Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  The first round of Terry’s handcrafted fireworks display screamed into the sky. The fireflies went dark as shimmering, multicolored lights washed over me. I grinned, in spite of everything. Terry always did the best fireworks. There were benefits to living next door to a wizard.

  As the next set of fireworks boomed and crackled overhead, a huge phoenix exploded from the tree line, leaving a raging fire in its wake. It screeched a challenge and dove at Terry’s house. I swore and grabbed my great ax. Living next to Terry had its drawbacks, too.

  Janet would have screamed at me for rushing into the fray. For a moment, I didn’t miss her at all.

  The phoenix was massive—it loomed in the night sky, half again the size of the biggest dragon I’d ever faced. A swipe from its fiery feathered tail ignited all of Terry’s carefully timed fireworks. They shot into the sky and framed the mythic bird like an explosive halo.

  I screamed a challenge of my own and charged across the yard. I felt alive for the first time in weeks.

  Terry hurled balls of ice at it. One glanced off of a massive wing. He spared me a single glance when I joined him. “Hey, Doug. I appreciate the help.”

  “What did you do to piss this thing off?” I asked, swinging and missing. For something so huge, it was damn hard to hit. Lucky for me, I’m hard to hit, too.

  “I might have stolen some eggshell fragments. For the fireworks.”

  “Eggshell fragments?” I asked. “It’s pissed over fragments?”

  Terry shrugged. “Baby phoenixes eat their shells.”

  “You stole food from its babies?”

  “I needed the shells!” Terry shouted. The phoenix snapped at him, and he barely managed to dodge in time. Its beak was longer than the wizard was tall.

  “Why?” I asked, swinging again, and scoring a hit this time. Hot blood singed the hair off my arms. “No one’s here to watch the show this year but me and you!”

  Terry slammed a bolt of ice into the phoenix’s left wing. “I wanted to cheer you up!”

  I stopped and gaped at him. He’d risked life and limb just because he knew how much I liked his fireworks? “You’re crazy.”

  Huge, burning claws raked down my back. Terry swore. I blacked out.

  Waking up in the hospital isn’t a new sensation for me. “Janet?” I called, groping for her hand. She’s always hated waiting in the hospital.

  “She’s not here,” Terry said. “And she’s not coming.”

  Memory came rushing back, and I let my hand fall. “Right.”

  “Thanks for your help back there. If you hadn’t distracted it, I would have been a goner.”

  “The phoenix. You didn’t kill it, did you?” I thought about its babies, hungry for eggshells, missing their mother.

  Terry shook its head. “No. I bribed it. Gave the damn thing half my stock of dragon claws.”

  I stared out the hospital room window. The view was familiar. “I can’t believe she didn’t come.”

  “Not everything rises from the ashes,” Terry said.

  The Plum Pudding Paradox

  Jay Werkheiser

  Professor Thomson, I’m here to save your Plum Pudding theory.”

  J. J. Thomson looked up from his desk. The stranger wore gentleman’s clothing, but they were dirty and disheveled. His deep-set gray eyes sparkled with intelligence.

  Thomson grunted and dropped his pen into its well. “Who the devil are you? And how did you get into my office at this hour?”

  “I’m a friend of Herbert Wells.”

  “What’s he teach? Physics? Chemistry?”

  “He’s a writer. Perhaps you read his chronicle of my exploits a few years back?”

  Thomson looked over his glasses at the untidy man. “Can’t say I’ve had the opportunity.”

  The stranger shrugged. “Pity. In the future, your Plum Pudding theory—”

  “Stop calling it that. The term is a gross oversimplification of my model.”

  “Oh, dear. Do I have my history wrong? Aren’t you the physicist who said that the atom is like a plum pudding?”

  Thomson drew back in indignation. “I never uttered such rubbish. My model proposes a diffuse positively charged cloud through which negative corpuscles revolve.”

  “The point is,” the stranger said, his gaunt face hardening with resolve, “next year Lord Rutherford will design an experiment that shows your model to be wrong.”

  “Ernest Rutherford? My old student? Brilliant man, but no Lord.”

  “Not yet. He won’t get the title until a few years after he proposes his nuclear model of the atom.”

  Thomson leveled a sharp gaze at the stranger. “And how would you have knowledge of the future?”

  “I’ve been there. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Rutherford’s work will lead to a new theory called quantum mechanics. It’s nearly an inverse of your model, a central positive nucleus surrounded by a negatively charged cloud.”

  Thomson raised his eyebrows. “And Ernest does all this?”

  “No, but he gets it started by disproving your model. And you have to stop him.”

  “Have I, indeed? Young man, even if I believed you, why on Earth would I want to impede scientific progress?”

  “You don’t know the terrible things I’ve seen.” The stranger’s face reflected the pain of his memories. He faltered, staring straight ahead as though seeing the horrors of the future once more.

  Thomson looked into the unfortunate man’s haunted eyes and his heart softened. “Stiff upper lip, old boy. Tell me what you found.”

  “It’s Rutherford’s nucleus! Once you have the nucleus, you can split the nucleus, and then—you’ve no idea the horrors mankind unleashes—will unleash—with that theory.”

  “But my good man,” Thomson said, “even if I were to dissuade Ernest from his experiment, someone else will find this nucleus.”

  “Ah, but you’re wrong. The new theory that arises in the future, quantum mechanics, says that reality exists only as a set of probabilities, none of which are truly real until observed. So don’t you see? The nucleus didn’t exist until Rutherford searched for it. Upon his measurement, nature rolled the dice and they came up nucleus. In essence, he created the nucleus by observing it.”

  Thomson struggled with the odd notion. “So you’re saying that if Ernest doesn’t do his experiment—”

  “Then nature doesn’t have to decide on the location of the atom’s positive charge, and it can remain diffuse. The Plum Pudding atom becomes reality.”

  “So all I have to do is write a letter dissuading Ernest, and my model of the atom becomes true.” The ghost of a smile played across Thomson’s lips.

  The stranger’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Will you do it?”

  “But it’s all nonsense.” Thomson threw up his arms and laughed. “Of course I shan’t write to Ernest with such rubbish.”

  The stranger grabbed Thomson’s arm in a grip like iron. “But you must! Consider this,” the man said, and his face became cunning. “Your letter cannot do any harm. If I’m wrong, someone else will discover the nucleus. But if I’m right, you’ll have saved the future. You must send that letter!”

  “Oh, very well,” Thomson conceded. “If it means that much, then I shall send it. He’ll likely ignore it anyway.”

  The man grabbed Thomson’s hand and pumped it vigorously. “Thank you, Professor. You won’t regret it.” With a start, he withdrew his hand. “I must be off. I can use my machine to find out…”

  Thomson never heard the end of the sentence, because the man was already out the door and trotting down the hallway. With a wry smile, Thomson watched him retreat from the Cavendish Laboratory. After a long moment, he returned to his desk and pulled a fresh piece of paper from a drawer. He lifted his pen from its well and wrote “Dear Ernest,” at the top of the page. He paused, allowing the pen to hover over the page. With a sigh, he reminded himself that he had given his word.

  His head snapped up when the door to h
is office flew open and the stranger burst through. In the few moments he had been gone, his hair had thinned and his eyes had acquired the first hint of crow’s feet. “Put down that pen!” he shouted.

  “Good sir, did you not moments ago convince me to write this letter?”

  In a voice just short of hysterical, the stranger said, “You’ve no idea the damage mankind will do with your Plum Pudding model!”

  Where Has the Dog Gone?

  Lisbeth Mizula

  The dog didn’t leave a message, a forwarding address, or even a thank-you for all the years he received two meals a day and all the water he could drink. The mongrel simply disappeared. However, he did leave something. It took me two hours, a trip to the drugstore, plugging in a heating pad (made sticky with my own blood from a day-old scratch by an overly-curious squirrel), and a powerful flashlight, but I held forty-seven of Rufus’s fleas hostage in a small, covered-glass aquarium that used to house my favorite mold specimen till it started resembling my ex-husband.

  I made my face into a cold mask and held the canister of Be Gone! flea powder against the side of their tank. “Where’s Rufus?” I asked, searching their miniscule, unblinking eyes. “Or would you prefer, a light dusting with…the powder?” I shook the unopened canister over their tank menacingly.

  I withheld blood and water from the tiny creatures for twenty-four hours. The next day, I tore back over to Sackit’s Drugs on my bicycle, got a second canister of Be Gone!, and placed it at the opposite end of their tank. As I suspected, they couldn’t casually go about their lives within constant sight of the twin vehicles of murder.

  After much hopping around, the fleas arranged themselves on the floor of the tank to form the letter F. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and, F is my favorite letter (!). I could work with this.

  “He went to Fisk Park,” I guessed. The letter went fuzzy, then jerked itself back into sharp F formation.

  “Ferdy’s Bakery,” I guessed. Again they fuzzed up.

  “Friendly’s Ice Cream,” I said. Then, “Fall Park. Feinman’s Pond. Fredericka’s Frankfurters. Fishy’s Fried Sticks.” The longer I guessed, the louder my voice grew until I was shouting out the names of every F establishment I could remember.

  “Faulkner’s Library! The Firefighter’s Forum! The Fruit of the Loom underwear plant!” My memory used up, I opened the Yellow Pages and called off an hour of Fs. I even made some up.

  But the fleas sat there, quiet, in formation. Or maybe they were lying down. In the end, in desperation, I uttered the name I’d been hoping to go the rest of my life without hearing again,

  “Frankenmeyeramousadamdavidbilltedtom.” The name fairly flew off my lips. It was the name of my ex-old man. The fleas jumped over themselves in excitement then spelled out a thin, weary looking, “Yes.”

  Hearing his name aloud, even though it was just me saying it, I went into a murderous rage. White powder filled the air.

  Now, forty-seven small grave markers line my driveway. Most people think it’s spilled gravel from the road.

  Don’t Take This Personally

  Richard Holinger

  Dear Author,

  Thank you for submitting your work to Calumet Review. Unfortunately, it does not meet the needs of our magazine. Please do not take this rejection personally. You may be an excellent writer, but this particular piece does not fit our magazine. Good luck in placing your work elsewhere.

  We recommend you read our magazine before submitting again. Perhaps you would consider a subscription. Most magazines our size are supported by generous donors, not by the authors who appear there. Don’t take this personally, but you have not committed to a subscription, and that makes you a parasite. Apparently you imagine we wait around for your next submission to arrive, every day clawing through hundreds of large envelopes to find your return address so we can rip it open and begin a communal reading of your latest revelation.

  If so, think again. Don’t take this personally, but when Kara, the graduate assistant, finds our magazine name misspelled (one “l,” not two) in your sloppy handwriting, she arranges a conference call among editors. “Are your wills in order?” she queries, “Because you will die laughing.”

  We do. We die laughing. That’s a trope. A hyperbole. You might try using some in your writing. Because—and don’t take this personally, but I tell you this because the creative writing instructor in me can’t stand someone suffering from a total lack of creativity—your manuscript contains not one memorable phrase, not one original idea, not one stylistic innovation.

  In fact, as long as I have your attention (assuming you know how to read), I want to ask you something: Do you own any contemporary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction books? Have you ever opened anything other than Where’s Waldo? When did you decide on Spark Notes over the texts? Are you aware the New Yorker is something more than a Big Apple resident? Do you skim even the cartoon captions? Take my advice: Study them, if for no other reason than to learn to write realistic dialogue, using the vernacular, contractions, and sentence fragments.

  Again, don’t take this personally, but your plot couldn’t keep a vampire awake at a necking party. Deus ex machina went out with Dickens, and your happy ending reflects your fantasies. We look for the crafted manipulation of mimetic particulars to superimpose an aesthetic reality upon subjective and objective perception.

  But why are we wasting time telling you all this when you couldn’t write anything more convincing than a grocery list? We don’t know, especially because you probably stopped reading our rejection letter at “Unfortunately.” We inform you of these matters for the same reason we publish our magazine, because we hope someday we’ll be read.

  So now it’s on to the next slush-pile submission. Don’t take this personally, but I look forward to whatever crosses my lap after yours because I know more surely than my wife will want to eat out tonight that it will be an improvement.

  Sincerely yours,

  Malcolm Joy Goodfellow

  BTW, don’t take this personally, but if you really want our advice, here it is: Stop writing or kill yourself. At the very least, don’t send anything else. Anywhere. To anyone. Save postage, paper or, if e-mailing your work, time.

  Also, your manuscript arrived without an SASE, so this letter will not be mailed. Naturally, you thought we would accept your work and would call with good news. Don’t take this personally, but you’re delusional. Seek help. But not here.

  One last thing: The editorial staff pooled our resources and came up with the postage to send your submission back to you, as we didn’t want it in our shredder. That’s hyperbole again, but you will fail to find it funny, much less offensive, because you think so highly of your writing you will think we are in the wrong, which clearly we are not, as we edit a literary magazine and you are dependent upon our judgment for your self-esteem. It’s also ironic, but you wouldn’t know irony if it swallowed your tongue. You wouldn’t know ambiguity if it pole-danced for you.

  Hey, look, AUTHOR, just kidding about all the above. We really loved your submission and would like your permission to publish it in our next issue. We just wanted to know if anyone appreciated the work that goes into writing a sympathetic rejection letter enough to read it. Congratulations! Proofs will arrive in about a month for your revision/approval. Thanks again for thinking of us. We invite you to send more work in the future. By the way, your name has been bandied about as an “Advisory Editor.” Let us know what you think.

  Best wishes,

  Mal

  About the Authors

  Eric Cline has sold two stories to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The first, “Two Dwarves and Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs,” appeared in the June 2011 issue. He has published three stories in Every Day Fiction.

  Corey Mertes is an attorney and a former craps dealer and ballroom dance instructor living in North Kansas City, Missouri. This is his third published story.

  M. Garrett Bauman’s stories have been in The New York T
imes, Sierra, Yankee, Utne Reader, Gettysburg Review, and Story, and he won the Great Books fiction contest in 2010.

  Joe Novara has written a number of humorous stories for Mother Earth News, Horse and Rider, and others. Other works include a young-adult title (Wa-Tonka, Pelican Publishing) and a collection of short stories (From My Side of the Fence, Syncopated Press). Read more at smashwords.com/profile/view/Joenovara.

  Sally Bellerose is the author of The Girls Club (Bywater Books, 2011) and was awarded an NEA Fellowship based on an excerpt from it. The manuscript was a finalist for the James Jones Fellowship, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and the Bellwether Endowment. Visit sallybellerose.wordpress.com. “Dead Man’s Float” was also published in Boston Literary Magazine (Winter 2006) and Sniplits (Summer 2008).

  Andrew S. Williams is a science-fiction writer living in Seattle. His work has appeared in Jersey Devil Press and Every Day Fiction. His website is offthewrittenpath.com, where he writes about life, writing, travel, and body-painted bike riding.

  Merrie Haskell works in a library with over seven million books and finds this to be just about the right number. Her first novel, The Princess Curse was published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2011. “One Million Years B.F.E.” first appeared in Escape Pod (2006).

  Florence Bruce attended Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, and later the University of Memphis. She is a constant reader, especially of American history, and has worked at learning to be a writer all her life.

  Christina Delia’s writing is featured in the anthologies Random Acts of Malice: The Best of Happy Woman Magazine, In One Year and Out the Other (Pocket Books), and Best of Philadelphia Stories: Volume 2. She resides in New Jersey with her husband, Rob.

  Katherine Tomlinson used to be a reporter but discovered she preferred making things up. Her work has appeared in Astonishing Adventures, A Twist of Noir, Dark Valentine, Eaten Alive, Powder Burn Flash, ThugLit, and Alt-Dead. Read more at katherinetomlinson.com.