Blueberry Croissants

[Fiction 101 is a story told in 101 words or fewer.]

Cycling in USPS outfits - his favorite Sunday activity. The five conquered hill after hill, he on the tail, past where Chucko last wagged his tail, and into an intersection one block from his deceased wife’s coffee shop. Seven years gone and still he relished Elpidha’s smile, extraordinary blueberry croissants, and –

HONK!

( Swerve!!)

Across the intersection, he gazed at the mangled bike, the four riders distressed around the body, the blood pool…

Later at the coffee shop, while Chucko waited outside the glass door, an aged Elpidha served him a blueberry croissant.

“It’s better on this side,” her smile reassured.

Anticipation

The white walls, the white couches, and white door in the room blanketed me like a morgue sheet. I waited there alone. My fingers once again reached to my bellybutton, running over the band-aid I had placed earlier that day over the biopsy stitches. The white couch gave way under my weight, like a fluffy cloud in the afterlife. I don’t know how long I sat there but I still hadn’t warmed it up.

To the side of the glass coffee-table in front of me stood one rack of magazines, also white, holding three or four periodicals. I picked one up, looked at the cover, then put it back. Picked another; put it back. Then another. Same stuff. Cover stories told of building retirement homes, decorating, traveling, and gourmet dining; they all told of living, and living well.

Such endeavors lay outside my sphere of concern.

Normally I would be bored at a clinic but boredom wasn’t what I was feeling. My body sat rigid in agony, as if rigor mortis had preemptively set in. I felt the burden of carrying the cross up Golgotha, alone; the anguish of not knowing God’s true will; the morbid surprise of an animal realizing the treat was inside a cage trap. I sat there contemplating what would come next, would the next few days and months physically hurt as much as the days since the liver biopsy had hurt mentally…

And how far down would my road hit its dead-end? Six months or six weeks?

Across the room the single white door begun to open, a door that led to consultation and biopsy rooms. I’d been back there before. Invisible graffiti covered the walls with diagnoses. Without the special UV light doctors have, however, I could not read them.

Her gown one with the morgue sheet, a short woman in a white lab coat—she had told me her name on the first visit but it didn’t register—walked out the door and guided me to the back of the oncology clinic where puzzlement turned to knowledge, and anguish became tranquility.

“Negative,” she said. “The tests were negative.”

Runt of the Litter

Dogs trump cats, everybody knows that. So when my seventh-grade buddy Chuck bragged that his cat Felicity landed on all fours from a two-story fall, gracefully walking away, it was no-brainer to show him that Stachti, my ash-colored puppy could do just as well. If cats could do it, dogs surely could do it better.

I opted for the third floor.

On the way to Chuck’s home, pulling Stachti along was like tugging Chuck’s dad’s yacht at the harbor—on my own. Stachti’s gripe wasn’t the wetness of the soil after the first October rain, I knew that; Stachti loved mud, as did I. No. Stachti must have known what was in store.

The only other place Stachti ever resisted going to had been the “bark park”. Stachti feared other dogs, large or small—scars of growing up with five bigger siblings when he was a puppy.

“Stachti can do better than Felicity,” I proclaimed when I found Chuck in his bedroom browsing the Internet, then presented the plan: Walk over to the house under construction by Chuck’s house, gently push Stachti down over the unfinished balcony. He would land on all fours and walk away.

Chuck laughed. “Yeah? That cement brick?”

I had met Chuck two years back, the day before Halloween. Within hours we were up to our first mischievous activity. We carved skulls on pumpkins and threw them over from a terrace, timed to explode feet from a passerby—a spectacular spilling of pumpkin brains on the pavement.

“Nice spread,” Chuck said pointing to a porn site on his PC. The only porn I ever got to see was at Chuck’s home; a computer was a luxury my family could not afford. We would take turns guarding against his mom and their maid. For my household, forget about computers, maids and yachts, even Stachti was a luxury. I got most of my clothes (even underwear) hand-me-downs from my younger cousins. Yes, when I was little I was little. Along with enjoying mud, I had that in common with Stachti as well. I too was the runt of the litter.

“C’mon, let’s go,” I said impatiently. My fingers pushed apart the blinds covering Chuck’s window, and I saw Stachti staring right up into the room. His brows pulled downwards, and his lips hung to the side, apprehensive and perhaps paralyzed.

Eventually Chuck agreed to come along. “But that wimp aint gonna jump, for sure” Chuck said and put on his white-and-red Adidas shoes. Brand new, never seen them before. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, as dad would say.

The house under construction where Felicity had performed her acrobatics was one house away from Chuck’s. Pulling Stachti up the cement stairs was even harder than tugging that yacht; Stachti resisted with all his might, whimpered even once or twice. By the third floor I had broken a healthy sweat.

It took even more effort to pull him three feet from the balcony edge. I pulled on the leash, but Stachti lay flat on the wet floor and barely moved.

“Let me show you how to do this,” Chuck said and grabbed the leash from me. He pulled, and pulled, and pulled, but Stachti barely moved.

Chuck let the leash loose for a second, then yanked Stachti with all his strength. Stachti gave in, and slid towards the edge.

But Stachti wasn’t the only one to move. Neither Chuck nor I had thought of the dangers of wearing brand new sneakers on a wet balcony.

Chuck must have screamed on his way down, in fact I know he did, because his mom heard him and ran out screaming seconds later. But I don’t remember any screaming. No, I don’t remember that at all. What I do remember is a different sound. I remember a singular clunk; yes, the sound a pumpkin makes when it hits the pavement spilling its brains all over as if before unsuspecting passersby.

When I looked down I saw Chuck wrapped like a pretzel, head malformed, blood gushing out of his mouth by the gallons like an unattended garden hose, eyes staring up, and the left foot twitching.

Then it stopped.

Stachti—lucky that Chuck let go of the leash when he slipped—curled up in my arms. He looked over the edge, then up at me, as if telling me, some are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but sometimes it’s best to be the runt of the litter.

[See you in April]

[During March, I'll be focusing on the revision of a novel. I may still post here 1-2 stories as part of a 2-week flash-fiction class I'll be taking starting March 4th. Come April I'll begin publishing here again.]

[Progress]

[I haven't been publishing as frequently as I planned to and wanted to acknowledge that. Rather than get into the explanation (which might sound like whining!) let me say that I plan to publish 2-3 more stories before the end of February, then take a month-long hiatus as I work on a novel. Many thanks to those who took the time to write comments. NOTE: just because I don't yet republish the blog entries, doesn't mean I don't take the feedback seriously.]

Second Half of the Truth

Today’s discovery notwithstanding, it had seemed like a splendid idea: spend a month with her son in Long Beach, California, while icicles weighted down her adobe in Huntington, on Long Island. Statistically, in the third week of January temperatures dipped into the lowest of the year. She couldn’t have picked a better week to be in warm Southern California.

But with what she found that morning while putting away her twenty-three year old son’s laundry in his closet, only four days into her stay, maybe this visit wasn’t exactly a blessing.

When Simon returned from the construction gig in Ventura, she managed to keep quiet about it for a whopping three minutes. Looking at her through the reflection in the window over the kitchen sink, as he finished rinsing a glass, Simon asked what was wrong.

“I found your collection,” she replied head down, noticing bread crumbs on the light-gray kitchen tile, and doing nothing about it. Eye contact while discussing such dirty matter discomforted her.

Just as Simon was putting the glass away onto the drainer, he pulled both elbows close to his torso, turned the tap on again, and re-rinsed the glass. In the brief silence that ensued, only the refrigerator and the water running could be heard.

“And today I signed off on a shipment from FedEx… From a company called—” But she couldn’t bring her lips to speak such name. She squeezed her left fingers with the right hand, then switched, as if occuping the fingers would keep her anxiety down, make her happy.

Now facing her, Simon blew air off, rolled his eyes. He rested the glass down on the drainer, in a calculated descend, almost as if stating that everything felt comfortable with this exchange. “We’ve been through this—”

“I’m not talking about the, you know... your sexual preference, or whatever you call it,” she replied with resignation. Though it shocked her when Simon told her he was gay three years before, she eventually came to accept it was better for him to live in honesty. No, it wasn’t the gayness, but the risk of the deadly infection that troubled her the most.

Yet, she never mustered the courage to confront him on the issue, and that troubled her. How could a mother sit back quietly while her son might spiral into disease? Now, she figured, her son’s addiction could toss him into risky sex.

“Five hundred?” She asked and declared, in one stroke.

“You counted?”

“Oh for chrisesake Simon, I wouldn’t touch them.” To her the VHS tapes and DVDs were already diseased. She raised her voice. “What do you do with so many dirty movies?”

Simon’s matter-of-fact response might have amused her if the matter hadn’t been about her own son, “Same as the next guy. Watch them!”

There was half a truth in that response, and she wasn’t going to pursue the other half. “It’s a hobby”, he continued unwittingly, “everyone should have a hobby.”

"Spectator hobby? Find a hobby to make you happy, something to keep your hands busy,” she said, herself immediately regretting the choice of words.

Indeed, that second half of the truth was now in the open. Perhaps she begun to accept it. While fiddling more with her fingers, a cultural voice at the back of her head reminded her: Busy hands are happy hands.

Baker's Dozen

Maggie spotted them before mom did: storm clouds forming in the west over the ocean, beyond San Diego. She dropped Josephine, her plastic Barbie-like doll, onto the dry dusty soil so typical of Alpine, California in November, and screamed towards the kitchen window.

“Ma! Rain! Ma!”

A light eastward wind blew her long brown hair over her face as she pointed behind her, to the west. Rain meant dad would come home soon. (Yet another pine cone to the collection.) “Ma! Ma!”

Mom, looking out the kitchen window, smiled then crossed herself. The fire east of Julian mountain had raged for seven days and there had been no relenting. The dryness had turned the paradise east of Alpine to a firefighter’s hell.

Their residence was at least half a mile from any other house. Dad treasured nature. Rescuing forests from fires fed his professional pride the most. He brought Maggie a burnt pine cone from each forest fire he helped extinguish. She couldn't count them, but her mother told her she had a baker’s dozen cones, so far.

Over the next three hours into the afternoon Maggie entertained herself at the yard west of the house, monitored by her mother in the kitchen, as Maggie monitored the clouds all the time.

She could no longer see San Diego, the view now obstructed by the rain falling. The clouds had now moved inland almost all the way to Alpine. Once the rain would move over the crest, the work of the firefighters would become easier. Another one for the collection! What number comes after baker's dozen?

Maggie heard the thunder a split second before she heard the shatter from the kitchen—a plate, a glass, or the vase her mother relished from her wedding? Unsettled, she let go of Josephine onto the dry dusty soil.

Out through the kitchen door, covering her mouth, mom stumbled down the stairs.

Maggie heard thunder once again. In the driveway, half-a-mile downhill, a police car left a dust cloud trail as it slowly approached.

[Writer's Digest Submission]

[No Astrapomythe today. Instead, I worked on my submission to Writer's Digest "Your Assignment". Unwittingly imitating Oscar Wilde, I spent hours adding and subtracting the same three-word sentence in a piece of no more than 75 words. The results will be published in June.]

Samantha's Solitaire

Was that the boss approaching? Samantha could discern his footsteps during a Spanish bull-run stampede, if she needed to. She clicked on the taskbar to hide her Solitaire. Nobody touches my Solitaire expertise after 22 years of gainful employment, she thought proudly. She swiveled on her seat 180 degrees just before the six-four boss towered the cube entrance.

“Hey!” she said preemptively, faking excitement. Relief! Two seconds late and he would have known why she made no progress writing the test plan for the 3.2 version of AccountAx™.

He scanned around her cube, looked at her PC monitor behind her, then looked at her. “You on track to have your test plan go for review by tomorrow, COB?”

“Working on it right now as a matter of fact,” she replied, aware how artfully she evaded answering his question. Neither “yes”, nor “no”. She could have won an Oscar for that performance.

Smiling, he nodded a couple of times at her, then left, but not before glancing at her LCD monitor once again.

Samantha turned around towards the screen. A window had captured most of her desktop, a window loaded with big yellow-magenta flashing letters spelling “Great Score!”

Solar System Crud

[Dependencies: Feb 3rd -> current entry]

“Contaminated. No other explanation,” Eugene Roberts said, not looking at Angela.

Though he was her manager at project Imperilov-Comb, as his chief scientist Angela felt strong enough to stand up to him. “Strict clean room procedures, Gene. Contaminated with what?” She had her palms facing up in desperation, shaking them as she spoke. “It’s not as if we have DNA from human-and-chimp ancestors laying around our offices, you know!”

Roberts gave her a glance, one of those I-wasn’t-talking-to-you glances. She stared back at him defiantly, aware of the other eighteen eyes in the room looking at her.

“Repeat the tests,” he commanded, a tone of anger barely disguised in his voice. “Look inside more dust samples.” He was now looking at her second-in-command, bypassing Angela.

The NASA conference room was long and narrow, the walls painted white, perhaps even freshly painted, judging from the strong disinfectant-like odor. Sitting at the end of the narrow conference table Angela felt uneasy, as if interviewed at an asylum—not as a caretaker, but as an inmate.

She was overwhelmed by the wild ramifications of her discovery: insider a comet she had found DNA belonging to a common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans. This would turn evolution theory on its head.

“The DNA must have left Earth about six million years ago,” she said. That was the simplest explanation. Occam’s Razor.

“Impossible!” Roberts jumped in. He stood up and begun pacing around, moving his arms uncontrollably as he talked. “Imperilov’s orbit does not intersect with Earth’s orbit.”

Angela knew Roberts was right. But the other alternative was even more wild: that evolution on Earth had been seeded with an intervention from the solar system. Not any intervention but one fully consistent with the life that had already developed on Earth. An impossible intervention made of solar system crud. Dust and water. Clay, she thought.

Something Inbetween

[v.2 posted 1105pm PT 2/4/06]

Though the video feed was low-resolution, twenty-three year old Angela could see Shane Truman’s five o’clock shadow, at only eight-fifteen A.M. Unlike her, the NASA Astrobiology scientist didn’t seem to care about good looks. If he would unexpectedly run into an exobiological party, his heavy stubble would unlikely ruin the affair.

“Odd hitchhikers you picked up,” Truman said.

“Mom wouldn’t approve. But flying through the tail of a comet we were bound to pick up something,” Angela said, leaning back into her seat at NASA’s JPL. With hesitation she added, “Or someone. It is DNA isn’t it?”

“Tell you what, I hear the dominoes crumbling down,” Truman replied, shaking his head in disbelief yet with a smile. “Textbook printers are warming up.”

He seemed both pleased and taken aback by the development. Angela felt likewise.

“Still looking for a match,” Truman continued, pointing to the monitor behind him, which displayed a yellow progress bar moving forward and backward, while text rapidly displayed and disappeared underneath, text too small for her to read through the little window on her PC.

The two had talked only once before, when she sent him the suspicious sample. She expected potentially organic material in the samples from the comet. But when a structure much like a chromosome showed up on Angela’s microscope, after she dissected a speck of comet dust, she was in disbelief. Now she knew she was on to something profound.

“Terrestrial life is really extra-terrestrial,” she said.

“Or, vice versa,” Truman countered. “Depends on the match.” He went on describing how he isolated the DNA and how his computer was searching for matches in various genome databases.

But Angela stopped listening. The monitor behind him displayed something that froze her breathing. Truman must have had the speakers off, or he would have been interrupted by dozens of exuberant beeps.

The progress bar had stopped its erratic redraw. Multiple lines of text, numbers, percentages populated the right half of the monitor. She couldn’t read those but—her heart beating thunderously—she could see the three diagrams on the left half, one of a chimp, another of a human, and a third of something inbetween.

Mismatched Socks

[Dependencies: Jan 31st -> Feb 1st -> current entry]

Cindy was losing her temper with him. Was he not understanding the upcoming medical bills?

“You must look for another job,” she said, telephone propped between right shoulder and head. With her hands she unloaded the remainder of the wicker laundry basket—socks, mostly—on the Formica counter by the washing machine. When she matched a pair, before stacking it on the shelf, she took a sniff of the jasmine fragrance but this time it had no comforting effect.

“If I jump ship, SMR dies,” Spence replied. His voice came across electronic, mechanical; it predicted impending disaster and betrayed a resignation to accept it.

Cindy had not heard that tone before, at least not since the death of Spence’s brother eight years back. That was the first time she saw Spence cry. Spence never cried. Always on top of his game, escalating the corporate ladder, slowly but always upwards.

“Well, you got to be CEO,” she said bitterly. You always wanted that more than you wanted the unplanned twins. You only wanted one, remember Spence? Which would you pick?

“Exactly why I must stay. After the babies are born—”

“Nicholas and Zachary,” she corrected him. Really, which one would you pick? Nicholas or Zachary?

“Nicolas and Zachary, yes. After they’re born, I can look for a new job then.”

They ended their conversation with married-couple niceties, which Cindy always wondered if any couple in the world actually meant. Not that she didn’t love him, but the telling of so at the end of each telephone conversation (when they talked four times a day) felt contrived.

In two months Nicholas and Zachary would arrive. Nothing in their lives would remain unchanged.

SMR couldn’t have picked a worse time to self-amputate.

She sorted through the remaining socks. Two gray socks matched, two black matched, and she stacked those pairs on the shelf. When she picked up the last two socks she held a brown-white checkered sock in the left hand, and a beige diamond-textured in the right hand.

A mismatch.

A man and a woman not understanding each other?

Twins fraternal, not identical?

But Dr. Fields was clear: the boys were identical.

It was then that she felt the first contraction.

Spence speaks to Beemer Guy

[Dependencies: Jan 31st -> current entry]

To lay off twenty four people was tougher than Spence had anticipated. Worse yet, the hatch still lingered. CEO Mike Devala (also known as “beemer guy” as only he owned a BMW in the SMR parking lot) was coming down to talk to him. Spence only had a minute to grab a cup of coffee.

He poured two spoons of sugar in his green marble mug. The kitchen today sparkled brighter in florescent lights, more sterile. It dawned on him then: the coffee carafe had gone virgin all day. Nobody ventured into the kitchen, everybody kept under the radar.

Cindy was expecting, in two months. Twins. He’d be a father! Even with a severance package, getting laid off would complicate their lives considerably. And there was no severance package.

Walking to his office dragged longer than usual; he tried hard (and succeeded) at avoiding other survivors. All those spared would meet in 15 minutes anyway.

But Devala wanted to see him now.

The bastard would fire him, too. Spence knew it!

There were only seven engineers left, six developers and one tester. How was he going to build and test a product with only seven employees? Nobody could be “VP” with just seven people.

Back at his desk, he took a sip. Today’s coffee was uninspiring. It was thinner than next year’s budget projection. Perhaps he had forgotten to add sugar, that would not surprise him. Whatever. He took another sip.

At almost 2pm he had not yet felt hungry for lunch. The thought of Thai or Chinese or Teriyaki churned his stomach.

Took another sip, looked at the photo on his desk. Cindy looked gorgeous in that shot at the skating ring at UTC Mall less than a year back. She was laughing hysterically while he was clenching onto the rail frightened but pretending to enjoy it. It was his first attempt at skating on ice. Today he felt the floor underneath him just as slippery.

Devala showed up at the far end of the hall across from his office door. Spence convinced himself he needed to remain calm but didn’t know what to do with his hands. He tried to pick a pencil on his desk with a feather touch but with his sweaty fingers the pencil slipped off easily.

Spence sunk in his seat despite his conscious attempt to keep his head high.

Closing the door behind him, Devala got to the point.

“Didn’t tell you the whole story,” he said. “The Board had determined that management had to be trimmed down as well.”

Damn. That asshole lied to him: used him to lay off all those people, then it was bye-bye. One look around and he knew it would be two hours packing all those belongings, then hauling that into the Nissan.

The two talked for five more minutes, then both joined the remaining engineers for the news.

From the CEO’s office, Spence looked outside into the parking lot as Devala placed the cardboard box containing his minimal belongings into the trunk of his beemer.

Jake's Request for Vacation

Jake hesitated when he reached David’s closed wooden door. Was vacation worth a distressed relationship with the boss? Engineering gigs were tough to come by in Sorrento Valley (or San Diego in general) and he didn’t want to ruffle anybody’s feathers, not right before Christmas.

But the request was overdue. For over a year, Jake had worked ten-hour days writing computer code; he needed the time off, or he would collapse.

Knock-knock.

No answer.

Perhaps David himself had gone to the VP to request the last week of the year off. But wouldn't his door be open? David always kept it open when not there.

Jake knocked again. Beethoven’s Destiny: knock-knock-knock-knock!

No answer.

Just the previous afternoon when they came back from the Thai restaurant David complained he felt worn out by the project himself. It was that comment from David that made Jake find the guts to ask for the week off. And besides, between Christmas and New Year’s not a lot of productive work got done.

Software companies expected company blood flowing through your veins--and out. Jake remembered David’s words during the interview when David hired him “We want people who think about the project twenty-four seven!”

Jake, head down, begun to slowly head back towards his cubicle when the David's door opened.

Out walked Spence, the VP, a level (and a dress code) above David. “Can I help you,” Spence asked dryly without a trace of a smile.

Jake scanned the office inside before answering.

“Nothing important,” Jake said and briskly walked away, any hope of vacation now erased. David had looked distressed, his eyebrows merged. A cardboard box sat on the desk which was now clean of all personal belongings.

Astrapomythia: Flash Fiction

Welcome to a series of posts of flash fiction. Every entry will be a short-short story. Occasionally I might blog on how it feels writing flash fiction.

Please comment on whether the story kept your interest or not. If you are so inclined, feel free to comment on the mechanics of writing.