Modern Flash Fiction

“Stop crying. You can’t be this sensitive about everything.”

“You gotta toughen up or the world is going to chew you up.”

“I told you to stop fucking crying.”

These were variations of the mantra my stepfather repeated daily. It was common to hear one a day, but three in two minutes were special. I looked up from the muddy grass and my eyes stopped on the wooden handle of his .357 revolver that he held out, waiting. My horse screamed again before I moved.

“Wipe the snot from your face and take the gun.”

Boomer twisted his head toward the sky, shaking in pain. His intestines were swelling from a blockage that was getting larger. Despite our efforts to keep him standing, he’d gone down thrashing, and more and more of his pale blonde hair was being covered by mud. My mom had run to the house to call the vet. He must not be picking up because she still hadn’t come back. Peals of receding thunder could still be heard behind his shrieks.

“I told you, if we couldn’t keep him standing that it was gonna be over. Only one thing to help him now – take it and help him already.”

One hand found the barrel and the other hand wrapped itself around the grip. I brought it down and let it hang at my side. Boomer had gotten quiet, but his labored breathing wheezed in bursts while his eyes darted. I crouched and I cupped my free hand around his ear before leaning in to kiss him above the eye. For a moment his eye stilled on mine before it rolled and he kicked out his legs. Even with Boomer’s screaming, I could hear the low tone of my stepfather’s hiss, “for crying out loud, stop kissing the damn thing and shoot it.”

I jumped up to avoid the kicks of his front leg and moved above the back of his head. I raised the gun and wrapped my other hand around it to steady the shaking that refused to leave. I trained my eyes as best as I could between the streams of tears, keeping the small area between the ears in the center of my vision. The hairs not covered in mud were shining in the sunlight that filtered through the gray clouds. I could hear the horse and my stepfather yelling, another peal of distant thunder, and behind it all was the wind still holding the smell of rain. The shot shattered through them.

I stood there in the silence that followed. The revolver was still trained on my horse, but my eyes refused to look below the ears that had gone still. The shaking in my hands was gone, but the echoes of it rang in my ears and through my limbs. My stepfather grabbed the gun from my stiff hands. The ringing was loud, but as he walked away I heard, “…decent shot, but would’ve been a great shot five minutes ago.” I waited until he was almost to the porch before I turned to leave. One last I love you almost burst through my lips, but I shoved it down. There was no point. There was no longer anything there.

I shook off my muddy boots before opening the creaky storm-door, letting it fall and slap behind me. My stepfather was already on his recliner watching some stupid old western while taking an oiled rag to the gun, and my mom was crying on the phone behind the bathroom door. I headed to the kitchen sink to wash my hands and face. I caught my reflection in a framed photo of our house and fields, the sunset a brilliant mess of orange, pink and purples. A demon was looking back through the glass, my face distorted by mud, rain, wind, and blood. I glanced at my hands and saw the red spatters between my knuckles. I closed my eyes and continued to the sink.

I turned the water as hot as it would go, but it didn’t feel hot enough. I stood scratching away at every fleck of blood I could find, scratching so hard that soon my own skin and blood joined the current into the black drain. I must have been at it for some time since most of the skin on my arms was raw by the time I noticed my stepfather standing across the sink from me. His eyes took me in slowly, staying on my eyes except for the barest of flicks downward – all the time he needed to formulate his opinion.

“You took too long today. When I tell you to do something, you do it. You don’t start crying like a toddler. You’re almost thirteen, and it’s time you learned that don’t care about your feelings. You either make the hard choices like a man, or you can wail and cry while a real man does the work. And now you’ve been standing here raking your skin off while using all the hot water. The world doesn’t revolve around you, so stop trying to get attention.” He turned and disappeared into the hallway’s darkness.

I turned the water off and stared down into water swirling the drain. The house was silent, and the windows were filled with night. Steam rolled up from the water as the last bits of me and Boomer swirled down. The drain gurgled on new air after carrying everything out of sight.

Despite living on a high wire between sleep deprivation and caffeine overload, Matthew Norris somehow manages to write poetry and short fiction. He is a Co-Managing Editor of Dogwood Alchemy; a former high school English teacher; and long-ago poetry editor for The Broken Plate. He’s an alum of Ball State where all of this poetry nonsense started. His work has been featured in The Broken Plate, Crack the Spine, Quotidian, and other publications. You’ll probably find him at a cafe open mic in Indianapolis.