Jean-Luc Bouchard

Daddy's Little Angel

 

            Her scream woke me up, but it was the smell that made me leap out of bed and sprint down the hall. I threw open her door and was hit in the face with a wall of hot air, reeking of struggle and blood. Aided by the sickly yellow of her cartoon duck nightlight, I could see that Polly was on her stomach, screeching her head off and thrashing. Her sheets had straight-jacketed themselves around her body, and the flailing was only making it worse. “It's okay, babygirl,” I said. I leaned down and gently but firmly held her legs. “Daddy's here. It's okay. You had a bad dream.”

            Polly cocked her head to look up at me, tears streaming down her face. She had ripped the pillow with her teeth; feathers were everywhere.

            “I’ll get you out, don't worry,” I soothed. I began to follow the knotted sheets with my hand, searching for an endpoint at which to start to unravel her prison. I tried to keep my eyes away from the crimson rawness scratched along her side, or the lamp, books, and dolls that had been launched against the walls and scattered across the room.

            “It hurts,” she said, taking a break from her shrieking to gasp for air in little hiccups. She had abandoned her flailing in exchange for an assortment of pitiful little tugs and shakes. The movement was making it harder to get her loose, but I didn’t want to take away any chance for her to feel useful. Not now.

            “I know, honey,” I said, finally finding a weakness in the knot. “But I'll have you out soon. You're daddy's little angel and nothing's going to hurt you now that I'm here.”

            “I messed up,” she said, starting to cry again. I could barely make her out between the sobs. “I was falling again. I dreamed I was falling and falling and I couldn’t stop. And I got scared and messed up bad and now I'm broken.”

            I ignored the terror I felt in my stomach as best I could and worked faster, pulling and prodding at the sheets while trying not to jostle the bed too much. I didn't want to move her onto her side until she was out of the sheets and I could assess the damage in full. The sound of old elementary school film narrators stating “Don’t move the body until a professional arrives to help!” was ringing in my head. Well, there would be no professional help tonight, and I was no longer the child in this scenario.

            “You're not broken,” I said. “Everything will be fine. Look at your mural and let's sing a song, okay?”

            Polly raised her head off the drooled-stained mattress as high as she could and stared at the picture I had painted behind her bed two years back, when she had first started having trouble sleeping. I had taken advantage of the blue wall and made a sea of clouds, complete with a cartoonish smiling sun and a crude Mary Poppins stick figure floating away on an umbrella.

            “Hush little baby,’” I began. “Don't say a word...”

            Polly kept her eyes on the mural, lower lip trembling, waiting to be freed. “Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird...” she joined in. Suddenly, she gasped and looked back toward me. “The bird didn’t fall, did it? The bird didn’t fall, right, Daddy?”

            “No, honey, the bird didn’t fall. The bird’s still flying high.” I pet her hair back briefly before turning back to the sheets. “Try to find it in the mural,” I said, hoping she’d turn her head away. “It up there in the clouds. No one’s falling anymore, don’t worry. Let’s keep going, okay, Polly? If that mockingbird don’t sing…”

            We sang and I worked. I could tell from the color and swelling of her joints that something was broken, or at the very least pulling in a direction it shouldn't. We got through two more rhymes before I grew desperate and started to look around for something sharp. Spying plastic orange kiddie scissors stamped “ART ROOM” on her work table (how had I not thought of that right away?), I kept up my part of the harmony as I grabbed the tool and made my way back to the bed. Choosing what seemed to me as the most-stressed intersection of sheets, I thought “Please God,” lunged at the cloth with the scissors, and tore open the knot.

            Polly screamed and plunged her face back down onto the bed, biting the fabric and muffling her cries with wet mattress. The tip of her right wing, missing at least a quarter of its snow white feathers, had been freed from the web and flopped down next to her body. Even in the dark I could see the bend in the wing, a crest of warped feathers and taut, red skin that had never been there before.

            “Everything's okay, baby,” I said through my own tears, trying to find a suitable place to cut so I could free the left wing. “Daddy's here. Just keep singing, okay? You’ll be free before we’ve finished the song, you’ll see. You’re safe now.”

            I cut at the sheets and gave up trying to sing, biting my lower lip instead to the rhythm of her wails. She sounded like a dying animal and I prayed for any other sound, any screech or siren on Earth—nails on a chalkboard, screwdriver in a blender—to replace that cry. Just when I considered putting my hands to my ears and giving in to the torment, I cut through the last lattice snare of blanket. As I started pulling shards of cloth off the left wing, no longer caring if I jostled the bed, I realized that her cries weren’t just from the pain. She knew without looking in a mirror as well as I did, staring at the two white waves peaking and crashing down from her shoulders, that she would have to settle for staring at her mural much longer than just tonight.

 

Jean-Luc Bouchard is a student of English, Music, and Asian Studies at Vassar College. He has been previously published in Umbrella Factory. 

 

 

 

Nikita Gill

Forever Neverland

 

Grace disliked Tinkerbell. She disliked her because she had wings and she could fly whereas Grace stayed on the ground, catching fireflies. The fireflies, in turn, made it easy because they knew she would let them go. She would stare at their radiant light in awe and try to understand how something so little could shine so very bright.

She tried to pretend the bread she had in the mornings was ice cream flavoured, and even imagined her little brother had never been taken from them but had been enthralled and forever lost in Neverland. When she tried to explain this to her mother, her mother would look away quietly, and sometimes, rise with a quiet shudder...and leave the room.

For a little girl who had the hope of the world resting quite easily on her head as a crown, she knew. She knew that one day, he would come for her and maybe, maybe they could be together again like they were in her dreams.

As she grew older, she slept on a bed of green, with a desk of wood and a massive window that made her love rooftops and the sky. She didn’t want to meet Peter Pan. She wanted to be him, and lead a group of boys who were more lost that she could ever be. So lost that they were found.

Grace's mind was made up when she saw the missing boy posters all over milk cartons. She knew what she would be when she grew up. She would be Peter Pan.

(The irony of this never quite occurred to her until her twenty second birthday, when the boy she loved and knew to be less than perfect, became perfect by losing himself to her forever.)

 

Nikita Gill is a 25 year old madness who once wrote a book called Your Body is an Ocean and now is editor of a literary magazine called Modern Day Fairytales. A long time ago, she wrote a six sentence story for Monkeybicycle.net and was featured there.

 

 

 

Sidney Thompson

Say It!

 

            “About fucking time,” said Sales Manager Jimmy Bertella.  He snatched the credit app. out of Cooper’s hand.

            “And he has eight hundred dollars,” smiled Cooper.  He set the money on Jimmy’s desk, and Jimmy let his dark intense eyes roll gradually up.

            “Hey, don’t get me wrong,” said Jimmy, “I’m proud of you for getting down payment, but you’re showing cash cars to somebody who’s got to finance.  You gotta be a bullet before a bank will give you a loan on something with more than seventy thousand miles.”

            Cooper shrugged.  “I didn’t know.”

            “That’s why you follow the process and fully qualify them first.  Why are you so scared to ask questions and take charge, Coop?  Jesus, you were a teacher.  You’re college educated.  Why the fuck are you stuttering and giving me Bambi eyes?”

            Cooper didn’t know what to say.  Selling cars was harder than teaching, but he didn’t understand why.  And he didn’t understand why Jimmy’s skin was suddenly raw above and below his eyebrows, thinner and darker now after lunch.

            “When I tell you what to say out there, say it the way I say it.  You can’t stutter, especially when going over numbers or they’ll think you’re lying, or at least think you’re weak, and if you’re weak, then your customer has to be strong.  That’s how it is.  Somebody’s gotta be the leader, and somebody’s gotta be the follower.  And if you ain’t the leader, guess what then, Coop, the customer will be.  Will have to be.  You understand that?”

            Cooper nodded.

            “All right,” said Jimmy, looking at the credit app., then turning to his computer to load the information.  “Let’s pull it and see what we’re dealing with.”

            Cooper sat in the chair backed against the wall.  He watched Jimmy click and type, then turned away to look out the plate-glass window at another salesman standing flat-footed in the shade, waiting, eating a bag of popcorn.

            “What the fuck!”  Jimmy banged his mouse against his desktop and swiveled to face Cooper.  “Did you not qualify this low-life motherfucker at all?”

            “I did.  He has a good job, I thought.”

            “Shit!”  Jimmy snatched the app. off his desk and thrust it into the trash.  “He can’t buy dick.  Can’t even co-sign for dick.  Tell him to get the fuck out.”

            “But he walked here,” said Cooper.  “He says he walks everywhere.  Are you sure there’s nothing we can do?  Something maybe?”

            Jimmy leaned toward him, and Cooper studied Jimmy’s sneering eyes and pressed lips.  The intensifying expression of contempt was so exaggerated Cooper couldn’t be sure if this man was genuine.

            “He’s done nothing but waste your time,” said Jimmy, “and now you want to waste my time.  Are you listening?  He’s a goddamn cockroach that doesn’t deserve one ounce of sympathy.”

            Cooper shrugged.  “We don’t have an old trade-in we can sell him for eight hundred dollars?”

            Jimmy smirked.  “Why do you care?  You pay your bills.  This bum doesn’t.  He’s nothing like you.  He’s forty-nine grand behind on his child support.  So, so what if he’s walking everywhere!  Did you even ever stop to wonder why?”

            Cooper lifted his hands from his lap and rolled them over in a mute gesture of open confusion.  He’d been raised—no, trained—to care for every individual.  Not to ask why.

            “Out there,” said Jimmy, pointing toward the light of the window, “you need to be like Inch-High Private Eye.  When they give you an opening, you ask questions.  So, Mr. Customer, what happened to what you were driving?  Easy as that.  And then maybe he’ll come clean and tell you he decided to stop making late payments on his car and went to making no payments.  Maybe he still wouldn’t mention the repo then, or the fact he’s a shitty dad, but I know he sure won’t if you don’t ask, and then maybe he doesn’t wind up in my store sitting in your office and wasting our valuable time on Memorial Day fucking weekend when you could be making us money on a decent customer somewhere.”  He opened his eyes as wide as the buttons on his coat.  “Get it, Cooper?”

            Cooper nodded, but he wasn’t sure he meant it.

            Jimmy crinkled his brow and the raw strips blazed redder.  He slowly leaned toward Cooper again.  “You think I’m full of shit, don’t you?”

            Cooper shook his head.  “No, sir,” he said.

            “You wanna tell me to fuck off, don’t you?”

            Cooper shook his head more aggressively.  “No, sir.”

            “Go ahead and say it.”  Near his face Jimmy held up a balled fist, with his index finger protruding like a bayonet.  “Say it!  Say, ‘Fuck you, Jimmy!’” and as he said what he wanted to hear Cooper say, with bared teeth, a red face, he made a forward, stabbing motion with his hand.  “Say it, like that,” he insisted, but Cooper laughed.  “Say, ‘Fuck you, Jimmy!’  Look, if you can’t say what’s on your mind to me, how the hell are you gonna say it to them?  Come on, I can take it, Cooper.  Say, ‘Fuck you, Jimmy!’  Say it!”

            Cooper decided he would do it.  He sat forward.  “Fuck you, Jimmy,” he said, stabbing the air.

            “No, you’re laughing.  Say it like you mean it.  Say, ‘Fuck you, Jimmy!’”

            Cooper tried again, but the exercise seemed too absurd, and midway he cracked a smile.

            “Work on it,” said Jimmy.  “Now get outta here and catch another up.”  He spun back to his computer, and seeing the money on his desk, raked it into his hand.

            “What do I tell him?” asked Cooper, taking the money.

            “Tell him that ain’t enough.  If he wants a car,” said Jimmy, “it’ll have to be on the Chinese payment plan.”

            Cooper raised his eyes to meet Jimmy’s, which seemed less intense upon him now, almost sleepy or affable, if not empathetic.  “What’s that?” he asked.

            Jimmy grinned.  “One lump sum.”

 

Sidney Thompson‘s  fiction has recently been accepted at Ragazine.CC, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, NANO Fiction, LitBridge, Ray's Road Review, The Fat City Review, and Connu. He writes fron North Texas, near Ruby’s Diner.