[New Flash Fiction] GRAY

BY BERGITA BUGARIJA

I reserved my last day in town for the museum of contemporary art, the famous one. A must-see, Madge said when I told her about the trip. The fourth floor would change everything, she gushed, her voice breathy. Hardly, I thought, but didn’t have the heart to crush her zeal.

I entered the concrete and glass box. I don’t mind minimalism. Although, the vast, sprawling lobby was scary. A block of white granite in the middle, the reception desk, seemed like a life raft in a sea of spooky echoes. Murmuring multitudes studied colorful floor plans that, if followed as recommended by their own Madges, would change their lives.  

First floor, Lichtenstein. Okay. Second, Mondrian. Fine. Third, Warhol. I get it. Kind of. And then the fourth, the inevitable: a square of gray. A mockery posing as art and all of us, certainly the Madges of the world, in on the prank.

Well, not me.

No one can tell me that a piece of gray painted canvas stretched on a frame is art. And the worst kind of gray, at that: nihilism gray. Not charcoal, not pebble, not mouse, not elephant, not concrete, not rainy day. Not smoke gray. Not ash gray. Not stone gray. Not gray hair gray.

Just gray. The synthetic kind, artificial like its callous attempt to make us second-guess our sanity, forgo our common sense, our instincts, our sensory grounded reality.

It’s not even that, like so much of contemporary “art,” the gray square made me feel I could have done it. Of course I could have. In five seconds. Madge’s hologram appeared before me emitting the art community’s worn-out comeback: You could have. But you didn’t. You know what? I wouldn’t have made this even if I could, or, for that matter, because I could! This shameless practical joke that went too far. Seriously, is this what I traveled miles for and paid money to see? This pretentious nonsense posing as a provocation, I suppose. Of what?

Oh, Madge…

Gray square like a gray cat; neither bad luck nor good fortune, just whatever. Not a majestic humpback whale gray, not a dewdrop translucent playful gray, none of the mystery of the fog gray. Even smog gray is more enigmatic than this dull one venerated at the world’s esteemed museum. Not moon, not London, none of the fifty shades from that bestselling erotic saga I never read but a friend told me all about. Even gray aluminum wall installations at any of the countless nondescript corporate headquarters have more depth and texture, more soul.

I don’t think this gray was even painted on the canvas, the charlatan artist didn’t even bother that much. What most likely happened is this poser bought a gray tarp from a knockoff Gucci handbag trafficker who used the cloth to bundle and transport the illicit cargo. So fascinating. Right, Madge?

My skin started to itch at the edge of my sweater sleeves.

The color of elegance, they say, of fine Italian suits. I say a warzone tent has more charm, more layers, more emotion. But no, let’s attribute to this gray square some deeper message, elevate it to a pedestal of a cliché metaphor like “the gray zone” symbolizing the absence of clarity and straightforwardness, the visual representation of the relativity zeitgeist. Or maybe it’s a social commentary on the gray economy, or a racial paradigm shift—the whirlpool of humanity in which all mingle victoriously color blind.

But wait. Maybe gray is a trickster. Officially achromatic, inoffensive, unassuming. Hm… Who are you kidding? What are you hiding, gray? Are you afraid that the nuance would overwhelm our fragile brains so we’d better not take a closer look?

I crossed the masking tape on the floor delineating the art’s personal space bubble.

Now up close, I inspected the travesty and guess what? It’s pixelated. And the pixels are not even gray but purple, peach, black, brown, indigo. Each pixel aware of its pigment, each more colorful than the next, playing their part, each anything but boring and meaningless, anything but meek, anything but safe. But all decidedly laying low, partaking in a camouflage orgy to create a deceivingly idle, harmless gray puddle, shun the attention, perpetuate an illusion of sameness, equality. All under the pretense of offering a generous respite for our overstimulated irises prancing along, uninterested in truth, preoccupied with distraction, counting on all to pass by unaroused, mindless, lifeless.

Neutral? Nice try, gray. All those pixels. What for? To glorify opacity and indecision? How brazen. How weak.

Just as the sweaty half ovals radiating from my pits reached my bottom ribs, the guard hushed that the museum was closing in a few minutes. I walked out the exit and breathed the fresh darkness, the streetlight polka-dotted night, the ease, order, the calm black and white.

Still, I was angry as anyone denied closure would be, fuming at Madge and the stupid gray square for wasting my life, for weaseling its way to that prestigious piece of wall real estate, blasé and arrogant, while so many worthy of the spotlight whimpered in bleak anonymity. How did the “artist” con the curator? How could the curator suspend all reason and allow that garbage to pass for art? What did they see? What could the “piece” possibly mean, what could it evoke, stir up? That drab, mute piece of nothing.

BERGITA BUGARIJA was born and raised in Zagreb, Croatia. After the War of Independence in the nineties she moved to Pittsburgh. Her fiction is forthcoming in Pleiades. She is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.

[Contributor Spotlight] Denise Howard Long’s “Carnival Ride”

 

Hear Denise read her flash fiction “Carnival Ride” from PANK 13 <3

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Denise Howard Long’s fiction has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, The Evansville Review, Blue Monday Review, and elsewhere. Her short story “Recuerdos Olvidados” was runner-up for the Larry Brown Short Story Award, and her story “Where It’s Buried” won Five on the Fifth’s Annual Short Story Contest. Denise lives in Nebraska, with her husband and two sons.

You Know Nothing: A Triptych

BY YASMINA DIN MADDEN

1.

My mother chases me around the dining room table while my sister watches, frozen in the corner of the room like a demented deer. The edge of the table catches my hip, and I swear I feel a crack somewhere inside me. She is a blur in my peripheral vision, her long black hair lashing out behind her like a whip. I only stop when she does, but I’m ready to keep going.

She lunges across the dining room table, but I jump back. I laugh as she pounds the table and spit flies from her mouth as she screams. “You think you know everything? Nothing! You know nothing.”  My mother’s face, which is beautiful—even I can’t deny that—glistens with sweat, and her full lips stretch back in a sneer. “You’re a lunatic,” I say. I smile because I know this is part of what makes her crazy: That I won’t raise my voice, that I won’t cry in front of her, that I won’t eat her Vietnamese food or follow her rules. “This is America,” I tell her. “Get a clue already.”

She goes into the kitchen, and I wonder if it’s over, if I’ve won, until she comes back gripping her butcher’s knife, the one she uses to slice meat for the soup that makes me choke.  My hip aches, and I feel sweat collecting at the base of my spine. Even for her, this seems like too much. Outside I hear children scream Ghost in the graveyard! Their laughter is far away, but it washes through the screened windows, muted as if we were all underwater. When I was a kid my mother cried for me when I got hurt. No one has ever cried for me but her.

2.

 

Stupid girl.  And me running after her crazy like a chicken with its head off.  Skirt so short and top she cut to hang off her, make her look like she live on the street. No shame! Always Elyse thinks she know. Her hair with blond from her father. And she puts lemon to make even lighter! No Asian in her. Not like her sisters, and brother. They have Asian. They know how to act. “Turn off the soup,” I yell at Lily who watches.

Elyse just keep running. Always going that one. Never home. Never helps. Only with friends all the time. When she home, only open her mouth to complain! “I won’t eat that,” she always say. Only cereal she eats. And then she in the bathroom. I know what she doing.

I lean on the table, and she laughs in my face! My wrist aches when I pound the table. “You think you know everything? Chúa ?i tôi s? gi?t b?n!” She’s so stubborn. When she was a baby, she barely cry. Not like my others, who cry easy, who let me hold them. No. Elyse only cry if it really hurts, so I knew it was bad if she cry. I always afraid when she little. I was so young with Elyse, and back then I cry with her.

In kitchen the soup boil over, broth everywhere, under the burners, dripping on my clean floor. All day I cook and clean and still more to do. Help kids with math. Max need to do his reading. Still need to chop vegetables for dinner! The knife handle is so smooth, and it feel so light in my hand.

3.

Watching my mother chase my sister around the dining room table is like watching a sporting event; not like tennis with its neat volleys and its predictable accumulation of points, more like horse racing: A burst of energy by beautiful, muscled beasts, who might, in a flash, collapse in a heap of busted bone and ligament. My mother yells for me to turn off the soup, but I won’t move.

They are long and lean, my mother and sister, with straight dark hair that flares out behind them as they lap the table. Who knows what they fight about this time: My sister’s smart mouth? Her habit of puking after meals? Elyse calls the Vietnamese food my mother cooks disgusting, which sometimes it is, but it’s often good, too. That’s the thing about Elyse, something can never be more than one thing for her. For either of them. They’re exactly the same, really, my mother and Elyse.

My mother can’t catch Elyse, so she yells, in Vietnamese, that she’s going to kill her. This is the only Vietnamese I know. “You’re a lunatic,” Elyse tells her. She is calm and smiling in her peach miniskirt and off-the-shoulder sweatshirt. My sister talks to me like this, too, and it makes me want to punch her in the face.

My mother goes into the kitchen and returns gripping a knife, the one she uses to chop bitter melon for the soup I love. Elyse is afraid, though she tries to look like she isn’t. My older sister is hard. But it’s true that my mother seems crazy. They stare at each other for a moment, both breathing fast. There’s a chance my mother won’t throw the knife, but there’s just as good a chance she will. We wait. When my mother flings the knife across the table at my sister, the tip of the blade nicks the wooden surface before clattering to the floor beside Elyse, who has flattened herself against the wall. No one moves, until, finally, I walk closer to the table and see the split in the shiny brown surface, glimpse the raw, splintered wood inside.

This piece began in the single point of view of the eldest daughter. However, I realized the piece called for the other characters’ points of view, in order to develop from scene to story. As a triptych, the piece then became an experiment in voice, in that each part of the story had to offer a voice and tone distinctive to that speaker. What held it back for a while is that I don’t feel particularly comfortable writing fragmented English, as it comes loaded with the possibility of stereotyping and cliché. In the final draft, I did use some fragmented English in the mother’s section to underscore the eldest daughter’s sense of her mother as other, and, of course, to develop the more overt tension of cultural dissonance. Finally, I’m interested in exploring narratives that take what we, as a culture, want to define as sacred, and, at least in this case, consider the complexity of a love that is inflected with anger and violence.

Yasmina Din Madden lives in Iowa and her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Idaho Review, The Masters Review: New Voices, Word Riot, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, Carve, and other journals. Her story “At the Dog Park” was shortlisted for The Masters Review Anthology: 10 Best Stories by Emerging Authors, and her flash fiction was recently shortlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of 2017.  She teaches creative writing and literature at Drake University.

 

 

[REVIEW] Where Alligators Sleep by Sheldon Lee Compton

 alligators

 

Foxhead Books

160 pages, $18.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

“What is so interesting at your feet? It’s only your destiny,” writes Sheldon Lee Compton in his story, “Ouroboros,” which opens his new collection of flash fiction, Where Alligators Sleep. The question of destiny is perhaps the most over-arching theme in these 66 short shorts. In the title story, Compton crisscrosses time, depicting an elderly couple in 2008 who survive by remembering their first dance together in 1951. He writes, “There is sadness all around, spread out like mud through a hog pen.” In other words, destiny isn’t kind to any of us.

This tragic view of human suffering is depicted most uniquely in the story, “Assignment,” where physical and learning disabilities in students are likened to assignments drawn blindly from a bag. We all get one whether we want it or not. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Microtones, by Robert Vaughan

~by Meg Tuite

microtones

Cervená Barva Press

36 pgs/$7.00

Robert Vaughan struck me as a shining star in the cosmos of flash fiction from the moment I read his first story online a few years back. He works those gray areas of fiction; mixed genre stories that are hard to classify, encompassing both poetry and prose in tightly packed tales that don’t lose the elements of plot, character, point of view or theme within the brevity of his pieces.

Microtones is an excellent composite of his published works–now tipping the scale at over 300 stories and poems in literary journals around the world. This collection of 24 prose pieces wraps us in his bold, poetic language.

In Vaughan’s opening story, “The Outlaw,” there are only twelve lines and yet, in this compact piece the nature of a relationship between the narrator and his fear of this man he has known for sometime is fully depicted. “I slice my pinkie while he watches me chop carrots in his kitchen.” The narrator attempts to prove to himself that this is a good man asking him to move in, but his actions tell us otherwise. “The water runs over my finger, the cool liquid mixes with my blood. I watch my future run down the drain.” Each of the stories in Microtones gives us a lot of meat on the bones of these compressed structures. In “Summer of ’66,” a relationship moves from birth to demise, from summer to Fall in ten lines, ‘We knew how to appreciate the little we had,” to “sought truth, but never found it,” to “we were drenched in silt by late August.”

Vaughan delves into deep waters. He pulls us under without an oxygen tank into the secrets that humanity and family try to drown us in. A drunk father is “an accident waiting to happen,” in the story “Wrestling With Genetics.” It portrays a son trying to relate to his father, who is so far from any connection that the son sees him as an “ailing pickled heart sitting in a laboratory glass jar on a top shelf too high to reach.” In “Stand Here,” a couple grasps to hold onto something already dead, “the leaving took half his life because it was uphill.” And the infernal abyss of incest yawns in “My Bicycle,” where a character recounts, “beard, his beer breath, deck of cards, his left foot brushed, no, rubbed my leg, the zipper of the open tent shut.”

The rhythm and vividness of Vaughan’s prose is expansive, powerful and unforgettable. The character’s lives are deeply excavated, blasting us directly to the core of their pain, denial, love affairs, secrets and yet, such urgency and conflict arise in so few words. This is what holds Microtones together as a collection, as well as the possibility that the narrators may be different, but a thematic story holds together throughout of love, betrayal and grief. It had me questioning whether it was the same family. “If only I could tell where one stone ends…”

Either way, it doesn’t matter. This is an observant, insightful narrator that doesn’t hold back on anything. Vaughan has the dexterity to create these entire worlds, layered and complete in one or two pages. This is what he excels at. He sucks us into his luminous vortex with guts, humor and grit. Microtones is as much about transcendence as falling. It is all of life. Vaughan breaks through the subterfuge of the unsaid and lets us “face gravity head-on.”

This is a fearless collection reminiscent of Lydia Davis that takes us on a “free-fall” of a ride we want to jump back on over and over again.

***

Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous journals. She has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She is fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press, author of Domestic Apparition (2011) San Francisco Bay Press, Disparate Pathos (2012) Monkey Puzzle Press, Reverberations (2012) Deadly Chaps Press, Bound By Blue (2013) Sententia Books, Her Skin is a Costume (2013) RedBird Chaps and Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014) Artistically Declined Press. Her blog: http://megtuite.wordpress.com.

 

 

 

 

I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND Official Release

In case you missed it amongst the holiday/New Year’s/list obsession hoopla, we are excited to announce the official release of I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND from Myfanwy Collins. A mixture and collection of both short stories and flash fiction, I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND brings tender, stark, and lost souls all of which are “in search of that which eludes them: an acknowledgment of a shared past, the fulfillment of a secret desire, a tenuous connection made whole.” Start your 2013 reading off right, order your copy here.

An official book signing of I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND will take place on Saturday, March 9th at 1 pm, during AWP Boston. Stay tuned for further announcements, reviews, and events.