I Didn’t Know There Were People Like That
by John Bruce
Once I answered a help-wanted ad for a network engineer.
They had an extra requirement: the candidate should have strong writing skills, since they wanted a lot of documentation. Well, I’d done a lot of network engineering, I’d also written network manuals, and I’d majored in English. I sent in my resume – like any good player in the job market, I had several versions. I sent them the one with the English major listed on it.
A few days later, the hiring manager gave me a call. We talked about my network experience, and we talked about majoring in English. That seemed good enough; he asked me to come in for an interview. “It’s really interesting,” the manager said to me when I came in. “Not many people major in English and wind up in this kind of work.” The guy gave me a technical question-and-answer on what I knew about networks, and he realized that yes, I knew network engineering. And I could write.
”Have you done much with writing outside the technical field?” he asked after a while.
”I’ve had a few things in the local alternative press,” I said. “But it’s just a hobby.”
”It’s really interesting that you’ve kept it up.” We chatted a little more about that. I told him I actually kept reading, too, reading the same writers they had you read as an English major.
”There’s no money in it,” I said. “For most people, it really can’t be anything but a hobby.”
”I should be up front with you about one thing,” the guy told me. “We’ve already made an offer on this job. The guy hasn’t accepted it yet, but he could, so since we’ve already got the offer out, you need to understand that the guy could take it, and he’d be the one we hire.”
”Sure,” I said. The guy had just told me he’d wasted my time, of course.
”I really wanted to talk to you, though,” he said. “I really wanted to meet someone who’d kept up his interest in English and writing after he’d graduated. It’s really been interesting talking to you. In fact, that was why I called you in. I didn't know there were people like that.”
Thanks.
John Bruce’s writing has appeared, or will appear, in The Los Angeles Reader, The Dartmouth Review, serious-lit press, Fiction on the Web, Cantaraville, Bartleby Snopes, Diddledog, Eunoia Review, Fiction at Work, The Journal of Truth and Consequence, Long Story Short, The Toucan, Lyrical Ballads, Pear Noir!, Lowestoft Chronicle, Underground Voices, and Word Riot. He has degrees in English from Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Her Song
by Huina Zheng
When my daughter came home from school, she didn’t call out to me like she usually did. She changed into her slippers by the door, her lips pressed into a thin line.
I opened my arms to hug her. She turned slightly and slipped past me.
“I’m fine,” she said. She didn’t look at me. Then she walked into her room and closed the door.
I stood there. That afternoon, her homeroom teacher had messaged me on WeChat. She had been class president for two years, but this time she lost the election by three votes.
Just three votes.
I knew that feeling. In seventh grade, I slipped from the top five in my class to the twenties. My mother stopped me in the living room. Her finger tapped my forehead as she told me I had become lazy, that I had disappointed her. I bit my lip. I didn’t argue. Didn’t explain. Didn’t cry.
When I got back to my room, I could taste blood. I lay on my bed and started singing. I don’t even remember which Faye Wong song it was. I only remember that, little by little, I felt myself calm down.
Now, I heard a song coming from behind my daughter’s door. It was the one she sang all the time. Her voice shook at first. But as she continued singing, it became steadier.
I stood outside her room. I did not knock. I did not ask, “Are you okay?” I hummed along with the melody coming from inside.
She didn’t know I was outside. But I knew that inside that room, she was using the same way I once had to bring herself back.
Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.
Lady Octopus
Octopus sculpture by Charlotte Loring
by Marie Anderson
Lausen stared through the window at the octopus on the wall of Aunt Schik’s Art Gallery. Her octopus! Painted with acrylics in purple, red, and blue, with fierce green marble eyes. Eyes that had seen what had happened to Lausen. The body and eight legs sculpted from newspapers, paper towels, aluminum foil, and, if Lausen’s mom had for once been truthful, something else. Something Lausen could use right now. Lausen’s mom, sister-in-law to Aunt Schik, had created Lady Octopus ten years ago for Lausen’s 16th birthday. How had she ended up in Aunt Schik’s Art Gallery? With a price tag of $1000 dangling from the lower right edge of the frame!
Lausen flung open the door and marched into the gallery. From behind a counter bookended by potted lush green plants with suspicious-looking leaves of three, Aunt Schik scowled.
“Well, well, well. The Prodigal Girl has returned. What have you been doing lo these many months, Dear?”
“Recovering, Aunt Schik. That shouldn’t surprise you.”
“Have you an appointment, Dear?”
“That’s my octopus! What’s she doing here?”
“Your late mother gave it to me, Dear.”
“She’s mine! And you’re lying. You stole her off the wall in my bedroom after Mom died.”
“I wouldn’t dream of stealing, Dear. If you’d wanted it, why did you leave it behind when you moved out? And why didn’t you scurry back and claim it after your poor mother passed? I don’t recall seeing you at her celebration of life.”
“So you did take her! Mom didn’t give her to you! I want her back!”
Lausen strode to the octopus, grabbed the frame, yanked, but it stayed fast to the wall.
“You may certainly purchase it, Dear. I can offer you a ten percent family discount. Though a daughter who can’t bother to show up to help her ailing mother, who can’t bother to deal with all the tasks involved after someone departs these mortal coils, has perhaps lost her right to be considered family.”
Angry tears spilled, blurring Lausen’s eyes. “You of all people know why that happened. And if you’ve conveniently forgotten, ask your husband. My uncle. My mom believed her baby brother over me. Her daughter. I’d always be her baby girl, she’d once told me. Hah.”
“False memories, Dear. Perhaps planted by an incompetent therapist.”
“She’s mine. I want her back.”
“Repeating that won’t make it happen, Dear.”
Lausen clenched her fists. Eyeballed the distance between her fists and Lady Octopus’s head. She turned to face Aunt Schik. “So what will make it happen? Dear.”
“$900. Cash, not check, not credit card, not crypto. Dear.”
Lausen nodded, turned back to her Octopus, and rammed her fist into the beautiful, doomed invertebrate’s head.
Aunt Schik shrieked. “What the hell? I’m calling the cops!”
Lausen pulled green $100-bills from the shattered head. Stuffed them in her pockets and ran out the door. She’d count them later, but no doubt there was plenty to keep her numbed for a while.
Again
by Jon Fain
I was getting over one, being careful, but I’m a sucker for a woman who laughs at my jokes. When we ended up together in the kitchen, our conversation began with remarks about the other guests. Then we trolled out the occasional minor confession, had some hits here and there. The best part was that it had been free of the dull usual—nothing of kids, or houses, no talk about jobs.
Now a couple of days after the party we were having lunch. Ann told me I’d been in one of her dreams.
I’d heard the same thing from a guy in the men’s room at work, the week before. I knew his face—in that way who he was—but not his name. His cube is on the far side of the space, across the sea of dividers. Over there, their computers make the calls to customers, not take them in.
As I dried my hands under the machine, he turned from the sink where he was washing and told me he had dreamed about me. I misunderstood at first; I thought he was coming on to me, his line.
In his dream we had been in the company lunch room. Something he was working on was missing and he was sure I was responsible. But he knew I was a professional house watcher and he didn’t want to bother me while I was on duty.
As for Ann’s, in her dream that she told me about we were at my house. In this one I was a Catholic, one of many kids.
“Is that like your family?” she asked.
“Close,” I said, though it wasn’t.
“They didn’t like me,” Ann went on. “So you drove me home.”
“That’s it?”
The table was so small our hands almost touched. I gripped my wine glass as if now that it was empty it might fly away. Like the guy’s at work, it wasn’t much of a dream. And that was disappointing because except for rare circumstances I never remembered mine.
The food arrived. She looked at her watch. She was dressed much nicer than me. No doubt she had a nicer job too.
“So what do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked.
She laughed like I hoped she would. It was something from the party. In the kitchen, a man nearby had said it to a woman, his line. Maybe a half hour later, Ann and I still in the same spot, we heard him try it on another woman. We couldn’t help it; we’d both cracked up.
“Oh I don’t know,” she said. “What about you?”
I took my sunglasses off the table and put them on.
“A professional house watcher,” I said.
She kept smiling, didn’t get it, but nodded like she wanted to.
I didn’t need a watch to look at. I’d wait as long as I had to, for her laugh to come again.
Jon Fain’s micro fiction has appeared in Blink-Ink, The Dribble Drabble Review, 50-Word Stories, Molecule, ScribesMICRO, Sudden Flash, The Woolf, and elsewhere. https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/jonfain
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