my flash fiction

Rex 84 – The Beginning #fridayflash


It was the second Wednesday in November.  I hadn’t heard from my husband in four days and woke to news that the gates of our enclosed community had been closed and barricaded overnight.

“I’ve heard they’re going door to door looking for US citizens,” a neighbor told me.  She’d slipped out after her husband had gone out to the fields that morning to warn me.  She didn’t know we were dual citizens and hadn’t traveled using our US passports in years.  I wasn’t even sure which packing crate they were in.  We’d moved four times since leaving the US.  Twice since obtaining Canadian citizenship through my native born husband.

I thanked her.  I didn’t know her name at the time.  She was native.  They didn’t mix much with the expatriates.  A cultural preference more than a religious objection.

News reel exploded from the flat screen at the end of the breakfast nook.  Grainy cell phone images from Flickr and video from YouTube hastily retrieved by Al Jazeera before the media blackout highlighted a frightening recitation of silenced Twitter feeds and Facebook updates.  The revolution did not take place in cyberspace, it was just recorded there for a few moments before vanishing like the people who took the pictures and dared to stand witness to history.

No one knocked on our door.  The whispered warnings were fearful winds which blew like the sandstorms, searing and scouring the unprotected in their path.  The company had locked the gates.  When the army arrived, in search of Americans “in need of assistance”, they were sent away with a reminder that the Emirate was not subject to the United States of America, but they would graciously keep them apprised of any needs that might arise.  Praise Allah.

I scanned our passports before burning them, transferred the images to flash drive before deleting the files and then I waited.

Camp sat on the gulf coast.  The moist air ran in little rivers down the panes of our hermetically sealed town home.  The winter was warmer than usual that year. Children played unattended in the park across the street.  I watched my daughter through the droplets.  And waited.

The day before Ashura, the President of the United States, addressed the world.  The next day I left my wet-eyed little girl in the care of only people I could trust, Aamina and Fahd.  They were engineers in my husband’s work group.  Aamina had checked in on me every day since my husband disappeared.  In better days, we had gathered on Friday evenings, discussing and debating while our daughters bonded in the way of little girls.

Fahd tried to discourage me.

“We can’t trust the news coming from America right now,” he said. “Wait a while longer. The company is negotiating the return of our people.”

“Your people,” I pointed out needlessly. “James is Canadian.  Enemy combatant.  You heard what that man said.”

“I don’t believe the Canadians have closed their border or that the Americans see them as threats,” Fahd said. “It was a bad election. That happens.  Americans have been spoiled by their democratic illusions.  The people there will learn in time and all will return to normal. Patience.”

“Not my virtue,” I said.  James would have smiled.  Fahd frowned but in the end agreed to shield my child until I returned with her father.

Without a passport,  I waited at the front gate until the Army transport arrived to collect me.  A guard stood uneasily at either shoulder, clearly disapproving but Fahd had accompanied me and spoken to them on my behalf before hugging me and driving off.

Heavily armed soldiers sandwiched me on the trip to a small airstrip near their base.  Eyes shielded by mirrored sunglasses, their body language obscured under layers of kevlar and khaki.  Their camp was in disarray and I learned from the handful of other detained Americans that the Emirate had politely insisted on their withdrawal.

“Where are we going?” I asked a tall, dusty man who appeared the least shell-shocked of the group I found myself among.

“South Carolina.  There are camps there.”

“Camps?”

“Rex 84?” he studied me and when I didn’t react continued, “It’s the Homeland Security Act that allows the president to declare martial law.   Intern citizens.”

“You mean enemy combatants,” I said, remembering the words I’d heard.

“Potato, po-tah-to,” he shrugged.

Patience, I thought.  The universe had schooled me again.

On the Road #fridayflash


Hands are not easy to remove, but with a Swiss army knife, a hammer and a pair of electric wire clippers, it can be done. They were all I had anyway.

The woman didn’t need her hand anymore. As nearly as I could figure, she hadn’t been dead for long. The tell-tale greenish cast to the skin just about the ears and the nape of the neck contrasted with her bloodless pallor, but the moist heat of the Gulf coast seeps in quickly. Dead bodies seed fast. This one wasn’t crawling  but would be soon enough.

I didn’t need the hand though I’d used fingers for the odd biometric scans that were still in use in some communities. I needed her ID braclet in tact, cutting the chain deactivates them. My own tag was worthless. I’d been issued it before the war ended and now it marked me as a transient refugee and I wasn’t going back to the camps. It was chipped as well, so I’d tossed it as soon as I could even though it was rare to run across SS outside the metropolitan areas and they are the only ones with functional scanners these days. If a person needed to cross a border however, which I did, chipless IDs were desirable. It said two things about the wearer. The first assured the border patrol the person had status prior to The Dissolution, and the second that he or she had never been detained. Detainees, who could be anyone from a simple refugee to a war crimes fugitive, were not allowed to travel freely between zones without papers. Visas were hard to get. Costly and nearly always attention attracting, I’d never bothered to try and obtain one even though I probably had connections enough still to do it.

The most important aspect of the bracelet was that, judging from its size and shape, it conferred citizenship on the wearer. I hadn’t seen one of the new IDs issued by the North American Alliance of States and Provinces, but it was similar enough to the old one that I was confident enough to sit in a ditch for two hours hacking skin and pounding bones to obtain it.

She appeared to have been thrown from a bike which I found a few meters off from her twisted corpse. I keep to the ditches when I travel the old major highways despite the paucity of traffic. It’s only marginally safer at any rate, but I exercise as much caution as I can now that I am alone.

I toyed with the idea of taking the bike too, but it would have made me a theft target and, being female I am temptation enough, so I left it with regrets. In the end I emptied her pack, keeping the useful or edible and then transferring my possession from the tattered Lululemon bag I’d liberated from a deserted store along with a few clothing items I’d always coveted but could never afford.

In the pack I found an old Canadian passport. Her name was Claire. I ripped the photo out and a couple of pages for good measure and stuffed them into a pocket of my light jacket. No one would question a beat up passport from before the war. Just having one at all was a coup.

I’d been heading west but now it was time to go north. I wasn’t sure exactly where the new border lay. The last I’d heard the NAASP extended only as far south as Missouri and just to the Mississippi, but the Confederacy had been in retreat all year and with luck I might hit the border sooner than that.

The heat settled around me like Lady Godiva’s golden tresses but in a sticky stringy way I’d come to loathe. It was not like the dry winds of the Emirate where I’d left my child in the care of friends when war broke out, trapping my husband in a disintegrating land.

The last word I had from him indicated that he was being relocated north. New Ontario maybe but more likely in the Nations. I was a long way from there.

Bracelet jangling loosely on my wrist, I climbed up the grassy hill to the road. Dusk darkened the horizon and dimmed the air all around.  I hadn’t seen or heard a motorized vehicle for almost a week. The rough pavement made for faster travel and, with my new identity, I decided to risk the scant patrols.

Eubie Blake: Beginnings #fridayflash a Day Late


Although he only existed in Eubie’s mind, Eubie liked to quote his old Canuck friend as though he was threaded through the fabric of a life Eubie blinked himself into like a bad sitcom episode.

“If you can’t be handsome, be handy,” was Robin’s shop-worn motto and since it was easier to fake handiness than handsomeness, Eubie went for the former. A roll of duct tape and the ability to tell a hawk from a handsaw had served him well in his salad days in The City, and even when maturity and responsibilities forced him to the chemically greener pastures on The Shore, a passing familiarity with a hammer, the ability to differentiate between a nail and a screw and the electric screw-driver with multiple heads meant Eubie more than held his own among the honey-do set.

Most of the time, the incongruity which was simply “then” and “now” to Eubie was like a well-crafted flight of stairs. Eubie glided up and down unaware because the effort required was negated by simplistically elegant design coupled with flawless implementation. There were moments though when the hasty craftsmanship of this new reality resulted in mis-step. A face would turn up wrong. Mud brown eyes tinged with jade that should have been the green of a shadowy forest, or a mis-matched couple with children who seemed uncomfortable in their skins. Children, Eubie noted early, jittered perceptibly with low-level awareness. The dissonance of existence coursing through them like the after effects of a taser jolt. They reminded him of Zoey’s Siamese, Mrs. Fletcher.

“She disapproves of me,” Eubie complained one hazy morning as they sat on Zoey’s enclosed patio that just skimmed the treeline of the massive green space of City Park.

Mrs. Fletcher narrowed her china sky eyes and sunk deeply into Zoey’s lap as she lounged on one of the rattan chairs Eubie had liberated from a posh address recently in lieu of payment for  a disposal service. Her snow white feet propped up on the matching table, she stroked the animal from head to rump with hypnotic rhythm.

“She has cause,” Zoey said, leaving Eubie to the mercy of his half-memories and imagination. It had occurred to him even before Mrs. Fletcher’s obvious disdain that the animals whose paths crossed with his own were aware in a way what was wrong.  Just as children sensed their altered states, pets possessed a caged attitude that manifested in knowing looks and inappropriate contact. Cats were especially seductive, Mrs. Fletcher excepted, when they weren’t sizing Eubie up for meal potential, and dogs ran the gamut of psychiatric disorders. It was like karma had conspired to incite a rampant deathbed belief in its own self.

Eubie missed Robin just like he missed Omar, the coffee cart guy. But the difference was that Omar still haunted the corner of 42nd and Passing Square which is where Eubie stopped for his double-double on his way to the public library on mornings after a subway run.

Running subway had been the bread and butter of his trade in the early days after he’d found Zoey again. These days his clientele was semi-exclusive and his reputation beyond his active control, but he found peace riding the sewers of The City. Far beneath the concrete, time couldn’t torture him.

Zoey called it “temporal sensitivity”. It didn’t bother the vampires. In fact, vampirism inoculated it’s members to a large extent from the déjà vu vertigo that roiled Eubie’s consciousness.  He remembered people who’d never lived, events which hadn’t happened and a world that suddenly wasn’t a cesspool at all by comparison.

Memory has become a perpetually chipped tooth that I can’t keep my tongue off of, Eubie thought.

He longed to be counted and ignorant, but he had stepped off the early evening transit eighteen months earlier to find himself displaced and horrifyingly aware of it.

“At least you’re not a cat,” Zoey said.

“And that would be the only upside,” Eubie replied as Mrs. Fletcher purred and smiled Cheshire-like, as though she knew something Eubie did not .