GARY FINCKE: Angel Number

Flash Fiction by Gary Fincke

Angel Number            

It had been so long since his father had died that Phelps had had time to develop heart problems of his own. At least his father had counted himself lucky living to sixty-three with nothing but health until tumbling to the ground, still playing from the whites on the fourteenth tee at the municipal course.  Phelps was fifty-one and thinking every flight of stairs was a bullet.

Two years ago, he’d had a heart attack in one of his classes at the community college.  Business writing. They were learning the intricacies of the job application letter. They’d finished with the colon after the greeting, how this showed formality and respect and a sense of what the world expected from you if you wanted to work with your brain instead of your hands.  

Just as he started in on the crucial first paragraph, how it introduced the employer to the applicant’s qualifications and interest, Phelps had felt tightness in his chest and his voice had squeaked shut. Pain ran down his arm. “Oh Christ,” he thought, “not here in front of the GED crowd and a bunch of mid-lifers,” just before he was lost in the inability to do anything but sit and go helpless. “A warning,” Phelps’ doctor had said.  “A wake-up call. A shot across the bow.”

The doctor talked like that, in threes, like he believed in the power of what he had decided was his angel number instead of science. “How are you?  How you doing?  Feeling ok?” the doctor had said a few minutes before.  Phelps had wanted to answer, “Enough of that.  Stop it.  Shut up.”  Instead, he kept that triple play to himself like everything else, including his conviction that a mild attack was like a civil-defense-alarm minutes before the first nuclear missiles arced over the horizon.

Phelps had a son of his own who needed to listen up. Twenty-seven. Maybe a decade before Drew would remember every chicken wing and cheeseburger as he climbed a flight of stairs.  Like his grandfather, Drew believed not smoking was the cornerstone of a healthy lifestyle while he grew heavy on pizza and cheese steaks and large strombolis as if there was heroism in overeating or he had the same angel number as Phelps’ doctor.

His son worked night shift at the Hampton Inn.  “It’s good for me,” Drew explained, describing how he read most of the time after he finished a midnight Mancini’s delivery. Plus, he had access to the hotel’s fitness room. “I go in at four a.m. when nobody ever comes in or goes out. I watch the news while I lift. It keeps me pumped, seeing how survival of the strongest is just around the corner.”

“It’s fittest, not strongest,” Phelps said.

“They’re synonyms, Dad,” Drew said.

Drew sounded so much like his grandfather that Phelps shuddered when the weekend deliveries arrived from Mancini’s three hours after Drew sat with him for dinner. Phelps’ father, once, had said eating fettuccini alfredo was no different than riding a motorcycle. “What’s the point of getting up in the morning if you worry so much?” he’d said. “You might as well wake up dead.” Phelps had heard that expression a hundred times, but never outside of his family. It was like some characteristic passed down through generations, the shape of a nose, a talent for the sorts of puzzles that separated the quick-witted from the slow. 

Wake up dead, he repeated to himself as he pushed a cart through the grocery store.  It made him feel dizzy the way he did standing up quickly when he’d been drinking. He wanted to change the subject of his thoughts, but nothing came to him except the strange, distant voice of his father wheedling the chorus of that old “Eat, drink, and be merry” tune, its promise kept and filed in a mausoleum drawer.

In every aisle, there were packages filled with sugar and fat and salt. With cholesterol, carcinogenic dyes, and mysterious chemicals. A butcher stood alertly behind the extensive red meat display. The deli counter clerk sang along to the overhead speaker as she sliced salami.

It’s better to have one big terror than a thousand small fears his father had said. The secret word had always been “consolidate,” but Phelps had refused, until now, to say it aloud. For half an hour, he loaded his cart with colorful packages. They looked so much like presents that he opened one in the car, relishing the pleasure of each chip’s salt and grease, its hint of lime.

Rehearsal  

When he crawled into his sister’s closet, his mother, busy with housework after a week of grieving, was in the basement, two floors down. Outside, the early January weather threatened anyone unprepared who walked through the alley and past the stone wall that ran beneath the small window.

He sat among his sister’s dresses not yet packed for charity. With the thinnest blouse, he sealed the space where light crept in and waited for what the air would teach him. He kept on living while he shivered in the dark and listened for his mother’s first tentative question about his silence to amplify from routine to concern to panic. He would soon be missing. She might think him unconscious or dead. For half an hour, he was immersed in the power of anticipating his mother’s imminent future. 

At last, he hugged a pillow against his chest and began, with his eyes closed, to hold his breath. Counting to thirty. Counting to forty. Counting to fifty and then sixty before he gasped and opened his eyes to darkness. Each time he resurfaced he waited for his mother’s voice until, finally, it came from far below. He did not answer, not when her voice changed, not when it moved from impatience to worry and then, after a few more seconds, the one that began to sound like the voice inside his head.

When he heard her footsteps on the stairs, he imagined how close his absence brought him to her, the way his disappearance was no longer a wish. His future was visiting “Before much longer.” It seemed to say, “Inevitably.” 

“Get out of there this minute,” his mother said, but now he was breathing like a nervous thief. She followed him downstairs. “Never do that again,” she said when they reached the living room, leaving the rest of what she was thinking unspoken, and because he obeyed, she never said another word about that afternoon when all he did was wait in the darkness, old enough to be spellbound by the stranger who did not promise to have him back by morning. 

Friday was Miss Spangler             

On Fridays, with Miss Spangler, we talked about the endangered and gave reports on the extinct. The girls cherished whooping cranes, whose numbers had fallen to sixteen. The boys loved the condors, their numbers fewer than fifty and plunging. All of us had sent proofread letters from Ohio to people who were trying to save them.

Somebody, she said, knew where each of those condors lived. Someone checked on every egg. Now, a Texas zoo was trying in-captive breeding with a chosen pair of whooping cranes. Miss Spangler reminded us that everyone at the zoo was holding their breath because the world will be less without whooping cranes. “You will be less, too,” she said, “like only children.” No one said anything then. One by one, we looked at the five classmates we knew had no brothers or sisters, their parents, according to our mothers or ministers, selfish or sadly incapable.

“Think of the birds like this,” Miss Spangler said. “Here we are in the 1950s and there are twice as many of you in this class than there are of those beautiful cranes. Soon, there will be more of you than condors.” She paused and looked from one row to another to another. “That includes everywhere in the entire world,” she said. “Think of being the last. Think of searching for someone that looks like you and never seeing another child’s face.”

The next Friday, Miss Spangler showed us a picture of a dodo. “Not a real one,” she said, “a

replica reconstructed from bones and feathers because all of them were already gone forever.

They had no predators where they lived. They were large and flightless and such easy targets they were thought especially stupid for not trying to hide.”

“Dodo,” two boys said to each other at the same time, and all of us laughed.

Miss Spangler hissed. “Listen,” she said. “Once, there were so many passenger pigeons that they formed dark clouds. Tens of millions, more than the number of people in America. None of them were nearly tame and flightless. Nobody believed they could ever disappear, and now there are none.”

Miss Spangler walked up and down the aisles and told us to imagine ourselves being gone in a hundred years or even less. “I mean humans,” she said, “the species. Your children. Their children, too. When Ohio is empty.”

None of us could imagine that, but the class was quiet. Everyone crouched as Miss Spangler swept past their desks. “That view is called landscape for a reason,” she said. “Are you listening now? Good. Here are some ways that a future without us could happen.” By the second reason, the girls began to sob. By the third, even the boys shuddered as they tried hard not to cry.

Gary Fincke’s new flash collection The History of the Baker’s Dozen will be published in August by Pelekinesis Press. His latest book is a memoir-in-essays The Mayan Syndrome (Madhat Press, 2023). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.

Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.