Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (17 page)

“Reckon it was right to kill our horses?” Andy asked.

“Man’s got to eat.” Zeke sliced flank. “Way I figure, it’s us or them.”

Andy shook his head. “Still no sign of the herd.”

“We found the wagon train now, they liable to accuse us of sellin’ them steers.”

“We got rotten luck.”

“It’s cause of
them
.” Zeke pointed into the night.

“Forget them. Why don’t we shoot marbles or sumpin’?”

“Nah. I’m gettin’ the rifle and whiskey.”

“Okay. I’ll get the lamp.”

Lantern glow shimmered across the prairie. For minutes they saw nothing, passed the bottle, glared as clouds swelled. Then in the brilliance of lightning the men espied the varmints as they passed like spectral warriors between sagebrush and cacti.

A shot commingled with thunder. A squealing lupine body twisted in air—a geyser of blood erupted between antlers.

“Here’s another closin’ in!”

Zeke tried to sight it, but the sky broke in a deluge and drowned their light. The beasts howled. Andy dropped the lantern; it shattered.

“Son of a sheep farmer!” he cried.

“I HATE JACKALOPES!” Zeke stomped a retreat to the fire.
He drained the rest of the whiskey, then flopped on his blanket.

“Well, light’s flashin’ ‘round us,” Andy said. “Wanna play ‘I Spy’?”

But Zeke lay snoring.

Andy woke shivering in blackness. The rain had stopped, but he heard rumbling. He rummaged his pockets for a match, then scratched its head until it flared. In the dim light, the red eyes—at least a Devil’s-dozen pairs—surrounded them. He had just enough time to drop the match on Zeke’s head before the furry fiends stampeded. Teeth and claws drew gouts of blood with every hop, kick and nibble.

In the sunlight, they struggled awake, all bloody wounds and ripped clothing.

“We’re not dead!” Andy clapped.

“We are,” Zeke said.

“Sure?”

“Jackalopes attack, they don’t eat you, you wake up dead.”

“Don’t make no sense.”

“It’s true.”

Andy tested the idea by not breathing. Minutes passed. Half an hour. Finally he drew in a breath and sighed. “Well, what’s on the agenda for today? How ‘bout cards?” He patted his chest pocket and came up with a single ace of spades.

“Wait for it,” Zeke said.

“What ‘it’?”

“I don’t know. I ain’t heard nobody tell that part.”

Andy stretched. “I’m peckish.”

“They say the dead have an endless hunger, on account of how they miss life so.”

“I just don’t feel dead.”

“Give it time. Your liveliness will run its course soon enough.”

“You wanna play ‘Name That Tune’?”

Zeke just stared at Andy.

That noon Zeke ate stewed Andy. By evening he just had Andy raw.

Last thing Zeke remembered, before shambling into darkness, the final semblance of human thought flickering through his decaying brain, was Andy had always been too gamy.

Katherine A. Turski

I
beat my husband the other night. I couldn’t help it, he asked for it.

“I’m tired of playing games,” I said. “How much more do you think you can take?”

“Come on,” he coaxed. “Just one more round of Battleship.”

He shouldn’t have pushed me like that. After the third beating he reeled slightly, blinking in bewilderment.

“How can you do that?” Staring at the ships on the computer screen, he added, “I can’t even find your aircraft carrier. What kind of goofy strategy are you using?”

“It’s called ‘Hide the ships where you can’t find them.’”

“That’s ridiculous. I should be able to find them all.” This is from a man who demands daily to know where I’ve hidden his reading glasses. “You must be cheating.”

He shouldn’t have accused me of cheating. I demolished his fleet three more times. Even his PT boat wasn’t safe.

“Just a few more rounds,” he mumbled.

“Haven’t you had enough punishment?”

He shook his head. “Are you kidding? I’m just getting warmed up. What, are you scared of losing?”

“I’ve been petrified the whole time.”

“Very funny. Come on, set up for the next round.”

I put a hand on his shoulder and said softly, “It’s late, honey. We need to get to sleep.” Once the lights were out, I pretended not to hear him whimper, “Just one more round.” I felt like a sadist.

For the rest of the week he begged me for more. I only replied, “Not tonight, I have a headache.”

Several nights later we visited another couple. After dinner they invited us to play games. My husband’s face paled and he excused himself to the restroom, claiming a possible case of distemper. The wife gave me a look eloquent with sympathy.

“You beat your husband, don’t you?”

“Only at Battleship. He asks for it, though.”

“They always do.” She stared at her husband, who fiddled nervously with a card deck.

“Try beating this one at Scrabble. He’ll keep you up all night until he finally wins.

The Tiles are so stained with sweat you can’t read the letters any more.”

“And the dictionary?”

She shuddered. “Don’t ask.”

Ads for popular games claim their products bring people closer together. So does hand-to-hand combat.

Yet, after much thought and research, I’ve finally found the perfect game for my husband and me to enjoy. There will be no more complaining, no suspicion of cheating, no criticizing strategy. I call it “Strip Twister.” The way I figure it, my husband will never know if he’s winning or losing, and even if he does, he probably won’t care.

S. Michael Wilson

I
t was waiting for me on the kitchen table when I came home from work, just sitting there innocently, as if it belonged.

Under normal circumstances, my kitchen table is cluttered with a variety of newspapers, junk mail, half-eaten toaster pastries, and dirty dishes accumulated over weeks of hastily eaten meals. Finding it completely void of debris was odd enough on its own. The shoe in the center of the table, however, was the proverbial cherry on the gluten-free chocolate cake of astonished bewilderment.

It was a red satin shoe with black lace trim, a four-inch heel, and absolutely no business being in my house. Yet there it was, perfectly centered on the kitchen table as if awaiting a catalog photo shoot. The shoe’s very existence was so inconceivable that I stood and stared for what seemed like an eternity, swaying ever so slightly in the gentle breeze of my own disbelief, as I attempted to deduce a logical explanation for its presence.

There was no chance that it had been left behind, accidentally or intentionally, by a member of the opposite sex. Seventeen different species of Amazonian swallow had become extinct since I last entertained a woman in my humble abode. Even if my last brief female acquaintance had suddenly decided to swing by and drop off a random article of clothing, doing so would most likely have been a violation of the terms of her parole.

The possibility that I had left it there myself and forgotten it was enthusiastically pondered, but firmly rejected. Even if I did happen to own such a shoe without consciously being aware of it, there was no way I would have cleaned off the table for the
first time in twenty-three fortnights simply in order to display it. The idea that I might actually be an amnesiac with a penchant for female footwear was remotely worthy of consideration, but accepting that I might be a schizophrenic foot fetishist was a grand leap from giving myself credit for tidying up the kitchen, and such a leap I was unwilling to take, no matter what kind of shoes I was wearing.

I cannot be sure how long I stood there grappling with the implications inherent in this bizarre case of phantom footwear. All I know is that it was a knock at the kitchen door that finally startled me from my befuddled trance. Now was not the ideal time to receive visitors, but I instinctively turned and answered it.

I opened to the door to find a red satin evening gown standing on the rear stoop. Squeezed incomprehensibly into that startling crimson splash of fabric was the largest single-serving of machismo I had ever seen, outside of my embarrassingly short-lived vacation at Lumberjack Fantasy Camp.

He was a towering brute of a man, so large I had to look at him in shifts. The dress was stretched impossibly tight over his massive torso. The seams strained audibly with every breath he took, groaning like freshly damned souls. A thumb thick as rebar hooked itself under one dainty spaghetti strap and straightened it with a shrug. Muscles like coiled steel cables rippled under his broad, fur-matted shoulders. It was impossible to tell where his chest hair stopped and his beard began. I morbidly wondered if it was a backless dress, then shuddered at the thought.

His handlebar mustache was so big it had handbrakes. The only thing keeping it in check was a square jaw that jutted out like a granite cliff, dented and pockmarked by the shipwrecked hulls of a thousand shattered knuckles. An eyebrow the same size and temperament as a Russian hamster arched threateningly. The eye below it and its mate, both balanced precariously above cheekbones you could sharpen a straight razor on, shot me a quizzical glance with such force that I felt the breeze tussle my hair.

“Hey. Mac.” His voice purred like a dump truck dragged sideways over hot asphalt. “Ya didn’t happen to find a shoe lyin’ around, did ya?”

His breath hit me like a monthlong sanitation strike. I nearly swooned, but managed to remain on my feet, and only whimpered slightly. Following a hunch, I let my gaze freefall past his unmercifully exposed calves, where it landed with a thud on a pair of painfully large feet.

They were the kind of feet that undoubtedly gave birth to massive, trench-sized footprints, the kind that zoologists make plaster casts of and compose lengthy dissertations about in the dead of night. Wide, calloused, hirsute slabs, with a dense pelt covering their arches that made the man’s chest hair seem like peach fuzz; the bulging knuckle of each bowling-pin-shaped toe wearing its own little comb-over. The middle toe of the left yeti-sized foot, the one adorned with a tasteful herringbone ankle bracelet, was minus a nail. The raw pink skin of that helmetless soldier promised me a tale of death and despair. It was an ode I was unwilling to bear witness to, and I allowed my eyes to retreat upwards once again.

Questions swam through my mind like rabid sea monkeys. A thousand expletives threatened to escape my throat simultaneously, yet all I could muster was a slight nod before staggering zombielike to the kitchen table. Inviting him into the kitchen was out of the question, mainly because I doubted that his freakishly large frame would fit through the comparatively tiny doorway. I lifted the satin pump gingerly in both hands and, holding it at arm’s length, turned and offered it to the delicately garbed behemoth.

The man’s eyebrow arched even higher, threatening to leave his forehead altogether. His eyes fixed me with a stare that threatened to injure me on its own.

“Really?” he asked. “Do I look like a size five to you?”

Daniel Kason

T
he two aliens were silent as they scanned their holographic computer screens, occasionally looking up to chuckle and make an amusing remark when one of them found a particularly good bit.