flash fiction

BROWN BENEATH THAT THIN

Premium unleaded, premium powered, she made her way to Culebra, said, "Let's build something together." He balked, of course: he'd seen el mariachi loco before; distaffed, it mattered not. Portland was in progress: there'd be time for that when the getting was good, or at least getting. Shamu along for the ride, sans trainer, may she rest in peace. Cetaceous vagabond’s got a lovely ring to it.

The river was rising. Not the downtown rinse bowl, jeweled green jade paste, no: the Frio, the underground jewel out west, spilling her banks, spilling the banks of everyone up and down the canyon. Word came to him late, as it will, and he blamed the chancery, fizzing pharmaceuticals, and the carrion downpour in May. It had been decades since the likes of Nadine in green pools, tiring in the green lines, the tender brown flesh beneath, and the tenderest white beneath all that. In his shirking days, he would have shirked his way with not a moment’s hesitation, grilling no further than the balanced hemispheres of his less than nautical brain. It was crying time in these days beyond the green line, and no amount of Brubeck, Walton, or Tyner was gonna stop the thrashing: it demanded a passel of self-examination he’d given up on shortly after she’d taken all the brown beneath that thin green line and left him gasping, for the not and the always and the never no mo’.

It was Hondo before they spoke, forty miles of hand surfing out the windows. The prospect of brother V’s barbecue pit and the angels in heaven under the shade and the wisp of a green line at the horizon . . . it all welled up inside him as he pulled into the icehouse on the corner of Gray and Tuttle. Seek and ye shall find; he’d been bled of that one for years. He turned corners yearning through oceans of time and found the green line fading, gone, impaled by desire still hunting.

“Here,” she said, at the eight mile crossing on the farm to market road. Irrigated rows of green corn bled into the horizon; she splashed barefoot down the sodden alleyways, leaving him to consider what else was left to him but decades more of seeing her recede into the mist. “Alone Together” sung in Carmen’s living room the night before, beyond the crowd, above the world, we’re not too proud—it stung him then and stung him now. She’d shed all her clothes by now except the thin green line, turned a face to him that he’d seen only once on the horizon of her, deep in those last days when loss had a sting that almost mimicked joy. Blood oranges, he’d wept beyond all the ropes of pity he could manage to find.

“You’re next!” she cried, and the ghost of him rose from behind the wheel, he felt the green lines upon himself now, the brown beneath the green, the tenderest white beneath the heart of him. His fingers sang in the green tips of the plants, his toes squished in the mud. He found her halfway down a row, the water burbling around her, spilling into the next row and the next and the next. He lay down in the row beside her, felt the tendrils of his roots grasping for more beneath the mud and watched as the green line dissolved in the sky above him and sailed away.