Mini Pack: Four Flash Fiction Pieces by Anne Cooperstone

1 THE GIBEAU ORANGE JULEP Marion and Suze lost their second cousin in the parking lot of the Orange Julep. One moment she was with them, the next moment she was gone.

While waiting for her return, the sisters sipped their sodas through plastic straws under the shadow of the Julep’s sacrosanct sphere. The building, long ago painted carmine red, resembled an oversized marble. It was three stories high, next to a Burger King on a Montreal highway.

“If aliens ever came down they’d think it was a temple,” Marion said, shielding her eyes against that other, orangish orb.

Suze shrugged, chewing the tip of her straw. She rubbed her jaw where it was sore.

“Where do you think she is?”

It was Marion’s turn to shrug.

Marion, Suze, and Liza had come from a family wedding twenty minutes up the highway.

Marion and Suze were chain smoking behind the rental hall, kitten heels sunk into freshly laid mulch, when Liza jumped out at them from behind the bushes. She was precocious and awkward, just nearing puberty, knees like doorknobs, her face buffed with the wrong color makeup. She wore a cardigan over a spaghetti strap dress over a thick tank top, protective layers between new body and air.

“Smoking is a really uncool way to die,” she said. She had just gone through the D.A.R.E. program at her elementary school.

The sisters shared a sidelong glance. They were Irish twins, nineteen and twenty; sometimes even they forgot which was older (it was Marion, by ten months).

“Go back inside,” Suze said.

“My mom said she’d take me to get a Julep.”

“Do I look like your mother?” Marion asked.

They took her anyway, in their dad’s Toyota. They drove with the windows down. Suze felt around in the glove compartment and surfaced with a tube of plum-colored lipstick, the cap missing, the tip crushed. She stared at it, so like a purple bullet. After touching the pigment, her fingers looked bruised.

“What’s that?” Liza said, pressing her chin into Suze’s shoulder rest. Her breath smelled like the eggy party sandwiches that were passed around after the ceremony.

Marion plucked the tube from Suze’s fingers and tossed it out the window. “Trash, now.”

At the picnic table, without Liza, the sisters sucked at the dregs of their Juleps and looked everywhere but each other. To their right, a man in a leather jacket laid across a picnic table like a cadaver at the morgue, chewing a toothpick while his friends bickered across his body. At another table, a family played tic-tac-toe with hamburger cartons and forks.

“You don’t think she was kidnapped, do you?” Suze asked. She was wringing the fabric of her dress, light-blue chiffon.

“No way. Who’d want her?” Marion paused, considered. “Even if she was, there’s nothing to do about it now. If she turns up, she turns up. If she doesn’t, well. Rest in peace.” At the look her sister gave her, Marion laughed.“ I’m just kidding.”

“But where could she have gone?”

Both of their heads turned toward the highway. They were close enough to the speeding cars that the wind tickled their eyeballs.

“If she’s not back in ten,” Marion said.

2 “If she’s not back in ten, what?”

Marion avoided Suze’s eye. She knew that Suze would blame her for this. Suze blamed Marion for everything, so much so that Marion had started to suspect that really, in actuality, Suze really blamed herself.

“Then we’ll start to look,” Marion said.

There were only two directions: toward the Julep and away from it.

3 PLANE Halfway through our flight from Los Angeles to Boise, a very pregnant passenger went into labor. The geriatric woman in 28B squeezed my hand and said, “We’ll remember this for the rest of our lives.”

The task of deliverance went to a urologist in his second year of residency. He stayed quiet at first when the flight attendant asked through the intercom, “Is there a doctor on board?”

He would let someone less specialized, or more experienced, volunteer. But when there seemed in earnest to be no other doctor on board, after the second then third request went unanswered, the urologist finished his whisky and took off toward the cockpit.

They took over first class for the birth, which had been mostly empty, anyway. The two passengers who’d been usurped from seats 2A and 2B were offered new seats in economy, but they chose to wander listlessly round the cabin instead.

I tried to drown out the birthing screams with my headphones but after a while I gave in and wept. My seat mate held me to her chest and repeated, “Oh, but you’re just so young. You’re just so young.” When the newborn’s cries rang out through the plane, everybody clapped like we’d done something great.

I caught a glimpse of the baby after landing. They let the new mother off first but I yelled about a connecting flight and rushed ahead of the other passengers. A paramedic waited to escort her and the infant off the plane. The baby’s mouth opened and closed like a guppy, its eyes squeezed shut against the fluorescent airport lights. When the medic went to swaddle the newborn, the mother took the blanket from him and did it herself atop the ticket desk. I watched its fingers, toes disappear one by one into the womb-like wrap, its skin still pruned from the embryonic fluid. If I had been closer, it is possible I would have wrapped my lips around its hand to see what fresh life tasted like, the mammalian brine.

At bag check, I watched the conveyor belt go round until it was only my suitcase left, paltry and leather, a gift from an old professor. I walked out of the airport and down past the taxis, toward the long-term parking lot, and then past that too, until I reached the I-84, a parade of bodies zipping by in cars.

4 TALKING SHIT ABOUT A PRETTY SUNSET LA I walked up a hill on the East side toward his sister’s empty house. The hill was too steep to be man-made. A construction vehicle left me in the dust. The door was painted red like liquid Tylenol. Inside the house, the shower was on and he was in it. The house was made of dark wood. The floors were the same as the paneled walls. There was no furniture besides a coffee table. I walked toward the bay windows. It is impossible to be alone with my thoughts. The heat found its way inside. There was a tricycle in the backyard. Twigs stitched across the chain link fence. The tricycle was to the left. There was a family living on the bottom level. He told me this later.

The shower turned off. There was condensation on his forehead. There used to be a freckle at the tip of his nose. It disappeared sometime between the Pacific Northwest and Seville. When we kissed it was just like old times. He picked me up and dropped me on the coffee table. Wine flew, maroon drops on the wooden panels like a Pollack, a darker red than the door. He took a washcloth to the wine stained wall. His sister was trying to sell the house. We played chess twice and I lost both games. He did not let me think that we had a future.

I want to precisely describe sharing a fried chicken sandwich in our underwear. My body moves of its own volition. Is there something so wrong with loving more? We moved the mattress to the cooler room. It is easier to cry lying down.

I left his sister’s house. It was the day before the heat wave broke. I sat with my friends on a rooftop. We talked about how our skin was supposed to clear up after graduating high school.

There’s no such thing as irony if you have a bad memory. He sent me a picture of my necklace cupped in his palm. It looked like a newt, all slippery on his skin.

There’s nothing fancy about heartburn. I will stop eating acidic foods when it starts to feel like a problem.

NY A stranger and I arrange to meet at a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn. The restaurant is a window, the menu taped to the glass. I see him ambling down the sidewalk. He wears a Rush shirt without irony. We order three dishes to share. He places his hand between my shoulder blades. He pays, but only after checking that I would not mind.

—Chivalry isn’t dead, I say.

He winks or twitches. We eat at a picnic table in a park. I tell him a story about being fifteen.

I meet his friends. They ask me who in the room would I most want to sleep with. I ask them what would be worse, ruining a friendship or having such great sex that you fall in love? I make one wrong move and have to start over. The dog finds a tennis ball under the couch. We eat rare

5 steak and grilled scallops. Everyone misses the old New York. It’s over every time the ball drops again.

The next time we meet it’s in a park on 10th and 15th. During the day, its view of New Jersey is blocked by a structure being built by the city, an island of hexagons on the Hudson. During the night, the park is infested by rats. We sit on metal chairs drinking tall boys. I see twenty, twenty five rats flit by. They are chasing each other. They are playing.

—This must be where all the subway rats go out after work, he says.

—It’s the only place in this town they can really let loose, I say. No suits and ties required.

He moves over to my side of the table. We hear the elegiac music of scuttling rats. I am wearing pants with many pockets. He puts his hands on my knees. He is a good kisser which makes up for the fact that he was homeschooled in the name of Christ.

—I really want to take your pants off, he says.

—Hubba, hubba, I say.

We kiss until my lips feel swollen. The whole time I think, this could be anyone. I know it could not be anyone. It could not be my ex at his sister’s house.

—Do you want to go home together? He says in rat park.

—I’ll make someone wait for once, I say.

We hold hands when we leave. There is an arch at rat park’s entrance like at a carnival. I watch us from behind as we exit through the gates. It looks like the ending to a movie. The movie would not include the rats.

When we do go home together, it is to his new apartment in Prospect Heights, but by that time the excitement is so gone that I’m not convinced it ever existed.

He calls me a few weeks later to tell me that he’s worried about a thing he had said to me at rat park. He says he’s not good at these things.

—Someone had to explain the Louis CK thing to me a bunch of times before I understood it.

—Hold on, I say. What thing did you say to me at rat park?

—The thing about wanting to take your pants off.

—Didn’t Louis CK jack off into a bush?

—Well, I don’t know, I never really understood the whole thing about him.

He asks me when I’ll next be free to go on another date. I tell him that it won’t be for a while but I’d let him know.

LA He drove to my friend’s house to drop off the necklace. He did not get out of his car. Instead, I got inside. We sat on the hot leather. It was the same car he’d always had. I ran my hand across the center console. Though I did not expect him to kiss me, it still surprised me when he didn’t. I told him it’d be too hard to see him again. I thought I’d be rewarded for doing the right thing.

Instead, he told me he understood. He hugged me for so long that it no longer felt intimate.

There is a chance we’ll never see each other again. I keep hoping for a proclamation of love.

Instead I go to a dispensary and spend my paycheck. This is my grand gesture, I think as I light

6 up on the roof. Nothing is worse than feeling old at twenty-five. When my neck creaks I tell myself, that’s the way it is. Nobody else in the apartment complex is outside. It is as if I’ve come out from underground and found the party empty. I do not care to find out where everybody has gone. Pollution makes the sky the color of his orange cat’s paw. He gave the cat to his mom because she was lonely up the coast.

It’s hard to appreciate something that happens every day. I am struck with fear that life is made up of these days, one after the other. The most interesting things have already happened by tomorrow.

7 TWELFTH STEP At the supermarket, her girlfriend throws a tantrum in the freezer aisle.

“She’s fine,” the girl says to staring passersby. “She’s emotional, so what? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

But she buys her girlfriend a pacifier that day and starts coaxing it into her mouth any time they go out in public. She thinks as she drives that everybody sure loves individualism when it comes to technology expos and comic con but as soon as her girlfriend starts to scream, it’s all about fitting in.

“I just can’t take it anymore,” the girl says at AA. She holds a monitor in her lap in case her girlfriend wakes up.

“Is she in your car?” Someone says, peering over her shoulder.

“The windows are cracked,” the girl snaps, and the moderator suggests everybody join hands.

After the meeting, she’s pushing 80 on the freeway; her girlfriend sleeps better in sonic motion. She opens the glove compartment for some gum and finds there a tiny bottle of vodka instead. Her girlfriend must have switched it, trashed the gum and replaced it with Tito’s like an IED. Instead of anger, the girl feels gratitude and opens the nip with her teeth. She checks the rearview mirror, sees her girlfriend curled up like a cherub/heavenly body, feels the onus of love like a wrench in her skull. She drinks, she drives.

8 Anne Cooperstone is a current MFA candidate in creative writing at Stonybrook Southampton.

She is based in New York.