Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (20 page)

I
magine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for. You are now lying on a thin mattress in a hot room. The walls are made of dried earth, and your sister, who is younger than you, is in the room with you. She is starving, her belly is bloated, flies land on her eyes, you brush them off with your hand. You have a cloth too, filthy but damp, and you press it to her lips and forehead. The piece of bread is the bread you’ve been saving, for days it seems. You are as hungry as she is, but not yet as weak. How long does this take? When will someone come with more bread? You think of going out to see if you might find something that could be eaten, but outside the streets are infested with scavengers and the stink of corpses is everywhere.

Should you share the bread or give the whole piece to your sister? Should you eat the piece of bread yourself? After all, you have a better chance of living, you’re stronger. How long does it take to decide?

I
magine a prison. There is something you know that you have not yet told. Those in control of the prison know that you know. So do those not in control. If you tell, thirty or forty or a hundred of your friends, your comrades, will be caught and will die. If you refuse to tell, tonight will be like last night. They always choose the night. You don’t think about the night however, but about the piece of bread they offered you. How long does it take? The piece of bread was brown and fresh and reminded you of sunlight falling across a wooden floor. It reminded you of a bowl, a yellow bowl that was once in your home. It held apples and pears; it stood on a table you can also remember. It’s not the hunger or the pain that is killing you but the absence of the yellow bowl. If you could only hold the bowl in your hands, right here, you could withstand anything, you tell yourself. The bread they offered you is subversive, it’s treacherous, it does not mean life.

T
here were once two sisters. One was rich and had no children, the other had five children and was a widow, so poor that she no longer had any food left. She went to her sister and asked her for a mouthful of bread. “My children are dying,” she said. The rich sister said, “I do not have enough for myself,” and drove her away from the door. Then the husband of the rich sister came home and wanted to cut himself a piece of bread; but when he made the first cut, out flowed red blood.

Everyone knew what that meant.

This is a traditional German fairy tale.

T
he loaf of bread I have conjured for you floats about a foot above your kitchen table. The table is normal, there are no trap doors in it. A blue tea towel floats beneath the bread, and there are no strings attaching the cloth to the bread or the bread to the ceiling or the table to the cloth, you’ve proved it by passing your hand above and below. You didn’t touch the bread though. What stopped you? You don’t want to know whether the bread is real or whether it’s just a hallucination I’ve somehow duped you into seeing. There’s no doubt that you can see the bread, you can even smell it, it smells like yeast, and it looks solid enough, solid as your own arm. But can you trust it? Can you eat it? You don’t want to know, imagine that.

Y
OGURT

T
hey were fighting more than usual lately, or perhaps fighting had just become usual, he thought, as they walked home from Yogurt Express along the dark side street. There was no moon, and in the darkness the houses loomed huge and unfamiliar.

He was thinking about earlier in the week, at the grocery, when they’d fought over the sugar cereal. He’d tossed it into the cart, and she’d taken it out, reprimanding him.

“I don’t want you buying this crap,” she’d said.

“Jesus,” he’d replied, wheeling off cockeyed down the aisle. “What are you anyway, my mother?”

These petty clashes rankled him more and more, and he held on to them for days, replaying every nuance and detail, running his mind over them like a tongue on a sore tooth.

Now, as they walked along the quiet street, not touching, he thought what it would be like to live alone, all that freedom. The idea of a separation—he with his own space, his own time, his own decisions—increasingly gave him pleasure. There were, of course, the complications of the kids, the house, the two cars, the bank account, the country property, but was that any reason to stay together?

A rapid slap of feet on pavement just behind them brought him up short, and, as he turned, startled, a cup of cold yogurt slashed into his face, blinding him.

“Hey!” he shouted.

A dark shape scurried past, turning the corner. “I
hate
couples!” it snarled and disappeared.

He felt weak, his breath uneven. “What was
that?
” he said, wiping yogurt from his eyes and chin.

She was silent a moment, and then, “I’ve seen him before,” she said. “In the daytime. He wears a skullcap, and sort of slinks around. I thought he was harmless.”

“Jesus, it’s such a . . . a . . .

“Violation?” She gave him the word he was looking for.

“Yes, a violation. I wonder if we should report him. Warn the children. Lock our doors.”

They had reached the corner, but no one was there. In the light of the street lamp, she looked serene, and, he thought, well,
valuable
. He put his arm around her and drew her close. Slowly, she put her arm around him.

A
C
HRONICLER’S
S
IN

O
nce upon a time, during the reign of terror, mass arrests became the order of the day. Most often they took place at night: a group of hooded men would knock at the front door and order the sleepy host to get dressed, and then take him to one of the many small prisons mushrooming all over the town. Sometimes the policemen would arrest whole families, including the children and grandmothers who slept on the hearths.

The population of the town was shrinking, and all night long saber-rattling patrols could be heard leading the people away through the streets, from a great many houses. Many people began to spend their nights fully clothed, dozing with bundles under their heads as if traveling, expecting to be arrested. People were amazed that there was so much room in prisons, but then one house after another was turned into a prison, and one person would languish in another’s house as if in jail: the rich in poor people’s quarters and the other way around, soldiers in schools, priests in barracks, doctors and patients in brothels, debauchees in convents.

There was an increasing shortage of labor, and prisoners did most of the jobs. Since they were dressed like other people and their numbers were kept secret, it was difficult to know who was a prisoner and who was free. The prisoners were even employed to make arrests: they carried sabers although they were prisoners.

The number of arrests was rising—among the next victims were members of the notorious City Authorities. Priests, merchants, chiefs of staff, sentries, clerks, and others were taken away. In the end they were all made prisoners, even the members of the Administration themselves. Everybody spied on each other; everybody was a prisoner and nobody knew who was actually in charge, issuing these orders and arrest warrants. Everybody had the feeling that he was taking part in the running of the town, in the arrests and in the serving of time in prison. And as all of them were dressed alike and enjoyed the same rights—all of them being under arrest—they went on doing their jobs as if nothing had happened. They lived their ordinary lives and, had someone asked them, they would probably have said they were happy.

Several years later they would deny that any arrests had been made at all and claim that it was all a fabrication of an inadequately censored, and undoubtedly malicious, chronicler.

Translated by Miroslav Beker

H
ERE

E
lvis lives three houses away. We don’t have houses exactly, they’re metal sheds, corrugated, very shiny, with nothing inside except us, when we’re there. We wave Hi in the mornings and evenings like any workaday neighbors, but there are no lawns to discuss, or sports, or even weather, so waving’s about it for social life here. The two sheds between us are officially vacant, the sliding doors wide open on bare cement, so if we did talk it might be about who lived there last, or who’s about to live there, but the fact is that even here and now I’m in too much silly awe to attempt small talk with a dead legend. I’d naïvely expected to meet my parents here, or pretty Nancy who developed a brain tumor in my second grade, but we seem to be on our own with a vengeance, the only exceptions being as I say these neighbors we see before and after work. What we are is complete strangers with identical schedules.

I don’t know where anyone else goes or comes back from. Next door on the other side I have a very short woman, possibly a dwarf, who wears boxy little dresses of a 1940s cut and carries a blue aluminum lunch pail. Unlike Elvis she always throws me a genuine smile that warms me with its gallantry and lack of self-pity. Beyond her lives a burly Sikh with a turban who clears his sinuses loudly as we set off on our separate ways. No one goes in the same direction as anyone else. We all walk straight ahead but the horizon seems to widen so that our paths diverge and we soon disappear from each other. I have a fairly pleasant job but it takes me a long time to get there; I never know how far I have to go because the route is always some new combination of all the walks of my life—through the woods behind my first remembered house, up the cast iron stairs to my father’s law office, across my high school playground, down the driveway of my second wife’s condo after she married again. All these places are quite deserted except for me. And eventually, in one of these settings, I see my bench, with the day’s task laid out for me, self-explanatory, some variation of a simple mindless chore I performed in a shop course, like soldering, or a tray of letters to case out from my days in the post office. It’s good to work, I have no complaints on that score. But I must say that the fact of Elvis so near and yet so far distracts and preoccupies me at my labors.

I have no idea if I am unique. It may be that everyone here has Elvis living three doors away and has to confront that situation in his or her own fashion. It may be only those like me who played his records to annoy their fathers and had those records confiscated or broken in two, or those like me again who used his mystique on girls of thirteen or fourteen with bad intentions, who now have to face him first and last thing every day, and decide what to say to him. Or it may be that I alone, out of how many billions, by sheer chance am the nearest neighbor of this illustrious figure. The question in any case remains how do I make the most of it?

And every day, bending my sheet of tin or aligning my crisp envelopes, I am rehearsing my first approach. I will not pry or invade his privacy. I will brighten his day, as the dwarf lady does mine. Sometimes I ponder an apropos line from one of his hits. “Takin’ a walk down Lonely Street!” I might call out. I try this aloud at my bench; it gives me shudders. Should I tell him he’s looking good? He must know he isn’t. Most mornings he has trouble getting his door open and has to pause for breath before he closes it behind him. When he takes off his shades to check the sky his eyes are puffed almost shut. But his self-assurance is something to behold. If he were a rotted corpse, if he were a skeleton, he’d still be Elvis. Wherever he goes is the right place for him. I’d like to tell him that in simple casual words that don’t crown him with the thorns of his fame all over again. But the fact is I probably won’t.