MIKKI ARONOFF

★ ★ ★ ★

FLASH FICTION

Image by Shardar Tarikul Islam

‘Getting the Picture’

Harriet’s Great Pyrenees, Snowball, died this week. Goldfish and guinea pigs have died on my watch, but a 150-pound dog? When I asked her how she felt, she just shrugged and looked sad.

I went to talk to my neighbor to the south. She made me some tea from a bag. “You’d have to lose something that big to understand. Life’s a bitch and then you die,” she said, voice sticky like treacle. What, raise a monster dog from a puppy and wait for it to die? I needed an empathy shortcut.

So I talked to my neighbor to the north. She made me some tea of twigs, told me to close my eyes. “Picture Harriet’s dog growing and growing until it’s bigger than a mountain.”  So I shut my eyes and stretched and pulled that dog like taffy until he blocked out the mountains to the east. “Are we there yet?” she asked after a few minutes. When I nodded, she said, “Now shrink him to the size of a sugar ant.”  But Snowball was white, so my ant looked anemic. I started again. This time with a black Newfoundland. “Now what?” I asked after a long silence, since no other instruction seemed forthcoming. “Not sure,” was all she said. “I just thought losing an ant would be more manageable.”

I rushed home to relieve myself of tea. I stretched out on the sofa and squeezed my eyes and tried so hard to lose a well-loved ant I actually became one – first tiny, then dog-sized, then tiny again, back and forth for what seemed like hours. That was some rabbit hole. Towards the end of all that morphing, I was a person again, but mite-sized, craning my neck up at a gigantic insect that could squash me into oblivion.

But squashing wasn’t what happened. That Bunyan-sized creature raised up and wrapped its forelegs around my neck. Its antenna waved as its middle legs embraced my waist. It whimpered and whined, rubbed its massive ant mandibles against my cheeks, now wet from my tears.

The next day, I knocked on Harriet’s door. “I know what you must have felt like losing Snowball,” I told her, going in for the hug.

“I don’t think so,” she said, staring straight at me, then down at the fluffy black pup snuffling in the palms of her hands.

* * *

‘Old Friends’
~  after Chaïbia Talal, Personnage, 1966

The first one asked: Why so downcast?

The second one said: All is lost.

The third one said: Whatever you have lost, your loss could not be as great as mine.

The second one replied: I am old now and wilting. I drove in nails to fasten but the heavens fractured. I am without donkey or prayer and my legs are weak. The mother of my son’s mother is shrouded. I cannot smooth the jagged edges.

The first one replied: Oh.

The third one huffed and puffed.

The second wept.

The first one bit his nails to the quick.

The third: Your donkey?