Flash Fiction International

by Robert Shapard James Thomas

  He stops, his back to the café window, and digs in his front pocket. The small truck, white and latticed with dried mud, appears to be his. Luis knocks on the glass and waves. Daniel squints. He offers an uncertain closed-lipped smile.

  You’re funny, she says, standing up. She walks out of the café. Luis says hey-hey-hey, the word tugged out of him in sharp little jerks.

  Daniel, she says. She steps into him, so close his head blocks the hard afternoon light. He smells like bluff sage and wind. His eyes are mild as cloud shadows. She sets her mouth on the wilderness of his mouth, lets it open against the rough structures of his teeth.

  ARGENTINA

  The Lord of the Flies

  Marco Denevi

  THE FLIES IMAGINED their god. It was also a fly. The lord of the flies was a fly, now green, now black and gold, now pink, now white, now purple, an inconceivable fly, a beautiful fly, a monstrous fly, a terrible fly, a benevolent fly, a vengeful fly, a just fly, a youthful fly, but always a fly. Some embellished his size so that he was compared to an ox, others imagined him to be so small that you couldn’t see him. In some religions, he was missing wings (“He flies,” they argued, “but he doesn’t need wings”), while in others he had infinite wings. Here it was said he had antennae like horns, and there that he had eyes that surrounded his entire head. For some he buzzed constantly, and for others he was mute, but he could communicate just the same. And for everyone, when flies died, he took them up to paradise. Paradise was a hunk of rotten meat, stinking and putrid, that souls of the dead flies could gnaw on for an eternity without devouring it; yes, this heavenly scrap of refuse would be constantly reborn and regenerated under the swarm of flies. For the good flies. Because there were also bad flies, and for them there was a hell. The hell for condemned flies was a place without excrement, without waste, trash, stink, without anything of anything; a place sparkling with cleanliness and illuminated by a bright white light; in other words, an ungodly place.

  Translated by José Chaves

  SOUTH KOREA

  Honor Killing

  Kim Young-ha

  SHE WAS TWENTY-ONE, with fair, beautiful skin. Even when bare, her face glowed, always radiant and dewy. This was precisely why the dermatologist’s office hired her as the receptionist. Her job was simple. All she had to do was write down the patients’ names, tell them in a friendly voice, “Please take a seat until we call your name,” find their charts, and hand them over to the nurses. Her glowing, translucent skin created high expectations, encouraging the patients to place their trust in the office, which bustled with a sudden increase in patients.

  But one day, her face started to break out. The problem began with the appearance of a small pimple, growing worse and worse until it spread across her entire face. Nobody could figure out why. At first, the young doctor, who had only managed to start the business with the help of bank loans, treated her lightheartedly, but later zeroed in on her with desperation. And the more he focused on her, the more her condition worsened. Red spots covered her face, making her look like a splotchy pizza from far away. The despondent doctor pulled out his hair and the nurses hated her. One spring day, she left behind a note—“I apologize to everyone. I’m sorry”—and committed suicide. The office hired a new receptionist. Her skin was so luminous that it forced everyone’s eyes shut.

  Translated by Chi-Young Kim

  CANADA/UNITED STATES

  Signs

  Bess Winter

  IT IS AFTER a series of nubile young researchers have begun to parade through Koko the gorilla’s life that she learns the sign for nipple. She draws her heavy arms close to her chest, and her leathery pointers spring out toward the unsuspecting graduate student. A look of expectation settles onto her simian face. Sometimes her gaze rests on the soft-sloping clavicle that betrays itself from beneath an unbuttoned collar, sometimes on the ponytail that rests coyly on one shoulder like a thick tassel, and sometimes on the face of Dr. Thomas, senior supervising researcher, as if she’s asking him whether she’s doing it right.

  Inevitably, the student looks to Dr. Thomas. What should I do? What should I say?

  Nipple, signs Koko.

  Inevitably, Dr. Thomas tells her it is her duty, as a paid researcher, not to interfere: that she should indulge Koko’s fetish, that this, too, should be researched.

  Inevitably, there is a long moment while the student struggles with the request. Dr. Thomas fumbles his pencil, tapping it against his notepad, twirling it between two fingers. He does this until the student takes in a long, reedy breath, looks down to unbutton her blouse with shaking hands.

  Then there is the moment when she peels off her blouse and unhooks her bra, and the moment when she sets the bra beside her on the table or hangs it by one strap over the edge of the chair.

  Dr. Thomas knows there are two types of graduate students: the ones who put their bras beside them on the table and the ones who hang them behind themselves on the chair. They may be further categorized by type of bra: underwire, sports. Then there are those who don’t wear bras at all. He can never predict which students will not be wearing bras, except that these young women are usually small-breasted, gamine.

  And there is the inscrutable moment between woman and beast when the researcher, breathing fast, sits half-clad in front of the gorilla, and the gorilla does not sign at all. When the researcher tries to avoid a direct gaze into the gorilla’s eyes lest she provoke her, she cannot; Koko seems to address her directly and without words. Dr. Thomas jots down notes, but he cannot understand why, in this moment, Koko reaches out to take the students’ hands. He can only hypothesize about why some graduate students cry at the slightest touch and why some smile at the gorilla, why some curl into Koko’s arms when she opens them. Why some allow her to touch and gentle them, to trace their eyes and nose and soft neck with her rough fingers. Why some nod knowingly, and why the gorilla nods back, and why he feels a sudden shift in the room, as if he’s the unwelcome guest at a sacred rite.

  He can only guess at this, too: why, after each student leaves for the day, and it’s just Dr. Thomas and Koko, the gorilla regards him with a withering look. Why she pokes at her fruit and then looks up at him like a wife waiting to broach a touchy topic at dinner.

  And why, when she finally signs to him, nipple, he searches her earth-brown eyes for some silent instruction. But if there are words in those eyes, he can’t find them. Those eyes are deep and ripe. They’re unmapped territory. He doesn’t know whether to remove his shirt or call back a graduate student. With a shy hand, he touches his collar and makes to open it. But before he completes the gesture the moment passes, or he has done the wrong thing already. Koko looks away.

  UNITED STATES

  Idolatry

  Sherman Alexie

  MARIE WAITED FOR hours. That was okay. She was Indian and everything Indian—powwows, funerals, and weddings—required patience. This audition wasn’t Indian, but she was ready when they called her name.

  “What are you going to sing?” the British man asked.

  “Patsy Cline,” she said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  She’d only sung the first verse before he stopped her.

  “You are a terrible singer,” he said. “Never sing again.”

  She knew this moment would be broadcast on national television. She’d already agreed to accept any humiliation.

  “But my friends, my voice coaches, my mother, they all say I’m great.”

  “They lied.”

  How many songs had Marie sung in her life? How many lies had she been told? On camera, Marie did the cruel math, rushed into the green room, and wept in her mother’s arms.

  In this world, we must love the liars or go unloved.

  CHILE

  Lost

  Alberto Fuguet

  IN A COUNTRY filled with missing people, disappearing is easy. All the efforts are concentrated on the dead, so those of us who are among the living can fade quickly away. They won’
t come looking; they won’t even realize you’re gone. If I’ve seen you before, I don’t remember. You see, everyone down there has bad memories. Either they don’t remember, or they simply don’t want to.

  A professor once told me that I was lost. I replied that in order to lose yourself, first you’d have to know where you are.

  Then I thought, What if it’s the reverse?

  I was erased for fifteen years. I abandoned everything, including myself. There was a quiz I never took. My girlfriend was having a birthday party and I never showed up. I got on a bus bound for Los Vilos. I didn’t have a plan; it just happened. It was what had to happen, and there was no turning back.

  At first I felt guilty. Then pursued. Would they be after me? Would they find me? What if I run into someone?

  But I didn’t run into anybody.

  They say that the world is a handkerchief. It’s not. People who say that don’t know what the world is like. It’s huge and—above all—strange and foreign. You can roam far and wide and nobody will care.

  Now I’m an adult. In some ways. I’ve got hair on my back, and sometimes the zipper doesn’t zip. I’ve been to a lot of places and done things I never thought I’d do. But you survive. You get used to things. Nothing is so bad. Nothing.

  I’ve been to a lot of places. Have you been to Tumbes? To the port of Buenaventura? Or San Pedro Sula? How about Memphis?

  Like a puppy, I followed a Kmart checkout girl as far as El Centro, California, a town that smelled of fertilizer. The relationship started off better than it ended. Then I went to work in the casinos in Laughlin, Nevada, that lined the Colorado River. I lived in a house across the way from Bullhead City with a woman named Frances and a guy named Frank, but we never saw each other. We left each other notes. Both of them were bad spellers.

  Once, in a diner in Tulsa, a woman told me that I reminded her of a son who’d never come home. “Why do you think he left?” she asked. I said I didn’t know. But maybe I did.

  Or maybe not.

  Without wanting to, I ended up teaching English to Hispanic kids in Galveston. The Texas flag looks a lot like Chile’s. One of the girls died in my arms. She fell off the swing set: I’d pushed too hard and she flew out of the seat. It seemed like she flew for two minutes through the hazy Gulf sky. I didn’t want to hurt her, but nevertheless, I did. So . . . what?

  What can you do?

  Have you been to Mérida, on the Yucatán? In the summer there it hits 108 degrees, and they close off the downtown area on Sundays so the people can dance. Sometimes I find a girl and join in.

  Last year I decided to Google my own name. Maybe they were searching for me. But even I couldn’t find myself. Just a guy with the same name as me who lives in “Barquisimeto, Venezuela,” and has a dental practice. He has three children and believes in God.

  Sometimes I dream about living in Barquisimeto, having three children, and believing in God. Sometimes, I even dream that they have found me.

  Translated by Ezra E. Fitz

  MEXICO

  The Extravagant Behavior of the Naked Woman

  Josefina Estrada

  THE WOMAN WHO walks naked through the streets of Santa María provokes astonishment in the children, delight in the men, and incredulity and anger in the women. She sits down at the corner of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Sabino, next to the bicycle repair shop. The children come out of the two adjacent slums and cross the street to watch her as she sniffs glue from a bag, her only possession. She doesn’t seem to care that she’s naked, yet neither could you say that she’d made a conscious decision to display her dark, abundant flesh.

  Even when she’s sitting down you can tell she’s a woman of vast stature. At shoulder level, her hair is a mass of tangles that contains balls of chewing gum, bits of earth, dust and fluff. The applause and whistles of the onlookers grow louder when she opens her legs and begins to scratch herself hard in the most impenetrable part of her being. At this point, the young men, who are always hanging around, can’t suppress their laughter. Instinctively, as if fearing that at any moment they too might reveal their mysteries, they finger the flies of their trousers.

  And when the woman lies down and turns her back on them, the onlookers begin throwing things at her. She takes a while to react, but they all know that as soon as she sits up, she’ll get to her feet and chase her attackers. And the children will then be able to see that her breasts are not, in fact, stuck fast to her ample abdomen. Some of the smaller children go and tell their mothers that “the woman who wears no underpants or anything” is on the loose again. And their mothers forbid them to go back outside.

  There was a period when she was seen by several women near where Aldama crosses Mina. Then for two years she prowled up and down Avenida Guerrero. She would go to sleep surrounded by a pile of clothes donated by well-meaning people, and which served as both pillow and mattress. When she grew tired of her bundle of clothes, she would burn it using the same solvent she inhaled.

  The huge, dark woman goes into building sites to wash. The glee of the workers reaches its height when she bends over to drink from the tap. They’re beside themselves with excitement when she picks up handfuls of lime and powders her armpits. Any man bold enough to approach her has always been repelled by the ferocity of her insults. The women who live around Calle Sor Juana complain not about the exhibition she makes of herself but about the fact that she’s freer than the men. Instead of putting an end to the extravagant behavior of this woman—which arouses lewd thoughts even in the most saintly of men—the police, they say, spend all their time arresting drunks.

  Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  JAPAN

  Sleeping Habit

  Yasunari Kawabata

  STARTLED BY A sharp pain, as if her hair were being pulled out, she woke up three or four times. But when she realized that a skein of her black hair was wound around the neck of her lover, she smiled to herself. In the morning, she would say, “My hair is this long now. When we sleep together, it truly grows longer.”

  Quietly, she closed her eyes.

  “I don’t want to sleep. Why do we have to sleep? Even though we are lovers, to have to go to sleep, of all things!” On nights when it was all right for her to stay with him, she would say this, as if it were a mystery to her.

  “You’d have to say that people make love precisely because they have to sleep. A love that never sleeps—the very idea is frightening. It’s something thought up by a demon.”

  “That’s not true. At first, we neither slept either, did we? There’s nothing so selfish as sleep.”

  That was the truth. As soon as he fell asleep, he would pull his arm out from under her neck, frowning unconsciously as he did so. She, too, no matter where she embraced him, would find when she awakened that the strength had gone out of her arm.

  “Well, then, I’ll wind my hair around and around your arm and hold you tight.”

  Winding the sleeve of his sleeping kimono around her arm, she’d held him hard. Just the same, sleep stole away the strength from her fingers.

  “All right, then, just as the old proverb says, I’ll tie you up with the rope of a woman’s hair.” So saying, she’d drawn a long skein of her raven-black hair around his neck.

  That morning, however, he smiled at what she said.

  “What do you mean, your hair has grown longer? It’s so tangled up you can’t pass a comb through it.”

  As time went by, they forgot about that sort of thing. These nights, she slept as if she’d even forgotten he was there. But, if she happened to wake up, her arm was always touching him—and his arm was touching her. By now, when they no longer thought about it, it had become their sleeping habit.

  Translated by Lane Dunlop

  BRAZIL

  Night Drive

  Rubem Fonseca

  I ARRIVED HOME WITH my briefcase bulging with papers, reports, studies, research, proposals, contracts. My wife, who was playing solitaire in bed, a glass of whiskey
on the nightstand, said, without glancing up from the cards, “You look tired.” The usual house sounds: my daughter in her room practicing voice modulation, quadraphonic music from my son’s room. “Why don’t you put down that suitcase?” my wife asked. “Take off those clothes, have a nice glass of whiskey. You’ve got to learn to relax.”

  I went to the library, the place in the house where I enjoy being by myself, and, as usual, did nothing. I opened the research volume on the desk but didn’t see the letters and numbers. I was merely waiting. “You never stop working. I’ll bet your partners don’t work half as hard and they earn the same.” My wife came into the room, a glass in her hand. “Can I tell her to serve dinner?”

  The maid served the meal French style. My children had grown up; my wife and I were fat. “It’s that wine you like,” she said, clicking her tongue with pleasure. My son asked for money during the coffee course; my daughter asked for money during the liqueur. My wife didn’t ask for anything—we have a joint checking account.

  “Shall we go for a drive?” I asked her. I knew she wouldn’t go—it was time for her soap opera.

  “I don’t see what you get out of going for a drive every night, but the car cost a fortune, it has to be used. I’m just less and less attracted to material things,” she replied.

  The children’s cars were blocking the garage door. I moved both cars and parked them in the street, moved my car from the garage and parked it in the street, put the other two cars back in the garage, and closed the door. All this maneuvering left me slightly irritated, but when I saw my car’s broad bumpers, their special chrome-plated double reinforcement, I felt my heart race with euphoria. I turned the key in the ignition. It was a powerful motor that generated its strength silently beneath its aerodynamic hood. As always, I left without knowing where I would go. It had to be a deserted street, in this city with more people than flies. Not the Avenida Brasil—too busy. I came to a poorly lighted street, heavy with dark trees, the perfect spot. A man or a woman? It made little difference, really, but no one with the right characteristics appeared. I began to get tense. It always happened that way, and I even liked it—the sense of relief was greater. Then I saw the woman. It could be her, even though women were less exciting because they were easier. She was walking quickly, carrying a package wrapped in cheap paper—something from a bakery or the market. She was wearing a skirt and blouse.