Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (10 page)

But he was a sailor from a foreign land and soon would be gone. This bothered her, of course. He would be gone, perhaps forever. She would miss him and his flatulence that announced, in its abrupt clarion way, the making of love. So she pursed her lips and began practicing explodents and susurruses against her
encroaching abandonment. She mastered the squeal and the thundering bassoon. As the final day grew near, she cooked up a good pot of red beans for him, the kind packed with molecules of blue methane aching for release.

On his last night in port he climbed the creaky stairs to her room and she fed him well, spooning the purplish mash in the direction of his mouth with mother love. Giddy, he began to break wind like there was no tomorrow, which there wasn’t. She followed his lead, blindly, matching him vibration for vibration with her practiced lips. He was a breezy old seadog and taught her more in that last evening than any landlocked blighter could ever hope to know.

Then he sailed. A storm rose out of the east, his hermaphrodite brig splintered and sank, all drowned. Perhaps a pool of bubbles gamboled on the surface of the ocean for a moment, she thought when she heard the report. But she had learned her lessons well and recited them over and over in her room. Phoo-oo-oot. Phleesh. Shuh-kuh-kuh. Vleen. Brap. High-pitched farts and low-pitched farts and farts that tromboned in between. Sometimes she forgot herself and left her window open. A blind woman living alone in a room above a seamstress shop doesn’t much care what the neighbors think.

I too was a sailor, in my youth, and had heard all the tales about foreign port cities young sailors hear on their first voyages. One evening, while the rest of the crew luxuriated in the local fleshpots, I stood in front of a seamstress shop leaning against a wall, a Players dangling from my lips, a tableau of solitude and dreams adrift. The strange and foreign port city at night was ablaze with torchlights in its cocky, smirky way, as foreign port cities always are. It was then that I heard him, above me, a sound I had listened to a hundred times late at night when the Dansker and Jenkins and Kincaid squatted and plotted in the lee forechains drinking watered rum and dicing away their pay: the song of the
legendary Drowned Farter. (It was said a pool of bubbles gamboled perpetually on the surface of the ocean at the exact spot his ship went down.) This, of course, was Adventure. I climbed the creaky stairs and entered the blind woman’s room. She sat cross-legged on a mound of rich pillows at the center of a web of colored threads connecting her fingertips to various corners of the room, like rigging on a ship, her haunted blind eyes long ago emptied of longing, a weathered figurehead on a bowsprit.

But she was kind and understood my loneliness. She took me slowly, knowing that I was young and that my heart was crowded with all the useless baby furniture of young hope. On her pillows farts exploded overhead like rockets, rattled below like grapeshot at the waterline. Ripped and snapped like sails in a gale, canvas that billowed and sagged and filled again. Hot musket breath raked the poop. I boarded her. She boarded me. And when she pulled me under for the third time and I felt my brief life spent before me in a few seconds, I was grateful for the foretaste.

You never forget her, your first foreign woman in a port city, regardless of the men she’s had ahead of you or will have later on. You board your ship the next morning and when the wind kicks up you want to turn back. Standing on the wooden deck you see your first foreign woman’s blind eyes in your own mind’s eye, and then you hear the crew scrambling up the ratline rungs of the shrouds, stinking of last night’s beer, farting their early morning farts and singing in chorus of their own first foreign women and the sea.

Edward Palumbo

I
t’s not for sale,” said the tiny gray woman as she clutched the black device with both hands. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Oh,” I responded glumly.

“Of course, I could rent it to you.” Her Shih Tzu barked at us from the living-room window, apparently displeased with the notion. “You look as if you could be trusted to bring it back, a nice, young, professional man like yourself. I don’t really need the money, but every little bit helps.” She paused. “No, no, I’d better not.”

“How much to rent it for one day?” I inquired.

“My husband, God rest him, bought it at a dusty old camera shop. But it’s not a camera, no sir, even though it looks like one.” She held it up as high as she could, and it shimmered in the sunlight. “Look at that workmanship,” she continued, “not another like it in the world. And look at the buttons: blue, green, yellow, and here on the side,
red
. But never touch the red one.” She laid it back on the table. “The red one cannot be touched. That is why it is separate from the others. You would not want to click it by mistake.”

“Yes,” I replied, “blue, green, etcetera, don’t touch the red. Got it. Tell me again how you make it work.”

“Well, you can point the lens at just about anything from a postcard to a child’s drawing to the finest Cezanne. Then you click the blue button and you are transported into the scene immediately. Wherever the place, whatever the time, it is yours to visit, for good or for bad. When you want to return, simply point the lens at yourself and click the green button and you’re home. Imagine, you could visit the Great Pyramid of Giza in the morning, have lunch with Churchill, and then stop by Yankee
Stadium for Game 7 of the 1975 World Series. Now, should you visit someplace where there’s danger, the Amazon jungle for example, that’s where the yellow button comes in. If someone or something threatens your safety, point the lens at them and click the yellow button. Your foe will disappear as quick as you please.”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars to rent it until tomorrow evening.”

“You must never touch the red button. That’s why it is separate from the others.”

Her Shih Tzu barked at us from the living room window. “I’ll be a minute, Mitzy!” the woman exclaimed without turning.

“I’ll give you fifty dollars to rent it until tomorrow evening,” I repeated.

“My husband kept it in the cellar for years. He only used it a half dozen times. It can be dangerous. He was knocked out by Joe Louis twice. Some people never learn. I started putting things out at six-thirty. Everybody loves yard sales. I had customers here before seven a.m. Mitzy hates men, why, I don’t know. She loves women though—and kids.”

“Fifty dollars, until tomorrow evening, I’ll have it back no later than eight p.m.”

“Hold it,” she said as she lifted the device and handed it to me. “Feel the weight.” I examined the device. It was indeed weighty.

“After noon,” she explained, “no one came, except you. Right now, it’s entirely dead. I suppose I made about eighty dollars, enough to buy dog food.” Mitzy barked on cue.

“How much will you give me for it?”

I pointed the lens at the old woman and clicked the yellow button. Then I took care of Mitzy. I’ll be back from the Bahamas on Thursday.

Tom J. Lynch

I
n one hand Harry Boydman held the cashier’s check that would save his life. With the other he shook hands with another satisfied customer. Thereafter, he fled into the night, away from the Dice Street Warehouse, a semilegal satellite accumulation area for industrial waste. Not until he reached the corner of Dice and Hamilton did he examine the check under the glimmering eye of a lone street lamp. A fog, like cigarette smoke, gently grabbed his hand, making Boydman feel a tad uneasy. It hadn’t been so long since he’d quit smoking.

The check was paid to the order of Milwaukee Toxic Takeout, a racket of Boydman’s in which he charged the going rate for clean and green disposal of hazardous waste, while he dumped the sludge in the sewers when nobody was looking. The number next to the dollar sign was big. Not bank heist big, but generous enough to raise the sword of Damocles that hung over his head. Boydman had borrowed a substantial sum from Roddy Size, a local kingpin and owner of Soapy Sam’s Laundromat up on 21st Street. The capital was intended to grow Boydman’s disposal business, but instead he blew it all on bubblegum and hookers. Consequently, Roddy sent out a guy to have a chat with Boydman. Monkey Cowalski was his name, and he was the kind of guy who could lift twice his own weight in soggy towels and underwear at the laundry joint.

Boydman folded the check in half and extracted his wallet from his pants pocket. After inserting the check, he flipped to the wallet’s photo sleeve, in which he had sequestered a picture of a bird named Cheezy, a cockatiel with a crooked beak, long since dead, and the last friend he’d had on this Earth. She had a
voice like a chainsaw on helium and he had taught her how to shriek, “I looove youuu!” And he had loved her back, until the day Cowalski had darkened his doorway.

Boydman closed his wallet abruptly, refusing to chain himself to that train of thought. No sense letting himself get dragged behind that memory when he already felt vulnerable beneath the street lamp’s cone of illumination. He put the wallet in his pants pocket and started across Hamilton street. He was halfway across and inches away from a manhole when the cover erupted and spun in the air like a coin, sprinkling asphalt all the way.

Something green. Something scaly. Something altogether unnatural and unexpected lunged from beneath the street. It looked like a giant iguana and it grabbed Boydman’s ankles, pulling him hard, dragging him into the hole. He was halfway beneath the ground before he arrested his descent by hooking his fingers in a deep pothole. He screamed, but no one answered. The street was empty and this was the kind of neighborhood where, if it wasn’t empty, people looked the other way and kept walking.

His trousers ripped and slipped off his waist. The creature fell with a fistful of pants, freeing Boydman to struggle up onto the crosswalk.

“My wallet!”

Without a second thought, he lowered his bare legs into the manhole and climbed down to a dark river of cold filth. His socks slurped it up like sponges. His feet tingled, as if a weak electric current ran through the sludge. The air smelled like turpentine.

Water gurgled and beasts groaned.

As his eyes adjusted, the dark coalesced into shapes. Man-sized lizards. Goldfish the size of buffalo standing on quivering young legs. A hamster with three eyes and enough room in its cheeks to pouch a Volkswagen.

“Who’s got my pants?”

They approached. Silent. Hungry.

An ear-piercing shriek stopped the animals and a hulking cockatiel, tall as an ostrich, pushed passed them. It had a crooked beak.

Boydman gasped.

“I thought I flushed you down the crapper!”

Monkey Cowalski had been an accessory to Cheezy’s murder. Boydman himself had done the murdering. When Cowalski had come around to collect for Roddy Size he put a gun to Boydman’s head and pinched his ear with two jagged fingernails. He gently instructed Boydman to smoke cigarette after cigarette and blow the smoke in Cheezy’s cage until the bird fell belly-up in the newsprint. As Boydman flushed the bird down the toilet, Cowalski told him that next time he’d pull the trigger if Roddy didn’t receive a return on his investment.

In the sewer, Cheezy approached, wings spread in a benevolent gesture. She stood a head taller than Boydman, and her wings blocked his view of the other creatures. She dipped her head, as if to preen her chest feathers, then raised it again with Boydman’s wallet clutched in her beak.

Boydman took the wallet and couldn’t hold back a smile, nor tears.

“I’m so sorry.”

Her black eyes never blinked as her wings embraced Boydman. She reeked of sewage and rotting meat. And chemicals.

“Cheezy, come home with me!”

She pushed him away and pointed a wing at the ladder leading back to the street. Boydman hesitated, but Cheezy backed off and lowered her wings, permitting the menagerie of mutant pets to resume their approach.

Boydman put the wallet in his mouth and scrambled up the ladder. Back on the street, he opened the wallet. The check was there, but the picture was gone. He wondered if, after paying Roddy, he’d have enough cash to buy another bird.