Patricia Q. Bidar

1. On a Sleepless Night, Your Slumbering Spouse Beside You

Ever think about how another student from the film department introduced us, and how I started calling you late at the adult theater you managed and how you’d chat with me between ticket sales? Ever think about the night I visited you at your apartment with all those Russian housemates? How someone brought out firecrackers, and I made a dumb joke about calling the police and was met with those hard, pale stares? How we went to your room and you said I shouldn’t joke about the police because of the firearms? How you told me you were a professional typist and played me the outgoing voicemail message and it was a funny take on your business name, “Finger King,” that had out of work pianists pounding out final papers for rich college students?

How you’d brought a six-pack into your room and how we started fooling around how you couldn’t get hard, and how just before you passed out I asked for cab fare and you gestured to your wallet and how all it contained was your driver’s license—I was suspicious enough to check your unusual last name but there it was on the government document—and some expired coupons for cat food? How a few days later I got you to come to my apartment and you couldn’t get hard and I asked if it was me and you said, not in a million years, and made me cum with your fingers?

And how you, carless like me, accompanied me on the airport shuttle to SFO for a visit to my folks? And how we got there early and started drinking beer and kissing and how I missed the plane even though we were sitting in the waiting area right in front of the boarding gate?  And how you ghosted me for real after I returned, and I obsessively called your number from pay phones all over the city? 

Remember how you kept that stupid Finger King/Pianists outgoing message on there? And how, one rainy night in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, I called you one last time and your outgoing message was clearly for your girlfriend, who had a Catholic-sounding name like Mary Theresa or Catherine Anne? How you pleaded with her, weeping, in your outgoing voicemail message to give you another chance? How you swore I was just a lost soul whom you’d helped at school and who wouldn’t stop calling you and how you promised you were still pure for her, for Mary Tess?

•

2. The Finger King’s Best Times Are Behind Him

In his salad days, he’d studied literature at Santa Monica College. His professors had been encouraging, especially once they heard he was from San Francisco and had once managed an XXX movie theater on Market Street; that he’d known Hunter S. Thompson, then famously serving as the night manager at the Mitchell Brothers on O’Farrell.

The Finger King had been a big drinker of beer or vodka shots out on the patio with his Russian roommates or every night alone in his room. He had a girl back home, a nice Catholic girl who was saving herself for marriage. That was okay with the Finger King.

He practiced on pretty, insecure girls from the theatre or film department. Grew adept at eliciting orgasms using his hands. The joke was that The Finger King was also the name of his business. He was a nimble typist, and prepared papers for other students.

Every month, he’d take the Greyhound back home to San Francisco. Church, then brunch with his widowed father and of course Mary Theresa. “I’ll leave you kids to visit,” the old man would say after they ate, and retire to his room for a lie-down. The Finger King and Mary Theresa would make out with The Wide World of Sports turned up.

The Finger King grew up without a mother. This pulled a certain kind of woman to him and would for most of his life. One such woman, twelve years his senior, became his wife and the mother of his children. He thinks of those adult theater days as his misspent youth. “But I sure had fun!” he always adds with a wink and a grin before his mouth settles back into its slot-like form.

Now, alone in the car on I-5 after driving his daughter to college in Berkeley, he thinks of a certain blue-eyed girl from the film department. How she used to call him from phone booths all over town. He never answered. He’d been so loyal to Mary Theresa he’d never done anything with these girls but fool around.

He can’t recall the name of that little gal from the film department, with her dimples and sad eyes. The way she’d curl her body around him as he used his fingers on her. How he’d put her in a cab afterward and return to his vodka and his tippity-typing. Maggie, was that it? Marnie? Suddenly, with the marriage and child rearing part of his life behind him, it seems crucial for him to remember. He has to pull over at Mission San Miguel and pace the hushed flagstones there, a self-pitying sob caught in his throat; it nags at him so much. 

He’d had a cat back then, too. At least, he thinks he did.

Bio: Patricia Q. Bidar is a working-class writer from San Pedro, California. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Connect with Patricia at her website (https://patriciaqbidar.com).

The post Flash • Flux appeared first on Newfound.

by Hannah Butcher, Kendall Clarke, and Matt Forsythe

A pinprick of guilt leads to stabbings.

Corina shivered beneath the layers—a sheet, a quilt, and a calico blanket her great-grandmother had stitched. Perspiration gathered on her forehead, beads of ice. It was the middle of summer, but her sweat was unnatural.

She hated the fever, the way it melted minutes into hours, muscle convulsions and chattering teeth. But the bubbling pit of nausea at her core was unrelated to her illness; it was the guilt of forcing her daughter into the role of caretaker. Lydia had enough to worry about as mother of her own child—playing nurse, cook, maid, friend, nanny. And now, with Corina buried beneath this avalanche of cloth, Lydia was expected to perform doubly. There were groceries to get, dishes to soak, a toddler to soothe. All while Corina lay helpless, unmoving.

Guilt is also an avalanche, isn’t it?

Her thoughts had slipped into metaphor after the doctor banished her to bed, concerned at the onset of fever after surgery. She had nothing to do but read and sleep and remember. And what was there to think about? The extra work she brought Lydia. The planting season she was missing. A body that refused to heal.

Dust floated where the sun shone through the window.

The day of her accident, she had been thrilled to return to the garden after a long winter indoors. Her arms full of tomato sprouts, she tripped on the back stoop. Her wrist could not support her. Soil rained down. It seemed to last forever.

At first, the doctor called it a bad sprain. She’d been lucky, he said, especially at her age.

Days later, she had trouble grasping the flour in the kitchen, spilling over the bag and dusting the floor with White Lily; yet she was determined to clean it up, knees on tile, wrist throbbing as she swept with a hand broom.

Lydia found her on the floor and sped her to the physician. An overlooked fracture was identified. Her wrist was cut open, scalpel separating skin from muscle, peeled back to reveal her ruby insides. An animal skinned and prepped.

The eight cousins, the specialist said, pointing to her scaphoid on the X-ray. That’s how I memorized the carpal bones in med school.

He listed them: trapezoid, trapezium. . . . She was surprised at the cluster. Like gravel from the driveway, pebbles by a stream—a literal handful, hidden under a paper-thin layer of skin this entire time.

She knew the more obvious bones, like the arm she once cracked in a fall from the tire swing. Or her metacarpals—sources of her arthritis—which now flared from lack of exercise. Trapped in this room, unable to work in the cool spring dirt. Soil therapy, Lydia called it.

Those bones she could feel. But this jigsaw puzzle? It confounded her.

Eight cousins, all buried within her wrist. She fingered the blanket with her unbound hand, an heirloom that would pass to Lydia.

•

Her family once had eight cousins. They grew up like siblings, playing together on neighboring farms, but drifted apart in adulthood, scattering like seeds.

There was Henry, her brother, whose son now owned and worked the farm, living across the field. Silvia moved to Naperville, and Samuel, her favorite, transferred to Florida to work for NASA.

You were always the smartest, Corina had confessed, rocking on the porch during one of his rare trips home. Growing up, I secretly wished you were my brother.

Intelligence and wisdom are two different things, he said. His wife had remarried and taken his daughters to Ohio. Eyes half-closed, he watched the sun settle beneath the horizon, under the cornfields.

Who else?

Tom was murdered in Vietnam.

Rebecca died young, back in the 80s.

Ethan was still alive, against all odds. So was Ruth.

Corina counted with the quilt patches. . . six, seven. Who was the eighth? She racked her brain, upset that she’d lost an important name because if she forgot, who would remember to tell her, who would tell her it was okay to forget?

Oh.

It was her.

Corina was the eighth.

•

Mama? Lydia pressed the back of her hand to Corina’s cheek. You still have a fever.  Her daughter’s palm turned and caressed her face. I’m gonna finish supper and let the doctor know, okay?

She refilled the bedside cup with water, pressed the rim to Corina’s lips. She must have swallowed because Lydia stepped away with a relaxed face, the relief and sadness of a duty fulfilled.

Be right back.

Her daughter’s touch reminded Corina that she had a body. She was floating atop some stem, a wispy string connected to fingers and lungs, these vulnerable things.

It is something, isn’t it? 

All this time we thought we were the roots of our children. But we are only the leaves.

Hannah Butcher and Kendall Clarke are recent graduates of Rollins College, where Matt Forsythe teaches in the English Department.  Their collaborative fiction has previously appeared in Sky Island Journal and The Headlight Review.

The post Flash • Pinprick appeared first on Newfound.