For the Birds
At night, when you get up for frequent trips to the bathroom, you can hear rustling inside the wall. At first, it’s loud and energetic, but it gets slower and fainter with the passage of time.
Bad bird, bad. A woodpecker made a hole in the wall of your house and then another bird—surely an opportunist, a trespasser, a squatter—built a nest in there.
A handyman covered the hole with cement and painted it over. He was a big, bald man, tattooed and beer-bellied. “No way the woodpecker would peck through now,” he said.
Neither would the trespasser, with its softer beak, working from its confined space inside the wall. The damn thing will die on its eggs soon. It will learn its lesson. Respect the rights of others. Don’t mess with the powerful. Know your place.
“I don’t think any bird is trapped in there,” the handyman said when he finished with the hole. “Its partner would’ve dived at me. Even if it were trapped, it won’t stink. It’s too small.”
You nodded knowingly.
Even if you were a bleeding heart, what could you do now? You couldn’t get the handyman to open the hole in the middle of the night. And you aren’t handy yourself.
By late morning, the rustling stops. The handyman was right. It doesn’t stink. Of course, it’s too early to tell, but you have a feeling that it never will. You trust your feelings; you have to trust something if not someone. You can fall asleep now, but you keep turning and tossing in your narrow, claustrophobic bed, your hands weak like clipped wings.
First published in Atticus Review
The Painter’s Wife
The painter conjured her down from the painting, and fell on the floor, exhausted. He slept without dreams because the time for dreams, vivid as they were, was finally over. When he awoke, she stood motionlessly over his supine body, and her gown smelled of fresh paint. Her face was frozen, her muscles rigid, her eyes glassy.
The painter turned his head and saw her likeness still on the painting. There, she was smiling, a faint but warm smile. He turned again, and there she was, alive, but as unwelcoming as an icy rain. She couldn’t be in both places at once; though no scientist, he knew that much. He parted his lips, about to ask her to move, to stand by the painting, so he could see and decide for himself, but she lowered herself to him. She was smooth under her dress, and warming up quickly to his touch.
Now, a day later, she smiles as if she’s used to moving her lips and squinting her eyes. Her curly red hair falls, full and thick, on her pale shoulders and back, in long strands that have lost their canvas flatness and brush strokes. Her smile is an enigma with the frosting of promise. Her breasts and belly carry his fingerprints. They exchanged rings once and DNA on several occasions.
“I love you to death, if you’ll forgive me such a cliché,” she says, testing the sharpness of her nails against the skin of her hand while watching her husband shave. She seems fascinated with sharp objects—a curious trait for someone who spent all her life inside the vulnerability of woven cloth.
The painter tried to get her next to the painting, to see them together, but failed. They never exist in the same frame. At least he can’t see them, which is the same to him. He blames himself: his studio is too big, she’s too quick on her feet, and his vision is not as good as it once was.
Nodding to her words, the painter cuts himself with the razor. He winces, but the little pain doesn’t prevent him from granting her poetic license to speak any way she wants.
She steps closer to the painting, walking softly like a cat. The painter blinks. One of them will be gone now. Maybe, all three of them, even the painting, will be gone. He’s not certain of anything anymore. Her hair and fingernails shine like a burning sun, and he brings his hands up to protect his face.
First published in Fiction Southeast.
A Civil Union
A jellyfish invites a peanut butter fish to the Sandwich Place. They hope to mate for life, but it smells fishy. When they divorce, the lawyers won’t touch them. They have bigger fish to fry.
A jellyfish proposes to peanut butter fish. When they divorce, the lawyers won’t touch them. They have bigger fish to fry. They won’t work for peanuts. So the newlyweds part amicably. They refuse interviews since fish don’t talk to strangers.
Safety First
I draw a doggie as requested by a three-year-old. I had to carry her because she was too sad to walk.
“What should we call the doggie?” I ask.
“Smoke alarm,” she says.
I never breathe fire next to her.
First published in The Open Journal of Arts and Letters
The Fifty-Year-Old Virgin
Misha, a man of fifty and no longer a virgin, sits in an eatery in Chinatown and eats General Tso’s chicken. He is usually afraid of fried meat, but today he needs the comfort food. He is too excited. Three days ago, he did what had eluded him all his adult life. A woman, relatively young and even a little beautiful, did that with him and even enjoyed it. This is what she said. Would a woman with such honest eyes lie? They were so close that they breathed into each other’s faces. Mila Coleman, and in Russian, Mila Kapustina. What a wonderful name. What a wonderful Russian-American writer. When they finished, she kissed him on the cheek.
His editor, who knows and sees everything, was also delighted. Good job, the editor said, slamming Misha on the shoulder and giving a gum stick. You pissed against the wind, and your pants are still dry. I’m sorry I called you an old fool.
Even now, three days later, Misha’s sore shoulder hurts. And he left the gum stick intact. He needs to chew on that.
The man, no longer a virgin, pushes the plate with the half-eaten chicken away and opens the newspaper again. Here it is, the proof that a woman with the charming name Mila popped the cherry of his newbie writer’s virginity. His first interview. His cheek still holds the warmth of her lips and a trace of her lipstick, and he’ll keep it either forever or until the next interview, whichever comes first.
First published in The Open Journal of Arts and Letters
THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES
Life is life, and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet after the female praying mantis eats her male.
Love, Naturally
On a sunny summer day so gorgeous that it would bring tears to the eyes of anyone with at least a ganglion, the fruit fly named Max stopped eating and turned his head toward his soulmate.
“I just can’t accept it,” he said.
“What can’t you accept, dear?” she replied across the banana peel from him as soon as she finished swallowing the mouthful and wiped her mouth delicately with a pair of front legs. “The cruelty of human researchers?”
“My mortality. Will I really die? Will my desires, my curiosity, my sense of humor just disappear into thin ether? Will I never see your huge, beautiful, multifaceted eyes ever again? Will you never be able to lay your head on my thorax? If I die before you, will you replace me with a fly-by-night lover?”
“That’s a scientific fact, Max, honey. The maximum—pardon the pun—span of a fruit fly’s life is 153 days. But don’t worry. You will only be 30 days next Friday. Just eat and make merry.”
She turned away, pretending to clear the banana goo from her huge, beautiful, multifaceted eyes. It really was her tears, and the bright lab lights reflected in each drop like dozens of little suns.
Humpty Dumpty in the Afterlife
After Humpty Dumpty took a great fall, the Devil glued him together again, incrusted him with diamonds like a Faberge egg, inserted a straw in his shell, and glued him to his fireplace mantle. Now, Humpty Dumpty has to watch waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men during the day. In the evening, the Devil slurps him out, all 78 calories of him, through the straw. In the morning, Humpty Dumpty is full of high-quality protein, vitamins, and minerals again.
He wishes he would fall one more time and break into a billion pieces impossible to fix, but the glue is devilishly strong, and the floor is covered by a thick Persian rug. So he is stuck. That is, until he learns how to turn bad and cause the Devil a bellyache. It takes two to tango.
First published in Matter Press
Research
I dropped from the skies or from heaven—whatever was closer at the moment—at the doors of the Kremlin library to research, and the clerk, an army major with a chest full of clinking medals, a carbon copy of Brezhnev, only with the bushier eyebrows and even more impaired speech, demanded twenty rubles and forty kopecks for the entrance, and upon learning that the subject of my research was a new novel about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, he tripled the fee because it was a three-part name, and when I paid, he still barred my entrance, saying that he didn’t trust me with an honest opinion about Lenin, because I was a Westerner, even if with a native speaker’s command of Russian, so I decided to shoot the major three times above his eyebrows: once for me, once for Lenin who now wouldn’t get a new novel, and once for Eastern Ukraine, and then to shoot myself, or maybe the other way around, but I ran out of breath before the end of the sentence. So I didn’t squeeze the trigger even a single time whilst wheezing and reflecting about the futility of life, the fragility of thought, and about the full metal jacket that speaks concisely and in an authoritative voice, even though, in reality, it’s nothing but a brute that serves everyone who buys, steals, or wrestles out a gun.
Instead of shooting, I gave the major $10 and got admitted. You can’t write well in a Russian jail, dead or alive. Lenin met me inside, and we fine-tuned the novel together as two wandering souls should.
First published in Guernica
Enjoyed this story? You’ll love The Most Excellent Immigrant—a collection of 22 interlinked tales blending magical realism and humor.