You on the Street

• Title – You on the Street

• Author – Amanda Barusch

• Genre – General Fiction

• Type – Flash Fiction

• Publication Date – December 18, 2020

• Publisher – Flashes [of Brilliance]

• Medium – Literary Website

• Available at – Flashes [of Brilliance]

• Link – https://www.flashesofbrilliance.org/flash-fiction-you-on-the-street-by-amanda-barusch/

• Synopsis – This one's a little autobiographical. I ran into an old flame on the street and for a brief desperate moment wondered what I could possibly say. The moment passed and so did he, without a word.

The Errant Strand

• Title – The Errant Strand

• Author – Amanda Barusch

• Genre – General Fiction

• Type – Flash Fiction

• Publication Date – August 17, 2020

• Publisher – Every Day Fiction

• Medium – Online Magazine

• Available at – Every Day Fiction

• Link – https://everydayfiction.com/the-errant-strand-by-amanda-barusch/

• Source Text:

  The Errant Strand

  Sweat crept down his back as he stepped off the rumbling bus and stood at attention with the other recruits. He’d used a cheap comb to part his hair with what he thought was military precision — on the right, in a thin straight line. But he couldn’t control that one strand growing out of his cowlick. He liked the idea of a wide-eyed cow licking his left temple but he did value order in those days, so he tried hard to control his unruly lock. He tried everything short of hair spray, which struck him as girly and he didn’t like the smell. Nothing did the trick so, as he stood there in the Texas sun, that one strand drew a proud arc and flopped right into his eyes.

  A tall guy with clippers sliced off his hair and for one hellish year of jungle warfare the strand lay stifled under a buzz cut. It never arced quite as high after that. He left the Army with his honor intact and his confidence demolished. Still, he got into Berkeley with the GI bill, grew his hair out and learned to roll a joint.

  He cultivated a taste for disorder and came to enjoy the simple act of dropping his dirty clothes on the dorm room floor. He made a few gestures towards revolution but he never hurt anyone. A newspaper reporter in a roiling street asked why he was protesting the war. Tears flowed from his stinging eyes and he yelled, “Why the hell aren’t you?”

  The next day, his picture was in the newspaper with a caption: “campus radical.”

  “I’m no radical!” he yelled and kicked a bike that was locked to a power pole.

  When they shot those kids in Ohio his mom cried. She kept saying, “It could have been you!” She wanted him to come home but he hated her when she cried. By then, the strand hung loose down his hollow cheek and people stared at him when he loped down the street.

  He majored in sociology because he heard it was easy. They let him graduate, much to his surprise. Then he applied for job after job and they told him he needed skills; more skills; different skills. He figured he needed camouflage so he got a buzz cut and a new shirt. Rubbing his scalp reminded him how much he disliked taking orders.

  “But,” Pop said, “you do like to eat, don’t you?”

  So he kept looking.

  Then he met Debbie in a crowded pub. She and another girl sat at the bar drinking wine and laughing loud, their t-shirts so tight he could make out all four nipples pert and ready. Debbie thought he was square with that buzz cut and Oxford shirt but later she said he had a poetic face, “Sweet, in a sad kind of way.”

  He nearly passed out when she reached up to rub the fuzz on his scalp and pressed her nipple into his shoulder. Later he would tell her the first thing he noticed in that bar was her tinkling laugh. He came to believe it was true.

  At the wedding, the errant strand once again strayed into his eyes. There’s a picture of him in his tux and her in her gown reaching up to tuck the lock back from his face with her fingertips. He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch.

  She tucked that hair back thousands of times. Even after their daughters were born and things got hectic, she always picked him up at work, always leaned across to tuck back his strand with her fingertips. But there’s only that one picture.

  Debbie collected travel brochures. She taped a postcard of the Forbidden City to the bathroom mirror. His company moved to China. His unemployment ran out. She threw the postcard away.

  By the time leukemia took her, their girls were grown and gone. They came back for the funeral and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t squeeze out a single tear.

  “To hell with them,” he muttered. “To hell with everything.” He sold the house, threw all those damn brochures in the trash, and signed up for Social Security. He kept his grey hair stretched in a ponytail at the back of his neck and started smoking pot again.

  “Hey! It’s legal!” he exclaimed with a cough.

  He met a biker woman from Nevada in a bar. She thought the strand made him look like Elvis and she never did tuck it back from his face. Joleen wasn’t the tucking back type, with her brown leather skin and unfiltered Camels, but she didn’t mind his mess and she had a good laugh. He liked to rest his head on her flat, little tummy.

  Joleen persuaded him to move to Elko and buy a twelve-foot skiff. He found winters cold but the summer fishing made up for it. She loved to angle for trout and he liked to putter with the boat. He found a measure of pride in being a veteran and joined the Rotary. On Saturdays, they drove a pickup to town to drink beer and gossip at The Star Hotel. A quiet contentment snuck up on him.

  The afternoon he passed was the hottest of the year. They were out on Ruby Marsh drinking beer with a few bass in the bucket.

  “Damn! I wish I’d brought my hat.”

  Those were his last words before, as Joleen explained to all who’d listen, “He just leaned over and died right there in the boat.”

  No drama and very little mess but Joleen was haunted nonetheless. She kept remembering his head in her lap, how after he died that lock of hair fell into his eyes and how she tucked it back with her fingertips.

Devil Wind

• Title – Devil Wind

• Author – Amanda Barusch

• Genre – General Fiction

• Type – Flash Fiction

• Publication Date – 2019

• Publisher – Crack the Spine Literary Magazine

• Medium – Magazine

• Available at – Crack the Spine Literary Magazine (via Lucid Press)

• Link – https://pubsecure.lucidpress.com/crackthespine260/#W0.KiFPllsw.

• Source Text:

  Devil Wind

  Evening shouldn’t be this warm.

  Santa Ana. That man on the television with the wobbling chin. He says you should say the middle ‘a.’ “Some people,” he says, “are just too lazy to say the middle a.” Test it on your tongue and imagine a wind named after a saint. No. Mama says don’t listen to him with his fancy words. It was the people named the wind Santana. This wind is named for the devil.

  The sun comes up dirty when Santana rolls through. The hairs prickle up from my head. Papa scoots his socks across the carpet and a spark jumps from his finger to my nose. “Static electricity,” he says. But then he has to go help out at the dairy.

  We’re shut inside. Mama mutters, “Those precious cows aren’t even his.”

  She squeezes my shoulder and tells me about the strong man who thought he could stop the wind. He climbed the cliff wall, hugging cold rock until he hauled himself over the edge and stood panting on the bare mesa. He stared straight into the dark eyes of the wind eagle. Her claws clutched the edge of a massive nest in the topmost branch of a dying tree. When she flapped her wings the wind snapped hair into his eyes. Tears cooled his temples. His kerchief tugged loose and flew away. The snaps of his shirt tore open one by one until it, too, sailed away, sleeves waving. With a gasp he landed on his back and his pants stole out from underneath. They, too, took flight. Socks and shoes dribbled along behind. He lost his hair and eyebrows strand by strand. He lies there now. Prone. Clinging to the base of that dying tree.

  You don’t close drapes against Santana. Better to watch the desert unhinged. Tumbleweeds bound in elegant arcs. A rusty slab of corrugated tin revolves in the air high above the barn. Dust devils twirl through the fields. Little tornadoes sucking water from crops. An invisible hand rips out our mulberry tree. Roots dangle in the desiccated air.

  Fire to the West. Smoke erases the sun.

  Santana’s churning. Get ready for a night of howls and whispers. Walls shudder in the dark; beams moan. Fingers of dust sneak under the doors. A window cracks. Coyote howls. Mama says no sleep for the wicked.

  When sun finally rises the earth so still and the air so clear. Colors hurt your eyes—red sand, purple mountains, sapphire sky pierced in the west by leftover stars.

  A chain saw slices the faraway quiet and Mama snores on the sofa.

  I slip outside and down the path to the corral. Trash huddles in the bottlebrush: plastic bags, baling wire, a Barbie doll with no clothes at all.

  I throw some hay to my hungry little mare hunkered there behind the wood pile, black tail snug against her chestnut rump. Her eyes swollen shut leaking sludge. She smells me and nickers but she can’t see

  all those stiff black birds scattered across the field.

Once

• Title – Once

• Author – Amanda Barusch

• Genre – General Fiction

• Type – Flash Fiction

• Publication Date – 2017

• Publisher – Crack the Spine Literary Magazine

• Medium – Literary Magazine

• Available at – Crack the Spine Literary Magazine (via Lucid Press)

• Link – https://pub.lucidpress.com/crackthespine222/#9qzH42zbXmYn

• Source Text:

  Once

  I was a girl not a nymph just a girl; a chapped-hands-pinning-sheets-in-the-breeze kind of girl with a secret love of soaring. Some girls, beloved of painters, gaze coy to the right, blue vein pulse at the temple and a single pearl. No, I was of the bouncing ones, cracked at the heel, pulling fish bones from my teeth, guzzling wine in the afternoon—intact, but not untouched. I soared, but I did not glide, and

  I never should have soared within sight of that bow-legged demigod with his bulging groin, and bulbous nose. He was not as artists draw him—smooth, clean, and symmetrical. No, he was randy as a porcupine with lead chains and that sibilant claim of affection. He found me charming in disorder, said he could see through my dress.

  Of course, I ran. Anyone would have, but no one was fast as I. I am a god! He screamed in my wake. He moaned, pled, and finally gave chase. My hair tangled and streaming, and no one fast as I, but he drew close and his fingers grazed my scattering hem. I called out to mother for rescue

  and my rescue began in the loamy space beneath my fingernails. Insidious tendrils lodged there, plunged into my skin, and sent fresh leaves out to reach for the glimmering sun. I sense their fanning still, in the ghosts of my fingertips. Rough tubers burst from my heels. Like blood hounds, they sought the most fragrant earth. Dragging my splintered body (twigs in my hair), they dove down to anchor my bleeding soles to the ground. Bark encased my breasts. The chords in my neck swelled and stiffened 'til my head bent back, eyes wide to sun and rain. Â My teeth clattered while the blood cooled in my veins. He stood clinging to my trunk.

  No one else noticed. It was so quick, or it was so slow. No one human could see.

  He's gone long ago. The spring sap flows and my leaves tremble. Tiny feet stream down the path below. My roots throb to their beat. The wind carries hints of skin and scented hair, as their warm sighs drift to the canopy.

  One comes close to pluck at an arrow someone whittled in my winter bark. Small, sturdy, with a rosemary essence, she leans on my trunk and kicks the ground. Echoes wave through the field. Then she pushes off and slips down the path, leaving a warm patch on my trunk.

  I groan, sway, and toss a leaf to light her way.