market day

flash fiction

It’s market day. The facility bused us to the commons. We gather in the grass; our pants droop with coins. I linger at the bus. “Take a stroll,” the nurse says, “get something nice!” I don’t care much for crowds, for the public, for fresh air, but the looming winter turned my stomach inside out. Screw it. I walk towards the gazebo, through rows of carpetbag Hucksters hawking cryptochrome kitsch and vitalized ciders. I walk with a limp now. Doc says sciatica, comes and goes, want a cane? A mob of ossified leaves skitters past my cane, blown October wrappers trapeze into ever-early evening. Everything is fast. Too fast. Loud. I hunch forward. No choice. Doc says advanced scoliosis, use the cane. I do. Thank you, thank you. I am slow. Hunched. I suck in my gut, suck to avoid brushing shoulders, clench the cirrhotic abdomens of my yesterself, my yester-yesterself, my yester-yester-yesterself…I imagine I smell of my father.

The first Huckster has the rakish air of someone bulldozed awake. He speaks in queer figurations, speaks of moles chomping through sprinkler lines, holds up a bag of yellow powders meant to deter. I have no ill will toward moles nor their preoccupation with sprinklers. I have no sprinklers. I have no moles. I nod. Smile. Thank you, thank you. The black nipple of my cane comes down on a boy’s toe. Sorry, so sorry. I catch tell of miracle balms, prodigious laxatives made from a Spanish saint’s foot, or at least I think. Doc says the hearing ain’t what it was—you should be wearing an aid… A horse-jawed man hawks tinctures, his voice shot with pubescent creaks, “One drop makes the liver sing!” Children tug at their mothers’ skirts, apple-cheeked, pawing for candied nuts and fudge bricks. A she-ogre sits in the grass cranking a barrel organ. The air grows vegetal, the stench of winter’s salty wool gathers in the eaves.

I pause, clutching my matryoshka gut. Doc says wanna live? Cut the booze... It’s loud. Too loud. The air is gummy with promise. I want to consume everything, every airborne promise. I want to titrate all chattering spiels into parseable gumdrops and retreat—fall back and sit on a pigeon bench with earned leisure, take out the ones that tickle my eye and invite them to whisper their promise on my tongue. The organ browbeats bodies forward in dazed procession. They press into my back, compelling movement. Sorry, sorry. I stumble into motion; a cog in something big—big and listening with its whole flesh.

A robed woman pushes through the crowd, a bushel of cauliflower held over her head. A pair of amphibious sisters peddle amulets they’ve cut from bark and polished with oils until they turned pool table green. A fat man buys three and ties them around his neck. Perfumes of boiled nettle and burnt sugar drift through the evening. A man with a velvet cap brandishes small tins filled with glittering grit, insisting they’ll keep one’s sleep from turning rancid, they’ll hush the visions that chew our hours, they’ll ward off whatever is coming — Frostbite? Heartbreak? Famine?

I lose balance, stumble, nearly fall. You okay? A passerby asks, a warm hand on my shoulder. I nod. Yes, yes. A vampiric widow offers narrow flasks of cloudy liquid, each stoppered with swollen knuckle corks. She speaks in low, honeyless tones, naming ailments I didn’t know I had: salt in the blood, airless dreams, bone-thirst… A child points to a flask of perwinkle clouds and cries until his mother presses her last coin into the widow’s palm.

The organ caliope deposits me at the gazebo’s mouth. I put a hand on its wet wood, steady myself, brush psoriatic shoulder crumbs from where the Samaritan righted me. In the gazebo, a pair of men wear bright blue scarves. The man on the left holds charms carved from bright horns, strung together on thin wire. He fingers his bone rosaries, head tilted up, eyes closed, jelly pulsing under his thin lids. The one on the right holds the robed woman’s cauliflower wreath. With each jingle of the left man’s rosaries, the organ deposits more people.

The right man begins to sing; an alien vowel pierces the caliope, frail-strong and castrato high. My fillings jump. My jaw locks. The organ stops. The right man sustains, long, outgrowing the itch for air. The left man joins. A breeze builds to flash the maple’s dead bellies. The crowd quiets, stills, straitens. I straighten. My spine unfurls, tendons unclench with each blue-throated phrase. We, the crowd, are straight. Chiseled and elongated, remade to stand with shared height. The voices climb into half cadence. Dissonant. Wanting. They hold the final dyad for inhuman minutes and stop. In the cesarua, we, the crowd, we as one put chapped hands into our pockets and turn them inside out, we let hard-won silver spill into the grass in percussive plops. The vibrations giggle through the dirt and charge under me, their playful force wedging between the divets in my soles. The couliflower constellation flaps over the right man’s head. The breeze summons gooseflesh with the exact placement and weight of dad, the exact torso placements of his arms when he’d scoop toddler me off the ground. The breeze builds when the blue throats commence their answering canon. The forces in my soles feast on their amplitude; the gooseflesh tracings become dad’s flesh and I, We—We as one are drawn up up up…

—

I wake up to something metal dropped in the hall. The nurse is fat and stinks of foreign spices. She’s taken the tube out of my throat and says something about me being “ready” to “try again.” Someone down the hall screams or laughs or snores. The fat, spicy nurse is above me now, smiling down, her breasts brushing my skin as apple sauce enters my mouth.

---

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