12. Two Flash Fictions

Written for Maureen Freely's Modes of Writing seminars. The first is based on Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl' (any resemblance between characters in this story and any persons living or dead is a coincidence, etc.); the second is an attempt to write about an act of cruelty in the manner of Carolyn Forché's 'The Colonel'.

What I Never Did As A Teenager

Well, I certainly never chewed gum, for a start, when I was your age. Wears your teeth to nothing, turns your face to a chimp’s grin. Neither did I carouse all night, as you seem to believe you have the right to, trawling from bar to bar in a manner to bring a sailor shame. I didn’t spend my evenings devising the most efficient method of acquiring rum and vodka when underaged. I was never out of the house after 9PM, nor in it after 7AM. I never neglected to thank my parents for all they did for me – food, clothes, footballs to play with – in spite of its scarcity. My father would have beaten me to a mess of blood if I had taken him for granted, or cocked a snook at the bread he put on the table. And when he told me I needed a job, I didn’t slouch about getting one. I never considered burdening them with any nonsense about a university education for a degree I would never use. I never hung around smoking or gassing with shiftless punks, upsetting shop security and clogging up pavements. Neither did I run up huge phone-bills for my parents talking to such gnats, or wear my eyes out staring at computer screens conversing with them. I didn’t destroy my ears with barbaric music, or worry my parents at rock clubs; I didn’t squander their money on racy records (Les Baxter, etc.) I was never away from the sink when my mother had finished the meal and started the dishes, myself drying and stacking each piece, floral patterns visible through years of wear. My bedroom walls were covered in posters – Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, bands with real men – not books, which you read once and file away. My bed was never defiled by the presence of man or woman. I never dawdled on promenades, garden paths, front-door thresholds or staircases yammering with fucking whores who never cared for me. I never succumbed to the ignominy of love. And you presume to call me less than a father?


Molluscs

It had happened enough times for me to remember. There was nothing very much in it – the press of a sole.

The garden was mostly concrete, unforgiving stone-studded grey yielding to grass and flower-borders. Later, I would kill slugs unfortunate enough to crawl out from the safety of the chlorophyll, with a pair of pliers and bottle of toxic pellets. But this was a different mollusc. The first one was an accident. By the time I looked down there was nothing but a mess of brown, mottled shards of shell, unidentifiable ichor oozing all among them. My bare feet sensed its perturbing texture, as my brain attempted to pin an identity to it. My mother was sat in a garden chair nearby, unconcernedly reading her thriller, and I asked her help. I found her suggested connection between this dismembered pile and what I knew as snails ludicrous. She went back to her reading.

I went to the metal sheet, corroded in places, that leant against the breeze-block garden wall, and pulled it back. I found it strange that snails could stick perfectly to surfaces, happily gliding straight along at 35 degrees to the vertical. It was a trait entirely foreign to a boy who could hardly stay on his feet for more than a minute. And yet it required little effort to pluck them from the surface and squeeze, or drop, or squash. Theirs was a strange crunch, somewhat satisfying, like cracking a walnut shell, mixed with the awful jelly squish of its remainder. And so, I crushed and crushed, shattering houses, pulping bodies, reducing innards to a slick of slime, wiping consciousnesses off my shoes (which I had gone to the house for). Millions of years of evolution were no match for sticky boys’ fingers, leather and board. My mother came over, and told me to stop. So, I did.