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five word flash
Give me five words.
That's the game I've been playing with loved ones and strangers alike whenever I need inspiration. They give me five words, I give them a piece of flash fiction.
Here are some of my favorites.
jo
Words: Hydrangea, carnage, toilet, banana, pillow
Jo has a hydrangea plant she protects like one would a child. It’s blue, sometimes. Other times, it’s pink. Jo says it’s the soil that turns it all different shades of pastel.
I watch her in the summers, watch her as she drags out a grey pillow and a book and reads to the plant. She gives it water and arranges the soil neatly around its roots. She sits in the rain and into the evening, Jo and the hydrangea, the hydrangea and Jo. I watch her and wonder how soft her skin is.
My father says she’s a sad girl. He says her mother didn’t love her enough and that no mother should be letting her young girl sit outside in the rain and dark. My mother pokes her head over the fence and says, “Jo, would you like some lemonade or a cookie or a banana, maybe?” and Jo says,
“No, Mrs. Peterson,” and she goes on sitting with her plant. I wonder what it would be like to love something that much.
It’s late one night and Dixon has to go toilet. I can tell because he’s pacing by the door. I stand up from my bed and bring Dixon downstairs and slide open the door.
“Go toilet,” I say.
I see them then. There are three, I think. Maybe four. They all look like vague blobs in the dark. I watch them the way you watch a vase fall. I listen to their murmured laughs, their suppressed swears and the hushed sounds of digging. It smells like moist summer and old campfire and a little like fertilizer. I wonder what it would be like to touch Jo’s hair.
Dixon pushes me to go inside. Something in me feels sour but I go inside anyway and pull the covers up to my neck. Just beneath my window, the boys dig.
I stay in bed when morning snakes in through the blinds. I stay in bed when I hear the high-pitched hollering from outside. I don’t think of Jo’s face seeing the hydrangea carnage. I picture what it must be like to have Jo’s body against mine, to have her dig her fingers in my soil and turn me pastel.
the new neighbors
Words: Tree, Sage, Cannoli, Vinyl, Stool
When somebody new moves to the neighborhood, you bring them something homemade. That’s just what you do. And Clarence is nothing if not a neighborly man.
His mother taught him to make cannolis when he was just a young boy. She’d planned to teach his sisters, but they could barely spend two minutes in the wooden stools before losing interest and running out of the kitchen to play in the backyard. There they were, Clarence and Beatrice, rolling out cannoli dough and wrapping it around the cool metal cylinders. Beatrice would pull Clarence far from the stove when it was time to fry the shells — but when it came to the filling, that was his time to shine. He learned how to pipe with precision, the prettiest way to roll the cream in mini chocolate chips or walnuts. If Clarence closed his eyes now, he could still smell the oil — hear the crunch of the first bite, feel the wobbling stool bear his weight.
There was a time when his mother’s kitchen was Clarence’s entire world, the white countertop the soil of their little planet. The things they grew there were sacred — the seeds of flour that they’d turn into beautiful trees, a small taste of a God-like power.
And today, 78-year-old Clarence will gift cannolis to the new neighbors across the street. He might not remember how to turn on his desktop, but age hasn’t yet gotten a claw on his baking. Clarence can still make cannolis in his sleep.
Armed with his 16 golden cannolis on a paper plate, Clarence heads out into a light snow.
The Shermans live in a sage green home with black shutters. Before them was the Wilsons, an older couple who had an affinity for getting the morning paper in their underwear.
The stairs to the stoop are slick with ice, so Clarence is sure to take careful steps. His hands grow red from the cold.
He knocks.
On the other side of the door is a woman with bright red hair pulled back in a braid. Something akin to concern floods her face.
“Clarence,” she says.
“I wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood.” Clarence extends his platter. The woman looks down at his offering like she’s trying to see through the foil. “Cannolis,” he clarifies.
“Why don’t you come in?” the woman says, taking a step back and gesturing into her home.
How lovely.
She leads Clarence to the kitchen and makes him a cup of tea — mint with a splash of honey, his favorite.
And as he sips his tea, the woman slips into the dining room with her cell phone to call Clarence’s daughter.
“It happened again,” she whispers into the receiver, staring at the two plates of cannolis that Clarence has brought her in the last three weeks alone. She can’t bring herself to eat them or throw them away.
Or to tell the kind old man whose mind has become a scratched Vinyl that it’s been years since she moved in.
“I’m on my way,” his daughter says.
So Lacey Sherman pulls up a seat beside Clarence and, for the third time this month, listens to him talk about his mother.
rapid ribbit
Words: Pomegranate, clouds, Jaguar, divine, belly button
There is a service where you can send a frog right to someone’s doorstep.
Rapid Ribbit: reptiles, sent promptly to your door.
Marla squints and takes a pomegranate seed out of the bowl in her lap.
The crouched jaguar of a bad decision looms beside her.
This is the tick that has buried under Marla’s skin. She hasn’t slept in weeks. Juliet, Juliet, Juliet.
“You keep the Maine cabin,” Carl told her. “I want you to have it.”
Carl gets the new wife. Marla gets the cabin. The cabin whose walls breathe with her at night. The cabin that’s a lone freckle on a back, the one Marla always wanted to sell, the one with a frog problem in the summer.
Carl has always hated frogs.
They skeeve him out the way most people are skeeved out by spiders or blood. Their skin is too slimy. Where are their bones? Their tongues are so unpredictable.
Marla was the one who cleared the frogs from the cabin with a broom while Carl cowered in the corner.
Marla used to believe every every inch of Carl was divine. There was God in his voice, in his fingers, in his innie belly button into which she would place her pinky while they lay tangled up in bed. Carl’s love was like a cloud -- clear and identifiable, but something Marla could pass right through.
Juliet moved into their home. She’s sleeping in Marla’s bed. She’s doing Marla’s dishes. She’s having Sunday dinners with Marla’s family.
The hand Marla lifts to her mouse is stained with pomegranate juice -- but this will be no damned spot on her skin. This is on Carl.
Marla hits “send.”
God is something else now.
a small, misshapen moon
Words: leaf, bedspread, carton, magnitude, gem
The Isherwoods didn’t need the 7:00 AM rap on the door to remind them that today would’ve been her birthday, but the rap came nonetheless. Paul answered. It’s worth noting that Richard had a key to the Isherwood residence and knew of each alternative way in (garage via code, a faulty lock on the sliding glass door in the back that could be opened if you jimmied it a certain way, the one neighbor in the yellow house who had a spare key). But today, Richard chose to knock. Today, Richard carried a plate covered in aluminum foil.
Paul took a step back to let his father-in-law inside. On the landing, Marielle tied her navy robe at her hip and floated down the stairs. They hadn’t been expecting Richard this early. It didn’t matter. Marielle took her father’s face in her hands and kissed his cheek. She still had indentations from the bedspread on her face and arms, etched on her skin like veins on a leaf.
They gathered around the kitchen table and Richard put the plate down in the center. Gingerly, he lifted the foil off as though revealing a gem. To call it a cake would be a sin. It was cracked and amorphous. It looked as though Richard had molded damaged crumbs into a vague cake-like mound. An “80” candle sagged in the center, a proud and humble flag on a small, misshapen moon. Seeing Richard’s cake made Marielle’s ribs tighten. She could picture her father squinting in the kitchen in the early hours, struggling to read the small print of a recipe, surrounded by cartons and containers and spoons. Until three months before, he had never spent more than ten minutes in the kitchen. It must’ve taken him all night. It struck her, the magnitude of this memory that did not belong to her; the love that was still caked under her father’s nails like dirt.
She took Richard’s hand and turned to Paul.
“Grab the matches,” she said.
the palm reader
Words: Greg, moist, yokel, quarterback, onion
Shannon’s here. And she’s brought a new guy.
She and Greg make eye contact across the bar and Shannon’s face exudes light. She’s got that way of looking at you like you’re the exact person she wants to see.
The room is rife with motion and alcohol, so intensely saturated that the air is practically moist. Greg feels unable to get an inch of space. It’s like everything is touching him at once.
Shannon kisses Greg on the cheek. Greg always holds his breath when she’s too close. He can’t bear it.
“Happy birthday!”
Greg wishes to be right here, in this spot forever, and somehow, also, anywhere but here.
She used to come over to help Greg find his sock pairs on laundry day (Greg’s least favorite, most menial task). It became Sock Day. She’d talk about work and her family and the trips she wanted to take.
We should go there,
she’d say,
you can’t imagine the color of the sky, so clear, you could fall right into it. I’ll have to take you there.
Then a new man would come alone and Greg would wear his socks mismatched, feeling Shannon’s absence in his footsteps, feeling her platonic love stitched in the thread like a gust of wind on his feet.
“This is Conrad.”
Or maybe she says Jackson. Or Tom. Or Patrick or Car Seat or Onion. It can be anyone, standing beside Shannon. It doesn’t matter. They come and go so quickly, laughing at her jokes and finding ways to touch her. And none of them are Greg.
“Happy birthday,” Shannon’s Man says. The accent is southern. Good. A yokel. Anyone but Greg.
They get Greg a cake. They sing to him. Shannon places a hand on Greg’s knee and says,
I love you.
But it’s all wrong.
Her words are a palm, covered in arbitrary divots and lines onto which Greg will read meaning that isn’t there. He will craft a fictitious story and believe it to be the future, telling himself it’s the way forward -- a quarterback throwing a ball to a field of people only to discover it isn’t a field of people at all but just a field, and he has never been a quarterback, and he has no idea what to do with this fucking ball.
Greg is wearing mismatched socks. One black. One with salamanders. He blows out his candles. But Shannon is looking away.
