love and death; death and love

flash fiction, fifteen minute writing exercises, a long time ago

April, 2004.

The Office

No one at the office agreed with Sheila Smith-Brownman’s choice except for Dawn, the new intern whose pink claw-like fingernails seemed to expedite her filing responsibilities to an inhuman degree. The raise was too big, too sudden, and too – Brad? He was the problem. Dave had been there for nine years, longer than Sheila herself; Janie brought brownies every Friday and never called in sick; Chase was undoubtedly the best worker, and he bid Sheila a friendly “Hello” every morning. Why Brad? besides the obvious reasons – the straw blond hair (“dyed”), grass green eyes (“contacts”), and wide white smile (“veneers”). Not to mention how much help he’d been to Sheila during her nasty divorce from Mr. Brownman, staying late at the office for weeks on end that winter, soaked through with Sheila’s crocodile tears and endless supply of gin. And Brad was rewarded for his troubles. Dave was too awkward, Janie, too shrill. And Chase had a gambling problem which Sheila had no intention of exacerbating, despite his cute “Hello”s and his light touches on her hand when he turned in his meticulous quarterly reports, a dark curl falling over his eye and – had she chosen wrong? No, no. Sheila always made wise decisions.

Sheila and Brad are on the airplane with rolling suitcases that fit perfectly in the overhead bins, except Sheila has packed too much (“I’ve never been to Hawaii before”) and the flight attendants are more than mildly irritated. Bag stowed in the compartment, they seat themselves in first class and Sheila orders a dry martini, and another. She’s passed out by the time the plane goes down (dead to the world twice), but Brad is wide awake, making seven-dollar-a-minute phone calls to girls in Detroit and Kansas City and smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, combing his hair, masturbating into the electric-blue solution in the toilet. And then he is panicking, struggling with the yellow oxygen mask with the broken elastic, and the life vest under his seat, and then with Sheila’s bag as it presses him down into the tray table, under the water.

Oh God, Come Quickly

The wind blows low across the roof of the house; I hear it whistling through the windows in the living room, and it smells like the Atlantic, like the dead roots of trees, like motor oil. The back door slams shut. Maybe the glass breaks. Maybe I’ve cut myself.
Out the clean kitchen window, the city is gray with rain and dust. Cars crowd it, luggage battened down with plywood and duct tape, their ironic armor determinedly pushing through clouded streets. Small children in the backseats. Messy hair, huge eyes, tiny fingers.
I take out my pocket watch - 3:29. Another half an hour, if that. Why didn’t these people leave earlier?
Small muscles twitch in my arm, and I consider calling Allison. But the urge quickly passes, dissolves out of my failing bones and maybe drops onto the wet floor somewhere, mixing with the mud from my boots. I reason the phones are probably out by now anyway; plastic receivers dead all over the Carolinas. And if I am wrong, which I'm sure is not the case, the lines are at least thick with frantic, weeping people, so many that they can't all possibly get through.
Who would I be to take their place? What do I have to say about any of this? And why are they all trying to get out now – don’t they understand it’s too late?
A tree loosens and tips somewhere, or a car flies up off the breaking asphalt, while the others get sucked down into the rising brown water. The lights flicker all at once. I catch a last glance out the clear paneled window before I fall.
The tile is cold on my back, wet and dirty, glass, ceramic, my back, my legs, my head hurts. My temple, my left temple, it hurts, it's bleeding. And there was a crack, now two, and the wind, screaming through the open back door and through the house, the white and gray of the dust and the rain, the dark scratching of the leaves crawling inside and the ceiling, the ceiling, cracking, falling, the ceiling, and I