“I should hate her,"thought Frances as she stood in the corner of her backyard holding a fully plucked chicken carcass she’d just been gifted by her new neighbor, Gladys. Frances didn’t like Gladys, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. She was nice enough. Funny in a self-deprecating kind of way. It wasn’t her hair, though her hair always looked like she’d just had it blown out no matter how she’d slept the night before or when she’d washed it last. And it wasn’t that she farmed while wearing Vineyard Vines and shoes that had maybe been worn and discarded by Martha Stewart, it’s that Gladys could pluck a chicken—like this chicken that Frances held now—rip every last puff of down from it’s slick, pimply body, maybe wash her hands and refresh her chap-stick, and then look like she was ready to go grab a latte or play a doubles match.

It was, most likely, that Gladys had only wanted to tryfarming and was simply in the process of reinventing herself.

Frances flicked a leaf off the sickly yellow corpse dangling from her fist as she recalled Gladys recalling her days on Wall Street as a top executive at the top hedge fund at the top of the tallest building in the city. In every respect, her prior job had sounded “pretty high up there.” But then there was the crash, the market adjustment, and they had to let her go. Poor thing. Poor Gladys. Her severance package was barely enough to fund a small country, much less buy this old thousand-acre working farm/winery on the North Fork of Long Island.

And she acted like being laid off, gaining financial independence, plucking a chicken without one blood-tipped feather ever landing on her $300 blue jeans—was no big deal. None of it! Nothing was ever a big deal to her. She could launch a space shuttle from her front porch,thought Frances,and act like she’d just loaded the dishwasher. Like ‘what? This old thing? This space shuttle? Oh, it’s fine. I just had it laying around. My nephew wasn’t using it anymore, so thought I’d launch it and get it out of the house.’

Frances realized she was choking the life out of her lifeless chicken.

She dropped her arms and that night’s dinner to her sides and took a deep breath. She filled her lungs with the same warm, grassy air she and her parents and her grandparents and her great grandparents had breathed in all their lives, generation after generation of farmers and farmhands and vintners, all here on the Northfork, everything from pumpkins to fiddleheads to pinot gris. Frances loved it here. She loved her family, her friends, her parish, her little house her unmarried freedom. She loved the skills she’d developed over the years and her expertise in raising grapevines from mere seeds and coaxing the few turkeys they raised for the holidays to eat more feed and grow meatier than turkeys on neighboring farms.

Expertise and skills her new neighbor, Gladys, could apparently develop within nano-seconds simply by googling what those skills were.

Frances suddenly realized she was coveting her neighbor and felt dirty and wrong. She thought of Father Chapin and his teachings and focused on the sky and pink hued clouds drifting by and pushed those jealous thoughts from her head as best she could. For the most part, gone. All gone.

Feelings remained, though.

Frances held up the dead bird and based on the tiny swirl of emotions still whirling around her gut she didn’t know whether to kiss it, punch it, salute it…but she forgave Gladys her perfection, her flawlessness and, in the end, Frances decided to pray for her chicken carcass, before stuffing it with lemon, rosemary and butter and shoving it deep into the fiery pits of hell.

“Oven!” corrected Gladys. “I meant, I need to go shove this bird in the oven.”

#flashfction #humor

Lara started building her first ship in a bottle a month after she met Steve.

He sailed. She didn’t.

He fished. She hated seafood.

He swam. She sank like a stone.

He dove from cliffs. Again, she sank like a stone.

But when they stepped into that souvenir store in Annapolis and saw those elaborate wooden ships constructed in glass bottles—she swooned.

She painted. He didn’t.

She sculpted. Statues unnerved him.

She curated a gallery. He preferred galleys to galleries.

She once curated a museum. Again, he preferred galleys.

She picked a medium-sized bottle off the shelf. It contained a schooner. She knew this because Steve looked at the bottle and said, “Hey! Check out that schooner, would ya?” And immediately it seemed like the perfect activity to bond them as a legitimate couple: art and water. He could pick the boat, the bottle and the materials and she could piece it all together and add more maritime décor to his houseboat way back on Lake Union, Seattle. Beautiful there. Such a nice change of pace.

So, faster than an encroaching Nor’easter, they bought plane tickets and commenced collaborating.

He complimented. She worked even harder.

He dreamt about that perfect wave. She obsessed over that brass porthole.

He stepped out for coffee. She skipped breakfast.

He flew to Annapolis for that thing he needed for that other thing. She said, “Huh? Oh! That’s nice. You, too!”

Now, two years later, she put the finishing touches on her 8th ship-in-bottle project. And did so while living in his houseboat on Lake Union. She made her own workspace: a heavy, wooden table with a magnifying glass wider than her head and thicker than her forearm.

Though the boat in a bottle collaboration became a little one-sided, Lara loved the process. Unlike Steve, she drank up details and projects like they were tequila and she the worm. He was more of a big-picture man.

She filed, sanded and stained the slivers of Boxwood making up the stern and bow. She used pipe cleaners to adhere glue to the garboard strake and developed a soldering iron technique to make sure each pintle fit securely in their gudgeon without popping out. She found the simplest way to complete the task was to rig the masts of the ship and raise them up once securely inside. Masts, spars, and sails worked best when built separately and then attached to the hull of the ship with strings and hinges, and…Lara built these hinges from scratch. Tiny hinges from bits of brass and copper found in discarded heaps at Lake Union Hardware, back when she used to leave Steve’s houseboat to go to Lake Union Hardware.

In the meantime, Steve sailed. He fished. He swam. He travelled wherever water could be found.

He met another artist who loved to paint and sculpt and curate. Another artist who was just as taken by the ships in the bottles in that Annapolis souvenir store—the tininess of it all, the details.

Lara turned off her soldering iron one day to find that Steve wasn’t there. He actually hadn’t been there for quite sometime, but Lara hadn’t noticed until she popped the cork in Viking ship circa 900 AD and placed it on the shelf next to Courageous, Ted Turner’s America’s Cup Yacht circa 1977 AD.

“Steve?” Lara was alarmed by how muffled her voice sounded. She cleared her throat. “Steve? Honey? I finished if you want to grab dinner or something. Indian, maybe?” She stood and leaned towards the deck complete with planters and plastic begonias. Her knees wobbled and popped as she walked for the first time in however long. “I could go for tika masala anything: chicken, lamb, shrimp…”

It was easy to tell he wasn’t there because this particular houseboat was easy to search in one glance. Lara merely had to stand at the stairs and look up, then out and side-to-side to know that she was completely alone. Steve’s was a tiny boat: Lake Union Houseboat, circa 1930, Renovation circa 1968.

Lara liked tiny.

“Uh…hon?” Lara’s voice caught when she stepped on deck. It was still so beautiful. Perfectly sanded planks of mahogany, ending at hourglass-shaped fence posts above the outboard motor. The water was rocky, but the houseboat didn’t even bob.

And when she reached out to flick away what she thought was a dangling spider or speck, she realized that the speck was a leaf on the other side. It hovered just above Lake Union Houseboat, circa 1930, Renovation circa 1968. Hovered starboard of the perfectly sanded mahogany deck. Lara’s hand hit glass. Her fingers rubbed the curve of what felt and looked like hard air. The leaf stuck there. Mocked her. It able to fly away if the right breeze came along, where Lara was left to wonder where her air might be coming from, much less the right breeze. She thought about yelling but then realized that the women in the houseboats on either side of her were concentrating. And not just on either side, but hunched, focused women worked on projects in houseboats extending indefinitely from either side of her neighbors—all focused intensely on the boat parts and bottles spread out in their respective workspaces. Lara swallowed, though whatever was caught in her throat now didn’t go away.

The woman immediately on her right crafted a Spanish galleon scaled larger than most models Lara had researched, probably meant for a magnum or a Jeroboam. The corresponding lighthouse next to that vessel was a detail she’d yet to consider. Lara thought about waving, getting that artist’s attention, just for an unobtrusive second, and issuing a thumb’s up for such masterful work. Then she noticed how little sun was left.

Pity.

Sure, the twilight sky was nice and, yeah, she had a few questions for Steve. But there was another box of gathered bits of fine wood and metals on the table inside. And Staten Island Ferry, circa 1819 wasn’t going to build itself.

The End

A muffin crumb sat on her collar and bounced every time she coughed. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. They’d been across from each other, facing each other, knee to knee, on Metro North for twenty-seven minutes already.

He, Joe, also couldn’t write the memo he’d been meaning to this morning and it was due at noon. But she, and her crumb, managed to get through at least a chapter of that trashy paperback with the shirtless beau-hunk riding bareback on the cover. The damsel, gripped by said beau-hunk and draped over said horse, looked ready to swoon, what with her hand brought to her forehead like that.

The blank laptop screen cast Joe’s face in a sickly glow.

And that crumb…

Earlier this morning, his wife, Lanie, had served frozen waffles. Even to him. And he hated frozen waffles. She got up just long enough to put eight of them in the toaster oven and dole out two each to Joe and the kids before trudging back upstairs to shower. No, not shower. To crawl back in bed and sleep until lunch, which is what she did most days now.

“You look righteous, L,” he'd told her every single morning, including this one. “So, hot. So, beautiful.”

Early on, Lanie smiled a little at Joe’s compliments. After a few months, she issued nondescript flat-lipped smirks. After a few years, an eye roll. Recently, maybe a grunt or a shudder. This morning, Eggos cooked dog-biscuit hard and served with a Frisbee toss.

“I mean, so hot. Your body just doesn’t stop! ”

He still meant the compliments, or at least thought they helped. Maybe helped combat her depression or exhaustion or post-partum somethin’ somethin’ or low iron or thyroid issues or any combination there of. He asked her just this morning what was brewing in that pretty little head of hers, and she finally flat out told him: “I’m fine. I just can’t stand you or the kids. You’re all jerks.” She leaned into her hip and picked a cuticle. “I kept thinking each time you knocked me up, ‘oh! Maybe I’ll like this one,’ but no. Every kid was worse than the last. All three of them just suck. Honestly. You bore me. All of you. I’m done.”

As Lanie had said this, she munched the only waffle crust on the table that didn’t have syrup on it and a crumb landed on her pajama collar. When she'd said the word jerks, Lanie had thrown her arms up in the air for emphasis. To show she’d flat out given up. Then her arms dropped to her sides with a slap. The slap had made Lanie’s waffle crumb dance, just like the crumb dancing now on this woman’s polyester lapel. This woman’s cheap spongy collar with the stubborn coffee stain just to the left of where her crumb jiggled, anchored by synthetic fibers. Fibers acting as a five-point harness for the only full-on-carb not sucked into her neon-pink lipstick-lined maw.

Lanie, had never like children. “They’re short, neurotic creeps who cry and scream all the time. Like my Aunt Beverly, but louder and shorter. Sometimes fatter but always more stupid. And they smell.”

But loud, short Aunt Beverly drew up her willwhen Joe knocked up Lanie the first time. And the will said her niece’s kids could have her money. All of it. Nothing for her niece. Definitely nothing her niece’s husband.

Aunt Beverly was the heir to the Velcro fortune. She wore lots of bling, some of which fastened itself around her thick neck, fingers and wrists with actual Velcro. And Joe understood that what rattled Lanie most was that Aunt Beverly knew she held all the cards.

Lanie didn’t have a job. She tried one once and it didn’t stick. She rarely showed and when she did, co-workers hated the sound of her voice.

Joe held a job, mostly to get away from his righteous, sleeping wife.

And the kids? The kids just needed to be plied with frozen waffles, to be kept alive until Aunt Beverly died. Then maybe they could use that inheritance to hire their own nanny. To hire someone to love them. Lanie could at least keep them alive long enough for that. Maybe. Making breakfast was hard. Sometimes the dial on the toaster oven stuck and things burned. But the toaster oven needed to last because Aunt Beverly really wasn’t that old. Or sick.

About a month ago, Aunt Beverly discovered Weight Watchers. The lifestyle lessons featured at the meetings really resonated with her. “Frozen waffles are empty calories, Lanie. Empty. I have three, sweet-but-savory slow-cooker porridges that will set them up right for the day ahead. Your children look like lump crab. With the right start, they’ll glow. They’ll have enough energy to tackle any challenges thrown their way. Or at least enough oomph to stand, or crack a book.” Aunt Beverly dropped five pounds in the first two weeks.

Joe thought she looked pretty good when she stopped by most Sundays.

Lanie thought Aunt Beverly looked a little too healthy and considered sprinkling arsenic on her pressed fruit snack bars.

The garbled announcement startled Joe. The doors behind him slid shut and the train jerked to life again.

“You’ve got a crumb. Right…right there by that stain,” Joe said to the woman across from him.

“Huh?” She looked down at her slightly larger boob.

“No, up. Right there.”

“Huh?” She looked at him, confused. Lipstick covered her front teeth now. Then she followed his finger to the collar flat against her left clavicle. “Oh!” Her smile flashed pink and white zebra stripes. “Thank you.” Their eyes met. Joe shook his head in disgust. Her smile dissolved into an uneasy frown. “What’s the matter with you? You okay or not?”

“Not,” he said and closed his laptop. Joe spoke quietly. “It’s my wife. I hate her. I mean, I really, really hate her. I’m not just saying that.”

The woman ran her tongue over her teeth, hard, scraping off 70% of the lipstick while she bent to pick up her purse, her paperback and leave. She moved without nodding goodbye and took another seat five rows back.

Joe kept talking to the space where the woman had been. In particular, to the space where the muffin crumb had been. “Even if Lanie does poison Aunt Beverly and actually gets away with it—I still have to live with her. The kids still have to live with her. None of the money will go to me.” He laughed out loud. The woman peered over five rows of bowed, phone-reading heads to keep an eye on him. “I’ll still be stuck. Maybe more stuck.”

The woman called the on-board ticket agent over, whispered, pointed.

Joe continued talking. “She’s such a bitch. And a lousy mother.” He re-crossed his legs and picked at one of the scabs on his forehead.

Other people around him started to move away. Joe didn’t notice. He pictured that crumb still bouncing on that polyester lapel. Except now the crumb had arms and legs. It wore glasses that made it look smart, and an earnest expression that made it look concerned. The crumb took notes.

“She always thought we were jerks. It’s so obvious now! If Lanie fucking loved us at all, she’d make real waffles. With homemade batter and one of those irons, ya know?”

The crumb nodded and asked, “And how does this make you feel?”

“I feel duped!” Joe screamed. The ticket agent spoke quietly into her walkie. “Lanie’s a babe, but one day she’ll be old and ugly, right? I should go. I should just take the kids and go away.”

“Is that prudent?” asked the crumb, re-crossing its legs, leaning back in its ergonomic office chair.

“Well, I can’t sit around waiting for Aunt Beverly to die!”

“Nobody is telling you to do that.” Where did the crumb get the bottle of sparkling water? “There are other options that we can discuss. For now, take a deep breath. Go to your happy place like we practiced. Calm yourself.”

“Me? Calm myself? You calm yourself, you fuckin’--”

“Sir?” The Ticket agent approached, flanked by two armed men in civilian clothes. “Sir, you need to come with us.”

“Huh?” Joe didn’t realize he’d been crying, his face flushed and ruddy. “Why? What up, officer?”

“Just please come with us, sir.”

“Don’t worry, Joe. I’ll make some calls.” The crumb turned back to its desk and reached for its phone. “In the meantime, I can prescribe a little something to help.”

“Yeah, okay. Okay,” Joe mumbled both to the crumb and the men escorting him down the aisle towards the first car.

At home, Lanie snored and shifted under her skunky, unwashed comforter. The dial on the toaster oven downstairs? Stuck. Waffle crumbs charred and smoked beneath the reversible wire wrack.

At the Weight Watchers meeting, Aunt Beverly nodded in agreement. The moderator’s idea that weight loss lead to empowerment really turned her on. So, she tucked the uneaten half of that pressed-fruit snack bar into her purse and brushed the crumbs off her sweater vest.

The End

 A shrill, barely audible whistle tweeted in the distance as the mid-morning sun reached 10:00…

Scratching noises. A thump. Then a tiny brown chipmunk popped out of its hole and sprinted in that bouncy chipmunk style halfway across the closely cropped yard.

He froze. Looked this way and that. Nose twitched. Tiny fingers curled in front of his tiny chest as if gripping a baton. Eyes darted from one house to a similar house to another very similar house. He eyed the shiny black street, so freshly paved it still had that hot tar smell—so seldomly driven on it still added spring to the Postal worker’s step.

Sensing no hawks or dogs, the chipmunk skittered across the remaining length of the yard, stopping when it reached the mailbox pole, steel and still bedecked with the bright orange PAID sticker from Home Depot. He leaned his back against this pole—stubby tail tucked beneath his left haunch.

Again, the chipmunk froze. Looked this way and that. Whiskers shuddered. Eager eyes took in the enormity of the cloudless sky. He brushed eight, fuzzy fingers and two thumb-like nubs against his tummy as if trying to whisk away water or acorn crumbs.

“What a day.” The chipmunk curled over his left side, dug around in fur with both hands and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Jesus,” he said and reached into the tufts on his right side pulling out first a lighter, then a phone that he immediately tucked under his arm. The chipmunk shook the lighter a couple of times and flicked it repeatedly until the flame caught and stayed and the tiny Marlboro Red tucked between his fluffy cheeks flickered to life. “Really, what a day,” he mumbled between puffs. He rubbed his eyes hard with his free hand and coughed a tiny, phlegmy cough. A productive cough, as if little chipmunk lungs were hacking up tar-laced crud from years of bad habits. “What a damn day…”

In the similar yards lining the street on either side, little trails of smoke snaked into the sky just above grass surrounding the base of every mailbox pole. The neighborhood was empty of people. Quiet, save for the barely audible hacking. The crackling, sporadic squeaks and sniffing.

He tucked away the lighter and removed the phone from his pit. On the back of the phone, a dirty nametag read “Chippy.”

Chippy pushed his finger against the button at the base of his cell. Facebook immediately blinked on at the same post he’d left off from the day before. Chippy swiped at the screen until he got to his updated newsfeed and scanned.

Typical.

“Such an asshole,” Chippy muttered. "Honestly, how many pictures, Stripy? How many pictures are you going to post from one stupid trip to Austin?"  Chippy coughed, and spit a piece of ash into the grass. He swiped up and watched images of Jingles and her kids drift by. His angry-looking mother. His chubby sister gripping a ragged bible. Corny-Toots looked good except for that blue-jay scar fur didn’t grow around anymore.

Chippy paused long enough to remove himself from his class reunion group chat. Then took a long, slow drag.

He swiped up, and there she was. Nibbles.

Nibbles looked good. Really good. The years had been kind to her. Her tail was still full. No sign of mites. And despite all the pups in older posts, her figure was hot. And if there were any stretch marks, you sure couldn’t see them under that shiny pelt of hers. “Damn, baby,” muttered Chippy.

Chippy took a long drag and crushed his cigarette against the mailbox pole, leaving a poppy-seed-sized mark. He weighed his options. He called up messenger and typed something he didn’t send. It didn’t read right. “She don’t wanna hear from me,” he muttered. “Not after that whole thing.”

But Nibbles looked so good.

Chippy scratched the back of his head and ate what he found there. Then he read his unsent message again. He pressed send. Then he instantly regretted it.

A shrill, barely audible whistle tweeted in the distance as the mid-morning sun reached 10:10…

Chippy cursed under his breath and pocketed his phone. Then sprinted in that bouncy chipmunk style back to his hole all the way across the closely cropped yard.

The End

“All righty, then. Show then door number two!” The announcer yelled and swept his arm towards the middle of three closed entries.

Nothing happened.

“Susan?” he hissed through perfect teeth. “Sus—”

“Oh!” Susan snapped to and sashayed past the announcer, her gaze still lingering on that odd, plain couple on stage—again. For the fourth time. This week. She pivoted, bent low over the knob and jerked the door open, finishing with her other hand held high—feet and ankles locked together. Nailed it, she thought. And flashed her glistening teeth. Flipped her flaxen hair.

And there it was—their prize. “It’s a NEW car!” Yelled the announcer over the explosion of applause and screaming.

Sara’s jaw dropped to her knees, quickly buoyed by a grin so big her eyes shut and her scrunched nose leaked.

“Oh, no,” Joe stammered. Sara groped but his slack hand fell from hers. “Oh, no. Not another new car. Why? Why couldn’t we just spend the wheel for cash or…”

“Honey! C’mon!” Sara clutched at her flowered collar and patted her perm as she wobbled over to the bright red Ford Fiesta. “Lord have mercy! I can’t believe our luck these days!”

Joe followed, adjusting his Bass Pro cap and glancing at Susan as he passed. Not at her cleavage, but at that tiny mole on her wrist. At that bracelet. Susan’s eyes followed his. “Creep,” she mouthed. Joe looked away and shuffled after his giggling wife.

The audience cheered non-stop. Susan beamed and strutted around to the other side of the car. She waved her hand the length of the bumper. She drug her finger one way over the streamlined roof and then the other way. She rested one heel on the front tire, then—“Susan? Open the door and show the lovely couple the dashboard of the most fuel efficient American made model in the country!”

“You got it, Ted!” Susan beamed uncertainly at Sara and Joe, now wrapped in each other’s arms. At least Sara’s arms were encircling what she could of Joe’s waist. Susan indicated for them to back up a little. As she opened the front passenger door, her bracelet caught on the door handle and fell to the marble floor. “Oh! Sorry, let me—”

“Wait,” whispered Susan. She held up her splotchy, plain hand. Susan paused in mid-stoop.

“Honey?”

“Hush, Joe. Lookee there.”

“Ma’am? Let me just take that. Okay?”

“Hush, now.” Sara’s knees popped as she bent to pick up the gold chain. So thin, it looked like a child’s. She turned it over and over again in her course fingers. “Oh, my stars,” Sara choked, and looked at the buxom model, now speechless and staring back. “Susan? Susan Grace?”

“Mama? Is...is that you?”

“Yes.” Sara clutched the bracelet to her chest and turned to Joe. “You…knew. You knew, right?”

“Yes, baby.” Joe adjusted his hat. “I knew the first time we came.”

“Why not just say…” Sara broke down and sobbed as the announcer tried to quiet the confused audience with jokes. She reached way up and cupped her plain hand against her daughter’s flawless cheek. “What are we gonna do with all these cars, Joe?”

Susan placed her hand over her mother’s and squeezed.

“Who cares, Honey. We’ve got our little girl back. And she can have her pick of Ford Fiestas.”