flash fiction

Consignment Shop (NaFloScribMo)

Uncategorized

The mother/daughter team drags a torn black trashbag full of baby items and I suspect nothing in there ever belonged to either of them. Mama has an odor, wheezes, gave her front teeth to meth and is still high enough to think she’s pulling off normal. Mama’s insistent, though, hand on hips she wants top dollar, many dollars, any dollars.

No one else in the store. Just Mama, Daughter, store owner, me.

The daughter is a youngish thing, belly slack from teen pregnancies, sporting an unapologetic black eye. A catfight, a man, a door, something. Lots of reasons to have a shiner and no real reason to cover it up. While I wait in line she steals a toy and sees me watching as she sticks it under her shirt. She doesn’t care. This is what we do. So what.

The store owner lady takes a step back from Mama and toward her cash register. She’s got Christmas light earrings shaking slightly below permed hair and her sweatshirt has a Jesus fish pinned next to silver baby feet. They both float just above her heart. This isn’t the kind of customer she thought about when she dreamed the baby consignment shop with its plush infant baubles and tiny Easter dresses hanging just so on the racks. Like a year-round church-basement baby shower. Not today.

Mama’s tired of waiting so she heaves the lawn-and-leaf bag on the counter and dumps it out fast. A small mountain of dusty baby clothes, and from the middle an unopened can of powdered baby formula falls out and rolls against the daughter’s foot. When the girl and her black eye bend down to get it, she pulls the stolen baby toy out of her pocket and places both on top of the clothes. Here, mama. These fell out.

Mama is tweaking and and scratching her arms and looks ready to get loud when the bell over the shop door tinkles a bit. They all turn and look at me, but I’m still there.

At the river bridge

Uncategorized

This is not a ghost story because no one saw a ghost. It begins on Thursday after lunch sometime when a man who stops at the Citgo station for cigarettes is driving the upward curve of the river bridge at the lock and dam. See, there he is wrestling with the cellophane opening strip of his second pack of Marlboros. That’s why the adrenaline shot clean through the top of his head when he rounded the top of the bridge and saw the white Malibu stopped dead in front of him. There he goes, all twisted in a cigarette pack and swerving with a fast thumb, so it’s no surprise that on the narrowish bridge his truck slices the driver’s open door backward, where it swings like a limp fracture until it lets loose and spins across the double yellow lines.

He thinks he’s hit a woman. For the smallest second he thought he’d seen a swish of brown hair and that he’d look back after the brakes stopped screaming to see the blood and nasty of a terrible thing. In the oblong rearview mirror he realizes it is not a woman he hit but a car door, and that the long brown hair belongs to the head of a woman perched girl-like on the railing. It covers her face as she looks at him. She is real and not a ghost, but as soon as he slams out of his truck the woman and her long hair push off from the railing and into the boil of the waters below the dam. He stops right there in the scary middle of the bridge’s crest. He might be thinking she is a haunt or a misremembered story or the sun is too high and the water playing tricks. Hell, all he did was pull out of the Citgo.

When he reaches the railing there is nothing to see. The car is real, the key chain sways a little in the ignition and the car is still running. The Malibu’s shorn-off door is a hell of a mess and so is the passenger side of his truck. He looks down at his right hand, where the crushproof pack of Marlboros are now crushed, the cellophane easy-opening strip still dangling.