PURE FRANCIS

Joel & Heather

by Kimberly Bunker

         Joel felt that school was a gigantic joke played on him by someone who had not yet shown his or her face. To him, it was clear that what teachers were saying and what students were tested on was of secondary importance, a red herring--but you were supposed to go along pretending it was primary. He felt that all the while his third grade teacher went on about conglomerate rocks, while his sixth grade teacher explained sentence diagramming, while Miss Hart made them rewrite their spelling tests if the words were too high above the pale blue line and Mrs. Salvatore read excerpts from Heart of Darkness, they did it all with a wink. “Here is what I’m saying,” he heard, “but listen to what I am not saying. Everyone knows today’s spoken lesson is useless and boring, and you’ll forget it after the test. But I dare you to remember something.” He had seen patterns in the eraser swipes on chalkboards and heard them in the rhythm of the Pledge of Allegiance. He watched his teachers rearrange the children’s desks and sit and stare, almost defeated, at their own desks after dismissal. He had been both friendless and marginally popular. He went along with the joke and learned to follow arbitrary rules in order to accumulate abstract rewards. He observed how his name looked at the top of every page he handed in and understood that the formation of identity is ongoing, flexible, a choice you repeatedly make that no one else pays that much attention to, as long as it’s there. He learned mental liberation in physical captivity, that by being forced to study something so mind-numbingly dull in such an unnecessarily uncomfortable setting, one was being trained to look inward, to explore the recesses of the universe. One would not learn the nature of reality by being told to think about the nature of reality. No, Joel’s teachers were smart enough to know that one will only begin to think about that while suffering--so, to inspire thought (that is, to teach) the nature of reality, they must incite suffering, preferably of the mildest sort. Joel thought that his grade school was really stellar.
 
         Heather was terrified of solar eclipses. She remembered one happening when she was in second grade; they had spent the day learning about it, and when it happened, they were allowed to look out the window with special cardboard glasses on. Heather had closed her eyes behind her glasses because she was afraid of going blind and she did not trust whoever made them, or the teacher who said they were safe. The other children looked, though, and the rest of the day they were bouncing of the walls, describing to each other the black circle and the flames. She mimicked them and no one knew she was lying. One girl had claimed that she’d removed the glasses and later complained that her eyes hurt. Heather didn’t know whether that was true, but for weeks afterward, she felt uneasy whenever she saw the girl, and wondered when she would come in to find the girl’s seat empty, and she, Heather, would eerily know what the teacher was going to say before he said it: “Boys and girls, Lindsey will not be joining us in school anymore because she is blind…”
         That afternoon stayed with Heather, and now she was terrified of solar eclipses, because she did not trust her ability to resist seeing what one looked like. She was uncomfortably curious to know, and was sure that the next time one occurred, her rabid curiosity would overcome her, and she would stare at it with naked eyes.


Kimberly Bunker's hobbies include livin' in the tenth dimension and trying to figure out what on earth that means.

Retrieval

by Skye Shirley

When the neighborhood women
meet for their Wednesday book group
I stand at their sinks and guard
their children sleeping.

As infants they clenched
my smallest fingers and only
ate soft food. Now they read
mysteries by lamplight as I

rinse plates downstairs.
Across the street, my
driveway is plowed.
Snow scatters as I gather

their Lego pieces. I know this
flurry well, and love the tasks,
rituals. I give vitamins, brush teeth,
unfold pajamas, light the dark.

And downstairs load
the dishwasher and sit
on the old loveseat.
The skylight is blanketed

with snow: don’t you
marvel at this bliss?
Even the cold yearns
to touch me.


Skye Shirley checks this forecast before the weather forecast.

The Match

by William C. Blome

          When everyone moved away from North Dakota towns like Temple, the buildings left behind faced eternity with a hardness or softness of demeanor that more or less matched what they were made of.  No surprise, then, that to the furious winter wind, a granite mansion was entirely stoic, while to a far gentler spring zephyr, a clapboard bungalow moaned and groaned, and it’s that aching out loud that first drew the attention of Morris Fourbears to a once-white wooden house.  Morris and his relatives soon came to stand at different compass points and different distances (up to something like a tenth of a mile) from the house.  They typically held vigil for several hours at a clip, at all times of the day and in all kinds of weather.  Then days came when they no longer appeared near the house, when it might have seemed to someone who knew of their recent visits that they either no longer wished or needed to bear witness to this deserted dwelling.  It’s the latter conclusion—that they no longer felt it necessary to form a surrounding presence—that was correct.  For the Fourbears clan—and very much Morris in particular—believed they now had what they wanted from the house.

          Well, almost.  They had certainly learned beyond any reasonable misinterpretation that if Morris could get a particular woman to torch the house and then consume a fistful of the ashes, the woman would remain Morris’ loyal and lifelong lover, provided each gave the other oral sex at least once every other day.  What remained undiscovered, however, was even a single clue as to the identity of the woman.  (Older members of the Mandan tribe wondered additional things, such as whether Morris and/or the woman might live forever; how many children they might have; and how pain- and/or hunger-free they might be for however long they lived.)  But Morris for his part stayed focused on trying to find out exactly who the woman was and when the orbit of her days would cross his own.  More precisely, when would he start getting regularly greased, and how soon in advance should he set up (probably with his childhood buddy, Claudia Whitehawk) a practice schedule to perfect his muff diving skills?

          Morris decided to be proactive, and he encountered no problem getting Claudia to help him.  As Morris related to her his family’s recent involvement with the deserted wooden home that often sounded alive and in agony; as he related the moaning-and-groaning prophecy about a woman who would set the house afire, consume a measure of its ashes, and then share oral sex with Morris for life; and as he confessed his need in all fairness to be able to give as good as he expected to get, Claudia signaled her understanding and willingness to render assistance.  In days that followed, she was repeatedly on her bedroom carpet after slithering out of her cocktail dress and undergarments, bidding Morris to follow her lead and come on down on top of her.  With little more than a month of practice, Morris Fourbears pronounced his fellatio technique sufficiently honed, and he told Claudia he was ready to find his fated woman.

          Perhaps too quickly—perhaps much too quickly—Claudia Whitehawk immediately made an exaggerated show of getting up off the floor and going to retrieve her outsized purse, of reaching in and groping about and then eventually and triumphantly coming up with a box of blue-tip wooden matches.  She further made a point of constantly balling and unballing her right hand into a fist in front of Morris’ nose.  Then she proudly struck one of the matches across Morris Fourbears’ now-zippered fly, and as the flame came to full-fledged life, she almost over-yelled, “Let’s go forth and prepare my meal, Mo, and then we can chow down on one another forever!”  But Fourbears (to either his wisdom or his folly) refused to believe in Claudia Whitehawk.  He thought nothing she had done or promised to do would convince him otherwise, and he simply told her, “I just don’t think you’re the one.”  He paused in the palpable silence that followed and patted his own crotch several times as if to console it; then he stood up and walked away, not all that long after the match Claudia had struck and continued to hold was completely consumed by its fire.

William C. Blome believes microfiction must avoid being fodder for macrofiction.

8 Things I Know About Her

by Alexis Stratton

The Preacher
When she was young, she wanted to be a preacher.  Hymnal in hand, she'd recite the baptismal rites from the back section—call and response, waiting for her stuffed animals around the room to answer in chorus.  She held a baby doll in her arms, sprinkled a plastic teacup of water over the baby's plastic head.  The baby was baptized at least twelve times.  Her mom caught her in the act once and tore the hymnal from her hand.  The baby fell to the ground.  “You're gonna ruin the carpeting if you keep that up.”

Fire and Brimstone
Her own preacher was an angry man.  She'd sit in the pew alongside her husband and listen to the pastor yell about fire and water and repentance.  “You've got coals in your soul,” her husband used to say when they got into fights later.

The Elements
She ate hunks of bread after he died.  Hunks of bread and boxes of saltines.  They were thick in her mouth, salty, unswallowable.  But she couldn't stop eating them.

Rapture
When she was 16, she was in love with a man from the next town over who sold vacuum cleaners.  “I'm gonna make it big someday,” he'd say.  They sneaked off in his big van, week after week.  Then he was gone one day, just gone.

The Prayer
“I want to be something big.  I want to take up the room.  I want to be bigger than anything—so big they can't escape.”

The Father
“Shooting an elephant is hard work,” her dad always used to say, pinching her mom's rear end and throwing his head back in laughter.  Her mom had thick, meaty hands and scrunched up her face at him when he said things like that.  “Aw, I was just kidding, honey.”

The Transfiguration
Always one fantasy.  To be sitting in the living room, sprawled out in majestic splendor, watching TV.  Her sister's saying something, but she can't hear.  Her body flows out in folds from the crooks and crannies of her frame.  She's getting bigger and bigger—but lighter and lighter.  The folds expand and grow and push out to the corners of the room until her sister runs screaming, yelling to Jesus for salvation, but the flesh grows and transforms and breaks the windows and her head breaks through the roof and suddenly she's weightless and flying—floating gently above.  Her toes tip off the grass, her shoelaces bigger than tree trunks, and off she goes, into the sky, her sister's voice a tinny nothing behind her.

Those Who Have Ears
A newspaper thwacks against her head.  Her sister's voice behind her.  “Are you listening to me?”  The TV sputters on—a preacher in a purple suit, shouting and praying to Jesus.  She bites her lip.  Her body fits comfortably in her chair, flesh forming around wood and fabric.  “For God's sake, you have to get out of this house.” 


Alexis Stratton thinks that this might be the most impressive talent ever.