Three pieces from Jerome Stern's Micro Fiction:an anthology of really short stories
Mount Olive -- Monifa Love
Mount Olive Primitive Baptist Church is two miles from my home. She is a calla lily growing in deep woods. On the third Sunday of each month, I sit in the middle of the fourth pew beneath the jade shower of the skylight. I join other ample women and our rail-thin sisters in testimony and tears. The hymns are cradles and bayonets-nesting our laments and pressing us on. We sing like we have known each other all of our lives; our voices thickly woven ropes, making ladders. Vaselined children with swinging feet draw on their legs and rock to the rhythm. Thin brown men in thinning brown suits punctuate the preacher's cadence with shouts and the percussion of their canes and polished shoes. The faithful rise and fall in the spirit like dolphin. Guardians in starched white uniforms resuscitate the overwhelmed with gentle, gloved pats to powdered faces. The elder women whisper underground words to call the faint back from their peaceful homes. They wield their fans with the skill of a signal corps. Elation evaporates from our bodies. Mercy rains down. Our tongues capture the tonic and we are saved. The service ends with hummingbirds calling "A-men" and the reverberation of small, powerful wings. We drift out to our cars. Well-worn leather bibles cross our hearts and touch the sky. The children pile into backseats to watch the church disappear through dusty windshields, their minds on early supper.
Your arm and hand cock back instinctively, although they have never moved like this before, because your firstborn has taken a piece of your thigh between her two-year-old, sharp and white incisors, and it surprises you to find your arm in this position, you who dress her naked dolls so they won't look cold, but her teeth take deeper hold and drive everything out of your head except, oddly, your own father saying "silly bitch" when you were five and left your bike out in the rain and also the sound, so compelling, of skin hitting skin and, even more oddly, something your aunt told you about y grandfather boxing your father's ear so bad it bled rough red stuff from the eardrum -- all this, even the love you feel for both these men, rushes through you so fast you understand for the first time -- as your hand descends -- the phrase "seeing red" and the only thing between your hand and your child is your puny intellect scared shitless in some corner, so that just before your hand hits the tender part of her thigh, the part you had kissed just twenty minutes ago when changing her diaper and before she screams, your daughter looks at you first in disbelief and then in complete comprehension, as though, perhaps she knew these stories all along, and you wonder, with terror, as you've never wondered before, if this is the history you've been trying to write.
He and his lover were down to their last few T cells and arguing over who was going to die first. He wanted to be first because he did not want to have to take care of his lover's parrot or deal with his lover's family, which would descend on their flat after the funeral, especially the father, who had been an Army major and had tried to beat his son's sexual orientation out of him with a belt on several occasions during adolescence; the mother, at least, would be kind but sorrowful,and secretly blame him, the survivor -- he knew this from her letters, which his lover had read to him each week for the past seven years. He knew, too, that they all -- father, mother, two older brothers --would disapprove of their flat, of the portrait of the two of them holding hands that a friend had painted and which hung over the bed, the Gay Freedom Day poster in the bathroom, all the absurd little knickknacks like the small plastic wind-up penis that hopped around on two feet; maybe, after his lover died, he would put some things away, maybe he would even take the parrot out of its cage and open the window so it could join the wild ones he'd heard of, that nested in the palm trees on Delores Street, a whole flock of bright tropical birds apparently thriving in spite of the chilly Bay Area weather -- he would let it go, fly off, and he would be completely alone then; dear God, he thought, let me die first, don't let me survive him.