Small Places
Fiction runs for the fences

The Bear Deluxe Magazine continues its response-based series with the fourth installment: “Small Places: Flash fiction runs for the fences.” This collection of short narratives exhibits compelling, entertaining and poignant stories of lives lost, disappeared landscapes and childhood memories. Despite their brevity, the imagery, constructed in 100 words or less, lingers as a reminder that it is not the number of words that make a story but the potential for a single word to carry the reader off the page—a world where one word can mean 100 different things all at once. For an extended collection of submissions, please visit www.orlo.org. To receive notices of future response-based features through the writers’ list-serve, email bear@orlo.org.

White-Knuckled Drive
An average woman is driving on the freeway one average day when, suddenly, she slams on her brakes. She clutches the steering wheel—knuckles white, fingernails digging into the palms of her hands—and begins to scream, a shrill noise that permeates the air around her. She continues screaming while honking cars pass her, drivers waving their middle fingers; she screams until white froth forms at the corner of her bloodless lips and she is coughing uncontrollably.
Still in drive, foot on the brake, she lights a cigarette and chain-smokes until they come and take her away.
Gloria Harrison
Portland, Oregon

The Amazing Greatcoat
November felt like the beginning of the end.
Given the right circumstance—one drink too many on a frigid night—to end his squandered life in some act of wild abandon seemed appropriate.
The bluff terraced down to river. Gorge winds pummeled through town before putting out to sea, so when he pushed off the rock face, a gust of icy wind filled his greatcoat and he billowed up, soared wide, spiraled to an ass-first landing in the middle of Main Street, then slid under an old parked Caddie. The pretty blond driver opened her door
and laughed.
Evelyn Sharenov
Portland, Oregon

Last Banana
After a horrible mix-up at the zoo, Dad and I left with a lemur instead of my little brother Joey.
“Maybe Mom won’t notice,” I said as we waited
for the MAX. “She’s always saying Joey acts like a monkey.”
Dad glanced down at the lemur. We had dressed him in Joey’s spare blue jacket and red hat, and he actually did resemble Joey a little.
Dad suddenly looked relieved. “Yeah,” he said with a smile, “maybe she won’t notice.”
And, up until later that evening when she reached for the last banana, she didn’t.
Tim Josephs
Beaverton, Oregon

Wheelbarrow of Love
Transfixed, Yema stared at the garbage floating on the lagoon. Again! He fumed.
An example teaches best. Camouflaged, he shoved
a wheelbarrow up the dark lagoon, but no one came to dump anything into it. He came downstream: Detritus littered the surface; upstream was not different. At midnight he clambered up a coconut tree and surveyed the surroundings. Seeing someone carrying refuse, he slid down. But the person hurled the waste and scampered away. Before dawn, he lay flat in the grassland. A woman stalked toward the lagoon. Creeping, Yema leapt on her.
“Two years in jail,” the judge said.
Akoli Penoukou
Lome-Togo, West Africa

Dinner at the Yacht Club
She’s impossibly young, blond. There’s her fiancé, the doctor with an Irish name. She isn’t wearing a ring. He says she’s a mortician. She says she’s studying French literature. He hasn’t looked at her. Two sheets to the wind, he scrubs with half-lemons, moves behind our chairs, cracks, dismembers eight lobsters in three minutes. He flings hard orange shells onto an aluminum tray; beads of crustacean juice arc the round, linen-draped table. She squeezes her hands together between slim legs, grinning. Yeah, baybeh, she slurs. The band’s too loud. She mouths, I’m the only one
wearing a bib.
Rebecca B. Rank Perry
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

Birch Limbs
Amanda approached a pile of birch branches that lay in the corner of the clearing. Under the overcast November sky they looked as cold, grim and foreign
as a mound of animal teeth. “This is the exact place…
fifteen years ago,” Amanda thought wordlessly. The heap of discarded tree parts suddenly seemed a monument of former horrors, like a piece of the Berlin Wall. Thin strips of white bark flaked like skin.
Eyes wet, Amanda turned. On a nearby bench sat
an old woman, ignorant of all that had transpired when Amanda once walked alone through the park at night.
DC Young
Seattle, Washington

Lost Luck
Rail-thin, hollow-eyed, Santa-bearded, the shabby man stepped aboard the Tri Met bus just as the gentle Portland rain turned torrential. Impulsively I called out: “Here, sit by me.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out something. “For you.” It was a four-leaf
clover. “I sell them.” He went on to explain that he
had found 29 that day. I blushed as I realized I had no cash to offer. The rain stopped. He stepped off the bus near 52nd and Holgate. I pressed the clover in a book from my bag. I no longer remember which book it was.
Rosalie V. Grafe
Portland, Oregon

Balcony Views
“What do baby birds eat?” In his doorway stood the small, silver-haired neighbor he only knew from mornings on their adjoining balconies. For weeks she had sipped chai and praised the twittering nestlings under the eaves while he had gulped black coffee and cursed them.
“You’re feeding them?” he groaned. Wordlessly, she strode through his apartment. On the balcony, his eyes followed her finger pointing to roadside debris. Or a crushed mama bird. He gazed up at the winged orphans crying hungrily. He met her sad eyes.
He threw up his hands. “I’ll go find mealy worms!”
Jodi Webb
Pottsville, Pennsylvania

Counterinsurgency
G.I. Joe shimmies past the humongous Budweiser cans and scales up the side of the Naugahyde La-Z-Boy to the home of the sleeping giant. Inches away from
the gaping mouth of the beast, G.I. Joe readies his mega-power blaster and prepares to disintegrate the giant’s brain, freeing mankind from his reign of terror. Just as he’s about to pull the trigger, the giant sucks in a buttload of air and shoots it through his rubbery lips, blasting G.I. Joe from his perch. Activating his quick-release parachute, Joe floats to ground zero. Then pees on the giant’s foot.
Clifford Henderson
Santa Cruz, California

Empty Autumn
Some people collect stamps, porcelain figurines, leaves pasted in blank books. My father collected arrowheads, chiseled to a point that pricked your
finger. The autumn I turned twelve, we walked to
the field a half-mile from our house, a cabin on the Osage River. It was the end of the harvest season
and the tractors had already come through. Corn had been planted there in the early spring. Late summer it was cut down to shanks
that turned brown in the sun. That day in November,
my father combed the smooth, plowed rows, his rough hands forever coming up empty.
Andrea Deeken
Portland, Oregon