Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (31 page)

I stared without breathing across the dark room as Edward stood in front of the closed drapes, which blocked the sun from our Acapulco hotel suite. On the wall beside Edward was a tall mirror, which didn’t reflect his image. Still, I didn’t need a mirror to tell me of the beauty I saw before me. Edward’s pale, chiseled body heaved as he smiled at me, and his taut buttocks tensed slightly, running an erotic flash between my thighs.

Edward’s gaze was mesmerizing. I felt like prey caught in the eyes of a powerful predator. A predator who could rip me apart if he chose—rip me to pieces and drink my ever-so-vital fluids.

“You know I’d never harm you,” Edward said, reaching for my hand. He pulled me close and hugged me to his sweaty body. “Never forget,” he added. “I may be a monster, but I love you.”

“You’re no monster,” I said as I kissed him.

“Perhaps. But the vampire leaders won’t be happy that we’ve married.”

“Why should they care?”

Edward looked pained, as if I’d asked him to bare his soul for all the world to see. “There are things about my people we never show outsiders.”

“Like what? Do you glow in the sunlight or something?” I’d meant the comment only in jest, but Edward looked at me with his ages-old gaze and nodded.

“You are close,” he said. “It’s supposedly the most intense feeling any vampire can experience.”

“Better than sex?” I asked, wicked memories of last night flashing through my mind.

“Far better. Would you like to experience it with me?”

My body shivered in excitement as Edward again pulled me close and we kissed, a kiss that reached into the depths of my soul and caressed my very being. As we kissed, Edward reached out with his free hand and flung open the drapes, revealing the morning sunlight angling across the beach and the waves. In the sunlight, Edward sparkled, light jumping around his body as our kiss grew even more passionate, our emotions crashing like the waves outside our hotel room. I felt like I was on fire.

Except I wasn’t on fire—Edward was on fire!

He looked at me in panic as I stepped back. His skin smoked and his sexy hair flared. His wondrous, taut buttocks charred black. “Aw crap,” he said. “They always told me we sparkled in the sunlight.”

As he said this his body exploded in flames, knocking me against the window. When I stood up, ash rained across the hotel room.

I guess Acapulco wasn’t a good choice for a vampire honeymoon.

John M. Solensten

M
r. Sammler did not care much for computers and all that tech business. It all seemed too detached from real life—real life in his woody back yard and in the hills down the road. During their infrequent and (he guessed) forced appearances, his grandchildren seemed strangely remote to him as they sat about silently caressing the faces of their I-Pods or whatever they were.

Mrs. Sammler had another notion regarding connecting with the world. She was a very social being and could hardly bear spending an evening in the tired old house they shared. She belonged to things and found her husband’s hanging about the yard and woods all alone boring and antisocial. “Who in the world do you talk to out there in the elms?” she asked him when he came back in the house smelling of moss and damp leaves. “Don’t you get lonely out there?” she asked, and he would smile a limp smile and reply, “As Thoreau said, ‘Being alone is not necesarily being lonely.’”

When he said that, she waved him away, picked up her purse, and hurtled her Lincoln toward a meeting of some sort.

Mr. Sammler’s Korean War buddy, Eric Jensen, would often come over when he saw the car whirling away past his front door and down the road past his front yard.

“I wonder how you two manage to keep it together, you’re so different,” he would say to Mr. Sammler over a Bud.

“But we do,” Sammler would reply. “We raised our children, and they have moved on to good lives.”

Jensen often reviewed his PSA with Sammler. “The hormone shots keep it just about zero,” he would say, and Sammler, knowing the reference, would reply, “I know.” He did not like
to review his health issues with Jensen, or anyone else for that matter.

“Where does she go when she goes?” Jensen asked. “She always seems to be going somewhere night and day.”

“Oh, somewhere to meet with people—sometimes at the capital—political stuff!”

“At seven p.m.?”

“Yes, of course!” Sammler would usually reply, and then turn to work on his Norwegian fly rods or Browning auto.

“I don’t know about that,” Jensen said. “How old is she now?”

“I told you—sixty-eight.” Sammler hated to recite her age. He was twelve years older.

“Sixty-eight,” Jensen replied like a dull echo in the room before he finished his Bud and went home to watch the Hunt Channel on TV.

One morning Jensen walked in and saw Irene Sammler’s office door was open, revealing a computer, a giant printer, and a scanner.

“My God!” Jensen exlcaimed. “Your wife is a tech, a real tech.”

“She’s on Facebook,” Sammler said. “She’s on it for hours.”

“A social network.”

“She’s very social.”

“You ever look at it with her?”

“No.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

“A social network—socializing with all kinds of people.”

“All kinds?”

“All kinds.”

“Ask her nicely to share it with you so you can learn it.”

“I don’t get the connection.”

“People get quite chummy on these things.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“Do it. Go on patrol, old buddy. See what’s on there and out there!”

“Maybe. By the way, when’s Charlie Goodthunder’s funeral?”

“Tuesday next. First the WWII vets go, then us Korean vets. A kind of succession, somebody said.”

“I suppose,” Sammler said. He could see Goodthunder’s young face in the obit section of the Times. It was a vague face on a vague uniform.

The very next evening Sammler asked Irene if she would show him how to use Facebook. She seemed irked at first, then looked at Sammler’s face for something, touched his hand gently, sat him down where he could see her computer screen and showed him her “friends.”

In her photo at the upper left Irene looked quite young and beautiful and ready to face people—all kinds of people…

It all looked quite sweet and chummy to him at first, but then he asked her if there was any pattern in placing photo images.

“I put the ones I know best near the top.”

“How’s it?”

“I’ll show you.”

Ah, there on the top were her two sisters, two sorority pals, and—and two men friends from college, Robert Holm and Caesar Lopez—both looking young and joyful, both with not a bit of gray, both (he remembered from her class reunion) widowers, quite rich…

“What about this Holm?” he asked bending down to look more closely.

“Oh, we chat a lot—just college remembrances, et cetera!”

Sammler wondered what the et cetera was.

“It’s all kind of harmless and social,” she said, patting his hand again and making the computer screen dark.

Dark. Darkly.

No matter. The succession was there. First the WWII vets and then the Korean…

A matter of sequence, succession, time.

Andrea Brill

I
t’s Friday and I’m fat. Well maybe not technically fat, but just kind of fat. Maybe I’m plump. I like to think of myself as curvy—sensual if you will. Truthfully, I have forty-three pounds to lose by next Thursday. My husband, my eat-all-day-and-night-and-still-not-gain-a-pound-husband and I are vacationing in Costa Rica next week.

It is no surprise to me that I need to lose forty-three pounds. It’s not as if I woke up one morning and was suddenly forty-three pounds heavier. “Horace, Horace, wake up! I think I ate Sparkey last night!”

In an attempt to lose my flab, I’ve given it the ugliest name I can think of—Hulga. I thought this might somehow inspire me to misplace her. I apologize in advance to the Hulgas of the world whom I may, and then again, perhaps may not, offend. (It concerns me that Hulga is a fine name for a nice Icelandic woman and yet so fitting for forty-three pounds of lard.)

I’ve tried ditching Hulga in fitness centers across our nation and even in a few foreign lands. She clings to me like peanut butter and jelly, like coffee and donuts, like bacon and eggs, like…well…you get the point and now understand why my favorite clothing hut is Miss Mable’s Fit Ums.

Two weeks ago, while dining at one of my favorite trans-fat-free cafés, I spied a brochure proclaiming the extraordinary reducing powers of Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™. An omen, I thought, a sign. Why there was even a likeness of Dr. Lookingood himself—white lab coat and all—guaranteeing that I had the potential to shed forty-four pounds
in seven days. How fortuitous, I thought, for I only had to lose forty-three!

I promptly called the overseas exchange and express-shipped my metamorphosing elixir.

My panacea was short-lived and soon replaced by propagations of doubt after the oily parcel arrived. Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™ smelled like feet. I even detected the tell-tale bouquet of sewer gas.

My uncertainties were confirmed upon reading the FAQs.

DR. LOOKINGOOD’S EXTREME MIRACLE WEIGHT LOSS POWDER™ FAQS

Question:
Dr. Lookingood,

I have used your weight loss powder for six weeks and have yet to lose any weight. What am I doing wrong?

Answer:
Dear Madam,

Stay the course. Your body is in the initial stages of dramatic weight loss. I suggest you immediately order another shipment.

Question:
Dr. Lookingood,

I have lost 58 pounds using your product but now have an Elvis-shaped fungus growing on my back. What did I do wrong?

Answer:
Dear Madam,

This is a typical response. Your body is only now becoming adjusted to the key ingredients in Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™. Personally, fungi and Elvis arouse me. Please send photos.

Question:
Dr. Lookingood,

Each packet of your weight-loss powder costs $7.99. The recommended dosage for my weight (378 lbs.) is three packets each day. This is my eighth week on your program and I have only lost 12 lbs. I’ve spent over $1,300.00. What am I doing wrong?

Answer:
My Good Lady,

I fear yours is an exceptionally difficult case. I suggest you increase your intake of Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder™ to six packets every day.

Question:
Dr. Lookingood,

I have used your weight-loss powder for three weeks and have gained 14 lbs. Help! What am I doing wrong?

Answer:
Dear Madam,

Do not be alarmed. You are experiencing fluid retention. Reduce the amount of water used to mix each packet of Dr. Lookingood’s Extreme Miracle Weight Loss Powder ™ from the recommended 64 ounces to 48 ounces.

Question:
Dr. Lookingood,

Each time I call your help line I am put on hold. The calls cost $4.99 per minute. Do you have a toll-free number?

Answer:
Dear Madam,

No.

Neither Hulga nor I have been to Costa Rica. I think we will have a fantastic time. I sure hope she speaks Spanish.