Stela
Stela returns home for a short visit at Easter. Her mother tells her on the phone that the Captain is delayed at a car auction in Montgomery. In her room, she plucks at her eyebrows, and at one stage she pretty much removes both her brows. Her routine is the same as the kids’ game played with daisies, “He loves me, he loves me not.” She makes sure to end on “He loves me,” though she knows this to not be true.
After the shock of seeing her eyebrows gone, she pencils them back on and drags a small amount of grease over the raw flesh with her index finger to ease the itch. To add insult to her bitterness, she singes her hair with the curling iron right before Easter Mass, and has to wear a bright yellow bandeau to hide the burn. She doesn’t linger outside the church, citing a headache, which, in fact, is true. When she arrives back at the house, she rests her head on the arm of the sofa in her bedroom and stares into the lights of the lava lamp until she falls asleep.
In the dream, the Captain wears his full-dress uniform with the shining buttons and the tassels on his shoulders. She can smell the gin on his breath, and the bay rum he splashes into his cupped hands and runs through his hair, combing the strands back tightly. Instead of unzipping his trousers and pinning her to the bed like he usually does, this time he opens his mouth wide and swallows her whole, headfirst. Stela wakes in a sweat, the terror of the Captain’s love still there in the air, his faint scent in the dark room.
By the time she’s ready to go back to school, her mother signs on at the local community college for a ceramics class, and Stela, with the Captain at auction, is light and trouble-free. On the last night, she climbs out the window of her room, scales the fire ladder to the roof, and lies on the slates, staring into the vast velvet cloth of the universe, the pinpricks of light reminding her that other loves await.
. . .
Brandy
When the town is filled with tourists and filmmakers, Brandy retreats to his cabin, away from the lookers poking and actors shooting blanks around the town he now considers his. He keeps curtains drawn against curious eyes, and naps or whittles. After the last tourist leaves he locks the entrance gates and makes sure all museum doors are closed to protect interiors from weather and animals. Sometimes Prissy follows him, sweeping dust and leaves that onlookers drag in. Prissy is the last person he sees, waving from the back of her boyfriend Zack’s motorbike.
Still with daylight left, he roams the dirt streets and wooden boardwalks. Hops the acrylic barriers. Tries on hats, pokes around in old tobacco containers and pipes, continues the game of solitaire left unfinished on the saloon table. Takes his dinner of scrambled eggs or stew to the fancy house and eats at a mahogany table set for twelve, or to one of the cabins and eats at a wooden table set with a humble bread board and pewter pitcher. He grows accustomed to the old portrait photographs that watch him eating. Every sound is amplified—the crickets, the grouse beating its wings against the ground, the prairie wolf howling, his fork against the plate.
It is on one of those nights, eating dinner in the cabin next to his own, when he hears a noise behind him. It is a noise he can’t place—he’s grown so familiar with all of them. It sounds like silk against silk. He turns, but sees nothing in the evening’s August melon light.
After that night, he hears more—footsteps, harnesses clanking—and he feels more—draughts, as if a door is opening, pushing air into the room.
He buys a hound and keeps it tethered up outside his cabin. This is no Ghost Wolf he is comfortable being haunted by.
From The Bitter Kind: A Flash Novelette, by Tara Lynn Masih and James Claffey, Oct. 2020 (Cervena Barva). Permission to excerpt is granted by Cervena Barva Press.
The Bitter Kind will be releasing October 2nd with Cervena Barva Press. In turns tender and brutal, this gorgeous novelette in flash is collaboratively written by acclaimed flash fiction writers James Claffey and Tara Lynn Masih. It’s a slim one, coming in at just under 70 pages.