Below are a couple of microfiction stories that were recently published in the online journal, 101 Words (101words.org)
FERMENT
“There is dirt in this juice!” she wailed, pushing the purple liquid out and over her bottom lip and onto her yellow dressing gown. She could no longer spit. Caroline recoiled, more frustrated than angry. She set down the plastic cup on the nightstand.
“There is no dirt,” Caroline whispered, unheard, exasperated.
Her mother’s hands were sallow, bespotted and bruised along most of the knuckles. Caroline sighed as she reminisced about the times when those hands mixed Kool-Aid, braided her hair, or waved goodbye at the close of Christmas dinner.
She sat, wiping her mother’s chin, wishing one of them was dead.
STILL LIFE
Apoplexy. Aphasia. A box made solely of lids.
No one grows up imagining this, yearning to be a warden while trapped as a prisoner of the flesh.
His eyes were focused; he could roll his neck just enough to see his reflection in the mirrored closet doors. He mourned his gait, forgave the saddlebags and the muffin top that crowned his jeans. He wanted only to return to those imperfect but effortless turns of phrase, to bad jokes and easy laughter, to rub his own belly for good luck.
It was now still life, a zombie’s elegy of regret and remorse.
An additional story or two…
DUSKSINGERS
It’s June. Too cold for ice cream still, but I like to take off my sock and dip my foot in the wading pool.
This year we have cicadas. The buzz reaches you before the swarms do.
I am standing in the bathtub, on my tiptoes, looking out the bathroom window through a screen that’s never been cleaned. I’m watching the trees sway, like on a million tiny televisions. I can hear the Battlestar Galactica siren of the cicadas, rolling and repeating. It’s spacey and cool.
Mama made me stand here. My period is going down my leg and the water is only hitting on one side because of how I’m standing. I saw Psycho last year, when I was eight. I saw Star Wars too. Princess Leia was the only girl. I wanted to see what her mom looked like and if she taught her to do her hair like that.
chirr chirr chirr
The mildew is brown and black in the corner of the window, with specks of green. Cicada wings are like stained glass windows, and I think, maybe Jesus is a cicada because they are reborn and they ascend. They land on tree branches. And on people. Mama hates them.
They stay on the branches closest to the big amber lights that light up our parking lot. The cicadas are brown and black. And pink too. Like the water running down the drain. Mama says I’m too young for a period.
Jesus hasn’t come in a long time, Mama said. But like I said, maybe he’s a cicada.
Mama also says I’m a woman now and to stay away from Charley. Charley smokes cigarettes and he has an -ey not an -ie. I know because I watched him write his name once. He told me to come closer and he touched the hem of my baby doll top. Mama was in the bathroom and we were in the front room, so she didn’t see.
Mama talks a lot, like the cicadas that chirr chirr chirr.
When I sit on my bed at night, I listen to how the cicadas sing their alarm for a long time and suddenly stop -- all of them at once. I count the alarm time with Mississippis. Sixteen Mississippi. Sometimes twenty.
I’m too young to lock my bedroom door, Mama says. I listen to the cicadas sing when I feel scared.
John Lemanski 