternoon sunlight spilling through the window over the sink. Laura, meanwhile, hummed as she painted her toenails, occasionally giving an approving nod to the gnomes.

  Will crossed the living room, slipped his feet into his shoes, and took the flowers outside. He made a lot of noise with the car and took an inordinate amount of time to gather his computer bag and empty lunch sack. When he reached the door with flowers in hand, Laura waited there, her eyes wide and her face flushed, to give him a long welcoming kiss. Over her shoulder, Will thought he spotted a pair of gnome legs disappear through the screen door in the back of the house.

  Late

  David O’Neal

  Christ, I’m late,” Andrew said to himself. “And I’ve been working on this friggin’ deal for a month!” It was 8:30 am in Boston; the meeting was at 10:00 in Springfield, a two-hour drive. “Damn, damn.”

  Andrew dressed hurriedly in the suit he had laid out the night before, put on his perfectly shined shoes, and stuffed a tie into a pocket. He gulped down a cup of coffee, poured another cup to take with him, grabbed his briefcase with the papers in it, and rushed out the door of his apartment toward his car, which was parked several blocks away.

  It was cold outside; the sidewalks and streets were treacherous from ice under the two inches of snow that had fallen during the night. He lost his footing once and spilled the coffee, but managed to land on his hands, not quite going down. Andrew started the car, cleared the front window with the windshield wipers, and ran the other windows up and down to remove the rest of the snow. Then he put the car in gear and lurched out into the narrow street. Right in front of a pickup truck. The truck, being cut off, just managed to stop before hitting him. It was a painter’s truck with a ladder in the back; the startled, frowning driver wore white coveralls stained with paint. Andrew couldn’t take the time to apologize.