Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (24 page)

“Sixteen pounds, Terry. You know what else weighs sixteen pounds? A sledgehammer. Don’t be a hardhead.”

I lost my first three fights. I used to charge like a bull, right into a stiff jab. I gave the blood-hungry dogs in the audience their money’s worth. By my fourth fight Mack was sick of it. He kept the towel over his shoulder, ready to throw. I thought he didn’t think I had the heart, but when the bell rang, he told me to stop taking a beating and finish the guy. “I know you’re better than this,” he’d said. “You been taking it for three fights; what you got to prove?”

So I let him see my blood on his gloves, and he got cocky. I chopped his legs with a few shins, took his speed away. When he stepped in, I let the mad dog loose. Dazed him, gave him the fear. He went for a takedown, I sprawled, came up with a knee and felt it connect. Drove him all the way to the cage with punches, until the ref pulled us apart. I felt like a king.

“The champ’s people got juice here, they want this guy to bust you up. Don’t be stupid, Terry.”

I lost two more on the way up, but I never backed out. That got me noticed. I got stupid on the ground once, had to tap or lose my arm for six months. I’m not that stubborn. I tapped, told him “Good fight.” He was real technical; he deserved the win. The other loss was bullshit, the ref called it on account of blood when I was working the guy’s arm for a Kimura. I got robbed, but it’s all part of the game. I’m sure some of the guys I’ve pounded felt robbed, too.

“Terry. You gotta be smart about this. This guy’s like you, but a middleweight. It’ll be a bloodbath, and no one will benefit.”

I know how hard a middleweight swings. At least this one will have gloves on, and no wedding ring to cut me up with. He won’t have hostages to make me weak, girls to slap around the kitchen, a fork to jam in Ma’s cheek. And he won’t have a bottle to drown in, or a car to wrap around a telephone pole, to rob me of my rematch once I got my size, like my old man had.

“Terry, I thought we got past all this. No one can take it like you can. You gotta think strategic. There’s no reason to fight this guy.”

Mack knows I don’t quit. He also knows if he throws in the towel, I walk. When he took me on, he said no more bar fights. I said fine, but you call a fight and I’m gone. We shook on it. I’d say he’s like a father to me, but that word ain’t a compliment to me.

“Punch the little bitch, ya fairy,” my old man says. Sipping whiskey, making us fight for his entertainment. My sister Annie’s hair is tied up, and we wear oven mitts for gloves. Tears on our cheeks, we circle the cold basement floor.

Annie bites her lip and throws a wide hook I can duck, but I don’t. It thumps my ear, which rings for days.

“Now hit her back, ya little faggot! Toughen her up!”

Double vision from the water in my eyes, I swing. I go low, but she won’t block. Her lip splits open like red roses on a grave. She falls on her butt, dress deflating, buckled shoes giving the concrete a one-two.

I rush the old man and he laughs, letting me get a few in, then I wake up in bed with a goose egg on my eyebrow.

“Terry!” Mack yells, snaps me out of it. “Last chance. Be smart, kid.”

I pound my gloved fists together, hop off the table. Mack slaps me on the back.

I walk head first into the crowd’s roar.

Peggy McFarland

C
harlie left the farm, mostly to escape his heritage. His great-great-great-great-great grandmother’s penchant for pigs and rats worked for her, but Charlie wanted to travel and spin his own tale.

After miles of heat and dust, Charlotte’s progeny happened upon a remote structure with a tantalizing buzz. He scaled the stone foundation to an opening. He considered this new corner, but the setting sun’s rays glinted upon shards, an omen to continue exploring. Broken windows did not make for comfortable homes.

He lowered himself into a subterranean room, then stopped and studied his surroundings. Rustlings, buzzings, and murmurs, along with a pleasant dankness—an enticing place for the kind of prey he needed for survival. Yes, this could be home.

He climbed a table leg to a mahogany surface, clambered over brass handles and descended into a large box. The bottom surface was soft, the walls cushioned. Corners were necessary for the structure he aimed to build. A centipede emerged from between cushions and padding, and nuzzled its way toward a pillow. Flies circled above, occasionally settling upon upholstered buttons. It would be difficult, but if he could build his web, he’d feast. He scurried to the indent and got his gland working. Yes, it would work, he could establish the anchors around those buttons. A hinge and the upper edge were more than suitable. A family of cockroaches convinced him; time to spin.

Charlie spun his silken radii, which spiraled larger and larger
connections to his long, taut frame-threads. He labored most of the night, and reinforced sticky threads in anticipation for crawling delicacies.

Abdomen aching, eight eyes bloodshot, eight legs sore, Charlie settled into the center of his web, proud of his handiwork. Outside, the night bugs lullaby faded and the first rooster blared to the world. Background noise to Charlie, his attention remained focused on a moth gnawing its way along the cloth.
Come on… come on…
Charlie thought, anxious to feed.

So intent on his dinner, Charlie ignored the bat that glided in through the broken window. He also ignored the bat’s evolving shadow—wings snapping outward into a billowing cape, round body elongating into human form, dark face glowing pale in the predawn shimmer.

Charlie bared his fangs, almost drooled, the moth wing one flap away from the first sticky thread—

—human-like fingers pinched the moth and flung it upwards. The same brazen hand swiped aside Charlie’s night-long labors. Charlie scrambled, wedged his body behind a button’s pucker and felt the weight of a head settle. Hinges croaked. Charlie was trapped inside blackness.

Charlie collapsed into misery. Without blood, he would expire. Without a web, he couldn’t suck blood. Within an airtight box, a web was pointless. Charlie peeked out from his hiding spot. Adding insult to injury, the human-esque blob filled almost every inch of available real estate. Charlie crawled onto the head. If he wasn’t so exhausted, he would start a new web anchored in the offender’s hair. A touch of his ancestor’s moxie crept into his tiny brain. He considered weaving a swear word across the snoring mouth. Scurrying to the lips, he revved up his gland. Empty. Didn’t matter, he was too exhausted to finish the task, plus he couldn’t spell. All he truly needed was to escape this
coffin and find an airier spot to spin a new home.

Charlie stopped, sniffed. Warm blood, puddled in a dimple. Charlie skated across skin, swung over a fang and dove for the blood. The face shook. NO! Charlie refused to be shaken off, not until he sated his hunger. No time to spin and anchor. Charlie latched on the rat’s way—he bared his own fangs and chomped into leathery skin.

Sour blood filled his mouth. The taste was horrific! He curled into a ball, slid off the face. The body shifted, crushing Charlie’s plump body, pinning a leg, tearing off two others. A blacker black enveloped.

Even with six legs, Charlie could clamber and spring, spin and weave. Penny Zuckerman destroyed every message, but Charlie didn’t care—A-HA and STIL HEER weren’t exactly poetry. Plus, he’d have to move on soon, taunt a new family. The Zuckermans were becoming pale.

The bathroom light glowed as Penny fumbled through the medicine cabinet for salve. She scratched her angry red welts, screeched when she came upon Charlie putting the finishing touches to U R FUD.

Her father-in-law Homer blamed his spider problem on a niece. Penny would shout NONSENSE, but her husband, her children, and every visitor to the Zuckerman homestead bore the same red welts. Penny grabbed a can of Aqua-Net and screamed, “I GOT HIM!” until the rest of the family rushed out of their bedrooms, tripped over each other, and chased Charlie. Brooms slammed, newspapers smacked, household items crashed.

A lamp crushed his engorged body against the wall. Charlie shrugged it off, scurried into a crack, and settled in until the humans retreated. He could wait; he had eternity.

Almost nightly, they squashed and smashed, swatted and
sprayed, and every night Charlie wove a mocking web. Charlie wondered if this would end.

Maybe a Zuckerman—maybe another family—would look at a genuine baseball bat and get a flash of inspiration. Maybe consider the wood, see a smaller, sharper destiny inside its bludgeon-form. Maybe that victim would think about the lost art of whittling, shave off chunks and refine the slivers until the clumsy sports equipment evolved into a sleek, sharp toothpick. Then that inspired individual might sneak during daylight to the overlooked junk drawer, lift the old shoelaces, push aside dead batteries and toss out useless corks to aim that tiny weapon into the abdomen of Charlie, the vampire-spider.

Charlie chuckled in his safe-crack, sure that inspiration expired with his ancestor and rarely flashed into human brains. Tomorrow he’d crawl out, weave another word-web and scurry across snoring faces to gorge until his belly bloated.

Sally Clark

S
ometimes you wonder why people do the things they do, until you walk a mile in their shoes or dig a season in their gardens.

Shortly after my grandparents died, my husband, my two children, and I moved from a big city to a small town of less than five hundred people. We moved into my grandparents’ four-room, un-air-conditioned house where every spring my grandfather planted a vegetable garden on the east side of the house, between the house and the road, barely five feet from a moderately traveled street. After we moved there, I wondered why he hadn’t planted his garden behind the house, between the fig trees and the peach orchard, away from the dust and traffic of the road.

Although we were “city folk,” my husband, Mike, always enjoyed working a vegetable garden. As soon as the ground warmed, he began weeding and planting in the long, sunny rows my grandfather had tended years before.

One day in early spring, he cut plastic milk jugs in half and placed them around his tiny, new tomato plants to protect them from the sharp wind. As he worked, the owner of the local grocery story, Bunny Weinheimer, slowed his pickup truck and pulled up next to the chicken-wire fence that separated the garden from the road.

Rolling down his window and shaking his head, Bunny asked my husband with mock concern, “Don’t you city boys know that’s not where milk comes from?”

Never one to be outdone, my husband smiled and replied,
“Well now, Bunny, you see that row of milk jugs over there? Those are male milk jugs. And you see this row over here? These are female milk jugs. I think it’s gonna work.”

With a broad laugh, Bunny moved his truck on down the road to the store, licking his finger and stroking it down in the air, scoring one for the city boy.

As the days went by, I watched from the kitchen window as other pickup trucks slowed and stopped beside what was now my husband’s garden. In this German-heritage community, each truck that stopped seemed to have a beer cooler in the back, and the locals were always happy to offer Mike a cold one. To encourage the friendship, he would stop working and accept a beer, lean on whatever rake or hoe was in his hands, and welcome the conversation. But since he was a light drinker, he usually poured the remaining beer out when they drove away, the tomato plants absorbing most of the fermented suds. I decided that my grandfather had chosen that particular space for his garden to cultivate friends as well as vegetables.

As we settled into the community and the garden began to grow, Mike used mop and broom handles to stake the flourishing tomato plants and tied them with pantyhose to keep them off the ground. They seemed a bit wobblier than usual, but promised a happy crop.

“Well now, I heard you were trying to grow milk, but what are you trying to grow with those pantyhose?” Alvin Dieke asked as he parked by the garden and popped the top of a beer. “You already got you a wife.”

“Yeah,” Mike replied, “but she needs help around the house, so I planted a few mops and brooms.”