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Flash Fiction

Editor’s note:  We recently received this pair of diamonds from Nancy Rafal. For any who think that 1,200 words are too few to tell a fine story, here are two elegantly crafted ones, the first just short of 300 words, the longer one of less than 500, for 756 words all together. Short or shorter, each of these stories manifests the crystal purity that can result when fiction is writ by a poet’s hand. – HCT

 

Jimmy

 

He marched into her classroom with that air of confidence particular to ten-year-old males. After two decades in Room 106-4th grade she could detect it. She could also uncover the hurt of the world her female students carried in those senseless backpacks, and all the other potent plights of the young brought into the room from home and neighborhood.

She recalled the first week of school last fall when she and Jimmy established their territories and marked them – she with chalk and college credentials, he with his engaging manner which left its mark on the rest of the students, tagging them for his camp.

His assignments were never pleasant to read, even after she tamed them to lie flat and still on her desk. They had no white space, were filled with extra scribbles, went off the lines, and they made her doubt her own abilities to teach.

She and Jimmy had come to a truce sometime between Christmas and spring break. His homework hadn’t changed but he allowed her to take some of the children to her side.

Today she couldn’t figure out what was going on. She looked at Jimmy and he wasn’t there. The hair, skin, lips, clothes were all Jimmy but the eyes were barred; she couldn’t read them. At recess he played alone instead of flitting from group to group leaving each with a giggle, a smile, a song. She saw him actually push Peter to the ground and walk away. When Peter didn’t complain she ignored it.

She always graded the morning math papers at her desk as she munched her lunch apple. His paper blinded her. It simply said

 

GOODBYE TEACHR

I MOVING AWAY

 

 

 

 

Grandma

 

My mother didn’t talk about her childhood, her marriages to my father and stepfather; her relationship with her own mother, Grandma Press. In turn I learned not to ask questions about anything.

Grandma Press lived with us in an apartment behind a storefront on the eastside of Milwaukee. She had the large front room which once served as a backroom to a soda shop. She worked for the Milwaukee Road doing something with paper tickets in a vast room full of other ladies all doing something with paper tickets.

For seven stolen cents I could hop the downtown bus and meet her at Holleway’s Cafeteria. I never telephoned ahead because I just knew she’d be there. She always was. We’d get in line and she’d snatch six or seven wrapped straws to go with her glass of milk. I’d take coffee, not allowed at home, and she’d start the straw wrapper fight. Before she returned to that cavernous room of women and paper tickets we’d skip across the street to the Plankenton Arcade, feed the carp, page through comics, and maybe she’d spring for one nickel game. I’d wave from the bus window and watch her turn toward the Road building.

Grandma Press never ate with us at home. When she did come home my stepsister and I would vie to be chosen to run a comb through her long gray hair and we’d watch her braid it and pin it back up. She’d let us make runs in a stocking if one was already begun and tickle us if we started too close to her knees.

When mother and stepfather went out, Grandma Press would watch us. From our beds we’d hear the Longiene Whitnaur Hour on the radio but it didn’t drown the wet cloths slapping and the mumbled cursing sounding from behind the locked bathroom door.

When we moved away into the house my stepfather and mother built by hand, I saw Grandma Press less. On one visit we arrived to find boxes and boxes of perfumed jewelry made from dried rose petals. My mother shook her head. On another visit I spied a stack of steamy romance magazines Grandma Press said she found in the garbage. She’d fart proudly in public, tiss and shake her over-rouged lipstick visage at the wild costumes of her youngers.

A month after my husband’s death I returned to that hand-built house hoping to shed the last month’s pain and looking for comforts to my own tragedy.

Mother was now ten years beyond Grandma Press’ last age. Mother and I walked down the road, now paved and full of mailboxes. I gathered courage to ask the question which bubbled in my mind for decades.

What was Grandma Press’ maiden name?

Press, Mother shot back and we walked on.