Flash fiction by Susan Grimm
Autoflash from the Year 2022
one
This morning the main clouds were like slabs of shale, gray without all the fluting and puffing, as if they were continents so there could be a little drift. In the rifts or valleys–of course this is all upside down–it was whiter. The sky such a generous serving over the highway and further out over the lake. Earliest, when I pulled the curtain back, there was a pink cast to the sky but it looked wrong, sicklied somehow as if the color itself had a virus.
two
The view out my front window–the invalid’s book cover. Two houses across the street: blue and red and yellow and white. No one ever sits on the b and r front porch. Someone new has bought it and if I was really an invalid, I would note that there was a car in the drive today and a van that claimed to be for inspection. The inspector wore an outfit with shorts made from that grey serge service worker uniform material.
three
The sky is a pretty blue, but not all the way to sublime, the clouds an everyday cumulus. Not that I don’t like clouds everyday but they are not clouds of curiosity or passion or threat. The tree on my tree lawn is so young, and there is already an unhealthy rusty cast to the leaves on the top and some of the southern side. Should southern be capitalized. I don’t think so. I see that even in my word bricks I do not believe in the question mark.
four
There were three main “paths” into the wood. I remember the apple tree to the right, how it grew sideways after it had part-way fallen. In the yard mother had made little islands of ivy, so practical because there was not much sun. In the summer the heat lived in our yard, puffing itself up like a cushion of chiffon filling every space and celebrating the dark at night and the stars clustered above.
five
My porch. I used to spend so much time out here especially in my difficult years. Maybe I was someone else not under the ownership of the roof. For a long time the porch looked excellent, the paint not peeling on walls or floor, the rhododendron growing up to screen me from any passerby. I used to have to trim it because it grew past the downspout. No more. The chainsaw and I have a date outside some time when E is not around.
six
My first married house on W. 105th Street. I can’t remember the address. J and T also on that street with the same landlord. We lived upstairs. I’m pretty sure this was the house where we had the couch that coughed up the dust of its foam cushions. We’d gotten it from one of the Vytos’ mothers.
seven
The most interesting thing about the 105th Street house was the man who took a sledgehammer to his wife’s windshield. People stood in the doorways to see what was going on. Screaming but no violence. The next day the same man was out front (the car was parked on the street) trying to repair it. Also, I guess, on 105th B and I were getting used to being married. For part of this time I did not have a regular job which I found both confusing and lowering. Our landlords were a husband and wife and the husband’s brother who lived with them. They were very persnickety in a wash your garbage can way. J and T used to make fun of the brother who played the accordion.
eight
When we were driving back from Niagara Falls, E and I played a game in the car that involved 3 coffee stirrers and a paper cup from Panera. E invented it after he had been being cranky and obstreperous– about two and a half hours into the trip. It’s possible that on this trip he also sometimes claimed to have to go to the bathroom out of boredom. But the game–we had to represent something with the materials named above. It started with just the stirrers but that was too limiting. We added the paper cup and its lid after I drank the last of the coffee and wiped the cup out with a Kleenex. The things we made/suggested by putting the five things together–a toilet paper holder, a triangle, a periscope, a submarine, that Covid molecule they’re always showing, a diving board and pool, a bow and arrow, and maybe 20 things more
nine
How pleasurable an empty road is even if you can hear engines and machines grinding away someplace else. And what is in harmony with emptiness. Maybe the greenhouse which is transparent which seems like a kind of empty. On a personal note, when is it good to be empty and when is it bad. Maybe it’s about intentionality–if you empty yourself it’s a kind of preparation, a purifying back to true state as opposed to being emptied when things drain away through the hole that’s been scraped on the side of your head.
ten
R and E are laying on the front room floor having dragged some pillows and comforters from a bed upstairs (a practice I abhor). B and I bought one of the comforters a hundred years ago at a big warehouse sale at the IX Center. E is watching Sonic the Hedgehog 2 which he has already seen but he’s enjoying it. R is saying he’s going to go to sleep but that maybe he’s too tired. We have all had a piece of ice cream cake that E and I bought at Dairy Queen this morning. It said “Congrats, R” (a small cake). R and I discussed earlier whether E was afraid/nervous about R being all right. When we were driving to see a tiny part of the Triathlon, E said to me, “What if he’s dead.” When we got to the West Boulevard entrance of Edgewater, you could not drive in, so we found an almost legal parking space and walked towards the bicycle course. As we approached, still not there yet, we saw R cycling towards us. It was the most wonderful happenstance. E has his hand on his father’s arm.
eleven
There is a particular place on the Shoreway where you can see the lake and the sky best where the ground falls down to Edgewater Beach. The sky was low morning lit with blue and faint pink and at least three kinds of clouds. There were the long lines of clouds like a strata of rock just above the horizon. And above that were clouds like the splats of a Rorschach only dark gray. And then there were the big clouds furthest seeming from the horizon which were tumbled up into rounded towering shapes with something scallop-y about their top edges but too rough for the neat idea that scallop conveys. I was miffed when the car next to me veered ever so slightly over the lines, but I realized they were looking at the sky, too.
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.
Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.
Flash Boulevard 