Health inspections and sexual fantasies occupy the mind of a café cashier in “Rating,” Olivia Mardwig‘s realistic yet dreamlike short fiction from our Summer 2018 issue.
{ X}
EVER SINCE SHE TOOK THE CASHIER JOB AT THE CAFÉ SHE’S HAD OVERLY REALISTIC DREAMS. The most frequently recurring is of her grocery shopping for the things she actually needs. Waking up, it’s an odd, unwelcome surprise to realize that there is no almond milk, there are no bananas.
The café is on the first floor of an office building so far west of the city it’s almost touching water. On certain days, when walking from the train, in the wind tunnel of the avenue, it feels like you could be scooped up and carried away.
The only customers are the people who work in the building and in this way everyone is a regular. Some are more friendly than others, but no face stands out in the check-out line. No person, by however small a margin, are you happy to see. Admittedly, much of that is caused by the lunch rushes, the only action between the hollow hours of mid-morning and afternoon. It’s hard to make an impression when like clockwork, they have their $6.99 turkey sub in one hand and exact change in the other.
Two springs ago she graduated college. She’s not sure what kind of day it was, and her only memory of the ceremony was an image that feels borrowed from someone else. Graduation for her meant the moment everyone threw their caps into the sun-filled sky, into a bright, blue beginning. She thinks about that image sometimes, whose experience it actually was, from what movie. But mostly she uses the blank stretches of time to fantasize about having sex with the dishwasher, the sandwich guy, the bread delivery guy, his brother. Inevitably someone takes the elevator down for an unnecessary cup of coffee and suddenly it would be here that she is.
After lunch, the day manager called the staff into the office for an announcement. She said that the following day the health inspector would visit to evaluate and issue a letter grade to the café. She looked more worried than usual. Her knee-length cardigan wrapped visibly tighter around her underweight self. Her crumb of morale was offered in the hardly audible, “We can do this”, as the wireless printer inked out next week’s order forms. Continue reading “Rating” – Fiction by Olivia Mardwig→
A young writer grapples with envy & artistic integrity in “Anonymity is Life!”, Sola Saar‘s delightfully unorthodox short story from our Summer 2018 issue.
{ X }
IT STARTED WHEN I WROTE “CRAIGSLIST OPERA,” a short story based on the time my sister tried to produce “La Boheme” by placing several ads online. People were so desperate for theatre jobs they actually came to our house to apply, though lost interest in the project once they met her. Katrina, 16, was taking a vow of silence at the time.
In the story, which was somewhat dramatized because I had not been there when it happened, a local Soprano singer named Clara came to our door singing Puccini. Katrina typed “$20 per show” into her phone and shoved the screen in the singer’s face, violently turning her head in the other direction. “I am worth much more than that,” Clara belted. “No you’re not,” Katrina typed back. Clara tried to argue, still singing. My sister stayed firm with the price, and the opera singer eventually left, unnerved by the interaction.
It was the only piece of mine to be positively received by my writing workshop. The story was published in my school’s literary journal, and my mother, whose pride took the form of gloating, photocopied and sent the story to all her friends, not considering how Katrina might react. When she found out, I got an angry slew of text messages demanding I retract my “fake article” about her.
“It’s not an article, it’s fiction,” I texted her. “I got the idea from a woman I saw on the news.”
“I see, dear,” she wrote back.
My response seemed to assuage her, or so I thought. A few days later, my mom told me Katrina expressed interest in writing a novel about my life. She said she wanted to write an entire novel, because it was “much more difficult than short stories,” which I mainly wrote. A week later she updated me that Katrina wasn’t going to write a novel because she was “retired,” but her roommate Caroline was in the process of drafting my life story. Caroline went under the pen name “Anonymous.” Caroline was a large brunette doll.
Caroline wrote the novel with her own hands, not idiomatically speaking. Katrina sat Caroline on her lap and gripped the doll’s tiny webbed fingers, delicately pressing each key. It took them half an hour to write a paragraph. Still, they were a diligent machine, producing several pages a day.
I envied Katrina’s discipline. I hadn’t written anything since I’d found out I’d gotten waitlisted for an advanced creative writing class two weeks ago. Most of the time I delegated to writing I spent staring at my laptop, hate-stalking this girl Hannah Brown who was the instructor’s favorite in our last workshop. She wrote these really inane stories about getting drunk with her friends at her Beverly Hills prep school. As the only freshman who’d gotten into the creative writing course, she boasted about how it had really inspired her to finish a novel draft over the break.
I rejoiced every time Hannah looked sloppy or dehydrated in a photo on social media. I knew I was being petty and mean, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I felt much more compelled to do this than write. I don’t know why I was so obsessed with her success. I wasn’t really threatened by her. Her stories were bad. I was certain they were bad. I knew my writing was bad also, at this stage of my life, but her writing was hopelessly, irredeemably, numbingly bad, and it would never get any better. I could tell because of the kind of human she was.
Whenever I saw her out at parties she had this stumbly air about her, it was more than tipsiness, it was a lack of composure that was almost embarrassing. I like to drink but I had a lot of composure, too much composure. I was like a fucking mannequin. Most close friends told me they rarely knew what I was thinking. But I knew the lack of composure she showed in public translated to how much writing she produced. She had what I didn’t, not talent, but a lack of self-consciousness that allowed her to sit down and fucking write.
Less than a month after Katrina declared she was writing a book about me, I got a PDF of her novel, Midget Utopia, via email. It was going to be self-published that week. The book wasn’t about me; it was about Katrina’s family of dolls, whom she referred to as “midgets” because of their inability to grow. I was scarcely mentioned in the index: a compendium of characters featured in the novel that included our family, her dolls, imaginary friends, and every person she could remember encountering in her life.
Vera Gunarsson, age 19: Vera is a pale human with long black curly hair and brown eyes. She is 5’5” and 105 or maybe 110 lbs. and is somewhat of an online writer. She is the sister of Katrina and godmother to Marissa. Vera lives in Northern California.
She waited until I returned home for winter break to throw a book party. I told her I didn’t know if I could make it, but congratulations on finishing a whole novel. She reminded me that she didn’t write the novel, Caroline did. She had, however, translated the book into Russian, I assume using one of those free computer-generated translating websites.
My mom’s entire family and some of our neighbors came to the Midget Utopia release.
“I thought you were the writer,” my aunt said to me at the book party. “I didn’t know your sister wrote.” She looked at the cover, which had an image of Katrina surrounded by her dolls on the bed, and opened it to the first page and began reading.
December 8, 1996: Kat Zlovesney is born in Russia at the Moscow Presbyterian hospital. She weighs 8 lbs. and 5 ounces and is 13 inches long with dark brown hair. She is immediately adopted by an American family and brought to Los Angeles.
“Russia!” she cackled. “I love it! Where’d she come up with that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s so creative.”
My mom announced it was time for the reading. We gathered around the couches and waited as Katrina fuddled with her phone. Her vow of silence remained intact; she wasn’t going to read the selection herself. She had an app on her phone that robotically read her typed words aloud. It sounded like Stephen Hawking reading the dust jacket cover:
My name is anonymous
Why be named? Not all people will remember you nor each other
Most people forget names anyway
Names are arbitrary and some people do not like their names or feel they were
Given the wrong name
In reality, we are destined to remain anonymous and not be forced to have a name
I SEE THE PRESIDENT ON THE NEWS. I curl up on the floor. Play dead.
I open the envelope containing my paycheck,
accidentally tear its little cellophane window.
Carefully, close all my windows. Weep, regret,
and think how a pound of flesh is inadequate.
Sorry excuses come across my desk.
I’m sorry they do, sorry they are,
sorry they’ll not be enough.
It might have been a victory.
By the time we got there
it was just blood and roses; not quite
a cemetery, but something solemn, sacrilegious
about which words fell like ashes
into and out of history.
I look the winter in the face.
The bare trees straighten
their crooked branches
with heartbreaking enterprise.
The pond freezes over.
The arthritis flows through me
one sorrow at a time.
I’m no longer sure I can
clench my fists, let alone
close my eyes.
You asked me to tell you.
I no longer watch the news.
Sometimes I remember who we were.
Sometimes I open my eyes.
{ X }
MARC HARSHMAN’s collection, WOMAN IN A RED ANORAK, has won the 2017 Blue Lynx Prize and will be published later this year by Lynx House/University of Washington Press. His fourteenth children’s book, FALLINGWATER, co-written with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. His poetry collection, Believe What You Can, was published in 2016 by West Virginia University Press and won the Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. He is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.
An infinite cycle of thank-yous to everyone who helped make last night’s reading such a magical, memorable evening: George, Denise, Kwame, and Rax for performing your flappy lits; Alibi for your scintillating singing and photography; Pacific Standard for the always-gracious hospitality; and all you fantastic folks who came to witness it all. Let’s do this again on September 26…
[all photos by Alibi Jones except the last one by JO’B]
George Kovalenko reads passionate poems about donkey sanctuaries & black metal
Denise Jarrott reads some invocational poetry from her book NYMPH
In these bewildering, tumultuous, often terrifying times, we all could use some extra helpings of unbiased guidance and compassion. With that in mind, we present the debut of our new contributor Chad Vice and his monthly advice column, “A Tad of Advice with Chad Vice.”
{ X }
Dear Chad,
I am 27 years old and terrible at making friends. I just get so anxious trying to talk with people, I struggle to put together more than a few words of boring small talk in any conversation. You seem like an interesting and sociable person. What can I do?
Gene F in Burlington, VT
Hi Gene!
Do you bathe? My greeting reminded me of how important good smells are in socializing.
The best thing I can say to you is: be honest.
Honesty is like a compass; it will point you in the right direction.
If someone says to you
“What do you think of that sunset”
And you say
“It makes me think of mesothelioma”
And he says,
“I’m so sorry who did you lose?”
Marry him.
Does that answer your question?
Dear Chad,
My wife and I have been married for four years now, and are preparing to conceive our first child. However we’ve begun having serious disagreements that we didn’t discuss or even anticipate earlier in our relationship. For instance, I want our child, regardless of their gender, to be named “Fritz,” after my all-time favorite film director Fritz Lang. Similarly, it’s also very important to me that the decor of our child’s nursery be primarily influenced by the German Expressionists of the early 20th Century. On the other hand, my wife insists upon a more Bauhaus-influenced nursery, and is adamant that our child be an amphibious kleptomaniac named Carlos William Carloses. Is there any way for us out of this troubling impasse?
Buford W in St Louis, MO
Buford, A lot of things in this life are terrifying and unpredictable. Like having a child. So, I say, live in the moment. Get specific about how you go about conceiving the child. Live out the fantasies. Maybe one of you is into pretending to be a pony. Learn as much about each other as you can. Be as honest as you can be before y’all get knocked up. You will learn to compromise. You may even find that the times you seemed immovable about names and occupations for your child, somehow seem silly. So instead, you fuck because it is fun and wait.
Dear Chad,
I am a staunch pacifist, and am strongly against harming or infringing upon the basic rights of any living creature if not done in immediate self-defense. Lately my apartment has become infested with hundreds of spiders, and while none of them have bitten me or attacked me in any way, their presence has become significantly inconvenient, and I feel like it’s time to evacuate these critters & clear out their numerous webs from my home. How do I do that without making the spiders resent me and/or eventually take revenge upon me while I sleep?
Tanya P in Charlotte, NC
Hey T,
Spiders are wily bastards. Too many legs. It makes them arrogant. That said, they also are dream catchers, but instead of catching nightmares, they catch and keep other bugs.
So that’s free labor.
If you can’t sleep, for you fear their unnecessary amount of legs, etc:
Kill all or move.
Dear Chad,
There’s this guy I work with who’s very sweet, a little slow– let’s say somewhere between Forrest Gump and Lennie from “Of Mice and Men”– and extremely talkative. He and I usually eat our lunch in the break room at the same time, and while I prefer more solitary activities during my free hour, like reading or solving crossword puzzles, my co-worker constantly tries to engage me in drawn-out small-talk about the weather and local supermarkets. What would you suggest is the most polite and least confrontational way I can get him fired so I don’t have to deal with him anymore?
Andrea J in New Braunfels, TX
Hey
Hey – HEY! Kid.
Look at me.
If they fire somebody one day,
Who is to say they won’t get a taste for it?
Everyone gets Their rewards
Eventually.
It’s a waiting game.
#shawshankredemption
Your fellow player,
Chad Vice
Dear Chad,
I have this overwhelming desire to run through the streets of Times Square smacking people on the backs of their skulls with some kind of Nerf-style bat. Not hard enough to cause any fractures or concussions or any serious injuries, but just hard enough to, say, make them think twice about walking super-slowly in the middle of crowded sidewalks with music blasting in their ear-buds and their stupid faces glued to their smartphones and apparently no fucks given about their fellow pedestrians. If I did succumb to this desire, I would fully cooperate with police upon my apprehension, and serve whatever sentence the state deemed just, because I think it would be totally worth it. Is this ethical?
Victor C in New York, NY
IFEELTHAT
Victory,
Seek victor C.
What you do they just
Can’t see.
With out a telescope or something.
You could contribute to that mess.
But what they do There.
As loud as they can in places,
Like times squared
YOU
You do in the st(f)ar(t)s
{ X }
CHAD VICE first identified with Play-Doh. He is a nut in a nutcrackers world. He prefers bold musical choices and sitting all the way through movies’ credits. He is here to hear you. He has studied under Merlin and your Mom.
Do you need some advice from Chad Vice? Email your questions & quandaries to FLAPPERHOUSE at gmail dot com, then pray to Athena and blow a kiss to the cosmos…
FIRST, YOU MUST OPEN THE DEEPEST PART OF YOURSELF. Lay a promise there. You will find it again. Cast your memories of it into the pool like a stone. Wait for them to touch the bottom. Know that the weeds and silt will soften their landing. Send the most secret part of yourself to the wood, the heart of it. Lay on the earth. Close your eyes, and wait. Eventually you will forget from which way you came.
The ritual is born of sex and blood. You must fuck the darkest part of yourself, you must own it. That is the person that you can claim when this is all over. The self that understands what it truly wants, not merely the clear shallows of your easier yearnings. Your blood should pound in your ears until the drumming is both a command and a question. When you are ready, when it tells you to, answer it.
The words should burn your tongue like whiskey, like shame, like difficult truth. You’ll feel something stir, in the oldest part of yourself. Don’t be afraid. This is the beast you can come home to. This is the future you can claim without recrimination. This is the joy you’ve always wanted, but didn’t yet deserve.
Take it.
{ X }
dave ring is the community chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival in Washington, DC. He was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2018 Futurescapes resident. More info at www.dave-ring.com. Follow him on Twitter at @slickhop.
We have submitted our nominations for possible inclusion in the 2018 Best of the Net anthology, which honors literary work that originally appeared on the internet between 7/1/2017 & 6/30/2018, and they are:
“DROUGHT” – flash prose by Kim Coleman Foote ( from FLAPPERHOUSE #15 – Fall 2017)
A young woman experiences some dark and stormy times during a Florida hurricane in “A Blond Joke,” Addy Evenson‘s hauntingly surreal short story from our Summer 2018 issue.
{ X }
SHELBY, HONEY, YOU’RE THE WORST WAITRESS IN THE WHOLE WORLD, Dad told me. He said, A monkey could do better. So I’m sending you away to visit your Gramma Kay.
That was up in Key Largo. Gramma Kay lived in a three-story blue house under palm trees, and next to a canal. It smelled like seawater, sawdust and stone. I hadn’t been there since I was seven. My mom had taken me out of there one night.
She said, No more drunk-madness.
Gramma Kay, like a lot of stewardesses, loved her margaritas by the pink sunset. When I was little, Gramma Kay used to take me for rides in her convertible car. She was bottled blond, like me.
So I wrote Gramma Kay a letter. It said,
Dear Gramma Kay, I know it’s been years, but I’d like to visit. Well, I don’t really have much choice. Dad is sending me there in less than a week because he doesn’t know what to do with me. He says that I’m flighty and a drunk like you. I promise that’s not all there is to me. I think that you’ll find if you take the time to get to know me that I have a lot of your good traits in me.
Love,
Shelby
So I headed out to see her. I took economy class. I didn’t have enough cash to check both of my bags, so I kept my favorite one. When I got to the curb, the yellow-cab driver looked at the address and said, You’re really going right in it, aren’t you? I said, How do you mean? And he said, The hurricane. He looked at me like he thought I was dumb but truly I didn’t have cable because cable makes people slow. So I just didn’t hear anything about it.
He stopped by the gravel road, and then got in a big hurry to drive off. I guess it was pretty windy there. And empty. I stood there on the cement, with my aquamarine suitcase. I wore flamingo-pink heels. I walked.
I knocked on the door.
Gramma Kay, I called. It’s me. It’s Shelby.
I heard music come down from the kitchen. Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville…
I went upstairs.
A man sliced a lime on the counter.
Oh, I said. Am I in the wrong place?
Are you Shelby, he said.
That’s me!
I’m Keif.
He was kind of handsome, but looked a little bit like leather. He was pale and had pale hair.
I’ll be here, at your service, he said. I’m the housekeeper. I’m here to watch Enchilada while your Gramma and Grampa are out for the hurricane.
What’s that you’re making, I said.
It’s a key lime pie.
A key lime pie! Oh, God, I love it!
Good. It’s for you.
How sweet. So, they knew I was coming?
Yes.
I’ll just put my things down in the guest room.
I came out again.
Oh my god, nothing has changed. Nothing at all, I said.
The lights flickered.
It’s horrible weather, I said.
That’s Maria, Keif said. It’s the worst of its kind.
Are we safe here, I asked.
Well, someone has to babysit Enchilada, he said.
Enchilada, my darling, my darling!
I ran to his cage and opened the door.
Oh, I cried. What is wrong with him? He’s not moving.
Oh, no, Keif said.
Oh no. He’s dead!
Oh no, Keif said. I’m so sorry.
I don’t understand. It looks like you’ve been feeding him.
I have.
But Gramma Kay got him because she said he would live longer than she would, I said.
We ate the key lime pie. It was real good, with home-made whipped cream and graham cracker pie crust. Keif took out the rum then, and I gave him a look that my ex said makes me seem up to no good at all.
FLAPPERHOUSE 