James A. Foster

We face each other across a linen-draped table at a crowded outdoor cafe in Amsterdam, me astride a giant tortoise and the trout floating in midair. Between us, a crystal trumpet vase sprouts a single black tulip.

“Hit me,” he says.

I tuck a cigarette into his mouth and light it. “Those things’ll kill you,” I say.

He tips a pectoral fin toward his head and says, “Can’t. No lungs.” Smoke puffs from his gills.

An organ grinder holds a leash tied to a monkey, who wears a waiter’s uniform and little red kepi. His name tag says, “Hello. I’m Bobo.” The organ grinder wears thick black glasses, and a white cane with a red tip lies beside him. He turns the crank of the hurdy-gurdy. “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” comes out.

Everyone but the trout and I—and Bobo—pairs up to dance. As the couples rotate slowly, Bobo slouches, hangs his head, and sobs.

A fleet of silver dirigibles swim into view high above us, blotting out the sun.

“It’s cold as death,” I say.

“Didn’t notice,” the trout says. “Cold blooded.”

I ask, “Where do trout go when they die?”

He blows two perfect smoke rings, one out of each gill, and shrugs. Or something like a shrug, since he doesn’t have shoulders. “Depends on how.” The smoke rings rise and merge into a figure eight.

“Meaning?”

“Usually, something takes us up.”

“To Heaven?”

He shakes his body, which wags his face. “No, no, no. Just ‘up.’ As in, ‘Out of the water.’”

“Like what?”

“Osprey. Eagle. Sometimes otter. Or one of you. To eat.”

The dancers’ feet leave the ground and they begin to rise, still rotating slowly with the melody. “Everyone has to eat,” I say.

“I tell you secret. Little fish? Full of protein. Once I am old, bugs are not enough.”

I think of Swift’s Modest Proposal. It’s a good thing human babies aren’t smaller, or shaped like minnows: like long, thin, slimy cigars, perfectly suited for a big fish’s gullet. Babies would stick in my throat.

The dancers stop dancing then tip over, backs to the ground, stomachs toward the dirigibles. They accelerate upwards. There are no birds.

Ash falls off the end of his cigarette and rises, toward the horizontal bodies.

“What if you just get old, and die?”

He did the fin-shrug. “We float off. Bear eats us. Or something. Or wash up onshore and rot.” He makes burble, which I suppose is a laugh, “Finally. Bugs eat us.”

Shade from the dirigibles chills my espresso. “That’s your body,” I say. “What happens to you.”

He doesn’t answer at first—just stares through lidless eyes. I wonder if he misses his river. There’s a canal nearby, but that’s saltwater. That would kill him. He says, “Beats me.”

The un-dancers zoom upwards now, far above the rooftops.

“Do you mind?” he says, pointing with his eyes at the stub dangling from his lipless mouth. It makes him look cross-eyed. I take it and drop it in my cold coffee. It sizzles then floats, belly up.

The music stops. The organ grinder begins to snore. Bobo unties the leash and shuffles over. He tugs his little white apron and tips his tiny hat. He nods to the cigarette butt floating in my cup and says, “Another?” His voice is surprisingly deep for such a tiny fellow.

“No thanks,” I say. “We’re done here.”

The trout bobs his head, as if nodding.

Bobo returns to his station, ties the leash around the blind organ grinder’s neck, and turns the crank. It plays, “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You.” The organ grinder begins to tap dance, beating time with his cane.

Far overhead, the floating bodies smash into the undersides of the dirigibles, like bugs on a windshield. Their shoes fall off and flutter down, like snow. The airships drift silently away.

The trout is gone.

 

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JAMES A. FOSTER is a retired Distinguished Professor of Biology, Philosophy, and Computer Science, with an extensive academic publication and editorial record. He lives with his wife Martha and calico kitten Skitterbutt in a tiny former logging town in Northern Idaho. Since retirement, he’s been writing fiction, and has published a poem and a short story in Bowery Gothic and Synkroniciti. He holds an A.B. in Classical Philosophy from the University of Chicago, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In his spare time, he reads classical Greek, plays the Blues, pursues wild fish in remote places, and drinks excellent whisky.

Alyssa Beatty

Farah watched the washer spin. Once vibrant colors, muted by water and soap, twined together and twisted apart: a hypnotic soggy kaleidoscope.

“Clothes’ll get clean without supervision. Don’t lollygag,” Sadie barked from just behind her. Farah jumped. Sadie was surprisingly stealthy for a woman of her heft.

Farah inhaled a blast of menthol. Sadie kept an endless stock of half-crushed packs of Parliament Greens stashed around the laundromat.

“I’m waiting to transfer it over to the dryer,” Farah lied. The machine had five minutes on it; so, eight in laundry time.

Sadie grunted and shuffled behind the counter to count change, her favorite pastime. She was a mystery to Farah. Who used words like lollygag without irony? And she was always here. No matter when Farah came in, Sadie was behind the counter, smoking and counting. 

She also claimed to be psychic. Farah saw no evidence of this. Sadie said she refrained from reading Farah’s mind out of courtesy, a statement so blatantly out of character it was clearly a lie.

Still, she did have an uncanny ability to predict the cost of every load of laundry dropped off, to the cent, without looking at the scale. Although that might just be experience.

Farah hated working here. The heat, the noise. The smells. Sure, there was a voyeuristic satisfaction in handling other people’s dirty clothes. When she got bored, which was almost always, Farah extrapolated stories from the stains. Was that ketchup or blood splattered on the cream blouse? She could see the petite blonde with the razor-sharp bob committing murder. To be fair, she could see any woman going full murderess. Her divorce had taught her that if you hadn’t felt the urge to kill, it just meant you hadn’t met the right person yet.

When Farah took this job, she thought it would be a good way to meet people in the neighborhood. Six months working here, and Farah still didn’t know anyone. She was just a thing people shoved their dirty clothes at. A washing machine with a face.

“What do you do on your time off?” Farah asked, unloading a bag full of children’s underwear printed with grinning ducks into the washer. Why were there so many? And oh god, what was that smell?

“What do you mean?” Sadie said, past the cigarette dangling precariously from her lip, an ability Farah secretly admired.

“For fun? What do you do?”

Sadie glared at her through mint-scented smoke. “This.” She gestured to the rows of stacked quarters. 

Okayyyy. Farah slotted coins into the machine, holding her breath. The smell would follow her home, she knew it.

What do I do for fun? she thought. Her mind went blank. She couldn’t picture herself outside of this room. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember her last day off, either.

“Can I have tomorrow off?”

Sadie squinted at her. “What do you mean?” These conversational cul-de-sacs were not uncommon.

“Can I not come to work tomorrow, so I can do something else instead?”

Sadie squeezed her eyes shut. “You forgot again. Why do they always send me idiots?”

“Hey.” Even for Sadie, that was harsh.

“Come here.”

Farah wove between towering stacks of laundry bags to reach the counter.

“I’m only doing this one more time. Then you’re on your own. No skin off my teeth.” Sadie pressed a yellowed fingertip to Farah’s forehead. “Close your eyes. It don’t work otherwise.”

Farah closed her eyes. A movie reel played against the dark of her eyelids.

There she was, in her old house, folding laundry. Her most hated household task. She’d washed the shower curtain liner with bleach and Borax—it was sparkling white again, all that nasty orange mold washed away—and she knew Marvin wouldn’t notice. He never noticed, and it drove her insane. She could kill him. Honestly, she could. She heard him slamming the front door behind him; he always slammed it no matter how many times she asked him not to, and that drove her insane, too. She picked up the knife she used to open the Borax and went to meet him.

Farah opened her eyes. “Oh my god. I murdered my husband, didn’t I?”

“Yep. Thirty-two stabs. Impressive. Overkill, literally, but impressive.”

“But…then I moved here. I got a new apartment, and this job. I must have served my time and blocked it all out. Right?”

Sadie snorted. “Sure. You moved here. Look out the window, dimwit.”

There was nothing. Just a white void.

“For the eighty-sixth—no, wait—eighty-seventh time, welcome to the afterlife. Hell sweet hell. You’ve been sentenced to an eternity of punishment designed just for you. Aren’t you a lucky duck?”

Farah remembered it all, then. Her trial. The humiliation, neighbors whispering in the courtroom. Hastily knotted sheets tied to the bunk in her cell.

“But, the people who come in…the laundry.”

“All for you, sweetums.”

It occurred to Farah that perhaps Sadie was a demon. That would explain her general air of contentment. “What did you do to end up here?” 

“Swindled old ladies out of their life savings. They all wanted to talk to their dearly departed husbands. I could do it, mind you. I really am psychic. But all the men did was bellyache about being dead. So, I told their widows pretty lies and took all their money. Died in my sleep and woke up with this peach of a job and all the Parliaments I can smoke. Afterlife is subjective, you ask me. This is my heaven.”

Farah’s knees buckled. She sank into an uncomfortable-by-design plastic chair. It made an awful kind of sense, really. Hadn’t she complained to Marvin a million times—not that he ever noticed—that doing laundry was her exact idea of hell?

 

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ALYSSA BEATTY lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in Penumbric Speculative Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, and Spread: Tales of Deadly Flora. Find her at alyssabeattywrites.com.