DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

Artwork courtesy of Amy Crockett and Chari Crockett

NO ONE HAS EVER LOVED SOMEONE IN A FIRE BURNING - JX Falber

I.

I was born in a bathtub underwater. No one has ever loved someone he saved from drowning. Our mother was a thin ghost bred of the ash at the pit of a cob pipe and we found you crying in the bottom of a deep gravel quarry in a fire burning. No one has ever loved someone in a fire burning and not ever has anyone loved someone, we've learned. For years we'd searched for the smell of it like steam in the bottoms of jars or in the morning grass, but grew content to sleep in the still terror of knowing something new of the world.

“We've learned enough,” we'd say.

II.

You wanted to be an actress and carved the word in the webbing between your middle and index fingers with the head of a sewing needle. Thirteen—I drank the blood. We kissed to the fractured and distant applause of our mother beating the dust from the laundry line. You stood to take your bows. That night we found the glass of a flower vase tangled deep within your hair and you promised your life to a performance of a young woman growing treacherously old, clutching a dream of being loved and passionate between her fingers.

III.

We grew together as orphans, coming to understand the nature of the world in observing the strange and dark colors of dawn—in wonder of times when there was a sky and others when there wasn't any.

IV.

We made love in singular thrusts spread hourly over the course of a month, falling asleep entwined and penetrated. On the thirtieth day you moaned an imperceptible frequency the exact pace of your lowering yourself into the bath and this was the manner in which I loved you, I said. In days, without a voice and still moaning, you wrote in a breath spread across the window:

“This is joy and may it be forever.”

V.

You had me set a fire to char the kettle empty, standing stiffened in the far corner. The air inside it turned to smoke and nested in the rafters and together we grew hot and starving, the bones of our fingers rattling against each other the sound of wanting.

VI.

Our mother dead and we learned of your inability to harbor a child. I pressed my hand against you, thanking God in whispers while forever you exhaled a great bellow of warmly scented dust.

VII.

Tired, you tapped the glass at the birds, watching it crack into long and black spiderwebs in a trance or a kind of meditation you hadn't known yourself capable of. Small pieces broke into the sink and broke again, bursting into pinpricks of sunlight in an arrangement which could have meant something only to you—and you promising yourself to remember it always. Later you thought of digging a hole to bury it, bleeding into the meadow brush and again picking the glass from your hair.

VIII.

You bore blood into the floorboards. We left it to scab black and high in the wood grain, for time to spread to dust.

IX.

You pinched between your fingers, walking the house in the pattern of fruit gnats and wandering spirits, your face sharp and soaked tar black—profound with an understanding of growing older. You bit your lip at the door off its hinges and the ivy vines pulling back the frame and wanted to know where something had gone that had never been there.

X.

“Life is both violent and dull,” you said.

You were white with bathwater and rage and I poured a kettle over you. There was a fly dead in the water, touching your breast in a rhythm and our home had grown dark with the deaths of too many things.

“Life is violent,” you said, “terrifying and rapid.”

I poured the kettle again and you sank to meet the fly.

“I was born in a bathtub underwater,” I said, “and you, in a fire burning.”

You were a still fury and steam, then swallowed the fly and sank again. You sank and kept sinking down until you were the bottom of things. You sank and you were the bottom of things born in a fire burning—born in a bathtub underwater and born in a fire burning. I was myself and poured the kettle and you were the bottom of things born in a fire burning.

“No one has ever loved someone he saved from drowning,” I said.

JX Falber

jxfalber.blogspot.com 

Equal Love

Peter Ho Davies

TOWN CLOCK - kara vernor

They are prepared. They’ve dabbed perfume between their thighs, ripped the hair off their upper lips, strapped on heels meant for stages. They’ve tucked rubbers into their wallets, washed their balls with peppermint soap, withdrawn enough cash for anything. For drugs, women. Paying off a cop. They don’t know what exactly, but they can feel it coming, the adrenaline humming in their stomachs.

They’ve gathered at the clock to watch one year become the next, to see what they can glean from this final hour. Boys hurl fireworks that clear bald spots on the street, fireworks the crowd sees coming because faces are turned up, waiting for the clock’s hands to move from reclined to fully erect.

The cheer is unanimous for the girl who delivers, the one who is sober enough to climb the “Don’t Walk” light yet drunk enough to flash her tits. The crowd is relieved someone has finally mounted something. To this they raise their bottles, their plastic cups of champagne. MoreMoreMore, they chant and shove closer like believers vying to be beamed up first, like she is there to save them, to climb atop the clock itself and fuck the life out of its death march.

Kara Vernor
kara.vernor@gmail.com
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands
Nick Flynn

A HEALTHY JEALOUSY - matthew antonio

At first, I thought to slice off his face and wear it over my own. Our bodies were similar, though he was perhaps a little taller and perhaps a little thiner, but still close enough that she wouldn't notice. Nor would she notice the red seam running from my hair to my ear to my chin. She never looked that closely anyway.

Then, I thought it better to slice off my face and place it over his without his knowledge. Impractical as it seemed, I imagined I would laugh a gurgling, wet laugh from my new red face as her desire to look at him gradually diminished over the weeks. He'd weep through the holes in my old face as he came to understand what it meant to live in her radiant indifference.

In the end, I found the greatest joy in wearing her face over mine.

Matthew Antonio
www.littlemachines.net
Incidences
Daniil Kharms

THEY WILL DIE BEFORE AUGUST - megan perra

He is lonely like Adam with every rib. He does what he’s always done. He grabs his rifle and his hat to escape into the forest, the mountain spines, the only woman who will have him. Nature takes him back into her womb with a sigh of summer air; humid and thick with mosquito clouds. He searches diaries of mud and paw prints to escape his singularity. By the salmon-stinking river his feet stumble into water and his heart into joy. Steady now against the empty bed, the vacant sweaters, the spaces he can't bear to fill; the rifle butt kisses his shoulder as she used to. The old grizzly looks up just in time to hear the bullet song penetrate her skull. He touches the mountain of her withers and is alone again. Then he notices. 

He cries with the two cubs.

Megan Perra
megan.perra@gmail.com
Wildwood
Colin Meloy

THE ILLUSIONIST - ken poyner

Now that there are more zoos than animals, I am much in demand.  I can play a marvelous monkey.  I can swell in contained water to any size of hippopotamus you want.  I’ve even done birds.  The key is that not only will you believe I am that one animal you were wishing to see, but I will believe it, too.  I will believe it like the taste of salt on sugar.  I can be almost anything.  For a short time, I can even be a box turtle. When my shift is done I merge quickly into the crowd and shuffle along as though I had been embedded in the populace all along: moving from empty cage to empty cage, peering in all the corners and hiding places just in case this is the cage that today has the animal, just in case I have found the one prize that today has been put out, sunning in the shadows.  When I find it, I look at the animal face on, eye to eye, hackle to hackle: and I say this is not me, how dare they hire an imposter.  This crowd deserves the best and there is no one better than me.  I demand only the best for my crowd.  And I have to be stopped from breaching the safety fence.

Ken Poyner

Complete Poems

Randall Jarrell

SNIPER - marcus speh

I sat on top of a Sycamore tree, comfy, and looked around, aimed here and there without any real passion for aiming until a girl appeared. She looked like Little Red Riding Hood without the hood. — The tale came back to me right away and with it a painful memory: how I’d wet the bed when my grandma first told me. Grandma in her own bed, blanket pulled up under her nose, our family’s nose, a little bulbous, strong-willed, strong sense of smell, grandma speaking Grimm into the dark. Both of us smelling the scent of the beast in the story. And then the ruckus when I peed myself! — I could smell the girl on the street now. She dragged a teddy bear after her and scolded him as little kids do: you stupid bear! I wasn’t sure she deserved to be shot at. I took aim: this was going to be tricky. I hit her between the shoulder blades. She turned, bent down, picked up the candy bar, dropped the teddy and ran off without looking up just as I imagined she would. The teddy on his back didn’t smile and he didn’t seem surprised either.

Marcus Speh

http://marcusspeh.com

Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis

HOW - david greenspan

how they survive the upper peninsula

Sarah only sings out of tune when she’s in the shower. Her eyes are shipwrecks in Lake Michigan. Francis masturbates in their bed as Sarah butchers low-fi indie pop. He decides not to leave their bed. He decides he is Lake Michigan. Sarah dips her toes into his shore. She breathes under his water and decides her neck has gills. While Sarah is underwater she builds churches, meets Elvis and buys insurance from great white sharks. Sarah emerges to kiss each of Francis’s toes. She tells him I have been baptized in menthol cigarettes, pennies and slot machines. 

how they forget to water the plants 

Sarah flashes her clavicles to hungry stockbrokers. They yell stork legs, while fingering their five hundred dollar silk pants. Francis manages a bookie’s office. The bookie smokes chunks of plaster wall and mumbles my keyboard is on fire– ants, ants are everywhere. Francis displays small paintings of bicycle tires inside Sarah’s left ear. Sarah moonlights as a movie critic using the alias Leonard Maltin. When their heating bill is past due, Francis and Sarah record themselves fucking. They sell the video as an instruction manual on how to cure Aspergers Syndrome.

how they talk with ghosts

Francis sculpts Sarah’s ankles with orange peels. Sarah thinks her most attractive features are her ankles and her laugh. Francis can’t draw her laughter but he says I will sketch pigeons as they flurry from your mouth. Sarah paints every door of their 1997 Ford Escort a different color. The rear driver door becomes a monument to Nas. Think graffiti and Uzis and black plastic and cigar guts. Think sharp pinky fingers. Francis and Sarah rattle a spray paint can. The ball inside chops off zombies’ heads, but not in the way you might think. It leaves the heads draped over telephone wires like so many Converse. The spray paint ball reveals itself to be a masterpiece on the rims of each tire: Francis and Sarah inside Urban Outfitters, building small deer.

how they are an island in the sun

There is electric guitar fuzz on my face, you can’t really call it a beard, Francis says. And on the seventh day God created power pop, Sarah says. They listen to the entire Weezer discography while Sarah shaves Francis’s guitar fuzz. When his face is brand new, Francis talks to the rain. He watches James Bond movies in an empty theater. He dances with Sarah on their ceiling and they defend The Green Album. Francis and Sarah fuck every time Rivers sings about heartache. They fuck a lot. Francis comes as three chord anthems tickle Sarah’s neck. He says I will crush your pretty toenails into a thousand pieces. Sarah responds let’s sew our pants together.

how they go to an a.a. meeting

Francis and Sarah move pixilated characters around a black and white screen. The pixels jump over gorges, rescue kittens and always make it home for dinner. Francis types c++ into their computer and the pixels begin to drink. Candle wax slides from their mouths. Sarah is turned on, she hides behind a Yellow Cab and touches herself. The pixels watch and drink and feel sorry for watching and drinking. By the time Sarah comes, the pixels have checked themselves into a hospital. Francis pawns his rosary beads to pay for the pixel’s medical bills. Minutes later, Francis and Sarah reminisce about the pixels and say they were bent carbon, dumb luck, a very small lake.

David Greenspan
davidgreenspan.blogspot.com
Seeking the Elusive Flower
Steven Crist