Selected Flash Fiction
Laura McCullough

Opposites Attract

Say a parrot could read your mind, would this change anything? Would you be more careful what you said around your dog? Would you be sure to cover the hamster’s cage at night? They say it’s possible — certain neurons we have in common with avians — and they’ve done some tests. They always do tests which often rule things out, but rarely prove anything. Still, this thing with parrots. Here’s how it works: the owner is placed in another room and selects cards with pictures on them: a couple embracing, a woman sipping tea. The parrot is in the kitchen with the scientists. It says, Give me a hug? Want some tea now? The scientists are not astonished; they won’t put two and two together until they match the tape of the bird’s words with the sequence of cards revealed in the parlor. When the owner comes in, the bird says, Got a goddamned cracker? The owner, who doesn’t yet know the results either, says, See, what did I tell you? He’s such a ballbuster. My cat has told me it will be a cold winter, again; I never believe her, but it always is. When she leaves headless birds on the porch, I intuitively know this is a sign of love.

Whale Explodes on City Street

News Report: Whale Transport through Taipei, Taiwan, 2004 ...

The whale had a five foot penis, and when its belly exploded, the penis was left intact. It was already dead and on a flat bed truck, the same kind they bring to pick up fancy cars whose owners don’t want them towed the old fashioned way, and the heat had baked it until the gasses in its guts swelled and, well, you can imagine what it was like: shop windows splattered, cars smothered in the thick entrails, walkers at lunch time not going back to the office and wondering how they’d get home with the slick and the stink on them. Traffic was held up for hours. The researchers waiting for the carcass fumed, their science in jeopardy, but people came on foot when they saw and heard this news on the news. And the penis was wonderful. The men gathered to see it. They waded through the ankle deep muck and some even reached out a hand to stroke a small length of it. One took out a jack knife and sliced a strip which he put in his pocket before turning away, one hand over his mouth and nose. One woman on the sidewalk urged her husband out onto the street. They had no babies, and maybe if he touched it, who knows? Strange things can happen. By the time the roadway was opened and the city workers had hauled the plastic bags away and had hosed the pavement down, the cars, the store windows, the people who needed hosing, too, the penis was all but gone, a ragged crevasse into the whale’s underbelly drawing no more attention than the gaping guts which the workers stuffed back into the beast the best they could. Then the flatbed moved on, the drivers tired and just wanting to go home, their own penises slack and hidden on their tired thighs.

The Family that Walks on All Fours

Not in America land of the upright citizen where families never look down but always forward toward the ever unfolding, always amazing, never limited future. Our children can be anything: the autistic boy around the corner will go to college and graduate with a degree in Drama, the girl next door has already begun dancing with the Atlantic City Ballet Company, my own son’s name is listed on Rankit.com, his weight, height, how many sacks, fumbles, chances at a division one scholarship. The family that walks on all fours was found in Turkey and was fought over by scientists wanting to fit them into flow charts of the evolutionary process and make names for themselves in that process, an international inquiry into scandalous behavior, payoffs, broken rules about Research Using Human Subjects. The world looks on amazed at video of their awkward bear crawl, fingers splayed, hips rocking, heads looking alternately down and ahead, down and ahead, smiles ripping their faces like grimaces. What would one day be like that for us? To be more intimate with the ground we walk on, get our hands dirty, our noses close to what is kicked up by the person ahead of us? On my way from the porch to the car, I look closely at the grass, the section that has been worn to packed dirt that no amount of seeding and watering ever revives. I squat and place one hand palm down; in this position, it’s almost impossible to look at the sky.

Help Wanted

Mary was hung from a train car crane, all six tons of her and the town had come out with their children — with box lunches. It was one of the best states in the country for lynching — though Georgia beat it out by as many again for a total of 500 or so. Of Tennessee’s 250, 50 were white; they were only four-fifths racist, I guess, so what was so odd about hanging an elephant — shoot, she’d stomped a man’s head, yes, squashed it like a squash; no one cared how she came to be in this country’s south all the way from south Asia. Hell, there was nearly a riot when the local sheriff suggested she be poisoned. Hanging. That’s the way to do it, and a six ton elephant, why that’s better than how many men? But that’s too simple, isn’t it, a nasty slash at a fine state. New Jersey, the one I’m from had one lynching or two depending on what books you read, and some say the fella was black, and some say white, but it wasn’t a Jim Crow state like Tennessee. Still, Jersey didn’t have an elephant, but we had Edison, who killed an elephant to show how AC could be used for capital punishment.  New Jersey had a Capital Punishment Museum in Trenton until just a few years ago when the curator died. No one seems to want the job, but I’m not worried, when there’s something awful to be done, someone’s always willing to step forward. When there’s an elephant to be hanged, someone’s always got a crane.

Laura McCullough is on the faculty of the English Department at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series. She has an MFA from Goddard College, has won a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowship, and recently was awarded a Dodge Foundation Scholarship to attend the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paterson Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry Motel, Faultline, The Journal of Art and Literature, In Posse, Slant Review, SteelPoint, and others.