Flash Fiction by Ron Riekki
One Halloween
I dressed up as a ghost, but I didn’t feel like being a ghost, but my mother had made me a ghost costume and said I had to wear it, that she wasn’t going to waste a perfectly good blanket and that’s all it was, a blanket where she’d cut out eyes and it wasn’t even a white blanket. It was blue. A blue ghost? There’s no such thing. I said I wanted to be a pizza delivery man, which my mother said was ridiculous, but my father was a pizza delivery man and she said, Yes, and it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world for me, and they were recently divorced and my father gave me his pizza delivery costume, which he said isn’t a costume but a uniform and my mother told me I wasn’t wearing that, that it wasn’t even washed, that there was a pizza stain on it, and I said that made it more authentic and I asked if she could put a ghost stain on the ghost costume and she rolled her eyes and rolled her forehead and rolled her spleen and said we were going out now, that it was late and she was tired and she hates candy and I told her I was putting the pizza delivery costume on and she said it was too big for me and she said I was wearing the ghost costume, period, and when she speaks in punctuation, it means you have to do it and so she’d spoken punctuation, so I said OK and went in the bathroom, saying I had to pee, but I really went in to put on the pizza delivery costume and I came out and she said, What the hell are you doing, and she never swears, so saying ‘hell’ for her is like saying the f- word for other mothers and I told her the ghost costume was underneath and it was and she could tell because the sheet was over my head and I could barely see through the eyeholes because she cut them too far apart so I only had one eye that could see out and she said I looked ridiculous and I told her I was a dead pizza man and she said that’s what she wishes my father was and I didn’t like her saying that and we walked out into the night and it was one of those Halloweens where you felt it was actually haunted, with night-fog and the sky dressed up like a witch and the trees bending like they were devils and I made an oath that I’d have a thousand candy bars by the end of the night or I’d be dead in a year and at the end I started running from house to house and my mother yelled for me to slow down, but I never should have said ‘a thousand’ in my head and the fear in me was growing like a lioness scared for all of its young.
My wife calls
and we’re not married, but we are, and we pretend we’re married and sometimes we pretend we’re doing BDSM and I call her “goddess wife” and she calls me “pet” and we listen to the quiet on the other end of the line, because she lives two time zones away and we’ve never met and she calls it a “prison marriage,” except we’re both free, except she works with special ed kids and I work on an ambulance and she says a kid yesterday ate an entire pen and I tell her a guy at our company went out to his front yard and someone had given him a brand-new car and it was because he did CPR on the guy’s wife and she lived, except we’re not supposed to take gifts from patients so he’s asking the boss if he can keep it, except they only gave the car to him and there were four people on scene that worked on her alternating compressions and bagging her and so they’re saying he could sell the car and split it four ways and he says forget it, that he won’t take the car, and everyone’s mad that he won’t split the money, but it’s his car and he should be able to keep it, but the command is saying lawyers would have to get involved, so the car disappears and there are rumors that he sold it, and other rumors that he gave it back and the guy gave him money under the table, some people saying he barely did anything, that he just barked a lot of orders so the husband saw that and thought it meant he was in charge, when he was just an EMT, and the paramedics say he didn’t do anything and the EMTs are saying they have no money and the medics are rich, and there’s all this tension and then during a late-night shift, this older dispatch woman has a heart attack and there’s like six EMTs in the back room and they all stumble out groggy and she dies and there’s this realization that only eight percent of cardiac arrests survive because CPR isn’t as easy as the CPR instructors say because the CPR instructors typically are people who’ve never done CPR, because CPR companies like to hire people with no medical experience, because they can pay them less, and my goddess-wife tells me that the first time we meet, she could wear a nurse outfit and I tell her that would be amazing and she says, shyly, if I’d be all right with wearing a nurse outfit, too, and I tell her I’m already wearing one, that I sleep every night in a nurse outfit and she whispers for me that it’s time to take it off and I pretend that I do and tell her, “I’m awaiting your next order, goddess-wife” and there’s a pause while she’s thinking and I love that gorgeous pause.
Ron Riekki’s books include Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates (Middle West Press, poetry), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, hybrid), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, nonfiction), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press, fiction). Right now, Riekki’s listening to Coeur de pirate’s “Comme des enfants.”
Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.
Flash Boulevard 