Flash Fiction

Cadavers Confessions over afternoon tea Cadavers He did not like thinking of coming or going or anything at all. He lived in a place where words were shrunk too small before they were eaten, and people talked too quietly and ate nothing at all. He had breakfast with skeletons and in this mausoleum it was easy to pretend that time was frozen in place. But if that had been the case, he wouldn't be so hungry. By day, he and the other cadavers were paraded before the living, who dissected them with their eyes, and nodded and smiled, and understood absolutely nothing at all. They peeled away his pale skin carefully, inspected his files, and when they left tore away his muscles as a souvenir. "We don't want you." Every time, he collapsed in a heap of bones, and his skeleton was taken away in the hopes that he would regrow his flesh and his pride and stand before the examiners a little more weary...but a little less afraid. He grew to love the inspections, the pain of the scalpel cutting away his defenses, because maybe...just maybe...they'd take along his bones, too, and he could move again without the fear of being torn apart. Every night, as the moon glowed eerily through the cracks in the wall, he scratched softly in the bedpost another day, and prayed, "Please, tomorrow, somebody take me away." Confessions over afternoon tea "I love him," she said. We were familiar enough that I could tell she only liked the sound of the words in her mouth. I smiled grimly over the rim of my cup and nodded slightly at her. "Why." "Because of the way he feels." A muscle in her cheek twitched slightly, as if the nerve had been tapped by a hammer, or a word. On the table, my hand was inches from hers, shaking with the vibrations of her fist through the table. She sucked her breath in slightly through her teeth. For a moment, I fought the urge to raise my eyebrow. "You like bricks." "The harder, the better." Her eyes were green with flecks of gold, and they shone at that word, defiantly, better. I said nothing as I drained my cup. We were familiar enough that I could tip my head back, that I could let off the mufflers so the tea screeched as it passed my lips. But only sometimes. She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, then shook her head slightly and sighed with half the passion of somebody in love. "It was nice talking to you." "As always. See you next week, then." She extended her hand to me. I shook it gingerly, wary of the bruises around her wrists though I did not look down.

A Terrible Sanctity Your Rapist A Terrible Sanctity It could have been days or months or years ago that my world was rudely modified—I no longer possess the ability to remember. I think that there must be a terrible sanctity in living on the fringes of reality and time, or watching life itself grow uninspiring as its flesh pales and peels and grows old. The day was old—that day so far in the past that it reveals itself only in scents and dreams. I remember the air stank of musty fur, like a rain was coming, and why not—I had always been fascinated with rain. Ten years previously, I had known to dance in it, with mud and water and croaking things. My mother had been smiling then. She was not smiling on the old, old day. I knew because it was the last time I saw her, thrown carelessly like sagging folds of silk on a hospital bed in Nowhere. I had taken the train to see her. That was the day I turned my back on her. It was the day I tasted his teeth on my skin for the first time and thought through faint unconsciousness that I had felt him somewhere before. When I woke, I was back Everywhere that she was not, a place full of more broken beer bottles than cheery photographs. I do not remember taking the train back. The next day was a school day. I liked those days, except for the bulky boys around corners who were looking for a thrill. I hadn't been wearing a backpack. I couldn't find mine, or perhaps I hadn't bothered looking. That was the first day I was seized with the terrible recklessness I had glimpsed the day before, when I'd seen my reflection flickering in the beast's eyes. I smiled because I knew they were coming. The first one asked if I was looking for trouble. I replied that yes, yes, I was. I almost smirked, but a trace of the old "me" remained. It glanced around wildly—there were five or six of them, and not a teacher in sight. It knew how to cringe when the first blow landed against my stomach. I didn't double over. "Don't touch me." "Or you'll do what—run home to your mummy?" The third-biggest one showed his molars, and his throat, to me. It was an odd laugh—the kind where no sound comes out. I tried to convince myself to feel helpless, but my teeth were suddenly large and foreign in my mouth, as stricken as the looks across their faces. I tried to say something coolly, dill pickle-cucumber cool, but it was swallowed in the low snarl that festered in the back of my throat. My attackers seemed oddly small. I glared. "Ghwargh did you say?" "Your mummy," the bravest one emitted. His neighbours clasped their hands over his mouth, but I wasn't watching him any more. Instead, the whole of my attention was fixed on that word; it hugged the curves of my forebrain, tickling like sand down the back of your pants. Your mummy. Mummy. Mummy. I felt an odd sort of explosion in the back of my head. Bits of brain splattered uncontrollably against the sides of my skull, into my eyes. My vision was painted in their shades of brown, and black, and red. Red. Red seeping through the threads of the carpet. On my hands, acrid and fresh. They were sticky if I rubbed them together and thought about the motion. I pushed myself up on my hands—claws—hands—it was an odd realisation. I spat through hard, caked lips and found my mouth was sour with the taste of soft flesh, hair and bits of bone. I couldn't have recognised them from the angle I was standing, not the way they had been torn and twisted. The room spun. I gasped without breathing. In a nearby window, I saw my reflection next to a crowd of my classmates staring back. My reflection, snarling and angry, lunged backwards until they ran screaming into the pandemonium of the school parking lot. Then it turned, panting, back toward me. I could see nothing reflected in its terrible yellow eyes, and, around those glowing slits, no colour save for a bright red that glistened along its mouth and arms, sticky in matted fur. I did not know my own height, but it must have been over seven feet tall. My foot brushed against the arm of the boldest one, his eyes glassy and cold with fear. He demanded an explanation, the sort that clawed hands could not pantomime. My mouth felt hard and swollen as I tried to say something, anything. My name is Brian. I am sixteen years old. Your Rapist When the next eclipse comes, he won't be able to see more than the shadows growing on the prison floor and the hard-scrubbed glean of his knees, but he will still have dreams about the cut of your hip against gravel, your blood bright and beautiful. His fist will be blue in the morning from imagining your hair gripping it like chains, the slick surface of his soles rooting him to the ground. Today is not special, but he does not know that. He sees the diamonds in your eyes when his back blacks out the sun, and he wonders for a moment if it is possible to wear them like earrings, cheeks against your eyelashes and hands cupping your shoulders like the rings of a trophy. Between your ears, something is gnawing. You think you are screaming, but any man would tell you that your song has been around since the beginning of time and just because nobody remembers the words anymore doesn't mean it's not beautiful. You sing so hard your voice breaks with the force of it. And he smiles, cutting a resolute line across your clothes. He is the kind of man who probably had dreams of being a seamstress as a boy, tearing bits apart when they do not belong and reattaching the edges with perfect stitches. He is an artist making himself out to be a monument, and you are next. You have never been so aware of the skin on the inside of your thighs. You have never been so aware of the spears growing from the edges of your eyes. Today is not special, but you do not know that. You feel the weight of a steel skeleton against your ribs, and you can think only of the shovel searching frantically in the hollow of your abdomen like dirty boy hands sifting through a bag of Cracker Jack. You hold on with all your might because you are afraid of losing your prize packet, afraid that somebody got you on sale, and you are worth more than this. When the next eclipse breaks, you will realize that you were less afraid of what you lost than of what he left inside you, growing, thrashing like a worm against your intestines and never letting go.

Short Stories

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Hate and Love (2009)
Collection of Short Fiction

A compilation of the best of Jake's short fiction, written in his last teen years. Nostalgic, heart-wrenching, sometimes vindictive and often insightful, Hate and Love represents his psychological journey in search of what makes us human.

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