BUSTED FENCE
In the photograph, it’s Halloween, 1956. I’m sitting on a split rail fence next to my girlfriend. We’re in the second grade. I’m smiling, but her mouth is shut tight because she has buck teeth and everyone torments her. I’m a skeleton, white bones on a black background. She’s a skeleton, black bones on a white background. Her mother made both costumes.
I still miss her.
I go back to the old town, to our neighborhood. I find the split rail fence. Now my costume is: Old Fart, stiff and slow. I pull myself up onto the top rail, put my loafers on the second rail.
There’s a noise like arthritis. Then the whole fence collapses.
I’m on the ground, splintered like a porcupine.
I hear someone yell: Hey!
I’m a kid again, always in trouble. I get up and run like hell. I didn’t know I had it in me.
*
The next day I was back at work, looking over my shoulder, feeling like someone was going to come arrest me for busting the fence. It would be a constable, in an old-time uniform.
My girlfriend, Eppa, joined me at the ice cream counter. She wanted to keep her father, my boss, from being pissed at me for giving the kids too much ice cream. She had donned a white apron. It increased her resemblance to her obese mother. The hook of her nose seemed more pronounced, her hair more straggly.
I felt so demoralized that I gave the kids tiny scoops. They glared at me, their love having transformed instantly into hate.
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BUZZING NEEDLE
1.
Angela goes to a tattoo parlor to get a prison camp number tattooed on her forearm, the same number her grandfather had in Auschwitz. The tattoo artist offers to do it for free.
I wish I could do this without needles, he says. I wish I didn’t have to inflict pain, but it’s a necessity of my career, just like it was necessary for the Nazis, who were merely following orders. If the Holocaust happened at all. If it wasn’t just a figment of the paranoid Jewish imagination.
Angela pulls her arm away. The buzzing needle hangs in the air. How had she managed to begin this spiritual act by stumbling into the lair of this creep?
A friend had recommended him. Sometimes you can’t depend on friends. Sometimes there’s no one you can depend on.
2.
I can’t depend on the governor. He banned the gay cure for minors. The one that Jesus inspired. Now I’m shipwrecked with the permanency of my perversion.
Emotional harm is weighed on a jeweler’s scale, but it’s my life that’s in the balance. How can anyone deny me the right to deny my true self when, every day, the world demands that I do so?
#
author bio:
Work by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois appears in magazines worldwide. Nominated for numerous prizes, he was awarded the 2017 Booranga Centre (Australia) Fiction Prize. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and as a print edition. His poetry collection, THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE, published in March 2019 by Pski’s Porch Publishing, is available here. Visit his website to read more of his poetry and flash fiction.