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Do They Know? by Sankar Chatterjee

22/9/2018

 
​John Glenn was leisurely exploring Bangkok’s famous food market. It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Shoppers of all faiths were busy with their last minute purchases of gift and food items. John, a young doctor from New York took two weeks of vacation to explore various South-East Asian nations to educate him to their history (many were under European colonial powers for centuries) as well as natural and architectural wonders. He was also interested to learn their modern state of politics, economies, and cultures now been under attack from globalization.

John was zigzagging through masses when he noticed a young woman frying and selling local dumplings. She was sitting under an old banyan tree, carrying a little baby in a sack wrapped around her backside. There were a number of small red plastic chairs and tables in front of her operation, in case any customer wanted to sit down while enjoying her fresh dumplings. John, though very careful about consuming street foods while traveling, kept aside his worries, bought some dumplings, sat (barely) on a little chair and began enjoying the fresh dumplings.

And that’s when he noticed the completely bleached-out arms of the lady, without affecting any other visible part. John’s medical curiosity forced him to start a conversation with her while the baby was in a deep afternoon nap. She spoke broken English. After a few preliminary exchanges, John went directly to the issue and inquired whether the lady had suffered any kind of medical ailment while growing up, that would only affect the color of her both arms! Her answer was negative. As the crowd was thinning out, she took a break from her activity to engage into conversation.

After her high school graduation, she wanted to go to college, but her poor parents could not afford the cost. To save some money, she decided to get a job in the fishing industry, a lucrative business in this part of the world supplying to all those giant networks of grocery stores both in US and Europe. Initially she was assigned to peeling shrimps, at the impossible rate of several hundred per hour for a meager pay rate. As she continuously failed in her daily output, she was reassigned to a different job of cleaning different areas of the operation throughout the day.

She was given a pair of thick rubber gloves to dip the wash-clothes into a bleach solution inside a long narrow bucket. Once the initial pair worn out, the owner blamed her. Then to save money, he only supplied her with thin and cheap latex ones that would crack open right after one use. She only survived three months, by which time her both arms would bleach out along with blisters with severe pain. Once slightly recovered, she started this new business.

Then, with a pause, she asked John “Do people in the west know how their clean fish gets processed before showing up in their grocery isle?”

Meat, by Rae Marie Luna

20/9/2018

 
The Mom makes dinner and she adds milk to the browning meat. She shares this cooking secret with the Girlfriend, says this is what softens the beef, it also takes acidity from the tomatoes. The Girlfriend says politely that she will try this, but knows her own Mother and Grandmother would disapprove, because that is not the right way to make Italian sauce.

The Boyfriend isn’t saying much in this conversation. They are seated together at a wooden table that faces the glass patio doors with tall pines outside and a swimming pool in the backyard. The Girlfriend is mesmerized by the pines and the stature they present in a way that makes her want to live in a tent. Part of her mind considers this while sitting awkwardly at the kitchen table. Maybe a cabin could happen instead? But she doesn’t see it with this Boyfriend; so, obviously, adding a cabin to their future is ridiculous. The Girlfriend feels clear about him now, in a way that she hasn’t been able to get for weeks.

The Sister comes in to discover there is a Girlfriend visiting for the first time. She doesn’t say hello. She speaks in a whispered sidebar with the Mom. The Sister has a large iced coffee with her, and repeatedly swirls it around with loud ice cubes inside the plastic cup. Aggressive energy goes hard into the non-stop swirling of the iced coffee for several minutes. It stops for a moment, and the Girlfriend thinks, okay she has calmed down. It starts again and sounds like a churning tornado about to explode, and the Girlfriend looks for the nearest exit, just in case.

The Boyfriend makes vague comments about the pool that no one answers. He then brings up pool parties in junior high, and the Girlfriend can’t believe that he is back on the topic of his adolescent popularity. The Sister says something cutting about junior high being 20 years ago, which the Girlfriend secretly appreciates, because he stops; but, then he swings around, yells, “You don’t know shit!” and the Sister throws the iced coffee at him, yells “No you don’t know shit!” and the Mom says it’s time to eat. It gets quiet and coffee with ice is everywhere.

The Girlfriend goes on to add a splash of milk to her browning meat, long after she doesn’t know what happened to these people.

The Promotion, by Ron Autrey

14/9/2018

 
Henry crashed noisily through the door and into the office of Mr. John Bergstrum, his wife's supervisor. The seated man glanced up to see Henry standing in front of his desk with a gun in his shaking hands. It was obvious that the man was emotionally distraught.
The supervisor sat, trying to anticipate what the next action might be as Henry began his tirade.
"You have been harassing my wife!", Henry accused .
John Berstrum was not one to be easily intimidated. "And who is your wife, sir?" he asked calmly.
"You know who she is!" Henry fairly screamed. "She is in your secretarial pool.....her name is Laura Cummings!"
Berstrum drew a slow breath. "I'm sorry, sir, but I do not know the names of all the girls in my secretarial pool. I have spoken to some of them - but only in greeting."
"She said that you........!" the irate man began.
"May I stand?" Bergstrum interrupted.
Henry hesitated as he struggled to gather his thoughts. "Yeah....sure....he said, distracted. "But don't you try nothing!"
A slight smile traced the big man's lips as he rose to his feet. "Obviously," he began, "there has been some sort of misunderstanding. I assure you, sir, I do not know your wife.....and I have never even flirted with any of the girls in my office. I am a happily married man."
"But she said !" Henry blurted out.
"Just a misunderstanding, son," Bergstrum said with a Sympathetic tone in his voice. "To my knowledge, I have never spoken to your wife."
Henry could hardly control his emotions. "My wife said that you were coming on to her.... and you touched her several times!"
Bergstrum screwed up his face in a frown. ""It couldn't have been me, son. Now.....please give me the gun before you get into serious trouble."
Henry hesitated as the supervisor held out his hand.
"Please, just give me the gun and you can go on your way. I will say nothing about this. And I will find out who has been bothering your wife and I will fire them. You have my word."
Bergstrum waited calmly as Henry pondered his predicament. After the angry husband considered the request for a long moment, he reluctantly placed the weapon in the big man's hand. "What are you going to do?" he asked humbly, feeling a bit dizzy from the experience.
John Bergstrum laughed. "Well, you idiot, I am going to kill you, of course!"
"What.....?" Henry gasped.
The big man was near ecstatic at his prospects. "Yes, I harassed your poor wife.....mercilessly, just so you would be stupid enough to walk in here with a gun in your hand!"
"But....why?" Henry was confused.
"Because....idiot, a big promotion is coming up and I need to look good to the company. I can just see the headlines; 'HERO BOSS SHOOTS ATTACKER WITH HIS OWN GUN."
​

Shopping, by N. T. Franklin

14/9/2018

 
Nate parked his panel van around the back of the seemingly abandoned building. As he entered the back door, the surrounding chaos was at a level higher than usual. Stepping around a stacked boxes of flat-screen televisions, he called out, “Freddy the Fence, how’s it goin’? Just once I’d like to come in here and not have it smell like microwave burritos. That too much to ask?”
From a short man weighing twice what he should, came a squeaky voice, “I told you to call me Fred. I like burritos and the cops don’t even know this place exists. How many you got for me this week?”
“No small talk today? Okay, right to business. I have ten, almost new, heavy duty ones. That’s $3,750 to me. When are you gonna to pay more than one-fourth retail?”
“Maybe when you call me Fred and I get more money for them. And when you stop griping about my lunch. I’m getting some new requests for them, so I could use maybe two hundred more, but not all at once.”
“Ohhh, gonna cost you more…”
“Goodbye, Nate.”
“Always a pleasure, Freddy.” Nate sauntered off smiling. Every week, the conversation was a variation on a theme with Freddy. Maneuvering past piles of DVD players and other electronics, he called back, “Next time maybe I bring you some burritos that don’t need microwaved and maybe you pay me a little more, huh?”
“Maybe.”

#

Nate was laughing and joking around with other employees at a checkout lane when he caught a glimpse of the store manager smiling at him. Last week he overheard the regional manager asking about the chatty new bagger that the associates and that the customers liked.
Nate was pulled out of his reverie by the manager’s voice. “Nate, please round up the carts in the parking lot. I ordered forty new ones two weeks ago but there are never any in the store ready for customer’s use.”
“I did that five minutes ago, but I’ll be happy to do it again, soon as I finish up here,” Nate said. Nate loaded the bagged-up groceries into a cart and turned to the elderly patron. “Here, let me take these out for you. It’s a beautiful day. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
With a smile, he was out the door and pushing $60 worth of groceries in a $1,500 shopping cart. This cart would make six in his van. It was going to be another good week.

Retirement Plan, by Mark Joseph Kevlock

14/9/2018

 
The two men had been friends for eighty years.

They shared the same birthday.

Today they both turned one hundred years old.

Their wives were long deceased.

Their cities were long at peace.

Now what?

To celebrate they sat upon a hover platform no wider than a dining room table and stared, each of them, at their cities in the distance.

"It's all so boring now," The Playboy said. "Fifty years ago it had character."

The Farmer nodded agreement. "You never knew when a super-villain was going to turn your day into an adventure."

"Now it's all settled," The Playboy said. "Fought for. Won. Sterile. Complacent."

"Almost makes you wish for a bad guy," The Farmer sighed. "Just to shake things up."

The Playboy was nowhere near as forgiving as his friend. "Let them all rot," he said. "They never meant anything but harm to our worlds."

The Farmer found his friend's use of the term "worlds" very telling — for they both thought of their cities that way: as individual planets, unique environments, outside of which neither of them had ever been able to accomplish very much. But within those city limits... oh, there they were gods!

"How much longer do you think we'll live?" The Farmer asked his friend.

"I'm only mortal," The Playboy replied. "I'll probably go first."

But neither of them expected to die any time soon.

That gave them years, perhaps decades, to fill up.

What with?

"Is anyone from those days still around?" The Farmer asked.

"No one I can think of," The Playboy replied.

"We've outlived them all," The Farmer said.

"And our own usefulness, too," The Playboy said.

"What we need," The Farmer said, "is a retirement plan."

"I'll entertain the notion," The Playboy replied.

So they sat and exercised their vast intellects to that end. Long moments passed. Twilight appeared.

"I can't think of a thing," The Playboy said.

"Neither can I," The Farmer said.

"Maybe we should go back to our secret identities," The Playboy said, "and live them for real."

The Farmer shook his head. "I don't think either of us would find that very amusing."

Silence came again between them.

"We could go look for other cities," The Farmer said. "Start over again with a new life."

"I have enough trouble," The Playboy said, "sustaining the old one."

The Farmer knew his friend to be nowhere near as fragile as The Playboy purported to be. They were, after all, sharing their centennial celebration.

"Maybe crime-fighting kept me young," The Playboy offered, as if reading The Farmer's thoughts.

"There is no more crime," The Farmer said, almost wistfully.

The lights of the two cities came on, one at a time, by the millions.

"How long do you figure," The Farmer said, "we should sit up here like this?"

"A while longer," The Playboy said.

And so the two men sat, companions in accomplishment. Friends for eighty years. Crime-fighters long since retired.

And without any plans.
​

Inmate 16539, by J. J. Landry

12/9/2018

 
I enter the dark room and take a seat in the front near the Chaplain. It smells like a hospital and like a morgue. It’s hot and humid out today and doesn’t feel any better in here. The steel door leading into the room on the other side of the two-way mirror opens wide, and they escort him in.

Beads of sweat create a gleaming shine on his bald head. I’m wearing the same one; only no one notices since I have a head chock full of wavy black hair. In his defense, he did too, just before they shaved it off earlier this morning in preparation.

Heavy brown leather straps secure his wrists, arms, legs, and ankles. Another pair of straps secures his neck and chest, tightly against the metal chair. Tears start streaming down his scared, sullen, face, merging with rolling drops of sweat like two streams converging into one river.

“Any last words?” The Warden asks in a calm, relaxed, manner. He sounds so smooth and so casual. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably think he’d done this a hundred times before – he hasn’t though, this is his first, and will likely be his last, as well.

“I did not do this. I’m an innocent man,” he screams out, ferociously through heavy tears before nodding defiantly to the Warden; signaling that he has said his final piece on this earth. The Warden hits the switch, and the chair he’s strapped to comes alive; lighting up the dimly lit observation room like the fourth of July.

I’ve spent the last twenty years working as the Psychologist in this prison. Sixteen years ago, inmate 16539 was convicted of killing a corrections officer in cold-blood, violently strangling him with piano wire. That conviction extended his short, two-year sentence for Possession of Cocaine, to his new, never-ending penalty of death.

It takes two minutes for his harrowing and horrific screams to finally come to an end. Two long, and I’d imagine, very excruciating minutes before he’s gone. Dead. The only thing is; he actually is innocent. He really didn’t do it, but I know who did.

The slightest wave of satisfaction washes over me as I get up to leave, but I resist the urge to let it overtake me completely. I sure wouldn’t want to arouse anyone’s suspicions, or draw any unwanted attention to myself, now would I?

Miranda’s Red Boots, by Mark Tulin

10/9/2018

 
Aiden sits by the fireplace and remembers Miranda’s shapely body, her alluring smile and large brown eyes that melted his icy heart. He longed to hear her soothing voice. The gentle way that she nibbled on his lower lip left him breathless.

Each rap on the door made his heart beat faster. He didn’t bother to look through the peephole. He knew the sound of Miranda’s knock and that she was standing there in her blue woolen coat, purple and white scarf and a knit hat with her cheeks flush from the winter chill. She was the only person he wanted to see in those miserable snowy days when there wasn’t much to make him happy.

She would never call ahead of time. She surprised Aiden and would always wear her knee-high red boots. Those boots were etched in his mind forever. He helped pull them off and placed them on the mat so the heat from the fireplace could dry them. He never wanted her to put them back on. He wished she wouldn’t leave, just engulf his boring life with her love and excitement and make him forget about the accident that left his mind in a lonely, dark haze.

That winter Miranda came over Aiden’s apartment almost every night. They talked for a while and then lay on the soft shag carpet and made love. Aiden would see her knee-high red suede boots by the doorway and be reminded that she was indeed real and that she was sharing the night with him.

She was like a bird that you couldn’t keep in a cage, a free spirit who never made any commitments. At the end of each night, Aiden didn’t know if there ever would be a next time. To Miranda, their relationship was nothing more than a temporary fling. And Aiden knew that if he pushed her, she’d never come back. He told himself to enjoy the time with Miranda however long it lasted.

But when the visits stopped, Aiden’s heart grew cold again, and he felt like his life wasn’t worth living. He kept hoping to see her red boots by the door. In the winters to come, he would dream of her on the cold, snowy nights, prepare the fireplace and wait for the knock on the door.

Yellow, by David McVey

6/9/2018

 
That Coldplay song ‘Yellow’ is playing in the background, droning away like a dying bagpipe, ‘It was all yello-o-o-ow…’ I just want it to stop, stop, stop.

I’ve no idea what else I want to listen to or what I would rather do. I just want something new, different, something fresh, anything to get me out of the Coldplay sound prison.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’ve nothing against the colour yellow. And I’m happy with songs about yellow, too; ‘Mellow Yellow’, ‘Yellow River’, even ‘Yellow Submarine’, they’re all shades of Dulux I can dance to. But this droning, whining, ‘yello-o-ow’, no, just make it stop!

The opposite of yellow is blue, isn’t it? I think so. I seem to remember it from school physics, like I remember nothing else, except for all that stuff about splitting the atom. That was cool. But maybe if I concentrate on blue, think blue, sing blue songs, I can cancel out whingeing yellow Coldplay? ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, ‘Blue Hat for a Blue Day’, ‘Blue Monday’, yeah, blue stuff, bring it on, get it on the hi-fi now!

Hang on – the Coldplay track has finsihed. What’s next? Nothing? Come on, bung another CD on, or get an iPod you cheapskates! Just put some music on. I don’t care what. Something old, something new, something borrowed or, yeah, maybe something blue but not, absolutely not ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay. I want something that fills life with colour, not something that drains it away along with the will to live.

Why is no one listening to me? Is there no one else here? Why am I talking like this? Why am I here at all?

Where am I?

Ah – found the hi-fi. And it’s my hi-fi! I’m at home? How can I have a CD with ‘Yellow’ on it? It would have got the frisbee treatment years ago! Was it planted on me by some enemy, some terrorist who uses bad music as a weapon?

I think I’ll sleep now. Here, on the floor by the hi-fi. There seems to be nobody about, it’s my hi-fi, my flat, so no one should mind.

I’ll switch off the hi-fi, just in case.

Bubbling Waters, by Mark Tulin

3/9/2018

 
Harold shuffled his feet to the edge of the hot tub. He grasped the railing and took a few steps into the bubbling water. “Ahh,” he sighed as the steam rose around him and eased into the comforting pool.

It felt so good. The jet bubbles massaged his stiff back and sore hip. He stared into the foamy, bubbling waters drifting into a relaxing abyss.

About ten minutes later, an old man joined Harold in the whirlpool. The old man smiled, and said in a thick German accent, “Sure feels nice to be in here today.”

Harold looked up, shielding his eyes from the bright sun. He had heard that voice before.

The man was friendly but Harold was fixated on the bubbling waters. There appeared to be a face forming on the surface. It was the face of a man that he thought he had locked up in a secret vault of his painful past. The image of the man terrified Harold. It kept floating around the hot tub.

“Any plans for today?” the man asked.

Harold was startled out of his reverie. “I have an appointment with the back doctor,” Harold said. “But I don’t feel like going.”

The old man related about his bad back and all the spinal surgeries that he had. “Surgeries never seem to do any good,” he said. “The pain keeps coming back.”

Harold looked in the water and the face was gone. He thought that his mind was playing tricks on him.

Then the water slowly changed into the color of blood. Harold’s old, frail body quivered. “Himmler’s water,” was his first reaction.

“Are you okay?” the man asked.

“I have to go,” Harold said with fear in his voice and grabbed the railing to make his way out of the water.

“I noticed the numbers on your arm,” the old man with the thick German accent said. “Were you in Auschwitz, Dachau?”

And before Harold could answer, the man raised his arm, showing him six numbers that were tattooed in faded blue ink on his forearm.

Harold took a deep breath to calm his rapid heartbeat. He wanted to go back into the pool and hold onto him, but he was too afraid. He didn’t want to go back into Himmler’s water.

Once Harold steadied himself, he said, “My friend, please don’t stay in there too long.”

    Longer
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    Longer Friday Flash Fiction Stories

    Friday Flash Fiction is primarily a site for stories of 100 words or fewer, and our authors are expected to take on that challenge if they possibly can. Most stories of under 150 words can be trimmed and we do not accept submissions of 101-150 words.


    However, in response to demand, the FFF team constructed this forum for significantly longer stories of 151-500 words. Please send submissions for these using the Submissions Page.

    Stories to the 500 word thread will be posted as soon as we can mange.

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    One little further note. Posting and publishing 500-word stories takes a little time if they need to be formatted, too.
    ​Please note that we tend to post longer flash fiction exactly as we find it – wrong spacing, everything.

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