I was slapping at the welts on my shins one green evening when you told me to suck on the head of a match. Sulfur, you said, would get in my blood and keep the mosquitoes away. One match a month was all it took, you told me. I went back to catching fireflies. You said it was phosphorous in their bulbs that kept them lighting up. I walked around with a match in my mouth for a week, the stick swollen soggy in my mouth, until my mother slapped it out because of the chemicals.

You told me once that you were Johnny Unitas. It was your stage name, and no wonder. A name like that, Unitas. You didn’t want to have people stopping you and making a scene. The secret to being a quarterback, you said, was seeing the whole field. I remember you stepping backward, feet like a fencer’s, palming an invisible ball and checking down the passing routes in our backyard. Scan the field, and make a read you said. I told everybody at school.

The two boys on our street, Kevin and his brother Christopher, didn’t believe me. Kevin sat on my back while Christopher punched me in the head and told me how stupid I was. A year later, after you’d died, I wasn’t angry that you’d lied. I was angry I couldn’t tell it like you did, my voice easy and convincing and plain.

I remember you told me once what it was like to be a paratrooper. You had just pulled up in front of Gramama’s house in your camper. The muscles in your forearms were cleaved by two thick pipes of muscle, and the hair that covered them was paper white and thick. You gave me an ice cream cone from the cooler in your camper, and I asked was it true you were in Vietnam.

You told me how it is after you jump, before your chute opens. You and the rest of your platoon are connected on a static line, and the bullets fly by you in the air, and you can’t hear them, but you feel their gravity, the way the marrow in your bones thrills toward and away the ripples in the air. And you’re so scared, you said, that you forget your body. You don’t even thrash around, but move like a swimmer, and it’s like your arms and legs are on strings, controlled like a marionette is, and you can’t even feel your muscles.  Your arms float up next to your face, and you notice your hand, in the dark air, floating. You just felt light, you said.

I heard after you died that when you drank you were worse. My mother said that once you came in when we were all living in Alexandria and you told everybody to go into the bedroom and lay down on the floor with all the lights out. I was there, too young to remember. There wasn’t any time to talk, you said. Someone was looking for you, because of an assignment at work. You worked at the Pentagon. We all lay down, mother said, in the bedroom with our hands over our heads. After an hour passed and then another, mother walked out and found you passed out in the living room, your head tilted back on the sofa. She draped a blanket over you, and never talked about it again till I was grown.

I have spent my whole life trying to feel as light as you.

Danny Nowell is a blogger and writer living in Portland. His writing about the NBA appears at ESPN TrueHoop Network blogs, Portland Roundball Society, and HoopSpeak, and he reviews books for The Oxford American online. What he lacks in finesse he makes up for in zeal. 

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

A strongman is lifting my car, his hands bolted tight to the front bumper. His trunky thighs and buttocks are facing streetward, and several women in the neighborhood have set up lawn chairs and are watching the spectacle from their front yards. His grunts are loud, like falling timber, and the birds perched on the roof have fled in search of friendlier shingles.

We have remodeled our lives with family in mind. Out goes the air hockey table and bean bag chair, the ninja throwing stars and KISS commemorative guitar. The car, a cramped but capable two-door, is the last loose end, the sole remaining relic from our previous lives.

Yes, I want take it, the strongman says, extending and contracting the fingers on his left hand. (If I could, I would call him by his first name, but it’s unpronounceable to those unaccustomed to the sounds of his language, a series of consonants arbitrarily arranged.) He rummages through his gym bag for his checkbook and upon finding it writes out a check for the requested amount. No haggling. We agree to sort out the title transfer and other details during the week.

Natalie stands in the window with our son. She smiles at me, since we now have the money to buy the minivan we’ve been eyeing. My son, in her arms, is trying to fit the head of a stuffed giraffe in his mouth. He couldn’t be more pleased with himself.

Every couple of months Natalie has dinner with the supervisor from her work, a woman who lost her family in an accident. It happened the winter before last. Her husband was driving their daughter to a piano lesson when his car skidded over a patch of black ice and plummeted into freezing cold water. He was able to force open his door but drowned trying to unbuckle his daughter’s seatbelt, which was stuck. This is the story the police pieced together from the remains. My wife brings our son along and each dinner the woman buys him a new toy, something bright and extravagant.

Natalie and my son have vanished from the window, departed for another room in the house, and I can’t help but wonder what tragedies will confront us, what feats of strength I’ll be asked to perform for my family. It’s not a matter of if, but of when, and I only wish I knew how it will all pan out.

The first crib we bought for my son – his name is Dev, by the way – the first crib we bought for Dev was recalled by the manufacturer. A faulty latch. The drop-side, installed wrong or burdened with too much weight, was prone to loosening from the adjoining railing, or detaching completely. When Natalie found out about this, she cried. How could we let this happen? I didn’t know what to say.

The strongman asks if he can walk the car home. I nod, absently, my head elsewhere. He untangles a complicated web of straps and ropes from his gym bag. With a tow hook, he attaches a thick rope to the underside of the front bumper. The other end of the rope is threaded through a climbing harness, which he belts around his waist and shoulders. He leans forward and takes several long, agonizing steps. The rope tightens. The wheels start moving. Slowly at first, and then a little more easily. His face is red and the veins around his temples push through the skin. His legs are pumping like pistons, churning forward, determined.

Natalie comes outside and stands beside me. I pick up Dev and hold him against my chest. The strongman reaches a bend in the road, disappears behind a cluster of trees. The women fold up their chairs, but we stay outside and wave goodbye to the car, trailing behind with no one at the wheel, as if moving under its own power. We keep waving, the three of us, to all the things we’ve loved that have let us go.

Ravi Mangla lives in Fairport, NY. His stories have appeared in Mid-American Review, American Short Fiction, Melville House, Gigantic, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He keeps a blog at ravimangla.com.

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

]]> http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/24995/feats-of-strength.html/feed 1 http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/24877/flood.html http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/24877/flood.html#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 15:00:59 +0000 Charlie Geoghegan-Clements http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=24877 Weather grows from underground. Great storms explode, often from just below he soil, where they lie, begging to be let loose by a spade. When lightning strikes it’s like visiting a birthplace, digging to that brown pile of soil from which it sprung, to hide and be bright down there, amid the clouds below the soil. Sunburnt grandmothers knew this, and hated when their headstrong husbands went out to tend the gardens, unafraid of what weather they might unearth.

When I wasn’t even a decade old, my own father drowned planting the tulip bulbs that would forever brighten the boarder of the walkway that my mother would shuffle along to reach the mailbox each morning. He unwittingly hit upon a hurricane and was suffocated by the flood of water that came up out of the soil. My mother never recovered. She sat by these untended walkways for the rest of her life. She moved to keep herself constantly out of the shade, and kept her neck straight against the sun. She rested there, being slowly baked and watched the tide of the untended yard. I’m not sure if that’s a suicide.

*

The force of Mary’s body pressed itself against me in a way that no one else’s ever had. I remember the first time we slept an entire night together. Not much about us, really, just that the sky that night was clear, and had been throughout the beautiful and unavoidably wet southern day.

It would be fun to tell a sex story, but the thing I most remember is how comfortable Mary and I were sweating next to one another and not talking, wanting to, but because of the heat, trying not to touch. We just slept silently as our sweat soaked through the bed, so that when we woke up, sticky and surrounded by a lake of dampness, each of us was un-self-consciously disgusted by the other.

*

In 1937 the worst series of tornados in Indiana’s recorded history left the state decimated. Small town post offices were thrown apart, doors found blocks away, and signage asunder. Farms were ruined, their crops beaten away by wind and gifted to the next town like airdropped rations. All the residents of a downtown hotel awoke without walls. It was a farmer’s fault. He dug too far while planting his field, hit a storm system, and when he awoke, covered the bodies of his two drowned sons with a sheet and stood looking down, into the upwardly pounding rain.

*

The wife of the farmer sat on her porch alone and thought of how barren memory could become. At a certain point all that you’ve done touches lips with all that you remember. At that point she realized that memory is a far, far better carry-on bag than reality will ever be. She looked out over her husband’s fields and didn’t think about them at all. She died, realizing that the sun was flooding her face and all of her uncovered skin.

*

Mary’s surface fascinated me, and I would examine it. It happened, every so often, that she would be asleep first and I would be able to look at her ribcage slowly move. I don’t think I ever understood the meaning of the word ‘blossom’ before I saw her ribcage while she was sleeping. That protective structure of bone and cartilage opened and closed above her lungs with each breath. She was her most vulnerable then. She breathed the way you watch clouds plow slowly over ill-shorn grass, up hills, and onwards towards you. I was waiting for rain. A great storm. But there was nothing titanic there: there was no thunder, or dark clouds, but simply silence: in our life there was just the unbroken space between two people in a weatherless living room.

*

Later, Ohio had a period of cloudlessly beautiful weather. Three months of clear and perfect pond-swimming days. Children with their pants rolled above their scabbed knees ran down dusty roads to leap from moss covered stones into rivers and lakes full of all the youthful reflections of so few clouds. All of the crops starved that summer, and Ohio needed federal rations.

*

Before the storming between Mary and I, which was inevitable and growing below the ground for months, I began to make a raincoat out of little bits of paper as thin as the peal from an onion, secretly praying that it would be broken apart at first rainfall and I would be washed, once naked and alone with the weather that was on its way, unselfconscious, but certain that I had made something.

*

The wife of a dead farmer sat at the edge of a greyish and barren pasture. After so many years she was able to finally long for water to fall down onto her husband’s land and her dirt-gritty forehead. The years were the only thing she could blame. She raised her hands to the sky, begging it to poor down over her, in one wet mass. She crawled into a bed made dirty by a red dust wind and rubbed her tongue over her teeth to feel all the bits of earth lodged between them by the breeze.

As she dreamed, all of the water within her began to storm. She peed seven times in two hours and vomited clear liquid twice into the pan next to her bed. She fell to sleep with a thin trickle running from her mouth and eyes.

When she woke up, the yelling of the water in her ears was the first thing to tell her that she was about to drown. She let go of the pillow that she had embraced in her sleep and slowly floated towards the ceiling. She smiled as her flood filled the room. As she began to suffocate she turned to look out of the window to watch the weather rise slowly and meet the sky.

Charlie Geoghegan-Clements lives in Boston. He has been published recently in Prick of the Spindle, the delinquent, 3:AM Magazine, and Marco Polo Quarterly.

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

Salt wind had peeled the green, blue, and yellow paint from the Ferris wheel gondola that swept Joel and his family up into the night, sweetly launched them toward the evening star.  This detail, the sea-battered paint, will return to him decades later.  That night, though, they all curved heedless through the indigo balm of August oceanside air and stopped, gently rocking high above the clacking roller-coaster and gleeful screams and taffy-sweet carnival atmosphere, cradle rocking with the whole wide Atlantic darkly moonlit and undulant before them, and Joel thought, This is just like the mantis movie, this is where the unsuspecting people sat when she rose up, up, up out of the ocean, a hundred feet and more of star-glimmering carapace and mandible.

He shivered in the settling gondola, held aloft by the benevolent ride operator–or the merely forgetful operator, or the operator distracted by a girl in short shorts and halter top—Joel shivering as delicious dread played every key along his spine.  Pray! Said The Mantis, discovered early one Saturday morning on television and watched in purest awe, the awe a different age reserved for burning bushes and fiery wheels in the sky, watched as his abandoned Quisp turned to mush in the plastic bowl.  In that moment of sublime, submarine revelation it became his favorite movie, and would ever remain in his top five even as more sophisticated fare replaced simpler, as if it knew what was coming.

He sat beside his father, across from his mother and sisters, right where the big scene in the movie happened, right there at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion, destined for its own sad fate in the future, reduced and razed and transformed into the parking lot of urban renewal cliché.  He scanned the dark swells with a hero’s steel-eyed gaze and his heartbeat went hummingbird fast because at any moment, anywhere out there—well, you never knew.

You never knew what was beneath the black waves and murky green water.  No one else in the gondola appreciated the awful, wonderful danger of their situation.  When the mantis strides out of the ocean, the Ferris wheel becomes a rotisserie of helpless, screaming wieners, a rotating buffet—his unique contribution to the critical literature about this film, a comment he will write in his early forties on the Radiation Cinema! blog.  He spared a glance for his clueless family.  His parents stared at opposite corners of the gondola, at dirty candy wrappers and discarded, trampled popcorn buckets, tiny jaw muscles throbbing.  His older sister slumped against the laughably unsafe safety bar, gazing at the crowd where it swirled below, its own kind of human taffy, and thought her angrily opaque teenage thoughts, while his younger sang Row Your Boat for the hundredth time, or at least the sixth or seventh.

All this will be given back to him years later, the understanding of what went wrong and why it all happened, all made clear when the mantis does step from where she had been hidden, crossing into the world Joel shared with his family and other billions, the mantis with her blistering memoir and tour of mayhem.  Then, for older Joel, middle-aged, forlorn, and lost Joel, as one of the devoured, everything will make sense.  And isn’t this the way of paracletes and messiahs, he will think, be they carpenter or shepherd or B-movie atomic insect?  Trailing long streamers of fragmented time, they return forgotten pieces of memory and history whether people want them or not.

Joel in the gondola?  Joel sits rocking in wonder at the mysterious, starry ocean with his family all together for the final time.

Tripp Reade

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

When I talked back, my father used to make me stand in the front yard holding milk jugs.  It was a good punishment—I was built for it and wanted more than anything not to be.  I would stare at the sunset, then the moon, and eventually the stars would quake in my gaze.  By dark, he’d be eyeing the stopwatch, grinning, shivering in nothing but a flannel shirt and jeans.  “This girl,” he would say, running a hand over his head, glancing around like someone else was going to walk up and be as amazed.

After, he would slap me on the back and I would sneer and pass the rest of the night in the bedroom.  My sister, a wispy blond who hid from boys and still had them knocking on our window, would quietly tap on the door, pace and whisper about homework.  I’d hide her schoolbooks and lock her out until she curled up in the hallway and fell asleep.

In middle school, my father pushed me to join karate, wrestling, rugby.

“You could be the only girl on the football team,” he said.

But I didn’t like the way he watched me, how he drew everyone’s attention.  I’d heard enough about my boxy torso, flat chest, shot-putter’s ass.  I crushed him and didn’t join anything, opted to eat sweets in bed every day from the end of school until dusk.  My sister filled out sweaters beautifully and stuck to the kitchen, canned vegetables with our mother and learned to talk.  She is a preacher now, or an artist, I can’t remember which.

In a program for troubled kids, after I’d put on enough weight to end up in the counselor’s office, the instructors defined physical, sexual and emotional abuse.  I raised my hand and asked about the milk jugs.  They licked their lips and didn’t let it go.  I knew it was something different, some other parent-child relation between frustration and admiration and even love, but I also knew it was not making me into the sort of girl I wanted to be.

Given the choice of snapping green beans with Mom or chopping down trees with Dad, I always chose the trees.  Mom said he and I were too much alike.  I grew up and tried out dresses, leggings, glitter, but found I was still the girl who could bench press her weight.  I think back to the jugs, how what I really wanted was to drop them and lose myself in my father’s flannel.  How I stood there still as a pillar, thinking I was strong.

Originally from New Mexico, Kim Henderson now lives with her husband and dogs on a mountain in Southern California, where she teaches at Idyllwild Arts Academy.  Her work has appeared in Cutbank, H_NGM_N, River Styx, New South, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, The Kind of Girl, won the seventh annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming this summer.

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

 

Grandmother asks me to test her coffin for durability and overall quality.

“You gotta try everything before you spend the bucks,” she says. “My big box is no sedan, sweetheart. This one’s for keeps, so get inside.”

She likes to find an upscale bargain. She likes to use the word sustainable. She likes to taste the flavors of fro-yo twice before sticking her spoon in any particular scoop. She says she tried out a few other grandchildren before settling on me. She brought a housewarming plant to my apartment, sealing the deal. “I think you have potential,” she says, “even though you live alone.” We grab a cup of chocolate and a cone of pistachio before heading to make her final purchase.

The wholesale casket warehouse is chilled with dry dust, and I look at Grandmother to make sure she’s serious. “With haste, missy,” she says. “Get in, I haven’t got all day. Just ask my doctors.”

I shrug at the salesman and sort of shake my head to diffuse things.

“Grandmothers, am I right?” I laugh. His ponytail is tied long and low. Maybe he’ll climb inside the box with me, show me the bonus features. Maybe we’ll buy the box for ourselves, take it for a spin, flip the top back, wake-style. I lean on the coffin and pop my hip. The store phone rings and he goes to answer it.

“Take a look around, whatever you need, you know,” he says.

In the warehouse, there’s some saxophone tunes playing at a low volume. This must be what music sounds like underground, I think. I am still leaning on the coffin, and Grandmother nudges my lower back with her famed depression-era muscles. I lose my balance and tumble in.

“How are the acoustics?” she asks.

“Not bad,” I say. I sort of nestle my face in the foamy padding, wondering if it’s hypoallergenic.     “It’s so soft!” I say.

“What’s that now?”

“It’s really quite soft.”

“Here, you want your purse in there?” she asks.

“Sure.”  My purse lands on my feet.  I think about sitting up to grab my phone, but it’s truly a comfortable box, and I stay where I am.

“Now try it with the lid closed,” Grandmother says, and I oblige.

Should I work on my taxes tonight? I think. It seems like a far away chore, like a germ trapped in a jar, and I can look at it without getting anxious or squirmy. It’s nice! The box keeps me in my own skin. I have that feeling when I know I’m about to take a nap, and I don’t try and stop it.

*

You don’t seem yourself, I say to my plant. She looks like she has plant flu. My apartment doesn’t get much light, but it has been particularly dark. Poor plant. I cancel some plans to dine out, and tend to her with a yellow water pitcher. Then I remember that I forgot to actually cancel the plans, but no one seems to mind. My fridge is stocked with things I love to eat, and I eat them whenever I want.

The coffin salesman shows up at my door several times when I am not in the mood. I can see his face through the peephole in the door.

“Not in the mood for you, sir.”

“Just saying hey there.”

“Hey there.”

“What can I do?” he asks. “I think you’re excellent.”

“Do you want to help me with my taxes?”

“That’s what I’d call a terrible idea.”

I look through the peephole again. His hair is combed out long and wavy. It’s been growing for years.

Do you want to help me with my taxes, poor plant? I am an adult now, I think, and perhaps I deserve an accountant. I don’t use one for the same reason I don’t go to the dentist. I don’t like being judged on things in my mouth, in my wallet. My receipts are in my purse, but my purse is in the living room, which is much too far away. I’m so comfortable, plant. I wonder if I can write off  Grandmother’s coffin as a transportation expense. Or research, perhaps. A gift?  Who needs an accountant when you’re a creative type.

“Do you want to come see the new caskets we have in stock?” he asks through the peephole.  Is he getting gray around the temples?

“Are you getting gray around the temples?”

“Probably on account of you.”

“Tell me about the new caskets!”

“There’s this one, and it looks like a pink ferrari. Wanna take a ride?”

Grandmother bequeathed to me her fro-yo punch cards, among other prized possessions.  She accumulated twenty-five punches, and I only need five more to get a cone of pistachio for free. I am excited for my free cone.  It’s a bargain I can anticipate.

“I have a free cone coming my way,” I tell him.

“Is that right?”

“No lie. Any day now, I’ll be thick with fro-yo.”

I think, I’ll call the coffin salesman to see if he wants to come and share the cone with me. I am lying on the floor next to the door, and he is in the hall. When I get enough punches., I’ll give him a ring. I stretch my arms up to the fan and the recessed lighting. I’ll tap open my ceiling and climb out to meet him.

Hilary Leichter‘s work has appeared in n+1, The Barnes & Noble Review, The Kenyon Review, the Indiana Review, the L Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She is an associate editor for NOON Annual and a recipient of a 2013 fellowship from The Edward F. Albee Foundation. She has taught at Columbia University and FreeBird Bookstore, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.    

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

The honey bee licks her forelegs and combs the pollen from her head. She stretches down the length of her thorax. What was once taut and hirsute now resembles the plundered stamen of a speedwell. She has been lost for six days. Her wings ache; an abnormal spasm pinches her bowels. She can hardly clock the sun as it passes across the sky. She senses a portent of cold in the air. She is nearly three weeks old and knows that winter is fast approaching.

Her life has not been marked by any great serendipity. Her birth did not come during an interregnum nor did gender grant her the chance for a proud mating death. She sustained the ancestral course: nourishing the young, extending the hive, performing housework. When her royal jelly had dried and her beeswax was spent, she was taught to fly great distances and sent out with the other spinsters to forage pollen and nectar.

Pressing the pollen into a ball with her hind legs, she affixes the golden nugget to a single hair on her corbicula. She has excelled at collecting foodstuffs from the start, searching faster than her peers, farther, but now it weighs on her like a fading talent. She has no use for so much food, let alone the stacks of nuggets she has abandoned along the way. Her hunger has waned with age. These daily rounds sate an instinct as immutable as the setting sun, but in her solitude, serve no greater purpose than relief.

She knows she will never again enjoy the thrill of a hunt with her comrades. She will never savor the proffering of a meal or the joy of welcoming a newborn child, and when the frosts inevitably come, she will not share in the warmth of the swarms shivering corporation. She knows this like she knows dark. She sails a sympathetic zephyr toward the blue horizon thinking of her first flight. The smell of nectar, green at her feet; she stepping off into the blue void, her body weightless, flying beyond the sounds of the hive buzzing somewhere behind to a place that only existed in the dreams of dead bees.

Sam Katz was born in Korea and came to the US at the age of 2. His fiction has appeared or will soon in The Good Men Project, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Per Contra, and Southern Humanities Review.

We set out in the middle of the night and arrived at the station by daybreak. The two men we’d been promised awaited us in black jackets and red caps, standing alone together on the empty platform with their hands behind their backs.

Once the train set off she asked the waiter for a glass of ice water. He brought the water to her boiling but dropped in ice cubes from a gilded bucket until it cooled. They left the bucket and the little golden tongs they’d used to withdraw the ice on the carpet of our cabin. I tried to read the book I’d brought but the pages kept moving every time I looked up. Outside the window the fog would clear for a moment and set in again.

Once as we rocketed past a line of telegraph poles she said, “At the rate we’re going we could run someone over and not notice the bump.”

I slid through our cabin door. The floor of the car was all bare concrete. Someone had retrofitted the dining car into three lines of computers running through spotty plasma monitors.

When we pulled into the city he looked up what he’d come to find but learned that the library had burnt down the night before. The firefighters were kind enough to let us under the cordon wire. “Just watch your step,” they said.

The drizzling rain of the morning turned the fine layers of ash into mud around our shoes.

The door to the records in the basement was intact in its frame but the stairs had all collapsed in. He spoke very rapidly for awhile about getting in from the basement of the department store next door but then abandoned the idea for some reason he never told me.

At our hotel I traded the empty ice bucket and tongs left to us on the train for an elevator ride to the roof and we stared down at the city and at the city that mirrored it on the opposite coast. Everything stayed in place while the fog cleared.

John Fram writes from an apartment within his price range in Texas.

No one knew quite what to do when they found the blonde-haired monkey with the thin golden face that looked like a byzantine saint. Large eyes – positioned close together in a flat profile resembling that of a painted idol – and a serious mouth set it apart from any image of a monkey the townsfolk had seen before. Perhaps they were waiting for it to initiate a conversation, since it looked so knowing, so human. But it didn’t speak, just bobbed its head once in a mournful fashion and ran up the tree in the copse at the centre of the town square.

It was decided that first they would name it. But they only had grainy pictures in yellowing library books of byzantine art and so couldn’t decide which saint it most resembled. The man in the stocks said it should be called Bob, because he thought that would be the funniest name, profanities notwithstanding, but he was ignored because he was an attention hoarder and being ignored was part of his punishment.

A list of saints was made along with a brief summation of their attributes, but still no one could decide because they could not tell what the attributes of the monkey were. It mostly sat in the tree copse, silent, and ate anything they offered up with shaking hands (it had rather large teeth). People grew tired and grumpy of staying out in the heat of the square so it was determined that they would reconvene in a couple of day’s time to discuss the name of the monkey further.

But once they were back to their regular lives, excuses began to be made about the timing of the next meeting. Too early in the morning and it would clash with milking the herds and gathering the eggs, too late and the tradesmen would be falling asleep on their feet from weary days of work. Meanwhile, people had taken to using the well at the corner near the cafe instead of the one in the town square a stone’s throw from the monkey copse (as it was now becoming known).

Enough people still passed the copse, those brave enough to ignore the churn of unease at the base of their stomachs, to give a report of the monkey’s actions. It sat, they said, swung gently between branches, ate any food that was offered. Its large owl eyes followed you right across the square when you walked past. Occasionally it would roll them back into its head and make a chittering sound with a wide grin. But then people stopped visiting the town square at all, skirting the alleyways around it instead. It was the man who was back in the stocks again who told them that the monkey had gone.

When they sent the chimneysweeper up the branches of the sturdiest trees to check, he couldn’t find a trace of the monkey, not even a wisp of fur. This unsettled the townsfolk so much that they started going regularly to church; donating to charitable funds. The priest, perceptive and cunning as always, began a campaign for a new saint’s icon for the west alcove, where a forgotten family used to have their chapel. Soon enough, a painted saint, in the byzantine style, sat at right angles to the congregation. They felt its gaze upon them when they were reaching into pockets for sweets or nodding off behind a raised hymnbook. And, in turn, they experienced guilt for the nameless monkey that they had spurned.

The woodcarver chopped down the copse, once a source of much needed shade and a popular place for lovers to linger, and nailed the wood into a cross for the church. But still the monkey did not come back, the barman’s wife said one winter night. Voicing a desire that no one had dared to say yet. Then, when a sickness visited the elderly of the town, the woodcarver’s son (who was not quite as pious as his father) used the remainders of the copse to make a statue of the monkey, slightly larger than life, and secured it in the space where the trees once grew. The townsfolk approved wholeheartedly, but the priest did not.

The head teacher of the school announced that she had found the saint that the monkey had resembled most, and that it would no longer be nameless. But a name was useless to the townsfolk now. They contemplated the wooden cross in the church on Sundays, saint’s face in the corner of their eyes, and stopped to gaze upon the monkey statue when they passed through the town square. They turned their palms up towards the skies both times, lips tightly closed. They prayed.

 Jane Healey is a British writer based in New York. She is currently studying for an MFA in Fiction at Brooklyn College.

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

It is time again to call my mother. I call her every day at noon. When she picks up today, she sounds great. A little winded, but energized. I can hear her treadmill whirring, her sneakered feet lightly thumping.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“Just passing over the Himalayas,” she says. “They’re lovely. They look like … oh, what are those things on a whale’s back?”

“Barnacles?”

“That’s it, sweetie. Barnacles. Oh, look, there’s a little mountain climber. He’s nearly at the top. Hello down there! Congratulations! Be careful now—don’t trip!”

“That’s impossible, Mom. You can’t see people from that distance.”

I have been worried about this. The drugs might be making her hallucinate.

Six weeks ago I suggested to my mother that it might be time to consider moving to assisted living. She said she’d rather be shot into space. The next day, she volunteered to be a test subject for Robert Alderbranch, the billionaire who thinks he’s figured out how to reverse aging. The formula involves exercise (both mental and physical), a strict diet, a daily drug cocktail, and orbiting the Earth alone in a small capsule.

“So what’s on the docket for today?” I ask her this every day, even though her days are all the same.

“Oh, the usual. After I’m done with the treadmill, I’ll have my kale and yeast shake. Next comes the crossword puzzle, and then I’ll do my crunches.”

“Wait, you’ll do your what?”

“My crunches, sweetie. Mr. Alderbranch says they strengthen the core. Didn’t I tell you? There are these … what do you call them? Like parentheses, only they’re bolted to the ceiling.”

“Brackets?”

“Brackets. I put my feet through them so that I’m upside down, although there’s technically no up or down, up here in space. I link my hands behind my head and touch my nose to my knees. I’m up to ten a day.”

“That’s amazing,” I say. “The formula really must be working.”

“Mr. Alderbranch is very pleased,” Mom says. “He says it’s not just the drugs or the exercises or even the weightlessness. It’s the … oh, what’s it called, when you see things from a different angle?”

“Perspective?”

“That’s it. You’re such a smart girl, sweetie. I know you’ll find your own calling in life very soon.”

The other day she emailed me a job listing from a law firm. It was another receptionist job. I have explained to her that I can’t be a receptionist because I’m an introvert. I’ve taken tests that prove this. Also, I have a PhD in comparative literature.

“Anyway, it’s true what people say about the Earth,” Mom says. “It’s just a little blue ball. Mr. Alderbranch says perspective is the key to everything.”

The formula is supposed to reverse aging, not just stop it. So how young will Mom get? Is there a predetermined cutoff point? If it were me, I think I’d like to stop at 35. That was a pretty good year, 35. I finally left my husband, the world’s most charismatic dentist, who cheated on me with multiple hygienists. That day, I turned my back on the large, sunny house we shared and ran for miles through the brand-new suburbs. I ran faster and faster, until I truly believed my next step would lift me into the air.

What if my mom turns into a teenager? Or a child? Will she actually get smaller?

“So when can you come home?” I say. “I mean …” I should not have said the word “home” to her. We never did resolve the question of assisted living. If Alderbranch’s formula works, that probably will no longer be an issue. But I don’t want to give her any false hopes. “I mean,” I say, hedging, “when can you come back to Earth?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mom says. “I haven’t asked Mr. Alderbranch. I don’t like to bother him with that stuff.”

“It’s your life, Mom.”

“But I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” Mom says. “He’s been so kind to me. Yesterday he sent me a bouquet of flowers—well, a photograph of a bouquet. They were lilies. Anyway, I don’t think it would work on Earth. The perspective, I mean. I wouldn’t have that anymore, would I?”

I haven’t sent her any photographs of anything.

“Oh, look, I’m coming up on your apartment complex. Hurry up, sweetie! Run outside and wave to me.”

“I’m in my pajamas,” I say. I don’t remind her that I’m also much too far away.

“I’m nearly there! You’re going to miss me! Run out to your balcony and wave.”

I suppose it will do no harm.

“OK. OK. I’m out here. I’m waving.”

“I see you! There you are! There you are in that old robe of yours! Do you see me?”

It’s impossible to see satellites in the daytime, much less anyone inside them.

“I’m waving to you,” I say, hedging again.

A star shoots out from behind my neighbor’s TV dish. A bright seam trails behind it, as if my mom’s unzipping the sky.

Ann Gelder‘s fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Portland Review, and other journals. Her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House (Spring 2006), The Millions, and The Rumpus.

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.