Tag Archives: short fiction

The Call Is Coming From Inside The Womb

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An insistent knocking begins the haunting of a pediatrician’s office- until a scrappy receptionist discovers the nature of the ghostly intruders.

I am going South- this train is taking me to Newport, Kentucky- where I am hired to work as a receptionist for my American uncle. He’s a pediatrician-obstetrician, my uncle, and I am to call him Dr. Lewiston and be grateful that he’s taken a chance on me, given the hell I put my parents through at school this year. I am to make reparations over the summer.  

Dr. Lewiston has no choice but to hire me, anyway, and I have typist training. None of the girls in Newport will take the position, he confided in his brother (my father). Parents are scared. Women are miscarrying at an alarming rate, and rumours are flying. If it’s the water supply or ancient curses, I don’t know, but everyone is healthy! Then the unthinkable happens. My last receptionist miscarries in our waiting room, with zero warning, dying later of a bloodstream infection. My reputation, lives of my friends- all are under threat. I need help, Jack. 

My father, scared of raising children and desperate to impress his physician brother, turns to me with eyes chaining like slot machines and tells me to pack. He says: Any place odds are below zero on Julia having a baby, Ed, is fine by us. She’s turning her life around. I already got to keep myself from killing the boy who turned it around in the first place. Then he sings on down the road to buy my ticket.  

Newport is amazing! Alive with night creatures, entertainment, and a kind of needy neon sickness I am already in love with. When I answer the office phone for the first time, it is like a new woman speaking: Thank you for calling Ohio River Family Care Clinic, how do you do? As if I’d been saying it all my life.  

I’m good at my job. It’s simple work and I love my budding friendships with the small-town people, learning their problems and minding their children. I make friends- with Miss Tee next door and Candace, who is older than me, married and works at the grocery store. But strange things are happening. A sensation of dread hangs in the office and disappears outside. When recording intake with patients over the phone, I hear strange clicks. Dr. Lewiston assures me the telephone lines are fussy and not to worry. When I’m alone, I’m driven mad by tiny incessant knocks. At first, I thought it was someone at the door, or tapping the doorplate out back, but I never catch anyone. I start to believe I’m going crazy. And I obsess about the clinic freezer. 

Three knocks on the doorplate- then six more, at a quicker tempo. This is Wilkes, the delivery boy. He has keys to the locked freezer and I don’t. Dr. Lewiston likes the milk to stay cold, so Wilkes comes and goes as he pleases. I wonder what he does back there besides drop off milk. I can’t ever leave the waiting room unattended, so I watch the clock and sometimes he’s in for ten minutes. There’s no money around either- just insurance paperwork and patient files- but there are expensive fish in the tank.  

One day I am lying on a picnic blanket beside the Licking River, with Candace spread out next to me. We are eating peeled grapes and sunflower seeds when a dark shadow crosses the blanket. I look up and see Wilkes, his orange threat of hair shining above a freckled glare. Get lost, creep, Candace warns. After he slinks off, I tell her about the door codes and the freezer- how I think he’s more than a milk boy.  

Candace’s mood darkens, and she tells me about Dr. Lewiston on the night of her miscarriage. There was so much blood. She lost consciousness repeatedly. Once when her husband left the room, Dr. Lewiston leaned in and whispered, You’ll be okay. Your baby isn’t big enough to make the cat jealous. Not like the others– and she won’t tell me anything he did after that. But I keep thinking something dark is going wrong inside my uncle. I promise Candace I won’t say anything, but I tell Miss Tee. Child, she says, I don’t know the good doctor, but it don’t feel right that so many babies ain’t makin’ it. Ask your questions. Miss Tee’s warning circles my head, and three nights in a row, I dream of breaking my fingernails along a cliff’s ledge, above a roaring sea, with my boyfriend screaming at me from the water. 

I wait for Wednesday, when Dr. Lewiston goes out for lunch, then make my move. I use the lockpick technique my boyfriend taught me, and I’m in the freezer lickety-split. It is horrific. Rows of giant or mini white fetuses, suspended in jars of green liquid. A Jell-O Salad of newborns floating in artificial wombs, instead of the marshmallows and pineapples Miss Tee prepares for the clinic staff. Except they move. One fetus clenches and unclenches a tiny fist. Another blinks open eyes yellower than goldenrod. Effortlessly kicks out a leg. A complicated network of machinery and tubes appear to be involved in nourishing them, keeping them alive. Not just alive- 

I’m sorry, Julia. Wilkes is pointing a gun in my face. I can’t let you leave, he whines in an awful nasal voice. The milk-splattered delivery apron is gone, replaced by a black suit, hat and sunglasses. He looks thirty years older. We’ll have to convince your father you’ve run away, won’t we, Dr. Lewiston? 

My uncle emerges from the shadows, face streaked with sweat. The yellow-eyed babies are smiling at us. They are growing up outside the womb. Already I sense vengeance shadowing their little hearts, seething in their yellow liquefied eyes, invading like the rampant ivy draping the backdoor entrance of the clinic. 

I scream and the babies scream underwater in unison. 

You’ve run away, my uncle mumbles, and his eyes become that liquefied yellow just as Wilkes pulls the trigger. 

Moonrock

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Until I was twenty-two, I believed the faces of the sun and moon belonged to the same rock. I thought: when man first walked on the moon, he must have done it at night.
When my friends heard about this belief, they mocked me until they realized that no one had told them outright that it wasn’t true. Then one of them punched me. Laughing, he attempted to reassure us that we had all learned about such things in science class.
“Come to think of it,” one said, “I have seen the sun and moon together in the sky, on plenty of occasions.”
“So there’s your proof,” said another.
I agreed, nodding wildly. I had seen them together in the sky, too, but I had found a way to explain it: if you really looked, one or the other was always more duskily faded. Like a reflection in water.
“Or ice,” another said dreamily.
“You know, the Apollo astronauts trained right here in Iceland in the 1960s.”
We immediately bowed our heads in the direction of our quietest friend. I loved when this one spoke. We were careless listeners among each other, but when he spoke, we paid attention. We paid him the reverence that only Valur had ever earned from us, in those quivering post-match moments in the Hlíðarendi Stadium.
“My grandfather used to spy on their activities, combing the surrounding volcanic rock for cavansite.”
“Cavansite?”
“It had been discovered in Oregon earlier that year. He read about in Geology Magazine.”
We all stared at him blankly.
“In his old age, he became obsessed with finding this rare blue mineral. He would take my father on long walks, circling the training camp, whose presence had been corrupting his ideal of the black-ridged Icelandic landscape. My father remembers these walks, though he was very young, due to how completely alone he felt. My grandfather never said a word to him about the astronauts over the fence. Their mission, their freeze-dried food and microgravity training. All stuff which would have been fascinating to a child. He was too busy searching, and they had to search quietly. Every rock my father picked up glinted like a tooth, but it was never the right one. Never the prismatic royal blue contained in the crinkled magazine photograph, which was tacked to the mantle in his father’s workshop.”
“Did they find it?” I had to ask.
“Forty-three years later,” he said, lowering his eyes. “Another man found it.”
We all started thinking it- that his grandfather had died trying.
“You have to wonder… Was the cavansite there all along?” a boy asked, incorrectly, but we forgave him. He was careless with words, while I was usually not. And I had been mistaken about the moon.
I wondered if I would ever live it down, and that night I lay awake, dreaming of astronauts landing without sound as tiny snowflakes on black rock.
I twisted my neck out the window and aimed it at the moon.

Real Talk

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These are real, real emotions, man, and we are on our way downtown. Downtown with our fingers on a lipstick cap inside our jean pocket to suggest a knife. Our hood, our hat is pulled low. We got this worm-lipped grimace on our face. We glide past the bus stop and see him with black, glittering eyes. Waiting at the stop, in khakis and a black raincoat and dark glasses, and he is just asking for it. Something like a fuse sparks in our head. He is pathetic. We are furious- not at him and we know it, but we can taste our own fury sitting like blood in our mouth. Our sweat is murmuring and our hand is a sweet fist- one to pump and kiss the sky. We wonder what it would be like to crush his skull under our blind boot, because our eyes have moved to swallow something small and pebbly from the part of our brain which recalls childhood. And the drama of the everyday never shakes down like this on the sidewalk- not without us slamming into it, not until we make it. And he never even saw us coming. No, he was thinking about divorce as a way out and how his whole life has been a lie and there was no way he could have seen us coming after that. No way, not from miles away.