Tommy Dean
Undiagnosed Harmony
Undiagnosed Harmony
After the storm, the boy stood in the circle of broken tree limbs. The water dripped onto his neck and back, slowly soaking his shirt. The wind had disappeared; the sky purpled with promise.
Inside, the mother counts out her cash, checks her phone battery, and rocks her luggage. The wind, an unknown enemy, had ruined her plans to leave. She wavered on writing the boy a letter. Excuses in ink felt like names chiseled on gravestones. If she said nothing, and disappeared like smoke, wouldn’t that leave the boy with nothing to remember but her scent, her touch on his forehead?
In the driveway, the father sits in his Rav4, hysteric in his silence, the low thrum of NPR as constant as the tick of the vehicle's engine. A gathering of sounds to root him in this place. He saw the wife’s suitcase in the coat closet last week. He was returning a jacket after a quick run through the nature preserve. He wondered why she didn’t leave while he was out. Running, pushing his body to the brink of collapse cleansed his mind, made him more driven, possibly a better husband, but the suitcase disagreed.
Sirens assert their violence, rocketing the air, claiming tragedy through the neighborhoods, forcing everyone to stop and contemplate the tick, tick of their selfish thoughts and whims, desires secreted away.
The boy and the man enter the house from opposite doors, their feet slick against the hardwood floors that haven’t been waxed in months, their faces stricken as they both reach for the handle of the suitcase. The wife, they believe, in their harmony of action, has been rescued.
The mother’s walk down the stairs is accompanied by the notes of sirens slipping toward and then past their neighborhood. She can see their shapes in the mirror that hangs at the stair landing. The boy a toll she’ll have to pay, the father a good but distracted man, with impatient shoulders. Apologies or lies shuffling like a deck of cards as she meets them in the foyer.
The red lights awash on the rain-streaked foyer windows. Wife, husband, son peer through the windows, heads stacked by height. Tragedy, a blacking out of their own desires, erased by the spark of fear that has them all reaching out, finding fingers, the gentle touch of reaching into the past and framing it in an uncertain future.
The sizzle of garlic and shallots, the wafting comfort of onion, and the gentle roar of the stove hood taking it all away. The metro engine of her heart is beating somewhere in the bowels of an ancient tunnel in a city that could care less about her trifling feelings, but still, it waits to greet her, to swallow her in only the way a beast can. And yet, she plates their food, the steaming chicken golden in the half-light doming the dining room table, cleared of the daily detritus by her husband, her son, eyes wide, his screen put away for once, these men of hers offering their own adventure of escape. She sits in her usual chair, ignoring for one more night the calcification in her bones, these roots dragging her closer to the ground, and further away from the beast of her dreams.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
Mike Murray
The Box
The Box
The box contains stories. Like German jokes without a punchline. Like dreams. The tale, boxed and sealed has no beginning nor end. For the addled, from the addled.
The box. Four sides, bottom and top is unremarkable from without. The walls and ceiling painted Navajo White – a landlordian prime color. The plywood floor is grey. Slate Grey. For a floor, Slate Grey is far superior to Navajo White. Slate Grey conceals blood. On the huge Navajo reservation in the most desolate corner of desolate Arizona, Navajo White does not exist. Except, maybe, on the sun-beaten siding of an abandoned double-wide; an aluminum box.
Normal and Talker ride battered Harley’s through the Navajo Nation traveling from Truth or Consequences to San Francisco. The motors drone, indolent, incessant. The riders roar past barb wired fenceposts, wrecked cars beaten senseless by the merciless sun and roofless shacks abandoned before air conditioning became a thing. Normal and Talker separately-together succumb to raw fuel fumes and mechanistic rumble. Each to his own meditates upon chrome and carburetors and windrush and a vibrating past receding in the mirror. Abord these motorcycles nothing, absolutely nothing, is static. They ride past abandoned silver mine punctures seeding the desert floor, an unfortunate wanderer may wind up deep in a hole, lost forever, so it is with the hypnotic nature of the road, the desert, the Reservation. Sunstroked, numb of hand, foot and rump, astride an awful, deafening Harley, romance is an illusion. Even Talker, rendered mute against the cacophony of engines, essentially designed in the nineteen twenties, is no help whatsoever. The arrow straight road bisecting an endless blue-white horizon does not inspire poetic notions. Rather, enormous sky and endless beige earth terrify him as if he’s stripped naked to the elements. Astride the unstable, oil leaking, gas sucking, clattering motorcycle, there is nothing to do but examine poor choices made. Floating far above the barren highway, Normal for the first time, understands he as the ridiculous; metalflake, chrome trim, upholstered in motor oiled leather; biker in a box.
Big-sky motorcycle adventure squished into an ungainly receptacle.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle implies that nothing is as it seems. Though we may know the speed of a subatomic motorcycle, predicting where in the box it belongs is problematic. Imagine a parallel universe where a big ass box is a tiny universe or, perhaps the opposite.
Home, sanctuary, safety, prison; Normal’s box is endlessly mutable. When a box contains the world, doors are superfluous, windows a distraction, unplumbed, the box lacks heat and is dark as a cave. Though the walls are bare, the box is lined with books. Normal stashes books in the box: albums, atlas, textbook, encyclopedia, essays, fiction, non-fiction, biblical (listed under fiction- horror). This library includes; leaflets, compendium, dictionary, manuals, dissertation, reader, roll, scroll, tract and treatise, hard cover and paperback all told his stash of books rivals the libraries of Alexandria and New York City combined. Every painting housed in the Louvre and the Getty adorn his Navajo white walls. Statuary from the British Museum – now twice stolen – reside in the box. Here too is a photo gallery encompassing in dramatic black and white, every woman who possibly, perhaps marginally, loved him or on some inexplicable whim, screwed him. Due to blackout drinking, not all of Normal’s photos are titled. Curiously or not, all of the women shy away from the camera lens gazing instead into oblivions shadow. One may assume this a gallery of broken romance and seething rage. Tiny splotches of blood on the Navajo white walls can be discerned if one is diligent.
The journey.
Normal wakes to find the nonexistent door kicked in. He is on his way to Sears to purchase a baseball bat; equalizer for whatever score needs settling. He stops for cigarettes in the tiny convenance store wedged into the front of his building. The store owner, his Navajo landlord, holds a bucket of paint and brush. To the landlord’s stink-eye, Normal replies, “What?”
“The fuck wrong with you last night … didn’t hear the firetrucks?” He points. “Fuckin firemen kicked in your door. Evacuated your dumb ass.” Noting the blank stare, “Don’t remember, huh?” His head wags back and forth, “Dumbfuck.” The Navajo landlord’s face fractures. He laughs, not a happy laugh, more like, I’m going to punch you in the throat sort of laugh. Then he chokes, “Goddamn – you a hazard.” His Navajo landlord’s message is unambiguous; evacuated from flame. Normal backtracks. He woke that morning as usual – naked, in a tangle of whiskey breath, exploded hair, filthy sheets, an erection but sneezing from the acrid aroma of a nearby house fire. In hangover’s turbulent pitch he recalls no siren nor flashing lights. That firemen bashed in the door is a total black hole. Evacuated. He has no recollection of the barefoot, naked, midnight sidewalk.
The Navajo’s recounting adds little green to Normal’s memory desert. Often alcohol’s oily sheen sloshes, thick as Creme de Menthe inside his skull prone to stuttering memory. For all he knows, the fire might as well have happened to another Normal. Grace, the same thing as dumb luck, shimmers across a burning horizon of ash and smoke with little recognition. Those who sleepwalk through inferno take note.
The box is clad in mirrors. Normal crouches shadowboxing before the mirrors. Left foot forward, dukes up, chin tucked behind left shoulder he begins throwing punches, slowly at first then rapid left jabs, an overhand right, a left hook, slide. The man in the mirror knows all his moves. Normal’s particular bob and weave cannot be disguised from the man in the mirror. Duck and hook, slip to this side or that, he sweats, cursing the mirrored image he’ll never beat.
Oh shit.
On closer inspection, the foe in front of him is ‘the Old Man,’ grinning his cocky, you’ll never be as good as me, grin, after all, he installed all Normal’s moves. And behind ‘the Old Man’, is the Old Man’s father, and his grandfather and on and on. They punch from all angles and ages, they are inexhaustible, an elastic infinity of punching men. Before the box and mirrors there was a photograph – four generations of semi-amused first sons, he sits upon the knee of his great grandfather, his grandfather stands to the left, ‘the Old Man’ looks over Normal’s shoulder. The photograph is in a wooden frame. They are four men in a box.
It is vaguely funny or perhaps like a magic trick; so many things misplaced within the box: a Kennedy assassination 1964 silver half-dollar, high school yearbook containing only a ghostly shadow of Normal, the Clash’s 1977 debut studio album, a Mikuni carburetor, his favorite Rose trowel, a roll of braided masons’ line, a wooden lacrosse stick, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, an expired passport containing the only exceptional photo ever taken of him, a bicycle frame pump, a tiny first edition Morrice Sendak book of ABC’s, an ink cartridge for a broken printer, and his virginity. If he removed every article from the box and set those things in an ordered pile, even-money, self-confidence might be found wedged in a lint dark corner like a long-lost Indian Head penny. Penny in a box.
From the addled to the addled.
Abandoned highway beneath boxed sky has no beginning nor visible culmination it is road to the long lost or perhaps never had. Normal ponders things denied; education, success, love; the most abstract thing on the razor edge. An ancient boxed road, old Route 66, is the reddish brown of a very old basketball, patched axis to axis in trills of black tar. The road, like all roads, is a timeline of sorts oscillating toward infinity. Speculation from wayfarers is of a world beyond the box. Perhaps so. A fog horn on San Francisco’s Bay mourns for all that has been lost. Beyond the Golden Gate, monsters, as yet unseen, roil in the living current off Ocean Beach.
The man, Normal, with the timeless contemplation of granite, mute to all that is and is not, cocks his head in wonder at the expanding nature of his universe-in-a-box that now envelopes the whole of the Pacific Ocean. Normal concedes that this place, this squared receptacle, no thicker than five sheets of paper, contains all the truth that can be found.
Mike Murray has, as most writers, a checkered history that we won’t get into here. He's been published in 2 Bridges Review, SF City College Forum, Red Light Lit, Strange Tales of an Unreal West and online. Mike, up until his recent departure from San Francisco, has been a regular contributor in submission based Bay Area literary events and readings including Bay Area Generations and Bang Out and was a 2018 camper at Lit Camp. Mike is a former member of Bricklayers Union Locals #28 and #3 and has an M.A. in C.W. from SFSU.