Flash Fiction by Jenny Wong
Boca do Inferno
The mouth of hell can easily be found on a map, if one ever looked. It exists on the roughened edge of a Portuguese coast. An arch of rock curves into the sky. Ocean roars down a whirlpool’s gullet. There are no eternal burnings or enraged infernos, just cold stone trapped in a cycle of rhythmic drownings and a pit of acceptance which swallows all that arrives.
A small sign says, “Watch your step.”
Currently, a silver Renault Clio is pulled to the roadside. A gray-haired man leans against the door, squints at the small circuitries in his selfie stick. His wife emerges from the car a few seconds after, slowed by the stiffness in her hip. Their conversations are mostly syllables now. Exhales tinted with sound. There is less need for whole words. Life has come to this. Precipices. Cusps. Bicuspids ground down in the night.
Nearby, two girls lean against the rail to take pictures. The straps of their tank tops are thin and cling to the bones in their unhunched shoulders. They do not understand the concept of baggage and prolonged exposure. The woman covers her head with a straw-brimmed hat to prevent sunlight from planting more freckles between the lines on her face.
Blue water soars up, meets its end upon bare rock. The woman does not wander close to the edge, does not want to peer into a mouth that hints at near futures.
Her husband has already crossed over
the fence for a better view.
Wind buffets temptations closer to her ears. Beckons. Parts of their bodies have already left the confines of their skin. His gallbladder last April. The round tip of her femur in March.
“Not yet,” she whispers.
The girls lift their cellphones and smile, their gazes only focus an arm’s length away. Two stars orbiting small technologies, while the undersides of their shoes tremor, unaware
as the earth slips
a little more beneath itself.
A Drowning on Dry Land
Julia hates dining in hotel restaurants, but it is late, and they are tired from a long day of sightseeing along the coast.
While Christopher eyes the list of reds on the wine menu, Julia thinks about the souvenir they bought earlier today. It is a small brick with a mosaic of broken glass glazed overtop, shattered fractals the color of hardened sea.
Christopher thinks it would look great on the dining room table as a conversation piece. The next time Karina and Arturo are invited over for dinner, he’ll tell them the story of how he found the brick in a little art store by the beach and they’ll run through the list of nice platitudes. How lovely. So unique. How much?
Julia feels sorry for that little rectangle of clay. She imagines it lying flat and still as it shrinks and hardens in the burning kiln, unable to stop the spread of melting glass that smothers overtop.
She hasn’t told him yet. That they found a name to what grows inside of her. A diagnosis. A thing with no heartbeat. A conviction of uncertainty to come.
When the appetizer of steak tartare lands in front of them, Julia recoils from the waiter’s gloved hands. All around her, diners rasp their knives around bone. Pink juices bleed onto white plates. Wine glasses are a table edge away from falling.
Julia stands and tells Christopher she’s going to look for the bathroom, but she’s really looking for an exit sign.
There is only one, located at the back near the kitchen. She pushes hard on the metal door and steps away from glaring scrutiny of white galley-kitchen lights.
The alley has its own glitter. Smashed bottles. Metal trash cans. Stars that shimmer in puddles, distant memories of expired light. Julia thinks about the brick again.
When they get home, she is burying it in the garden between the stepping stones and the bleeding hearts. Christopher will forget about it after a while like he does everything else. Or perhaps, she wonders, if it would look better underwater.
Things can change with the toss of a hand.
A sinking decoration
becomes just another rock
that settles beneath the surface.
The Collector of Bourlanda Alley
Marisol loves the sound of glass when it shatters the stillness of 3 a.m. darkness. It’s only a small violence and she does it carefully now. An underhand lob. A half turn away. Eyes closed. Mouth closed because she’s learned that she doesn’t want to spit up grit before she sleeps.
Her studio is not much more than a black metal door facing an alley. It is a sublet, an inlet, a closet squeezed between the shadowed sides of buildings. But the alley has a name and occasionally appears on maps if a cartographer is detailed enough, so the place is not entirely invisible, which perhaps means she is also not entirely invisible anymore.
On weekends, she sets up a lopsided folding table by the waterfront. Mostly, she waits for a curious tourist to pause and look at the bricks she makes out of clay and glass. There’s always a brightening of the eyes, a knowing smile, when they’ve seen the resemblance of her artwork to the glass mosaics that line the main street boardwalk. Travelers are always looking for ways to remember paths that others have never seen.
For each brick she makes, she tags them with little labels.
For Display Purposes Only
Local Artist
Hand Made with Local Materials
Which is mostly true. She gathers her glass from bins behind hotels and restaurants and bars. Grey Goose bottles are the best, but she loves the occasional extra virgin olive oil bottle with the dark green tint.
What her labels don’t mention are the other pieces that she collects from her nightly alley forages. Bones, feathers, fur – the bits that last longer than flesh. Secret things that she seals inside the molds and clay.
She lines her bricks up like little coffins before placing them in a flaming oven pyre. Clay hardens. Glass melts on top, becomes smooth, but still shows where sharp edges once met.
As the kiln burns into the night, she whispers the odd prayer to no god in particular, hoping what remains of those little creatures will find new lives and new homes with those willing to spare $5 per brick, those who find beauty in a common shape of clay that holds the memory of small broken things.
JENNY WONG is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. Her favorite places to wander are Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centers, and Parisian cemeteries. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions and longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains and tweets @jenwithwords.
Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.
Flash Boulevard 