Two Flash Fictions

art by Jenn Powers

by Zach Murphy

The Limbo

The cicadas are extremely loud this summer, and so are my mother’s outfits. The leopard print high heels, the oversized sunglasses, and the hat sprouting pink flowers are some of the more understated pieces in her wardrobe.

“You don’t hear about the sun when it’s behind clouds,” she once told me as she put on her beet-red lipstick in the mirror. 

My mother always looks so beautiful, even when she’s sad. Every time she comes back from the Friday night Limbo parties at Brunson’s down the block, her frown has dipped a little lower than it was before she went. It’s amazing how spending time in the company of other people can make you feel lonelier.

A “Welcome Home” streamer for my father has been strung across our house’s front window for a year now. It collects dirt with each wind gust, and its shiny colors have faded. My mother keeps saying it’s a pain to take down. But it’s just as much a pain to leave up.

When my father went overseas for his job as an underwater welder for cargo ships, my mother and I grew closer. She taught me how to cut my own hair, how to play softball. When my father didn’t come home, she taught me that you can’t trust people even when they look you in the eyes, that promises can be shattered and stomped on like broken glass.

“If he was dead, we would have found out about it,” she once said. “If he’s alive, he’s making a choice.” Which felt worse than a death.

Sometimes I create imaginary scenarios in my head about why my father hasn’t come home. Maybe he got roped into a plot to save the world. Or maybe the work has just taken longer than anticipated. Or maybe he told us it would be three years instead of three months and we just didn’t remember. After a while, I run out of explanations.

My mother was never one to sugarcoat. She didn’t even put frosting on my birthday cake this year. “Frosting isn’t good for you,” she says as she lights a cigarette from one of the candles. I blow out all thirteen of them, and we hear a car pull up on the street in front of our house. We get up to go look. An old man that neither of us recognizes gets out of the car and walks over to deliver a package to the neighbor across the street, gets back into the car, and takes off. My mother takes a drag from her cigarette and stares through the screen door. The sounds of the cicadas intensify.

Insurance

It’s raining, and the living room ceiling drips, drips, drips because the husband passed up on that free roof inspection and maybe he was afraid of the problems it might reveal, and his father-in-law now lives in the basement, and the husband and the wife keep finding blood-blotted tissues that look like Rorschach tests in the wastebasket, and the father-in-law won’t go to the doctor no matter how much the husband and the wife beg him, and the rain gets louder and louder, and the hole in the ceiling gets larger and larger.

It’s windy, and the family keeps sweeping the dirt, sand, and leaves under the davenport in the living room, and the daughter has been throwing away the sandwiches that the mother packs her for school, and she says, It was delicious, when the mother asks if she enjoyed her turkey and cheese, and the wind intensifies, and the hole in the ceiling expands, and the bills never blow away but the roof shingles rip off one by one, and the windows rattle, and the house sways back and forth until the family lives with vertigo.

It’s snowing, and the roof is beginning to cave in, and the husband still hasn’t told the wife that he got laid off from work, and the wife tells the husband that he looks so handsome in hats, but the husband wonders if that means the wife is embarrassed of the prominent bald spot on his head, and the snow keeps pounding on the roof, and the roof collapses and a colossal mound of snow lands in the middle of the living room floor, and the mound doesn’t melt, but just keeps accumulating more and more snow, and the living room becomes a blinding blizzard, and the husband thinks to himself that umbrella insurance would be great to have for a time like this.

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