Flash Fiction of the Month selected by Mary McLaughlin Slechta:
John Amen’s dreamlike work captured me with its poetic language and sensory details which, in such a small space, skillfully weave a library of stories. The speaker compares the tales told him by a worldly mentor who once held court, someone deliciously described as perhaps now “a severed cord flapping/in the stratosphere,” to glimpses into his own truly fantastical adventures, entered through a “carnival of restless sleep.”
Flash Fiction of the Month
John Amen
Remembering Richard
I scored a gig with a photographer named Richard, hours
on a site outside Sedona, my job to cart his lights & tripods,
rusty implements of the trade, gadgetry amassed over decades.
I didn’t love being cooped up in a New Age-y villa, staging
antique furniture, the standing around, waiting & waiting.
But the pay was good, & when the sun spilled through a west-
facing window, the world a prehistoric red, we packed & Richard
got us a cab into the city. You know we have numerous lives,
he said over a martini, telling me of his theater days in Berkeley,
apprenticeship to a moody auteur in the channels off Gothenburg,
his twenty-eighth birthday spent filming the sadhus of Varanasi.
I lived to fall in love, he added, describing the mad novelist
he wooed in Barcelona, a barista from Warsaw, his plunge
into the matrix of the flesh, a vampiric genius from Tangier
branding him with a spell that took a cold year to overcome.
How ’bout you? he asked. Not much to say, I blurted, a blank
screen dropping, my mouth suddenly dry. Not yet! he quipped,
leaping into a mazy anecdote about a chess match he lost in Berlin.
He spoke of Shakespeare, Socrates, the Aztecs & Incas. We ate
spicy cornbread, guzzled shots of gin & dark beer. Richard scaled
his monologues like a speed-climber ascending a mountain peak,
diving into a boundless fog, that elastic silence. Finally we rode
back to the hotel, Richard stumbled to his suite, mumbling in French.
I found my room & dropped into a carnival of restless sleep.
Three women sang a dirge while I swung a pickaxe in a blue desert,
a vision that returned when my mother died, again when I
quit drinking, years later following a friend’s suicide, three women
cringing as I buried a blade in the ancient sand. I recall the bright
umber of Richard’s eyes, can still conjure the music of his voice,
though I’m sure he’s deceased by now, a severed cord flapping
in the stratosphere. I wake & slumber & wake again, haunted
by the fact that some capricious dawn the waking simply ends,
who can say if there’s another dream on the other side of this one.
***
Photo by Chad Weeden
John Amen is the author of several collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine.
Honorable Mention
Patrick Joseph Caoile
Carry On, Ghost
You lit up the metal detectors like a strobe light. Airport security didn’t know what to make of it. The monitor registered all sorts of colors, all in the shape of a person outlining my own. They took me aside and tested for explosives. A swipe from a small slip of paper put through an elaborate machine. They had me pass through the detectors again and this time I was cleared. The detectors detected nothing, and on the screen was my own person again. “Must’ve been a glitch,” one of them said. But I felt your cold breath chuckle against my ear.
I made it in time to board, and I was relieved to have a window seat. As we ascended into the air, I took one last look of the city outside, a map of fireflies in the night. You were looking out, too, until our breaths fogged up the glass. There was nothing left to see of what we were leaving behind. I felt your hand grab on to mine, a coldness seeking warmth. I held on for as long as I could, until the chill thinned and your form took flight. I slept content and comforted for the rest of the night, knowing that you, too, were ready to move on to a better place.
***
Patrick Joseph Caoile is a Filipino American writer from northern New Jersey. He is an English graduate student at Seton Hall University and teaches in the first-year writing program.
Honorable Mention
Ron Kolm
A Subway Story
I had to come into Manhattan to cash my unemployment check, and I was very careful to sit in the front car and avoid the few other riders on the train. The pandemic had hit hard, and I was wearing a mask and trying not to touch anything. After leaving the bank I walked back to Union Square and headed up to the north end of the platform, breathing a sigh of relief when I got there. Time goes by and no train appears. I look over to my left and see a woman, maybe late 50’s, toss her bag and her mask onto the tracks, then climb down after them. “Hey, what’s up?” I shout through my mask. She moans and says that this is how she’s going to get home, she’s tired of everything. She edges over towards the third rail, and I unleash my best zinger: “Do you believe in any kind of God? Because if you do, you gotta know how pissed off he or she’s gonna be if you touch that thing!” Unfortunately my back is so messed up that I knew I couldn’t get down on the tracks to help her. A young guy hops onto the tracks and picks the lady up, depositing her on the platform. He gives her his mask and waits for the police, who do show up rather quickly. My train finally appears and I go home, amazed at how the Universe works.
***
Ron Kolm is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Suburban Ambush, Night Shift, A Change in the Weather, and Welcome to the Barbecue. He's had work in great weather for MEDIA, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers are archived in the NYU library.
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