Hey everybody, Missy over at The Literal Mom invited me to do a guest post today, and you can find out some more about our family vacation/reunion by clicking the picture below! Thanks to Missy for letting me participate in her Good Old Fashioned Summer!
Reverend George Lee
Once upon a time, a girl was born. Let’s call her Mary.
Lamar Smith
Mary was born in a small house, and there was no electricity.
Emmett Louis Till
Some nights, when she was little, she and her mother blew out the candles and hid under the bed.
John Earl Reese
And some nights, her father hid with them.
Willie Edwards, Jr.
But other nights, her father sat on the porch and whispered, “I dare you, I dare you, I dare you bastards.”
Mack Charles Parker
One night, her father didn’t come back in, and the next day, Mary and her mother moved into town.
Herbert Lee
Because they dared, those bastards. Oh yes, they dared.
Corporal Roman Ducksworth, Jr.
In town, there was electricity, and the small school, and Auntie Jane.
Paul Guihard
And in town, her mother’s feet and hands swelled while she scrubbed other people’s clothing, made other people’s dinners, watched other people’s children.
William Lewis Moore
Then one day, Mary’s mother put down the wash and said, “I may have to leave you,” to her daughter.
Medgar Evers
“I don’t want to, but I know in my soul your Daddy died doing what was right, and I don’t want to have to turn my head when I meet him on the other side.”
Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley
After that came nights, two, sometimes three in a row, when Mary’s mother didn’t come home.
Virgil Lamar Ware
And one night when she did come home, but she was bloody and silent.
Louis Allen
Mama and Auntie Jane went in the bathroom together for a long time that night.
Johnnie Mae Chappell
Then, Mama only went out to go to work.
Reverend Bruce Klunder
After that, Mary went out herself.
Henry Hezekiah Dee, Charles Eddie Moore
She was too young, but she went anyway, and every time she came home, Mama whispered, “Brave girl, just like your Daddy.”
James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner
And Mary said, “I’m always going to be like him.”
Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn
When she was old enough, Mary did not take a job doing wash, making dinner, minding children.
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Mary went to college.
Reverend James Reeb
She worked and got a two year degree.
Viola Gregg Liuzzo
She moved to a little apartment where she liked the manager.
Oneal Moore
And they got married.
Willie Brewster
But there were no babies; only work.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels
And her manager drank, and one day Mary walked home to her mama bloody and silent.
Samuel Leamon Younge, Jr.
And she told Mama, “Now, I’m just like you.”
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer
But Mama had a friend from the old days, and he helped Mary get a job.
Ben Chester White
And Mary moved to another little apartment and met another man.
Wharlest Jackson
And by the time they walked down the aisle, the first baby was already on the way.
Benjamin Brown
Then one March, when Mary’s Mama was decrepit, Mary still holding on, and that first baby was grown and going strong, the whole family went to Selma, to the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Samuel Ephesians Hammond, Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, Henry Ezekial Smith
They watched Peggy Wallace Kennedy and Attorney General Eric Himpton Holder Jr. embrace.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
And it didn’t make everything all right and perfect. But it went a long way. A longer way than any of them would have dared to believe.
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This one was for the Flash Fiction Month prompt requesting a story with themes of change and forgiveness. The story is fictional, but the names in red are all real people. And George Wallace’s daughter really did embrace the nation’s first African American attorney general in 2009 in Selma in celebration.
The list of names is taken from The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Martyrs’ page.
Four months after the first Zoloft
I have told this before. And I think I will repeat it until the end of my life, until it stops haunting me. In grad school, I lost my writing. I felt it drain out of me one idea after another.
I wrote a story, something about police and cats, and I couldn’t feel the next one there behind it. It wasn’t writer’s block. I wasn’t stuck. I had loads of words floating around in my tank. But I had no more stories at all. For four years, I stopped being a writer.
I’m good at the butt-in-chair thing. Always have been. When my teen peers were going to Friday dances and listening to teeny-bopper boy bands, I was scrunched into my half of a shared bedroom, typing. When my college classmates were out dating and dancing, I was writing. I did a few activities, theater and volunteer stuff, but mostly, I wrote.
So when I say that I couldn’t feel the next story behind the one I’d just finished, I don’t mean that I ran out of words to type. I mean that I ran out of writing. Again and again, I dove into myself, and again and again, there was nothing to tell. Scott gave me a gem by accident, about a couple trying to save a dying marriage. And I lingered over that thing. I wrote it and rewrote it until I thought it was perfect, and then I started over and wrote it again from scratch. Because, my God. It was my only story.
And when that was done, I sat down at my computer, and I typed some more. I banged out letters to the editor; I drew up analytical papers; I composed tirades to the graduate school; and I complained to the apartment manager. And none of it amounted to telling stories. I sent the whole family detailed e-mails about weekly nothings. I furthered a friendship with a woman in Great Britain who shared a fondness for one of my favorite authors. And none of it counted for writing. I finished two master’s degrees, and Scott and I got married and had a baby. And I was not a writer.
The baby broke me. I cried because she cried; I cried because she ate; and I cried because she sometimes stank really badly. I cried because I lived surrounded by words that I owned, even though none of them were mine. I cried so much that the doctor gave me Zoloft.
A week after I took the first pill, I felt the stopper fall into that internal drain hole; I felt the ideas stop leaking out. At first, I just had images to describe, phrases whose sounds pleased me. Then one day, the baby burped me a story. And when I’d finished it, when I’d typed the last letter and printed the final page, I felt the next story easing into place behind it, waiting to be written.
“Why do you want to borrow my collective’s tunneler. And what makes you think I’d give it to you?” Jay Harris stood in front of me in the middle of the sidewalk.
“So I can kill Leonard Grady.”
“Jesus!” Jay flinched like I’d just shot him. “What did he do to you? Why would I help you out? And now we’ve been seen out walking in public…”
“You talk like I’m going to get caught, Jay. I’m not.” I squared around to face him. “Leonard killed Maggie.” I tried to keep my inflection flat. I wanted him to think I could keep my emotions together. But my voice cracked on her name.
He stared first. Then he looked around for a bench. And after he sat down, he fixed his eyes right back on my face. “You’re sure? Because Maggie… God Maggie…”
“You think I want to ask her ex-husband for favors?” I pulled out a printout from my blazer. Jay flinched again, but he took it. He understood. He was a scientist, after all, one of the most brilliant stars of our generation and a member of the SciArt collective.
“How did you get his semen sample?”
“Paid a hooker. Can we skip this part? I’ve got a short window to get in position.”
“But how did he get to Maggie?” Jay looked so damned confused. Just like he had when she served him the divorce papers.
“Same way I’ll be getting to him,” I said. “He tunneled.”
“When I saw it in the news, I thought you did it.” He spoke rapidly, his voice running into hysteria. “But then it didn’t make sense for you to kill her on your honeymoon… But this… this is right back to graduate school.”
“Not quite,” I said. “In graduate school, you and Leonard tried to woo her with genetics. I guess he got sick of losing out.”
“He was always unstable. But she liked that. You know she only ever went with me in the end because I have viable sperm.” In fact, I had known that. I didn’t know that Jay knew it, though. “I thought I could make her love me like I loved her, but it doesn’t, just doesn’t work that way.” The longer he stared at the lab report, the more he stammered.
So I took it away. But he kept talking, now watching his hands instead of me, squirming on the bench like a kid in the principal’s office, “I thought she was resigned to me. But then you showed up…”
“Jay. I don’t have time. I need your tunneler. Leonard’s collective is scattered right now for the holiday. They’ll be back in their bunker again by tomorrow, and all of your colleagues will be back at SciArt. I don’t know when I’ll get a chance this good again.”
Jay brought his head up sharply. “You’re going after him at home?”
“It’s probably the last time this year he won’t be behind protected walls. I wasted my shot in the big city making sure, hooking him up with the whore. Maggie was my wife, you know.” Again, I tried again to keep my voice level; again, it cracked on her name. “I’m so close now, I can…”
“I’ll do it.” Jay came to the decision suddenly, and all the twitching stopped. “Come on. You can leave from the office basement. SciArt is clean. There won’t be any record.”
He drove us to the collective. But he had to take an anxiety pill before he showed me how the tunneler wand worked. I brought in my gear from the car and changed into a turtleneck and ski mask. We targeted Leonard’s home address, then scrolled around on the tunneler’s little screen. There was only one person home, a woman by the body waves. Leonard’s wife. I said, “I can use her.”’
“She’s innocent.”
“I said use, not kill.”
“Take this.” It was a syringe. “Sedate her.”
He helped me aim the wand at a blank wall in his collective. The tunneler’s screen showed Leonard’s basement. “Come back here,” Jay said. “I’ll wait.”
I fired the wand into the wall, and my body hurtled forward at a speed that threatened to dislodge my stomach contents. I landed in a heap at exactly the place Jay and I had determined, 300 miles from where I started. Travel time, less than a second. Recovery, however took several minutes. No wonder those damned wands were only allowed in the collectives. Bending space hurt.
I checked my equipment one last time and used the tunneler to find Leonard’s wife in the house. It looked like she was upstairs napping. This was a distance I could walk. I mounted the steps on cat feet and slipped into the master bedroom. I taped her mouth before she was fully awake, and I bound her to the bed.
She thrashed, but I had a good two hundred pounds and a lifetime’s training on her. As soon as she was tied, arms above her head, legs splayed out, I leaned in close to her frantic eyes. “Shh,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not even going to undress you. In a few hours, you are going to go on with your life. But when your husband comes through that door, he dies.” I showed her my gun.
She tried to scream something around the tape. I showed her Jay’s slender needle. “The question is whether you want to watch him bleed, or whether you’d rather sleep through the whole thing. Blink once for the needle, and blink twice for the viewing theater to remain open.”
She screamed some more then, but eventually she believed me. And then she looked at me, as if she could memorize the features of a man in a mask. And she blinked twice. “Brave girl.” Then I sat down beside the bed, waiting for the front door to open so I could relieve her of a husband.
Anna said, “I’m sorry, Mom.” She looked out the kitchen window towards the traitorous pool, where she would not be swimming today, after all.
“I just wish you’d told me sooner.” Kaya drank her herbal tea slowly. She pushed a second cup towards Anna, who didn’t touch it.
Then Anna got up. She meant to leave, but instead, she grabbed her swim cover up off the back of her mother’s chair. She wasn’t cold, but she felt naked. The bikini had been ill advised.
Kaya set down her mug and rubbed her own temples. “There would have been more we could have done about it then.”
“You would have let me…?”
“Not my call. And not your father’s either.”
Anna rubbed her abdomen and counted off days on the calendar on the wall behind Kaya.
Her mother said, “Sweetie, the world won’t end in three days when he gets home.”
“It ended when you walked in the door.”
“I apologize for my fever.”
Anna looked down at the perfect little basketball that rode in front of her everywhere she went. She wished she looked more like her mother, whose body had turned lumpy and nondescript with pregnancy. She wished she had still been wearing her blousy pajama shirt when Kaya came back from work an hour after she left. She wished school was still in session and she was sitting in Algebra.
“Do we have to tell Daddy?”
Kaya reached across the table and captured one of Anna’s hands before her daughter could pull it out of the way. “Of course we do. You wouldn’t have been able to hide it much longer anyway. You need to see an OB-Gyn. I don’t suppose you’ve had any prenatal care at all?”
Anna shook her head.
“Come on sweetheart. We’ll get through this together.”
Anna snatched back her hand and stormed away from the table. She went out beside the pool to bake in the sun. She had never felt so alone in her life.
___________________
And this week’s challenge for Trifextra is “The world will end in three days”. My response? “No it won’t.”
On the fourth, against our better judgment, we took our kids to the ball game, which was followed by fireworks. It was OK. We were right behind the home dugout, and a ball that the players were throwing around before the start of an inning flew over the wall and under our seat. Sam got it. Caroline had found a new friend and had stolen the Dad’s s seat to sit with the family. When she got back and realized she had missed a ball opportunity, she was hysterical. That combined with the total sensory overload (and this was BEFORE the fireworks) produced a total meltdown. The fireworks were loud. I wore earplugs. The kids refused them. Caroline’s meltdown intensified (predictably – she needs the earplugs). But then we got her out of the stadium and she just cried (as opposed to struggling and acting kidnapped) all the way to the car.
Anyway, we got home, and I realized that a Mama bird must have made her nest in our eaves, because I could hear the babies loud and close. They sounded like this guy. (To be clear, this is just some video I found on Youtube. The sound is twelve seconds in.)
I hate listening to mockingbirds.I had one right outside my bedroom window when I was a kid, who was replaced every year by a descendant, and who squakked at me all night long and generally screwed with an already screwed up sleep schedule. So I was not pleased to have an entire nest of them nearby.
But then, the next morning, I went out into the garage, and I realized there was no nest. Just one exceptionally stupid fledgling who had followed our car into the garage the night before. Once again, The Idiosyncratic Eye came to mind. (Unlike her, I was not to be raising any babies.) He had hopped up into a window and gotten trapped in the blind. I had to unload a ton of crap from a messy corner to reach him. But then he hopped out under the car. At that point, he was no longer in distress and just completely annoying. I went for a camera.
While I was gone, he hopped on out of the garage and perched on the edge of a box.
I snapped a couple of pictures before he hopped further away.
And then this happened.
Damn.
She didn’t even wait for me to leave. Just came right back to her baby. It was probably at the window in the first place because it could see her from there.
Mockingbirds might not be so bad after all.
“Too bad they’re extinct.” Rodney and Shara looked down on the electronic tigers. Shara traced her fingers along the glass, ignoring the little robot that was already descending to annoy away her hand and clean the places she had touched.
“They look so real,” said Rodney. “But I don’t think I would want to meet one of those on the street.”
“They didn’t play on the street.”
“You know what I mean. If I saw one of those things outside of a zoo, I’d run so fast I’d leave my pants behind me .”
Normally, Shara laughed at Rodney’s absurd descriptions. But today, she shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Not me. I’d stand there and wait for it. I’d clutch its fur into my face and breathe it in.”
“And it would shred you. Those aren’t kitten claws on that thing.”
“I’d welcome it. I’d drink my own blood as I lay dying.”
“Really? I don’t think I’d find it all that pleasing myself.”
Rodney pulled Shara’s arm. But Shara remained unmoved, resting her head now on the glass below her hand, oblivious to the descending robot and its tiny pincers. She remembered being seventeen. She remembered sitting in that doctor’s office.
“You’re cutting yourself again.”
“I fell on a broken bottle.”
The physician didn’t say, “You’re lying,” so Shara didn’t have to claim to be telling the truth. Instead, he said, “You’ve torn a tendon here. This one needs surgery.”
“Oh.”
“I can work you in right now, so you won’t have to come back.”
“Thanks.” She had come through three checkpoints and a guarded office door precisely because this cut was infected. She thought the doctor knew she wouldn’t return if he sent her away now.
Shara followed him to the basement surgery. On the way, he leaned into his secretary’s office. “Call Mrs. Carr and reschedule her for Monday next.”
“I don’t want to be a bother,” Shara protested.
“Nonsense. You’re here, and she’s not. If she needs me, she will come when I can fit her in.”
Downstairs, Shara lay on the table, and he eased both of her arms into pain blocking sleeves. “Why not just the one?” Her voice echoed a little as he gently clamped on the helmet that paired with the sleeves.
The doctor said, in a voice made tinny by the helmet’s metal barrier, “Your chart indicates a history of pain transference. You may feel me working on the arm I’m not touching, just like you used to feel your ear infections on the unaffected side.”
Shara lay still and strained to feel anything at all while he worked. He had mirrors. She watched him scrape down through layers of skin with a sharp little knife, suctioning away the blood at every cut. Then, he rubbed salve into the wound before he began his work with the needle and thread and then the surgical glue. Shara lost interest after he put down the knife, though. She tried to think how she could palm it before she left. Something that sharp would be handy.
When he was finished, he took off first the helmet and then the blocking sleeves. “There,” he said. “Good as new.”
And it was only then that she realized the trick with the mirrors and her wound had all been a diversion. Both of her forearms had three neat, tiny plastic buttons affixed where the sleeves had touched her skin. “What have you done to me?” she demanded, her hands flying up to touch her scalp where the helmet had rested. There, too, she felt little plastic knobs.
The doctor said, “I’ve helped, I hope.”
Shara fled the office, sobbing. She didn’t remember returning through the checkpoints, although she must have held out her passport every time, because she later saw the stamps that she had travelled both ways along the authorized route. At home, she picked up every kitchen knife, one after the other, and tried to slice herself. She couldn’t do it. Her hands would only carry the blade so close to her own skin before they simply stopped. She couldn’t do it looking, she couldn’t do it with her eyes averted. She could no longer draw the blade across her skin and watch the red blood well up. She eventually had to return to the doctor and plead with him to reset the things so she could at least shave her legs.
And, although she had been furious at first, the doctor was right. Mostly, he had helped. Though she still squirmed and cringed every time she handed over her passport for stamping, she no longer arrived home needing to make herself bleed in compensation for the checkpoints.
Still. There were times like this, like now, at the zoo, when she could feel the impotency of the extinct species. That need to roar and slash would clutch at her throat like a choking hand.
“Hey, Shara. Come on.” Rodney pulled her fingers away from the glass just before the cleaning robot could pinch them. Her face followed her hands, and he kissed her. “You know I love that about you,” he said. “That intensity. Sometimes, when you say things like that, I can feel them all the way in the back of my stomach.”
She smiled, because she knew he expected it, because she loved him. “But I think you’d be happier if we moved on to something a little tamer,” she said.
He nodded, then kissed her again, and his lips were hot like the Indian jungle.
Michael and Aura shacked up for six weeks in the seventies, but after a month of constant bickering, they made it to splitsville well before the altar. Michael was a poet. Aura was an accountant. Nobody was surprised.
After that, they were off-again-on-again during the eighties, until Aura married a guitar player and Michael tried to kill himself. They hardly spoke for twenty years. Then, they met at a New Year’s party and Aura reignited Michael’s flame with a drunken mistletoe kiss. Michael had been taking Prozac to cool the burning in his chest that was slowly drying up his heart. But she made it moist again with her lips and tongue, filled in the canyons with her scent.
The guitar player was on the road, so Michael came home with Aura. But he left before sunrise. He went to the desert. He said, “I want to stand in the Arizona sun and let it score you out of me.” When Aura’s husband returned the following week, she smelled a dozen women in his clothes, and he said something felt wrong on his side of the bed. Aura said, “Therapy,” but the husband said, “Divorce”.
Aura went to Arizona, where Michael was in a Phoenix burn unit.
“I didn’t think you meant it literally, idiot,” she told his white swathed body. He couldn’t talk. Moving his face hurt too much. And the salt from her lips would have scalded him, so she couldn’t kiss him, either. Instead, she sat beside the bed with a book of number puzzles. “But then, when you said you wanted to gouge me out, you went after yourself with a carving knife, so I suppose I should have known.” Then the nurses came with ghastly scrub brushes and silver tape, and she left so they could put him back together.
She sat by his side through the next month, while he healed. There was some possibility of his going to a psych ward after that. While Aura held Michael’s hand, the resident psychiatrist said, “Klonopin might help.”
Michael said, “Nothing helps.”
And then Aura laughed aloud at Michael. She laughed at him until the hairline cracks in his heart ripped violently apart, shattered into fragments smaller than grains of sand. She cradled his face in her hands and kissed his still raw lips and said, “Dear man, anything at all would help if you would only let it. If you would simply be a poet instead of trying to live a poem, we could have been engaged thirty five years ago.”
Then she left him with the shrink to figure out where to put the pieces of his heart, how to rebuild his own soul from its ashes. But she wrote her phone number on the pad beside his bed. She said, “I live in town now. Call me when you figure out what works.”
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, FlamingNyx gave me this prompt: She laughed at him until the hairline cracks in his heart ripped violently apart, shattered into fragments smaller than grains of sand..
I gave Barb Black this prompt: Ora wrote in his journal, ‘Sold 12 White Leghorn pullets for $45 and one yearling cock bird from breeding stock for $7.00. Tithe $5.20’. Then, he closed the books on September and turned over to a fresh page and wrote ‘October, 1919.’
Jordy said, “She’s got a ten a.m. or a three p.m. next Wednesday.”
The woman on the phone said, “I guess the three o’clock then. I’ll see if my sister can take the kids for an hour.”
“OK, if not, just give us a call, and we’ll set you up for another time.”
Jordy had stopped offering to hang out with people’s children. His Mom’s clients were uncomfortable leaving their kids with a teen boy. It didn’t matter that the shop only had two rooms and a bathroom or that his Mom could crack the door so the clients always had access to everything that went on. It was just how things worked. It wasn’t like he needed babysitting money anyway. Lacey Archer paid her son to work the front desk.
He hung up with the woman and flipped the channel. He flipped it again. It took two more clicks of the remote before he came to something approaching enjoyable, then he kicked back with his feet on the desk and listened with the volume on low.
He could hear his mother talking to the current client, a middle aged man. “Well, keep up with the physical therapist’s exercises, too.”
She came out of the door, and he hurriedly pulled his feet down. He reached into the cooler under the desk and produced a small bottle of water. His mother nodded at him to set it on the counter, then she went into the bathroom for a quick break before her 1:15 appointment.
The man stepped out stretching. “Your Mama’s got magic fingers,” he told Jordy handing over his credit card.
Jordy swiped it through the cell reader, then presented the phone to the man to sign with his finger. “Do you want go ahead and set up for next month?”
“Better make it two weeks. This driving kills my neck.”
Jordy finished the scheduling, and Lacey emerged from the bathroom to wish her client well. Jordy had time to tell his mother, “The four o’clock cancelled. Her husband got called into work.”
“You want her slot?”
“That would be awesome.” He never asked. But about once a month, she offered, and he never refused. There was a certain amount of guilt in acceptance. After all, he saw how carefully she treated her hands and arms, and he knew what happened if she hurt one. He thought often of the lean month when she over-extended her elbow.
“Did you get your Geometry done?”
“Yeah. I’m going to have to get Neal’s Mom to walk me through the last couple of problems, though.”
“Do you want to try a correspondence course?”
“Nah. I’ve got it.”
“OK. It’s so hard for me to judge from the outside.” She meant that even three years in, she still considered their home school group experimental.
“I’ll let you know if there’s a problem.” He meant that even if he never got beyond an average understanding of Geometry, he wouldn’t return to the place where his father’s wife’s son bloodied his nose and blackened his eye. And also that Neal’s Mom was a good math teacher.
Later, he stripped to his skivvies and laid under the cool sheet. Naked would have felt too strange. He pressed his face into the pillow as his mother started on his neck. The guilt was still there, but it faded completely as she worked her hands into his back. The math and the television, too vanished into the table somewhere.
They didn’t talk at these times, and Jordy drifted while Lacey worked. Ever since he could remember, his mother had been rubbing his back. Before the divorce, it had been through his pajamas at night. And after, when it was just the two of them, he had been her practice patient, the guinea pig for everything she learned at school. He knew the feel of her fingertips between his shoulder blades, and her touch drove away everything else. It was as if she rebuilt his fortress with her massage.
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This was my July 2 submission for flash fiction month, but I’m only just now getting it up here. I’m posting the flash fiction month all on deviant art, and I’ll submit them to my blog as I have holes in the editorial calendar. If you want to follow the deviant art in order, here’s a link to my profile. Look for “newest deviations”, and you’ll find the stories in reverse order.
Diana shouted, “You’re a goddamned hand mucker.” But she took the razor Trent handed through the shower curtain.
He said, “Fair’s fair. You lost.”
She snarled, “You cheated.”
He didn’t answer.
She hit the pits first. They took ages, and she had to rinse the blade between strokes. Then she moved on to her legs.
After the first one she yelled, “I need a replacement.”
“You don’t have to shout.” He pushed it through the curtain.
She attacked the second leg with a little too much vigor and got a red running slice for her trouble. After that, she demanded a third razor. “God almighty don’t tiny cuts bleed a lot in water?”
She stood in the shower, letting the water thunder down her back. Trent offered, “I could climb in and do it for you.”
“Fuck you.”
Diana hiked her left leg up into the soap dish and propped her ass against the wall. She started on the inner thigh, working across until she reached the middle. Then she took the left leg down and propped her right leg on the lip of the tub to attack the jungle from the other side. When she was done, the only hair left was on top of her head. She looked at the drain and said, “I can see why some people wax.”
When she turned off the water , celebratory explosions carried in from outside.
“Happy New Year,” said Trent.
Diana stepped out of the shower. Trent stood naked against the door with his arms splayed to either side of the frame. A rubber band affixed the ace and king of hearts to his left wrist. In his right hand, he held a can of shaving cream.
“You did cheat.” More bombs popped in the distance. In the bathroom, Diana said, “Now I’ll show you some goddamned fireworks.”
“Yes, I did.” And Trent reached up to the shelf beside the sink and handed her a fourth razor. “And I hope you will.”
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The folks running the flash fiction month challenge somehow neglected to give us a specific prompt today. That’s okay. Trifecta gave us a great one: Fireworks. And in case you’re wondering about my personal position on the topic of ladyscaping, I think Amanda Fucking Palmer has the right attitude. (Yes, gasp, I’m embedding a video.)