Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (19 page)

2
      Picking up his daughter from her internship at Perdue Farms, he overhears her talking to her BFF. “We’ve had KFC for supper every night this week,” she says. “My dad is such a
loser
.” When she says the word, she presses her fingers to her forehead in the shape of an L.

3
      The spring catalogue arrives with the chirp of awakening birds. Earthquake pills, TNT, a catapult, quick-drying cement, dehydrated boulders, a boomerang, and, free with every $100 order, a rocket sled and thirty miles of railroad track.
*

*
Some assembly required.

4
      The nights are long. His hind legs stiffen up in his sleep, and his right hip hasn’t felt the same ever since those jet-propelled tennis shoes blasted him through the center of the earth to China.

5
      On the family room sofa his wife eases the thread through the needle and stitches his tail back into place. Now and then she stops to look up at the shimmering sage in the backyard. “It’s not just the kids,” she says with a throb in her voice. “The neighbors are talking, too.”

6
      It’s the customer service as much as the good line of credit that keeps him coming back to Acme Corp.

Coughing red soot from another day’s avalanche, he asks Sue, the refund department operator, about her father’s knee surgery, swimming in Lake Wallenpaupack, her butterfly garden of bee balm and lilac, and on the other end of the phone, Sue is curious about life in the Southwest, and if it really is what they call a
dry heat
.

7
      During his lunch break in the shade of the cottonwoods he listens to
The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-confidence
by Dr. Robert Anthony on his iPod.

Closing his eyes, he visualizes the world he wants to live in: the bird browning in the oven, legs tied together, skin brushed in melted butter like an oasis on the other side of a great, uncrossable desert, and by late afternoon, the kids probing the tender curves with gentle forks, a mysterious passion on their faces.

8
      
…Next up on
Coast to Coast AM
we’ve got a caller from the Southwest, a Mr. W.E.C., who—now get this—claims to know a magical roadrunner that can pass through walls…

9
      The Southern Belle disguise has arrived. Inside the package is a handwritten note from Sue.
This should do the trick.

In front of the mirror he tries on the saucy red dress. Puckers his lips and turns to admire the ruffled bodice. The costume comes with a velvet bonnet and matching handbag large enough to conceal a stick of dynamite.

Standing behind him, his wife starts to cry. “Who are you?” she says. “I don’t know you anymore.”

He wiggles his eyebrows. The bird is good as cooked.

Courtney Walsh

B
less me father, for I have sinned,” Vicky told the eye-level black screen where she sat in the confession booth in St. Ursula’s Church of the Holy Redeemer in downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, a block away from Maxine’s Café, where the special tonight was tenderloin tips with a citric infusion, a mix of lemon, lime, orange, and pink grapefruit from a farm in Central Florida where last night, under a full moon, the oldest of the few panthers left in the state slept, dreaming of his mother, who, just before she was shot by a bounty hunter who had progressed no further than sixth grade in the Leland City School District and whose teachers, against their better judgment, were forced to keep him until he turned from a grubby, temperamental, unwashed little boy into a grubby, temperamental, unwashed adolescent with a hair-trigger temper and a habit of shooting anything that offended him, which included dogs, cats, alligators, birds, manatees, dolphins, and, one night, the old panther’s mother, who before she died latched onto his head and bit down, scoring his skull as if for trepanning, which surgery was finished by a world-renowned brain surgeon from Austria then visiting his aunt after the young man had landed on her front porch, cursing the panther, government at all levels beginning with the city council, and life in general going all the way up to God, who, it must be admitted, was a little perplexed by the way things were turning out, or not turning out, and sat back, amusing himself with other games, his attention span being infinite so that he
quickly tired of backgammon, Parcheesi, Monopoly, whist, bridge, Canasta, Pitch, and poker, games played on machines in taverns, games such as tennis, squash, racquetball played on small courts or games played on larger courts or fields, where he would have to split himself into the players, ten for basketball, eighteen for baseball, twenty-two for football, etc., etc., as well as the requisite number of competitors for soccer, rugby, bobsledding, curling, and other sports of modern times or earlier, including sports played all over the world, as for example, the Fiji Islanders played with conch shells, the Apache Indians with sticks and hoops, the North Laplanders with reindeer testicles, to say nothing of the sports on the nearest inhabited planet, thousands of light years away, but right around the block if you’re the deity.

Colleen Shea Skaggs

O
n a balmy, September Saturday night, she threads her way through the parking lot of the local saloon, The Waterhole. She’s a newcomer in town, a tiny Idaho ranch community, a stone’s throw from the Snake River. Thirty-two years old, a refugee from the big-city madness of Los Angeles. The new teacher in the small rural school: no metal detectors, guns, knives, gangs, no backtalk, no obscene language in her presence. Supportive parents. Moira, a redhead, partly natural, partly from a bottle, but no one needs to know that. Miss Kelly, her students call her.

Country music pours from the saloon’s open door. A male singer with the raw, lived-in voice of Willie or Johnny—the song about friends in low places.

She steps onto the wood-planked porch. Ranchers, both men and women, stand in clusters, shaking heads, laughing or lamenting about government intrusion, taxes, high feed prices, politicians, busted machinery, jughead horses, and clueless cows.

Inside is crowded and noisy. People dancing in the small area between the bar and the wall lined with tables of people. An open-beam ceiling, a decor of elk antlers, antique tools, old car license plates. In the dim light provided by flickering kerosene lamps, dust motes hover in the air like mini-galaxies spinning in space.

She climbs up on one of the only two vacant stools at the bar. Behind the bar hangs an elongated, faded black-and-white
photograph of old-time buckeroos lined up on their horses, the buckeroos and horses long since dead.

Rick, the bartender, sets a mug of beer in front of her. Rick: brownish-blond hair, a lean build, eyes a lighter blue than her own. Good-looking, but he doesn’t seem to know it, and she’s not about to tell him. She’d met him briefly at the school’s open house. Divorced, the father of a twelve-year-old daughter who was one of her students. A part-time bartender, a part-time rodeo rider, runs a few cows on his five acres. A horse for himself and one for his daughter.

The band is off its break, launching into the “Tennessee Waltz,” the male singer with a lived-in face to match the voice, singing in a heartfelt way. Lost loves, lost dreams, lost chances. Rick moves up and down behind the bar with fluid movements, drawing beer, wiping spills, bantering with the customers.

“Do you know what a cowboy breakfast is?” he stops and asks her.

“No, what?”

“A pee and a look around.”

“No thanks. I’ll stick to bacon and eggs.”

They watch an elderly couple step out onto the dance floor. The other dancers step back to give them the floor. The man is rawboned-handsome, well over six feet, broad shoulders, a little stooped, blue eyes with a gleam of mischief. Levi’s, a blue shirt. A head of unruly white hair. A little stiff in the knees and movements, bending forward to accommodate the shorter stature of his partner. The woman has a soft body, her face with fine features and wrinkles, permed gray hair, a peach-colored pantsuit, earrings flashing.

“Who are they?” she says to Rick.

“Tess and Angus. Both eighty-eight. Married since they were eighteen. The fourth generation on Angus’s ranch. Angus likes to
tell people he’s sleeping in the same bed he was born on.”

He fills her in on some of the history of Angus. Angus’s father lost the ranch to the bank in the Depression. His mother and father had to move into town, live in a tiny one-roomed shack. Angus, just a kid, hired himself out to ranches, saved his wages. People back then stuck together. No one would buy Angus’s father’s ranch. With no buyers, the bank let Angus buy the ranch back with easy terms. Angus went to town and brought his parents back to the ranch, where they lived the rest of their lives.

She envies family; her parents and sister were gone way before their time.

On the dance floor, consciously aware of their respectful, reverential audience, Tess and Angus dance with the practiced ease and grace of partners who’ve been dancing together almost a lifetime. They add a few theatrical flourishes to their act, a modest dip, an out-turned foot. Angus’s elbows held high in a courtly manner, his weathered, veined hand placed gently on Tess’s back as though cradling a precious gem.

Tess and Angus, Rick tells her, lost a son to the war, a beloved grandson to a drunk driver. As Angus gives Tess a twirl, he winks at the onlookers in a self-mocking way as if to say, Aren’t we the cat’s pajamas? But Tess is serious-faced, with rigid posture, square-shouldered, her moves mannered and exact as though she were taking a typing test for a secretarial position.

The song ends, and the couple’s waltz with it. They stand with flushed faces, friends and family crowding around them, talking and laughing. Tess and Angus, with losses, yes, Rick tells her, but with a son and daughter and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to carry on after they’re gone.

She feels a little buzz and not just from the beer, but a buzz of happiness to have found a home, here in this peaceful place with these down-to-earth, kind people.

She thinks of her little rental cottage facing the river; her cat, Max, lying on the back of the sofa, watching for her out the window. She sees Tess and Angus, leaving, hanging on to each other, each other’s crutches.

She’s had her one beer, time to leave, students’ papers to grade.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Rick calls after her.

She steps from the porch and out onto the dirt road, a lemon-slice-of-a moon above, night-air smells of freshly mown grass, the river, and the slight hint of manure.

Douglas Smith

I
t’s nothing,” he says, not for the first time.

She watches him straighten his tie in the hall mirror. So he doesn’t have to make eye contact, she thinks.

“I fear nothing?” she says. “Then I must be fearless. I don’t feel fearless.”

Leaning on the kitchen door frame, she hugs her faded blue dressing gown around her as if she’s holding the universe together. She’s staying home. Again.

He shakes his head. He does that a lot lately.

“I mean there’s nothing out there to be afraid of.” He picks up his briefcase, ready for another day.