October 2024 Flash Lit 5:2 - Hand Over Hand

“See,” said Hal, “all you have to do is double your bet and add a little every time you lose a hand.  That way, as soon as you win, you’ve recouped whatever you’ve lost and won some, too.”

Matt snorted.  “You’re not very good at math, are you?”

 

Hal eyed Matt suspiciously.  “I’m good enough,” he said, and rubbed the back of his head.

 

“How many hands do you think you might lose in a row?” Matt asked.  “Ten?”

 

Now Hal rubbed his upper lip.  “Well, maybe, if things don’t go well.”

 

“If you started by betting $2,” Matt said, sounding just like a textbook come to life, dry and condescending.

 

Matt shifted.  “I was thinking more like $10,” he said.

 

“Stick with me on the $2 for now.  We’ll also leave aside the idea of you adding extra over doubling for now.”

 

Hal said, “I don’t need this kind of negativity.”

 

“You lose the first hand, so you bet $4 on the second,” Matt went on remorselessly.  “Then $8 on the third.”

 

“I can multiply by two,” Hal said peevishly.

 

“Then $16 on the fourth, $32 on the fifth…”

 

“Still not worried,” Hal said.

 

“The sixth would be $64, the seventh $128, the eighth $256, the ninth $512, and the tenth $1024,” Matt said.

 

“That’s,” Hal sad.  “That’s not right?”

 

“If you kept going and lost 15 hands, that would be $32,768,” Matt finished.

 

Hal slumped in the chair for a minute.  Then, perking up, he said, “But I’m going to win.”

 

“Hand over your wallet,” Matt said.  “You’re not going.”

October 2024 Flash Lit 5:1 - Hand over hand

This used to be easier, Jenny thought, as she swung hand over hand across the monkey bars.  I was lighter then.

 

She pictured her first-grade self in her little white-collared dress and the shorts she had stealthily put on underneath so her panties wouldn’t show when she hung upside down.  There were a lot of things she didn’t know then, but there were calluses on her palms from swinging bar to bar over and over.  It had been almost effortless, free, rhythmic.

 

Not, however, when she was learning to skip a bar, and then, eventually, two bars.  Every time she missed and fell to the tanbark below, she heard the jeers from the line of kids waiting for a turn:  “You fell in the hot lava!”

 

Focus, she said to herself.  Here in hell, the lava was real. 

October 2024 Flash Lit 4:3 - On the Tip of My Tongue

Sweetness lives
at the tip of the tongue,
so why
do words I don’t say
taste so bitter?

October 2024 Flash Lit 4:2 - On the Tip of My Tongue

Ellie’s cold nose touched my ankle and then just the tip of her wet tongue.  Two heavy paws thumped on to the edge of the bed.  “Down, Ellie,” I said.  “I’m not dead, just sleeping.”

We did this, or some variation, over and over last night.  Sometimes she checked on Brent; sometimes she accompanied the ritual with a little whine.  Once Ellie was reassured and once we convinced her that no, we were not going to share the double bed with her, too, she resigned herself to sleeping near her sister Izzy.

 

And then, when I got up this morning, there was the thunder of paws and barking.  It was either joy that finally I would stop being mostly inaccessible or a recognition that awake I might be a whole different person.

 

I redeemed myself for this disruption by providing breakfast.  And now they are snoozing at my feet.

October 2024 Flash Lit 4:1 - On the Tip of My Tongue

 

“It’s not like there are brain cells in my tongue,” Lou protested, tucking her hair behind her ears.

 

“It’s an idiom, idiot,” Cindy said.

 

“But it’s a dumb one,” Lou continued.  “Gut feeling turned out to have some basis in fact.”

 

Cindy turned a page in the book she was half-reading.  “You’re just mad that I remember.”

 

“Remember what?” Lou eyed her sister suspiciously.

 

“That you used to say you loved people with all your heart and lungs.”

 

Lou said, “It makes just as much sense.”

October 2024 Flash Lit 3:3 - From Head to Toe

The metaphor-makers
got it before
the anatomists.
Score one for the arts.
The largest sense
Organ in the body
stretches under the skin,
a network of fascia
full of receptors
stretching head to toe.

October 2024 Flash Lit 3:2 - From Head to Toe

It made my whole body tingle, but not in a good way.  It was the crackle of anger and disgust and shame pulsing from head to toe, plus an aching in my chest and a stomach threatening to reject all contents.  And I wanted to cry.

Yes, it was an extreme reaction, but I don’t think it was disproportionate.  The provocation was a guard tower with a place for a searchlight and soldiers with guns at Manzanar.  Those guns were pointed inward.  At Americans.  At children, for God’s sake.  The only difference between the people held at Manzanar and me is that they were of Japanese ancestry.

 

I don’t know when I learned that my own country rounded up thousands of people and put them in makeshift concentration camps for years, but it was not before college.  I grew up somehow believing that Americans were the good guys now that we’d gotten rid of slavery.  We valued all people from all places, whatever color they were.  I wish that had turned out to be true.  We cis/straight/white people have a lot to answer for.

 

Seeing the history of Manzanar in front of me, the bones of the sheds people lived in, the toilets without partitions or privacy, the photos of families mourning their sons killed fighting for a country that questioned their loyalty, was powerful and horrible.  Seeing what the people confined to Manzanar managed to make out of their horrible conditions made me marvel at the resilience of people.

 

We Americans can choose.  We can choose to face and thereby begin to transform our racist history.  We can continue to try to sweep our mistakes under the rug.  Or, as more than I would like to admit want, we can embrace and expand that racism.

 

Vote, people.  Like our souls depend on it.