Writer of short fiction, poetry, and editorials.

Out of Town Guests

*This was originally submitted to Round 7 of the NPR Three Minute Fiction contest* It didn’t win.

They came in on a mid-afternoon train from Boston to Mystic, stowed away in the dark folds of Ginny’s unmentionables deep within her suitcase. She was excited to see her boyfriend after a month in Europe, but not nearly as excited as the guests she was unwittingly transporting from the bay-side hotel she stayed in after her long flight from Paris. The hunger-bubbles in the bellies of her stowaways were growing, and there was only one thing that would appease their appetite, and that was blood, tasty human blood.

It’s not that this multi-generational, extended family wasn’t happy living in Ginny’s dirty laundry, but they all were looking forward to a new place to stay and a hot meal. Even bedbugs enjoy a little travel and some foreign food once in a while. Luckily for them, since Ginny’s boyfriend, John, lived in the house in the middle of the train station parking lot, both was only a short walk away.

Ginny and John were in the middle of a whirlwind spring-fling turned summer-romance when Ginny’s job sent her off to Paris to cover the goings-on surrounding fashion week. For a month she bounced around from party to party, hotel to hotel, hobnobbing with the fashion elite, updating her renowned fashion column with candid pictures, and all the racy behind the scenes details she encountered along the way. Naturally jealous, John could barely handle her going away so soon after they met, but the numerous pictures she posted every day of herself and all those chiseled male models really wound his guts into tight, sickening knots.

John was excited to see Ginny, and by the time she’d unloaded her suitcase onto his bed, sorting the dirty clothes from the clean, his urge to lustfully pounce upon her won out over the jealousy that was simmering inside him, but just barely. The bedbugs, now more terrified than hungry, quickly scattered to the safety of their new-found home in John’s bed. As the late afternoon sky dimmed to a pale blue, the two of them indulged in each other passionately, a mix of animalistic rawness and pristine, young love. By the time the sun had fully set, the two of them laid spent, a tangle of limbs and twisted sheets, each reliving the afternoon in quick flashes and silly grins.

Soon, however, John’s jealous mind got the best of him, and his blissful bedroom cooing was replaced with a litany of questions, each more pointed than the last. Ginny bristled and pulled herself away from John, and the hungry bedbugs took a chance and began to make their way to a much needed supper. As Ginny angrily packed her suitcase, John’s jealousy became remorse, and John’s legs became a banquet for his still undiscovered guests.

By the time Ginny and John were done screaming at each other, the bedbugs were plump with blood and quite content with their new home. By the time Ginny was on the next northbound train, John began to realize that his jealous demeanor and short fuse made him a bachelor once again. At the same time, a bite from one of his new bedbug buddies began to burn and itch. Weeks later, John figured out why his sheets were covered in little dots of blood, and it was longer, still, before he made the connection that each fresh bite may be a tasty bit of karma for the way he treated Ginny. Sometimes life’s lessons are lost, sometimes they linger in the dark and bite you when you least expect it.

Second day of Autumn 2011

clouds creep in
7:48 in the morning on the second day of fall 2011. Napa, CA.

Autumn is less dramatic here than it is back home in Mystic. The air cools, but only slightly at first. The leaves change slowly, if at all. However, the sky changes, it hangs a deeper shade of blue, and the clouds come in from the ocean and stack themselves against the hills.

False Promises

© Kenneth C. Fish Jr.

So, that’s what it feels like to pretend, he thought, as he laid in bed staring at the water-stained ceiling, trying to fall asleep for what felt like the millionth time in his fifteen years of living. It had been a normal day. It had been a rough day. In Abel McIntyre Junior’s family, there was no difference. In his family, in the trailer park with the neighbors that surrounded him like ghouls from a house of horrors, the best days for him would likely kill any other kid, he always thought.

Abel knew how other kids lived, and it wasn’t like him. He could see their houses on the soft, rounded hills across the Mystic River through the loose glass slats of the crank-open windows in his tiny wood-paneled bedroom. They had yards with grass and swing sets in them where children played all summer, and mounds of colorful flowers that gleamed in the most carefree way from mid-spring to mid-autumn. Even in the winter when those same hills were just grey mounds spiked with the craggy skeletons of oaks and maples, the houses glowed golden and warmly, twinkling on the coldest of days when there was ice in the air and the river looked as if it was frozen solid.

They lived in actual houses, and those houses they lived in didn’t have wheels under them. This fact alone seemed to provide those kids with some sense of permanence and security that Abel never knew. This fact alone, Abel sometimes caught himself believing, raised them up above him and his ever-toiling Ma, Ethel, and drunkard Da, Abel Senior, and their house with the wheels underneath it just in case they needed to make a run for it again.

“Pretending,” his mother always said “is much better than reality.” For Abel, there was always a certain disconnect between that mantra of hers and how he thought he lived his life. He never thought what he was doing was pretend, it felt more like protection. It was what he did to make do as the poor kid who lived in the trailer park that was essentially used as a halfway-housing complex for the underfunded and understaffed loony bin on the edge of this otherwise rich white town. For Abel, it was survival.

* * * * * * * * * *
“Don’t you ever change your pants?” taunted Fred, the super-popular star of the soccer team at school. “I can smell those filthy things from here.” The reality of it was, Abel rarely did change his pants. In fact, he only owned three pairs; one for every day, one for Sunday, and one for the rare occasion when Ethel would sneak their dirty laundry into the laundry room of the loony bin where she and her sorry excuse for a husband, Abel Sr., worked.

Abel always loved laundry day. He relished the brief moment when the few clothes he had were stiff and crisp and smelled like the industrial detergent they used to kill off every biting, burrowing, stinging, blood-sucking creepy-crawly he imagined inhabiting the flesh of all those crazies where his parents worked. Every time he slipped into a clean pair of trousers or a fresh shirt he felt, if only for a second, reborn.

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