“Ma, I am going to marry Yingzi next month.”
Translated by Shouhua Qi
MEXICO
Labyrinth
Juan José Barrientos
LABYRINTHS ARE DESIGNED to make it difficult or impossible for those who venture into them to find the exit. But a very different building exists.
Those who have entered it remember the usual corridors, turns, and staircases, but also the murmur of a party, of muted laughter, furtive comments, the tinkling of glasses or silverware, sometimes the panting of secret lovers, the burst of an orchestra or jazz combo or at least a melody interpreted by a solitary piano.
Upon hearing them, they hurry to draw near, but the strange architecture, not devoid of traps and pitfalls, sends them down a chute like trespassers onto the street.
From there they look back at the bright and inaccessible celebration, where it seems that everything is happiness.
Translated by Juan José Barrientos
and Gwen Shapard
SCOTLAND
The Light Eater
Kirsty Logan
IT BEGAN WITH the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her taste buds. Without him life was so dark, and all the holiday debris only made it worse. She promised herself she wouldn’t bite down.
The bulb was sweet and sharp, and it slid down her throat with a feeling of relief: an itch finally scratched. She came to with a shock. At the realization of what she’d done, she tangled the lights back into their box and pushed them onto the highest shelf. The next day she pulled down the box and ate the rest. The power cable was slippery as licorice.
She got hungrier as the days passed. A lightbulb blew; she went to change it but ended up sucking it like a gobstopper. She had soon eaten the rest of the bulbs in the house. Lamps mushroomed up from every flat surface—and there’s no good in a darkened light. Each day she visited the hardware shop and walked home with bags full to clinking. Her eyes were always full of light; with each blink she caught gold on her eyelashes.
One night she opened her mouth to yawn, and saw that her path was lit. Up she jumped, pajamaed and barefoot, and followed the light across streets and playgrounds, fields and forests, all the way to the edge of the land.
She paused on the rocks, between the trees at her back and the black of the sea. This is where he left, and this is where she could find him again. She stretched her body to the sky in readiness, then opened her mouth to outshine the stars.
She spat out the bulbs—one, two; nineteen, twenty—in a runway from trees to shore. She spread herself out on the sand. A perfect starfish, a fallen body. An X, so he could find his way back.
ENGLAND
Late for Dinner
Jim Crace
THERE IS NO greater pleasure than to be expected at a meal and not arrive.
While the first guests were standing in the villa’s lobby with their wet hair and their dry wine, their early efforts at a conversation saved and threatened by fresh arrivals at the door, he was driving slowly in the rain along the coastal highway, enjoying his loud absence from the room, enjoying—first, the cranes and depots of the port, and then the latest condominiums, the half-glimpsed bypassed villages with their dead roads, the banks of coastal gravel, the wind, the darkness, and the trees.
While they were being seated at the dining table and were thinking—those who knew him—Lui’s always late, he was taking pleasure from the water on the tarmac, the old movie romance of the windscreen wipers and the dashboard lights, the prospect of the speedy, starless, hungry night ahead.
At what point would his sister or her husband, George, dial his home, discreetly from another room, only to get the answer phone and leave the message . . . What? Was he okay? Had he forgotten that they’d asked him round to eat with friends? Would he come late? Was he aware what trouble he’d put them to? Would he arrive in time to charm the sweet young teacher that they’d found and placed at his left elbow?
At what point would his plate, his napkin, and his cutlery be gathered up and two women asked to shift their chairs along to fill his place and break the gendered pattern of the table?
At what point would his hostess say, It’s not like him at all?
While they were eating in his absence—a sweet corn soup, a choice of paddock lamb or vegetarian risotto, Mother Flimsy’s tart with brandy—he was driving with one hand and, with the other, breaking pieces off his chocolate bar. He was dreaming repartee and dreaming manners-of-a-king and being far the smartest, sharpest person in the room.
While they were sitting in his sister’s long salon, for coffee and a little nip of Boulevard liqueur, and getting cross about some small remark their host had made at their expense, Lui reached the hundred-kilometer mark that he had set himself. He took the exit from the highway, slowed down to drive the narrow underpass—sixty sobering meters of bright lights, dry road, wind-corralled litter, a couple sheltering—and turned onto the opposite lane. He headed back toward the town and home, another hundred k, a hundred k less cinematic, less romantic, and more futile than the journey out.
The rain, now coming from the right, presented unexpected angles for the car. It tilted at the windscreen with more percussion than before. He had to put his wipers on their fastest setting. The smell was weather, chocolate, gasoline. The skyline warmed and lifted with its fast-advancing lights, those attic rooms, those bars, those streets, those television sets, those sweeping cars and cabs, those marriages that brighten up the night.
His eyes were sore and tired. His mouth was dry. He’d have to concentrate to take his pleasure from the drive, his safe and happy absence from the room, his prudent, timid, well-earned thirst. He put a steady glass up to his lips and sipped. Dipped his spoon into the sweet corn soup. Chose the lamb. Nodded at the windscreen wipers for a second helping of the tart. How witty he could be, how certain in his views, how helpful with the wine, how neat and promising. The pretty woman on his left extended her slim arm and squeezed his hand by way of thanks for his good company, and slipped out of the room into his car, a passenger, an absentee, the gender pattern at the table restored. He broke his chocolate bar in half and shared with her the unfed midnight journey into town.
Appears as #36 in The Devil’s Larder
MEXICO
Volcanic Fireflies
Mónica Lavín
ADAPTED TO POPOCATÉPETL’S sulfurous crater, this species of Coleoptera is endemic to the Valley of Mexico. It wasn’t reported in the literature until 1994, when Metro maintenance personnel encountered hundreds of fragile and sickly insects deposited between the tracks. Urban entomologists, long buried in routine fly and tick epidemics, were astonished by the golden powder emanating from the creatures, along with their signature stench, more typical of mineral springs than insects. With rigorous fieldwork—if that’s what you call nocturnal strolls in Metro stations—the scientists officially experienced the nighttime flickering glow of what we now know as the volcanic firefly.
Sophisticated chemical reactions catalyzed by sulfur are responsible for the luminescence of these inhabitants of the volcano’s crater, with its darkness, high temperatures and boiling lava. Old as the volcano itself, the creatures have now, for whatever reason, spread to the luminous space of the valley. Perhaps forced out by new gaseous vapors or volatile cinders, perhaps fugitive for generations, some subset found, in the blackness of Metro tunnels, the temperatures that enable them—after metabolizing the sulfur oxide of the contaminated atmosphere—to glow brightly and reproduce in an anonymity only recently violated. Magnification first revealed the eyes of these amber insects as fatigued, aged, with growths in their surface membrane. Fine electrodes detected a violent interior vibration, as if the insects’ vital liquids were imitating the gurgling of lava. Since then, people have given generous donations for the preservation of this species, born of volcanic activity, as it seeks the metropolis. A high-risk aerial expeditio
n is planned—by the more romantic entomologists, if this branch of study admits such inclination—to lower some of these insects into the cone of the crater, protected in an asbestos cage, to observe their capacity for re-adaptation. But the more skeptical—always the most realistic—think that it’s pointless, given the change already in progress. Golden and potbellied, volcanic fireflies have taken flight on theater stages, in actors’ dressing rooms, in corners of the red-light district and in bars. With vestigial auras of a volcanic past that’s moved its vertigo to another setting, they can be found wherever the smell of sulfur abounds and under the microscope now exhibit a young and lascivious look.
Translated by Patricia Dubrava
CUBA
Insomnia
Virgilio Piñera
THE MAN GOES to bed early but he cannot fall asleep. He turns and tosses. He twists the sheets. He lights a cigarette. He reads a bit. He puts out the light again. But he cannot sleep. At three in the morning he gets up. He calls on his friend next door and confides in him that he cannot sleep. He asks for advice. The friend suggests he take a walk and maybe he will tire himself out—then he should drink a cup of linden tea and turn out the light. He does all these things but he does not manage to fall asleep. Again he gets up. This time he goes to see the doctor. As usual the doctor talks a good deal but in the end the man still cannot manage to sleep. At six in the morning he loads a revolver and blows out his brains. The man is dead but still he is unable to sleep. Insomnia is a very persistent thing.
Translated by Alberto Manguel
RUSSIA
Four Hands
Margarita Meklina
MOTHER: A SHORT, black-haired jackdaw, she cordially opens mouth, door, piano. She walks right in, sits, begins playing right off. Bravo, Nonna, says her husband. It really is bravura. On the walls: candelabras and handicrafts created from nature’s cornucopia. Gay elation: “Know what I’m playing?” then acute condemnation: “Surely you’re joking, not the boyish Shainsky! It’s Chopin!”
The parting gift’s a shell, an abalone. She’s drawn to the cradle the guests brought. “I keep telling mine to try, but they’re in no hurry to make a grandma out of me!” An ostensibly joking nod to her weak son—some software specialist—and his strong, muscular wife.
Father: Looks like a bowlegged Cossack. Used to be a first-class pianist too, but ruined his reach (fishing), his back (sciatica), and the joy of music (drinking). Now he fiddles with his boat, named in honor of his black-haired helpmeet. There’s pictures of him and his catfish: he’s happy and bewhiskered, the catfish has whiskers too, but is dead. Father lives, but without will, like the forte pedal under his wife’s foot. He hems and haws in parting; he’s spackling, fudging it, fixing his oarlocks as he sits on the hull.
Son: A child soloist, went on stage with the orchestra (coughing in the auditorium, parents stock-still), then abandoned the bow to bond with the Italian people. On the way through Italy to the States he washed cars, hawked pins and mangy matreshka dolls on the sidewalk, and now he’s afraid of everything: of being alone, of being single, of his mother’s fury, his father’s indifference.
Son’s Wife: They had the wedding on a boat that all the white trash could fit on. Fraternization of intellectual Soviet Jews with the wife’s brother and cousin: arrogant American soldier-boy who went AWOL twice, slutty secretary. The young wife had three pairs of parents, all rednecks: her father—knobby head, shit-kicker boots—got serially divorced.
After the wedding: a rented apartment, shelter dogs (biters, who after a few training sessions at fifty bucks a pop had to be put down), snow and skis in Sierra Nevada, rest and sun in Israel, trips to India, Japan, Katmandu. Finally: their own home, with a stubbornly leaky faucet. Son reports to mother: yes, I bought a house, no, I haven’t fixed the pipes yet.
Mother anxiously awaits a grandchild. The first few tries are failures, but finally, the belly appears and swells serenely. In the sixth month the
Wife announced that she’s a lesbian.
Mother says that she refuses to have anything to do with a daughter-in-law like this, and
Father, with his catatonic, photogenic catfish, just repeats after the mother and continues floating on the boat named after her.
Son is in total shock. Got to fix the faucet and sell the house. Got to find another wife, and fast (he can’t make it alone, but he’d had all kinds of girls in bed before the wedding: students with improbable majors, spiteful ice queens, pimply nothing-muches with their salicylic acid).
Wife: Wanted to get married to be like everybody else, “to have a real wedding too, with guests, with nice stuff,” and so tried to smother all feeling for women, but she couldn’t do a thing about it.
Son is in shock.
Mother and Father are in total denial: she’s not any daughter-in-law of ours, her daughter is no grandchild to us, and if you keep visiting her, you won’t be any son to us.
Wife: I wasn’t even looking for anything, after all Sonya was already here under my heart, but then I saw Her and knew right away.
Son: My ex-wife and I got together, and I was suddenly struck: how did I get along with her for so long, this completely foreign person? This made me feel a little better, and right then Sonya started knocking . . . just as though she were waiting for me to fly in from Colorado (now we live in different states).
The next morning I got a call and I came right away, and there’s my ex-wife in labor, in the bathtub so everything’s natural, no anesthesia . . . I was holding her by one hand, and her live-in lover by the other. Then my Sonya came into the world, with her tiny little nose and nails . . . striking how much she looks like me . . .
Mother and Father: We don’t have any granddaughter. We don’t have any former daughter-in-law. There’s no such people.
They go to the piano and play a piece for four hands.
Translated by Anne O. Fisher
THE PHILIPPINES
Engkanto
Peter Zaragoza Mayshle
ONCE MY STUPID mother brought me to the arbularyo who told me to sit in front of him and took out a twig from his pants pocket and placed it against his palm measuring it and he waved it inches from my face and told me to close my eyes and I did and he told me to open my eyes and I did and he placed the twig on his palm and somehow it had grown longer extending a couple of inches past the tip of his middle finger and my mother gasped and he said that indeed an engkanto had found favor in me and he told me to lie on the floor and close my eyes and I did and he told my mother to close her eyes too and place her hands on my arms and grip them tightly and she did and I felt his damp hand clamp on my mouth and I felt his tobacco breath on my face and I felt his other hand massaging my breasts and my eyes popped open and I saw him leering down at me and when I tried to shout his hand clamped tighter on my mouth and when I began to squirm and struggle he shouted to my mother to keep her eyes closed and pray harder and hold me tighter for the engkanto was trying to break free and I twisted wildly and managed to kick him in the groin and he let out a yelp and I sat up and I looked at my mother and she looked at me both of us breathing heavily and she asked if the engkanto was still inside me and he croaked I was cured and my mother promised to send him a pail of crabs from father’s next catch and we left him there still holding on to his testicles and I never told my mother about what really happened for when we exchanged looks that day on the arbularyo’s floor I only saw benevolence and concern in her eyes unaware of what she had done. I have been her protector ever since.
ARGENTINA
Without a Net
Ana María Shua
TRAVELING FREAKS
Despised, listless, made into pariahs by the well-intentioned and the defenders of human rights, the freaks who once worked in the circus now wander the world aimlessly. They are the dwarves, bearded women, Siamese twins, pinheads, and snake men, the deformed and crippled individuals of all types who once upon a time would have earned an honorable living in show business. The r
eally notable ones show up on television. Because of the fallout there’s a lot of competition.
SURPRISE
We circus performers desperately try to figure out how to surprise the audience. It’s not enough to perfect traditional acts. We try, then, to outdo what has gone before: to do a somersault with five turns through the air, juggle with five anvils and five feathers, swallow an umbrella, or a lamppost, to sustain a human pyramid the size of an Egyptian pyramid on the slack wire, to enter a cage with 350 lions and two tigers, to make all the enemies of a randomly chosen audience member disappear.
How to surprise the audience? In the new circuses, they dress up the old tricks with costumes, choreography, lighting, and with acting.
But, as we get older, our bodies can’t take the extremes. We’re not beautiful enough, funny enough, elastic enough, ingenious enough to get jobs with the new circuses. How to surprise those damn cynical spectators who’ve seen everything? In an attempt to offer the ultimate show, we let ourselves die on the sand amid the applause, and it’s not enough, it’s not enough. Anyone can do that.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
The pleasure of seeing others risk their lives, the joy of someone else being in danger, is no longer acceptable. Nowadays the trapeze artists use safety wires, the tigers are muzzled, the bears have no claws, the knife thrower hurls his weapons against an outline of a human being.
Flash Fiction International Page 8
