BETH SHERMAN: Taut bodies of teenage girls who’ve never been kissed

Flash Fiction by Beth Sherman

Left Behind at Jones Beach

A cracked, plastic bottle, oozing sunscreen. A torn bathing suit bottom. Two broken kites. Soggy towels, reeking of mildew. Coolers stuffed with beer, potato chip crumbs, pulpy remains of a rotted peach. The memory of my daughter, age three, building sandcastles, stomping them flat. Talcum powder for removing sand near hidden crevices. Ring-billed gulls scrabbling over a half-eaten tuna sandwich. Skin peeling off in layers, fragile as a ladybug’s wing. Taut bodies of teenage girls who’ve never been kissed. My daughter, age 10, burying herself up to her neck, nearly disappearing. Thwack of Kadima balls on paddles. Ice cream dripping onto sticky thumbs. Sex, the promise of it, fresh as raspberries drizzled with cream. My daughter, at 15, in a tight cluster of girls who lie down, sit up, lie down like tulips unfurling. Gossip, skimming the breeze, landing ker-splash in the waves. Sting of sand flies and trash talk. Muscle boys and models, grandmas with three rolls of fat on their bellies, babies drowsing in tented shade. Planes trailing advertising banners for unnecessary dental procedures: giant teeth ripping through clouds. A beach ball kicked onto a stranger’s blanket. Sex, the allure of it, stripe of virgin skin below the tan line, bikini tops unloosened, flesh on flesh, exploratory, the wind toting dirty words. Jellyfish bites. Rain smell, salt smell. Weed, skunk-like, odorous, a menacing smell laced with unpronounceable chemicals. The fear of a child flailing, drowning. My daughter, at 23, kissing her girlfriend hard on the mouth, while three older men sitting under a stars and stripes umbrella glare. The knowledge that one of those men might follow us, rape her, shoot us all. (That thought we don’t leave behind but shove into the trunk beneath a striped beach chair). Voices babbling incessantly. Boredom. Sweet fatigue. A bloody flipflop when a piece of glass – not pretty green sea glass, but a shard from a soda bottle, cuts an errant toe. Whispered secrets. One time, a dead baby shark, slick with maggots, its expression vacant as the tide gentles it home.      

One Thursday

Mel thought the sloths would be lazy but he was wrong because they liked to scooch  upside down, particularly when no one else was around, staring at Mel with their luscious, marble-sized eyes, which he appreciated along with their incredibly smooth fur, their heads curved like the inside of a bowl, the air in their fake habitat pregnant with humidity because, he learned as a docent at The Sloth Encounter in Kings Park, Florida, sloths don’t know how to shiver.

Bring me home a sloth, Sue joked, as she poured Cabernet into two goblets, jutting her chin forward, which reminded Mel of his ex-wife, Rhoda, who was perpetually cheery, never at a loss for words, relentless almost, which made sense now that Sue had set her cap for him, as his grandmother used to say, and though he pretended he didn’t notice it was really quite obvious that Sue doted on him, bringing him quarts of chopped liver from the deli, cutting out interesting articles about retirement in the paper for him to read, dropping hints that she loved everything about Mel, even the parts Mel himself didn’t like.

When Mel was growing up, he played on a local soccer team, and his coach lived next to a park where they practiced and they used to go to Coach’s house after school when there wasn’t a game and this one Thursday, Mel was the only one who showed up, so they went over to the park, ran some drills, came back to the house, a ranch that smelled like gym socks and stale cooking oil and Coach said if Mel did him a favor, he’d let Mel play goalie in the next game and Mel remembers how it was raining that day, which is why they’d stopped practicing, raining so hard it hurt Mel’s neck, silver darts that nicked the pavement outside Coach’s house, how once they got inside, Coach gave Mel a bowl of strawberry ice cream and Mel’s never eaten ice cream since, hates milk and cheese since they’re related to ice cream, just like he hates the scared, embarrassed kid who gave in to Coach because three weeks after, he and his Mom saw Coach at K-Mart, picking through a pile of Bermuda shorts on sale and even all these years later  — 63 years to be exact – Mel remembers how weird it was that Coach could still do everyday stuff like try on shorts, that Coach could keep rolling along like nothing happened,

He and Sue went to dinner once a week but these weren’t dates, although Mel paid for both of them and at the end of the night, walking Sue to the door of 8J, which was two floors down from his own unit, he gave her a chaste peck on the cheek, and really, it wasn’t a date because Mel was done with all that, even though the last time, when he agreed to come in and was sitting on her sofa and Sue said bring me home a sloth, with that breathy lilt in her voice, he knew he was expected to stroke her thinning hair, to be led into the bedroom where it was sufficiently dark and the air conditioning hummed along, and do things to her body but the very idea of it was so abhorrent to Mel that he pretended to yawn, shifting his knee so it no longer touched hers, then backing away from her entirely, his back scrunched against the hard knob of the armrest.  

Before he could stop her, Sue leaned in and brushed her lips against his face, which felt like a bee had landed on his cheek, causing him to jerk his head back, like he’d been bitten, and there was a fierce noise inside him, a thrumming noise, insistent and sharp and it occurred to him that it always showed up in these moments, reminding him of a horse he’d once seen lying in a field, not the noise itself but what was inside the noise – images he could never forget like the horse’s tongue thick with flies, the horse itself frothing, damaged, so when Sue said fine, you can let yourself out, he couldn’t remember walking in.  

At his volunteer job, one of the mothers wanted to buy a sloth for her son even though they were $1,200 each and Mel groaned inwardly because he knew she and her husband would forget to feed the animal, neglecting it once the novelty wore off, not setting the thermostat to 80 degrees and the poor sloth would escape from whichever cookie cutter mansion they lived in and then, because the sloth couldn’t survive on a golf course alone, couldn’t feed himself or navigate traffic, the sloth would die and even though Mel knew all that and could have stopped it, could have said let’s go see the kangaroo instead, he watched passively as they filled out the paperwork and allowed himself to pat the sloth’s curved head once, no more, before they took it away.  

Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her fiction has been published in Portland Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Blue Lyra Review, Sandy River Review, 100 Word Story, Compose Journal, Fictive Dream, Sou’wester and elsewhere. She is also a Pushcart nominee, a Best of the Net finalist, and has written five mystery novels. You can find her on Twitter @bsherm36.

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