Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (12 page)

Some mutter or moan must have escaped his lips, causing her eyes to jerk up and meet his. The fluorescent lighting cast her skin in a pale blue sheen.

“So, you work here?” she said, appraising his vest.

“Yes, but not in the meat.”

“I was wondering, what kinds of brains do you stock here? I mean, it just says brains. They’re in the beef section, but are they cow brains? Or sheep? Does anyone know?”

Russ shook his head. “I don’t got a clue, miss, but I’m sure they’re good.” A long, gooey string of drool oozed from the corner of his mouth, and he wiped it away with his fist.

She studied him for a moment. “You like brains?” She didn’t speak with revulsion.

“I’d like them very much,” said Russ, yearning in his voice.

She smiled without showing her teeth. “You know what you are?” she asked, brushing a fly off of his forearm.

He blinked. “I’m a Wal-Mart stocker. Russ is my name. What more do y’mean?”

“How long you been wanting to try brain, Russ?”

“All night,” he said with a drawl. It felt like a very long night.

She shook her head as she laughed. “You poor boy. You don’t have a clue, do you? Tell you what. I’m going to be making some brains for breakfast. Done up in a skillet, with hash browns and gravy and maybe some eggs. Do you want to come over when you’re off shift? Maybe we can talk a bit, you know, about things.”

“You…you know how to cook brains?” Russ’s eyes welled with tears. All those years he looked for a girl, and for all the wrong reasons. Here before him was the perfect woman, one willing to make him brains for breakfast.

Life was good, Russ thought. Life was really good.

Eric Pinder

W
hen the Widow Jones screamed, her mouth rounded into a horrified little “o.” “Another guest dead! And at dinner, too!” As a proper hostess, she knew that dead people belonged in the ground, not at the dinner table—not even when dressed in a suit and tie.

The butler and Mrs. Jones’s two surviving guests fidgeted in a corner of the room, equally alarmed.

Detective Joe Thicke stood over the body. He lifted off the bloody toupee, studied it carefully. “Hmmm,” he said. “This man appears to be dead.” Quickly he verified his hypothesis by failing to find the dead man’s pulse.

Next, he scrutinized the four suspects. Of the four, the white-faced widow and her butler appeared the most upset. But the two young men in blue blazers seemed quite relaxed. Too relaxed. They had already consumed a fair share of liquor, and both still sipped from their glasses.

“Lady and gentlemen,” said Detective Thicke. “And you too, butler-boy. Today—” Suddenly the two gentlemen clinked their glasses together. “—today a murder has taken place! One of the people in this room is a killer!”

Joe nudged the corpse over with his foot, revealing a long, bloody, yellow pencil buried almost up to the eraser in the dead man’s throat.

“You know,” mumbled one of the intoxicated youths, “I always thought there would be less crime if nothing were illegal.”

Joe paused, blinked, and rubbed his masculine jaw. “Yes, quite.” Could one of these drunks be the criminal? No, their faces were
just too honest.

Joe studied his third suspect, the widow. Not bad, he thought, but a little too plump. And her aristocratic nose wasn’t to his taste.

The bald butler was next in line. The old fellow held a box of eleven freshly sharpened pencils in his white-gloved hands. Joe observed that the box had room for one more pencil. Hmm, what could have become of it?

Aha! Suddenly Joe saw a clue. Two bloody splotches stained the Persian rug near where the young gentlemen stood. Joe scratched his chin and wondered aloud, “Hmm, two bloodstains…”

“To bloodstains!” toasted the young men.
Clink
went the glasses.

“Yes,” said Joe. “Two bloodstains right there on the carpet behind you. Can you explain them?”

All four suspects stared at him, blinking in bewilderment. “You’re crazy!” screamed the widow.

She must still be in shock, thought Joe. “People,” he said, “this case is solved. The butler did it, in the study, with the revolver…I mean the pencil!”

Finally the shock wore off Widow Jones and her guests. But the butler spoke up first. “But…but…you killed that man,” he sputtered, pointing a bony finger at Detective Joe. “You walked in, asked to borrow a pencil, then stabbed that poor man in the throat. You’re insane!”

The others nodded in cautious agreement. “Far out,” said one of the drunks.

“You could be right,” Joe told the butler. “The only way to prove your story is to check the pencil for fingerprints. I shall do so.” Joe reached down to pluck the pencil from the victim’s throat. With his other hand, he pulled a silk cloth from his vest pocket and used it to wipe the pencil clean. Then he examined the pencil.

“No,” said Joe. “I’m afraid the killer was smart enough to wipe the pencil clean. And since you, butler-boy, are wearing gloves,
only you could have done that.”

The widow protested. “But you just wiped it with that cloth!”

“What cloth?” asked Joe, putting it back in his pocket.

“But we all saw you kill him!”

“Well,” said Joe, “four eyewitnesses. Five, since in all honesty I did see myself commit the murder.” He strode across the room toward the widow’s musical instrument collection, where he nervously began to open and close a violin case. “It’s an open and shut case,” he said. “As an officer of the law, it’s my duty to arrest this dangerous killer, me. I should be considered armed and dangerous. Do you?”

“What?” said a chorus of four voices.

“Do you consider me armed and dangerous?”

“Oh, certainly, sir,” said the butler.

“Good,” said Joe. “I shall now take the defendant to jail. Good day!” With a curt nod, Joe fled through the open window.

Kirk Nesset

W
hen your wife says she’s leaving, you do not object. You don’t even let her know you’re insulted—you’ve already foreseen the foreseeable, quaint as it sounds, and the business no longer shocks you. Politely, agreeably, you tell her to do as she pleases, watching the suitcases open and fill. You tell her to call when she can. Does she need any money? She says you shouldn’t be so agreeable. You nod. You tend to agree.

In a world so rife with contention, why disagree? Some people you know—neighbors, in-laws, people you work with—home in on discord like heat-seeking missiles. They blast great holes in your life, thriving on willful, blood-boiling chaos. This is not you—agreeable, peaceable you. Ready-made hardened opinion, you feel, goes quite against nature. It defies this Earth we breathe and traverse on, which is fluid, they say, and constantly shifting, alive at the core.

Last year, before this business began, you saw your daughter committed. Foreseeable, foreseen. Your daughter, who wasn’t ever quite “there” in the first place, thinks she’s a cipher, that she is turning into the wind. Better that, of course, than a cavegirl out of Ms. What’s-her-name’s novels, those books your daughter drank in to enter prehistory. When you visit, you don’t debate her absent identity. You agree to the terms. You offer your fatherly best, as it were, fresh-shaved, patient, mildly heroic, compact, and trim, if a bit frayed at the edges; no need to let her know you’re depressed. You bring her the weight of your affable nature, your humor, your unswerving desire to accept and agree, along with a snack of some kind, some candy, a bag of almonds or unsalted peanuts.

The visits increase once her mother is gone. Three, say, or four times a week. The house has grown strange, to be truthful, and you like to get out. Your once-agreeable furnishings, the sofas and tables you decided to keep, have taken on auras, gray hazy outlines, which tend to unsettle. The bedroom exudes a disagreeable air. You hang around late at the office, rearranging your files; you visit your daughter. You sit in cafés on the weekends skimming the paper, thinking, deciding which movie to see. At night you awaken sitting upright in bed, discussing strange things with your curtains.

One Sunday, at an outdoor café, a man sits down at your table. He’s thirty years younger than you, wide-shouldered, black-haired, bucktoothed. A fading tattoo on his hand. You come here a lot, he declares—he says he’s seen you before. You do, you agree; he probably has. You’re fond of the scones, you tell him. You glance at the crumbs on your plate.

Your agreeability, alas, makes you the ideal listener. People seem to sense this right off. You have a compassionate face, a kind face, you have heard. Like a beacon, your face pulls people in, strangers out of accord with good fortune, survivors and talkers, victims of the shipwreck of living.

The man has led a colorful life, as they say. He is funny, almost. You hear of his days as a kid in a much larger city, of all the hitchhiking he did, how for years he zigzagged the country, shacking up here, camping out there, he and a spotted castrated dog, a dog with one eye and one ear, a dog he called Lucky. You hear about his most recent romance.

He entertains, you have to admit. His problems, so vivid and real, draw you away from your invented anxieties. You lean back and listen, agreeably nodding, sipping your tea.

So I blow into town, he says, fully into his story. I go up to the apartment and open the door, and guess what?

You raise your eyebrows in question, unable to guess.

My girlfriend’s in there with Eddy, he says, this guy from downstairs.

Delicacy forbids you to ask what were they doing, what did he see. You wipe your mouth with your napkin. You look at your watch. The story’s growing less and less pleasant; you’re afraid for the girl; you don’t really like speaking with strangers. You take a few bills from your wallet and lay them down on the table.

He asks if you’re leaving, teeth extended out past his lip. You tell him your daughter is waiting. You’ve had a nice chat. He asks you which way you’re headed. You tell him. He says he’s going that way. You need to hear the rest of the story.

Down the block by your car he says to hand over your billfold. The billfold, he says. You feel the nudge of the gun at your kidney.

You are no crime-drama hero. You hand over the billfold, agreeing in full to his terms. He opens the wallet and scowls. You’ve never carried much cash on your person. Move up the street, he says—removing your bank card from its niche in the leather, tucking the gun in his pocket—we’ll stop at the bank. You move up the sidewalk. Nervous, giddy, you ask what became of his girlfriend.

I forgave her, he says, hands in his pockets. The she skipped out.

He slides your card in the slot at the bank. You stand side by side. He asks for your PIN, which you promptly reveal. He taps in the code.

Silence. The street seems strangely deserted. You ask if he’s found a new girlfriend.

Shut up, he says. He stuffs the cash in his pocket. Story’s over.

Half-joking, you ask if he’d mind if you kept the receipt.

Shut up, I said, he exclaims.

You begin to say that you’re sorry—you don’t quite shut up in time—and then the hand is out of the pocket, there’s a blur of tattoo, and you’re down on your knees in the flowerbed, there among nasturtiums and lupine and poppies, reeling from the shock of the blow.

Don’t be so shit-eating nice, he says, his shadow looming over like Neanderthal man’s. He says you remind him of Eddy, that two-faced adulterous creep. Lay flat on the ground now, he tells you.
Don’t move for five minutes. Down, if you ever want to get up.

You lie in the dirt on your belly, no hero, purely compliant. In a while you touch your scalp where he hit you, fearing there’s blood; there isn’t. You’re lucky. The soil, barky and damp, clings to your fingers and hair. Your eyelashes brush against flowers—poppies, you think. Petals as vibrant as holiday pumpkins.

How long is five minutes?

People step up to get money. You hear them push in their cards and tap on the keyboard. You feel the individual discomfort, the dismay they endure to see such a sight, outlandish, right here out in the open, a man flung down on the ground in broad daylight, mashing the orange and blue flowers.

It seems you’ve been here forever. You’ve been here in dreams, you believe, in piecemeal visions—even this was foreseen in a way, if not quite clearly foreseeable. You should get up, you suppose, but you feel fine where you are. Sprawling, face in the black fragrant mulch, burrowing, digging in with your fingers, digging in like the wind. You press into the earth. The street grows quiet again. Ear to the ground, you hear plates trembling beneath you, weighty, incomprehensibly huge, aching with age and repeated collision, compelled by what is to agree and agree and agree.