Herbert - 2 flash fiction

Dennis Scott Herbert 

Squeeze My Hand and I Will Read

My wife’s life-size Whitman Doll™ wouldn’t stop reciting poetry. It had to be repaired. Though, that wasn’t the whole issue. I was focused on making an escape, dodging the fangs, the poison, the house split and ablaze.

(And just to be clear, it didn’t have to go this far with the Whitman Doll™. She was the one who sold {private precious item} on Craigslist. I wasn’t playing dirty on the internet. Only getting even.)

The highway was jammed up with an afternoon commute so I tipped the brim of Whitman Doll’s™ felt hat, blocking the rubber face from view, as if it were a napping companion, next to me, exhausted from a long day of work. And the two of us, man and machine, opened the carpool lane. 

We were moving. But the Whitman Doll™ was draining me down. It glitched and stuttered through Leaves of Grass. “My tongue, my tongue, my tongue,” it said, stuck. “My tongue, every atom of my blood.” 

I turned up the radio but could still hear the recorded voice of some random American citizen reciting lines of poetry. And every time it finished a section:

“Squeeze my hand and I will read, will read, will…read. Squeeze my hand and I will read. Brought to you by the Whitman Project.” And the doll didn’t need a squeeze of its hand to start again. It went on to naked bathing men and I was like, alright this is too far. Is this why she’d kept the thing around?

(drink)

So we go on like that for miles. Me driving, it talking. Then sirens blare and lights in my rear view. No problem. Everybody knows what to do. Pull over. 

The officer sat in his car behind me. We waited. From the window I saw everybody else sitting in the regular lanes. Frustrated. Fuming in their cars. They had no idea what was going on in my life. I had no idea what was going on in theirs. 

Whitman Doll™ said, “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul.” I muffled him with my suitcase.

The police officer came up and tapped my window, said, “I gotta bring you back, Walt. Your wife loves you very much. Spoke with her myself, just now. She said, whatever I do, bring back her Walt.”

Then he asked me, “Will you follow me home?” And I said, “That won’t be necessary, officer. I will go home.” He said he would be watching. He thought my name was Walt, I obeyed him anyway. 

The Whitman Doll™ had to go to the back seat, I couldn’t take anymore. We exited off the highway. It jostled around, started up again.  

“Squeeze my hand. The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,” the Whitman Doll™ said. It looked real in the rearview, slouched on its side, the rubber skin life like, like my wife’s. I thought about years and years ago and my own tongue. A time of love in a honeymoon shack by the beach.

Southbound traffic was locked. We merged in and inched and waited and inched like everybody else who didn’t have a real person to ride with. I squinted into the line of cars turned orange by the setting sun. All of us moved together like some slow machine, one million of us, a millipede crawling home.

The Amateur

I hypnotized my first-grade-teacher with the ancient art style and an artifact emerald on a chain that once came from a .25 cent machine. The class was in the tech lab and we were supposed to do math. But we all wanted to augment Alice in Wonderland instead.

“Behold,” I said, “the emerald on the chain,” and swung it back and forth.

She smiled.

“You are getting sleepy,” I said.

“Very sleepy,” I said.

When she went to sleep her head clunked on a desk. The class cheered. I got high fives and pats on the back. Then we played Alice in Wonderland like we were on drugs for four hours, skipping science, art, and lunch. 

The principal came looking for us because we were not in the cafeteria. And when he found us, all rowdy and wild from the hours of Alice in Wonderland, he yelled. When he saw Miss Hurley asleep in a chair, he yelled more. But she didn’t wake up.

Nobody said anything about the hypnotism.

Miss Hurley never came back to school. 

Years later, when I was living alone in an apartment by the monorail track, my phone rang. This was strange because the phone never rang; it was fixed to the wall and dusty like an antique work of art.

“Nathanial,” the voice asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“This is Miss Hurley,” the voice said, “your first grade teacher you hypnotized.”

“Wow, Miss Hurley,” I said. “How are you?”

 “You ruined my life,” she said. “I’m an alcoholic.”

“Me too,” I said. “I’m an alcoholic, too – ” 

“Nathanial,” she cut me off, “I need you to do something. You really fucked me up.”

“How so?”

“I can’t sleep, I can hardly eat. The only thing I crave is peaches. Do you still have that emerald on a chain?”

“Of course,” I said.

The phone cut out. 

After a few minutes, the monorail whirred by, vibrating above nature. The pane of my one window shook and the old man next door moaned. My kitchen light flickered. The wooden boards of my water-damaged floor undulated like waves moved by the moon in an ocean of a distant memory. One childhood summer in a row boat beating against the shore. 

I spent the weeks after that call looking for my emerald on a chain, but couldn’t find it. 

One evening, while I was digging through a box of winter clothes and scarves, I heard the squeaking of steps below, the trudging of feet. Then, a small rap of knuckles on my door.

When I answered, a small, old woman stood in the hallway. Her hair was wild and matted and wet from the rain. Plastic grocery bags were tied over her shoes. 

I invited Miss Hurley inside and offered her a seat at my table in the kitchen. She sat under the light of the lone bulb and I saw how time had passed, the wrinkles across her face, the anxiety around her eyes. I told her I was having trouble finding the emerald on the chain, and this upset her.

She slammed her little fist down, rattling the flap of Formica that had come loose from the table. Her arm trembled.

“Don’t get upset,” I said.

“I really need this,” she said.

I told her we could try some other things. There was a book I had bought when I studied the ancient arts, when I wanted to be a hypnotist, when I was young and believed I had a gift.

“Give me a second, it’s in the back room.”

Once I returned, Miss Hurley looked tired, which I thought might help. I flipped through the pages until I found the chapter.

“Listen to me,” I said and read. I held up my index finger, following the instructions, and moved it slowly back and forth. “Miss Hurley.” Her eyes followed.

“You are getting sleepy,” I said.

“Very sleepy,” I said.

She didn’t go to sleep.

“Please,” she said, “I just want things to be normal. I want to sleep. I want to eat.” She hung her head, slowly moved it side to side.

“Okay,” I said, “Just a minute,” and I flipped through other pages. A distant whirring began to grow.

Old Miss Hurley looked up.

I told her, “You might want to hold on.”

And when she asked, “What?” the monorail sped by atop the hillside.

Dirty dishes tumbled in the sink and the empty picture frame fell from the wall. Miss Hurley’s loose skin quivered with the vibrations, her bones rattled. Her eyelids slowly closed and her head went down to rest on the table. It bounced around until the monorail was gone.

Finally, I thought, Miss Hurley could get some sleep. I went back to the box and got a long coat and a few scarves. I covered her and wrapped her tight to get her through the cold. In the morning, maybe she’d like some breakfast. But when I rummaged through the pantry, all the cabinets, there was no food.

This made me hungry and tired.

I dragged my mattress from across the other side of the room. Neither of us would have to sleep alone. I flipped the light switch off and got on the floor.  

Then I remembered. 

“Miss Hurley,” I said. She was under. This was my chance. “Behold, Miss Hurley.” My voice sounded big in the still evening. “It is first-grade, and we are together, lost at sea. Lost at sea, Miss Hurley.” 

From the mattress I could see cracks in the ceiling that were darker than everything else. It was like a night sky over an open ocean, like looking at voids in the universe, black holes and wormholes instead of stars. I held my arms straight up in the air to conduct energy. “When you wake up, it is first-grade, Miss Hurley. And we are together, lost at sea. Lost at sea and warm, with an endless supply of food.”