1 Glimpses of the Underside A Collection of Flash Fiction by Richard Krause 2 Table of Contents A One - Man Amusement 4 Breakfast 7 Bathing 9 Doll’s Wrists 12 Britisher Meets Hong Kong Girl 13 Community College 15 Carousel 19 On Being Japanese 22 The Virgin, and How She Spent Her Saturday Afternoons 2 5 The Attack 27 The Window 29 Exposure 3 3 Rusty 3 5 Eating 3 6 His Book 38 Wheelchair 4 0 The Surfboard 4 2 Penn State 4 4 The Boy with the Leaky Boot 47 The Red Stain 5 0 Bloody Mary 5 3 The Conquistador 5 5 Dragonflies 57 Ants 61 The Day Jack Was Stoned 6 4 The Unwed Mothers of Canada 6 7 3 Rutland 70 Book 7 3 The Polyglot 7 6 Postage Stamps 7 8 Rhino 80 Plant 82 Broccoli 8 5 Galen 8 6 Reading Olesha 8 9 Reading Your Writing in New Jersey 91 His Hip 93 Frank 9 5 Mr. A 101 ABC 10 6 He Suspected Her 10 9 Katrina 1 12 4 A One - Man Amusement He’s a one - man amusement is how he keeps her with him. He can dance, jump, whistle on cue. For her every mood he has a routine. He’ll imitate people they see when her spirits are down, bring those people home, have their penguin walk strutting through the house. Pretend to a bespectacled seriousness he doesn’t have to make her laugh, full belly laughs at some of his acts that have her rollicking, collapsing on the floor helpless in amusement. He knows how to please and play every one of her feelings like a new i nstrument he invents for the occasion. She is there waiting, the captive audience as he imitates now a cat, then a dog, a goldfish, the lips, the switched tail, the bug eyes, and there he is a butterfly, metamorphosed back into the caterpillar that she’s afraid of and will rush to him to stop the undulating transit up an imaginary branch. And cuddle close to him as he tells her, “Look, there it is on your shoulder,” and she’ll pull him closer and scream “no, no,” and then he’ll rub her with his bris tly beard and let out a long meow, or act the pirate, and she’ll jump free and squeal. He keeps even his audience of one on the edge of her seat. As the afternoon wears on he’ll settle into doing children, then old people, or clerks at the supermarket, li brarians, sometimes even himself, his stooped walk that she quickly dismisses. She prefers him to be like all the others rather than just himself. She wants to live with a hundred people and he provides her with them all at once, a circus of performers r ather than one ordinary man. By nightfall he is a trapeze artist. She is lying looking at him balancing himself 5 on the carpet that he’s convinced her is a high wire hundreds of feet above the earth. His arms outstretched he conveys for her his sense o f daring, then he falls, but it is only to be a fireman with a child in his arms landing on a trampoline, but in another instant his chicken wing is out perching his body high up as he somersaults himself upright again into the high wire act for her. She claps and yells when he falls again, diagonally he reaches out and before you know it he is a paratrooper, the parachute having slowed down his descent, his arms majestically holding onto the cords there among the clouds, she looking at him, the muscles in her neck propping her head on her hand all tense. Looking up anxiously for just who will fall to earth this time. He’s falling in enemy territory, her home country twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Fear is in his heart, down, down he plummets. She is frightened, she says, they have given her a cyanide tablet, she wraps it tightly in her kimono. She does as his narrative instructs, obediently weaves herself into his tale for he is still tens of meters above her village and she still has time to flee t he barbarian descent, falling back through time, back behind enemy lines before she was born, here he with her is history in the making once more. The same story a hundred times. Down he falls, down, plotting his strategy, getting the lay of the land. He fingers the butt of his M - 14, his knife, repeats the few words of Japanese he has learned, sights a clump of trees, a grass thatched house, her running desperately almost out of Rashomon , alone running, her black hair falling on her shoulders like a dol l, even and straight. He runs his fingers through the nylon cords of his parachute in anticipation, angles them towards her. Out of the sky he descends and it seems the faster she runs 6 the closer he is to her till finally her head is buried in a bed of l eaves that he lands on like a soft carpet. He shouts in English to her; she answers with little trembling squeals of Japanese, he yells, “Where are the villagers?” And she hazards in clear but hesitant English, “There is just me.” “Liar,” he sa ys, “liar. Where are the others?” “There’s just me.” “ Usortski , usortski ,” he says and pretends to slap her across the face as she drops on the bed for him. He tears at her kimono, she snatches at his face, his arms to free herself, then plunges her hand inside her kimono for the pill, raises it and smiles sneering at him and rushes it to her mouth, but he digs his fingers inside her clenched teeth, grabs her by the back of the neck and yells, “Cough it up, cough it up!” She makes two mock coughs, and turns her frightened eyes to him as he says, “Where are the others?” “There is only us,” she answers. “There is only us.” 7 Breakfast Every morning the young man returns bringing the old lady breakfast. They exchange small talk and she thanks him with the same unflagging earnestness, never failing to add “very much.” And he unfailingly reciprocates with an equally precise and well - intoned “you’re welcome.” Sometimes because of her loneliness she tries to engage him in longer convers ation, knowing that the remainder of the day she must rely on her own resources to dispel that loneliness. He understands, and for a few moments pretends interest, even offering a question sometimes to extend the conversation. Then he returns to his roo m, and she to hers to eat her breakfast. Why does this harmless relationship so bother me? No, more than bother me, it vexes me, it positively irritates me. I who applaud such gestures normally. He it is clear is not benefitting materially, so far as I can tell. Though he is clearly doing her a good turn. Why am I so vexed, madden ing ly so? Perhaps it is the satisfaction that he gets, or that she gets in the arrangement. Although I haven’t noticed it except in the unusual politeness in everything they say. She by turn is understandably grateful. But he, he needn’t be so polite, so accommodating. He is far to o helpful, to o willing to give. None of his goodness is held in reserve. His good turns have no real twists to them. Nothing contrary that I can see that would make them really valuable. He doesn’t do good and turn away. Be a little abrupt, chilly, remote sometimes, give his gesture some bite. No, he lavishes attention, well not overly, but more than allows his gesture real value. He devalu es it. 8 Here, this is what I am driving at: I think he knows the goodness of his gesture too well. He is puffed up by it. It is not something torn away from his self - interest. No, it is his self - interest. It is the essence of his feeling about himself. He do es n’t benefit materially, but he imagines he does spiritually. This is what vexes me. It is a good turn done and daily, as if it is natural to him. But it is not , he is calculating spiritual credit. Good turns should be shown with a kind of contem pt and with all the necessity of themselves, with no frills, no extras, nothing accessory. Christianity isolates them, enshrines them, gives them importance. It makes good turns unnatural, there isn’t enough opposition to the m , it pays no attention at al l to the p ar t of us that doesn’t want to do them. Christianity ignores that part of us as if it didn’t exist. That’s what I have against the three of them, Christianity, the old lady, and most of all the you ng man. There’s no opposition. The young man is bound to his good turn. Bound for the reward, the self - esteem of it. He is required to feel what he shouldn’t feel so naturally. He doesn’t allow himself to feel any differently. Just once, that’s all I’m asking, he should be irritated at the old la dy. Despise her needs, her helplessness. Admit to himself that he hates her, if only for a moment, that he doesn’t like gett ing her breakfast every morning. And let him show it just one time in his voice, and let her know it. This would make them both acceptable to me, and really calm me. And perhaps mollify the sting of not being asked myself to serve the old lady every morning. 9 Bathing At eighty - four she still had it. At least that is what the doctor told her sister, a nurse ten years younger who had been married three times. The eighty - four - year - old had never married and now was in the nursing home hiding under her bed every night the nuns came in to give her a bath. She screamed “bloody murder” each time she was touched, and really “put on a show,” her sister was told. Even when Margaret lived with her sister she didn’t want to be touched. In all that time she only allowed her back to be scrubbed from behind the shower curtain. “And I never saw her undress, come to thin k of it,” her sister mused. Despite that she was engaging, a little girl almost, with thick curls even at eighty, until that is, she was placed in the nursing home with the nuns. It was about the time her sister got tired of dragging her out to view the sun sets up in Shrewsbury, or forcing her to read the Wall Street Journal aloud at the kitchen table, to keep her mind alert, she said, while she cooked. She got tired too of making her walk straight, until finally her sister’s spine got so bent she walked pe rmanently stooped at the waist. Her sister also grew ti r ed of the same stories she told visitors again and again about Charlie. So she placed her in the home and sold the house and moved into an apartment by herself in town. Margaret didn’t communicate a fter that, and to her sister’s surprise she picked the smallest room when she could have had a larger one. She preserved an eerie silence broken only by reports of the piercing screams when they took her out f ro m under the bed to her bath. It took two of the strongest nuns, so large were they that you couldn’t 10 tell if they were not men in disguise. Each had one arm, and sometimes a third went behind supporting the old woman as they virtually carried her down the hall to fulfill the regulations that had to be kept by all. Each resident had to have a bath at least once every other night. All the residents peeked timidly out of their rooms when they heard the old lady being carried by the grim - faced nuns, their jaws firmly s et, their ivory crucifixes boun c ing on their dark habits, their trembling beads at their waist reminding people of their order, and of an almost tribal ceremony, a ritual that had not taken place in over seventy years. Riding a horse hadn’t done it, swimming or vigorous exercises had no t done it, and a man certainly never had. Margaret saw to that. She embarrassed her younger sister who took her alon g on dates in the way she would all of a sudden rise up and smack the man. Almost out of the blue with her pocketbook. More than once sh e made such a scene at restaurants that she just got up and left the table if the man so much as tried to be openly friendly. She didn’t have the grace of her sister who took the man’s hand just like her mother ha d taught her and patted it gently once or twice, and said with a smile, “Now be a nice boy,” and returned the hand to him. No, Margaret stormed off. And for years she went with Charlie who graduated from Yale, and wanted to marry her. He had a law practice in New York City, but she would have n othing to do with him outside of dating. Even though she often met his family in New Haven in the summers. But finally that too came to nothing. And so all the time it was building up, it must have been sixty, seventy , years, thickening in secret. The d octor who had examined her confirmed in astonishment that 11 it hadn’t been lost. Neither in the back seat of a car, or in any marriage bed. No, that would be left to the day when the whole nursing home would witness what was never performed by horse, or m an, or the bawdy reach of a salty wave. What a proper woman can close off like the most efficient suction in the world. Guarded by only a will that had the remarkable resolve to last seventy years. Perhaps it grew from her father being a Greek Orthodox priest, even though that made the younger sister elope at seventeen and get married, only for the sex , she later confided. It must have been something lasting in her. Something that endures. Something untouchable. A curtaining of mind that no random, a dolescent movement could ever perforate, no accident. But at eighty - four her resolve thinned, like the brittleness of her bone s , with her abandonment to the nursing home in Vermont. Her blood too was probably thinned by the medications, and the religion c ome back to haunt her, to manhandle her under the guise of nuns just doing their duty. Women on each arm, dragging her with the thin craning necks of the residents sticking out of their rooms. Extra silent. Knowing something similar could happen to them . That regulations are regulations. Did her piercing screams do it, or the legs she threw out to stop herself, the short jerks and starts, the pulling and pushing, the humiliation, the sense of helplessness, did that make for the tiny drops of blood on t he floor that barely anyone noticed, until they had to be wiped up? Proving that it was more than her pride that was lost having been forced to take a bath. 12 Doll’s Wrists He said she had doll’s wrists and that led him to grab her more than he might hav e wanted to bend her to his will, to draw her to her knees to do his bidding. In fact the whole room he outfitted for her; the changes of clothes, the tiny silverware, the small cupboards, a special room in fact that she could play in. And though they li ved otherwise normally, though she stayed at home to mend and sew, to cook and clean, for he wouldn’t let her wor k; still she took refuge in the room he had prepared before she came to live with him. A room in which she wove the smallest dresses with flou nces and coverall tops, and when he’d arrive by evening he’d just have to reach his arm in and pull her out of his fancy and play with this doll like he was never allowed to as a child. When he first set eyes on her, her thin wrists gave him the idea that he could recapture his youth and overcome the prohibition that haunted him even in adulthood until she arrived to play house with him, in the room he prepared for them, a room he stormed every night like a Great Dane that easily outsized all the furniture 13 Britisher Meets Hong Kong Girl The Britisher met the Hong Kong girl in neutral territory, Japan, and wooed her the same way he would have a hundred others. "You're like a diamond in a coal field. Did anyone ever tell you, you're beautiful?" he said looking long and hard into her eyes. And she fell for him, fell just the same as if he had been standing on a street corner in Hong Kong and she just one or two generations up from Canton had an unamorous brush with him, got entangled under his fe et, with his blue trousers, his navel coat with the large gold buttons, got entangled with the stick he swung so freely in tim e with his walk, the stick that taught "the locals" a lesson. Every street corner bore a story of someone getting hit, of the hu miliation that took place. For the British were allowed by law to administer corporeal punishment to the local inhabitants. She foll owed him and his blandishments, and submitted finally to the flat tery, actually grew fond of him like an Imperial Power, and even prou dly took him back to meet her parents in Kowloon who were st ill awed by the British, though privately suspicious of their daughter's involvement. You wonder what he saw in her large t eeth, her glasses , her two long greasy braids; maybe it was her intelligence, her quick - wittedness . M aybe i t was that she saw him standing on the prow of some huge sailing ship uniformed in blue, the tricorn hat, his arm inserted between his chest buttons gleaming in the s un; the vessel ever so slowly maneuvering its way into Hong Kong harbor just before noon. 14 And mayb e h e saw beyond her vision of him aboard that ship a hundred years ago, past Hong Kong, past the tiny British protectorate. He saw in her the vast mainland o f China, the terraced rice fields, the mountains in the half mist like e xaggerated humps of camels, the snakelike Yangtze and Ye llow Rivers, Beijing and Shangha i; and he saw the great railroads t hat would carry them to outer Mongolia and Tibet, and he s aw the Great Wall of China when she smiled, and the tombs of the Ming Dynasty and the thousands of warri ors preserved with their horses. A ll these things he saw in her, and the simple practical fact that her Chinese could get him to all these places in what was to be a trip of a lifetim e, as opposed to the tours everyone else took. She had expected they would stay together afterwards. But needless to say they parted within only weeks after returning to Hong Kong, after he took his trip of a lifetime. 15 Community College The death following the destruction of the 25,000 - 50,000 Iraqi soldiers. It started in the History Department. Quite innocently, for they were only the recorders of the past and couldn’t play any part in the battlefield horrors, so they left it to the S ociology D epartment. Its C hairman was from Iraq , so there was little more than an accommodating echo of what was heard. He too felt obligated to put the yellow ribbon on his office door, and as a concession to his conscience they let him keep the American flag inside on his desk. And the Economics P rofessor, he came from Bangladesh. He had daily call s from his friend in Washington that kept him apprised of the news about twelve hours before it was released to the public. But he was awaiting citizenship , and so could only speak up so much. He also taught Statistics, but gave that up in regard to the war when the school paper reported, “Not twenty Iraqi women and children were worth on e American soldier’s life.” He knew the cause was hopeless. The Accountant Professor who could rapid fire do a cost analysis lost all her flair for figures when it was civilians halfway around the world with their faces buried in countless grains of Iraqi sand. She knew it was wrong, but what could sh e do? She was only one person, and a pragmatist. And besides , she had to take her daughter down to the mall that very afternoon to try on a new dress for the one that had to be returned , not to mention her son’s weekly visits to the orthodontist to tight en his braces. 16 And the three Psychologists: not a murmur of the war dead. One, the man was young enough to get called up as he was already in the R eserves, though he strained to listen to both sides his head was canted to one side already anticipating bul lets whizzing past his own ear. The two History Professors co z ied up to the Iraqi to get firsthand information and instill in him their own values and historical perspective. He adopted their opinion, did “a 180 - degree turn ” the Bangladesh Professor accus ed him of , while admitting to his own 45 - degree turn. The two Computer Professors had all the gravity of their equipment behind them , one an ex - Marine , and were solidly in support of our troops. The s ecretary of one department started the flags and yellow ribbons on everyone’s door. When one member of the faculty was asked if he want ed a flag and ribbon, he said , “ No thank you. ” The N ursing P rofessor quickly said, “ Who said that? ” But it went no further. They didn’t gang up on him. He kept his vi ews to himself and was overruled by the constant television the s ecretary watched for war news ten feet from her desk The deaths started in each of these d epartments and spread up to the English Department which w as worrying about the next play, the horro rs of Greek tragedies, Afr ican - American literature , their own publication successes, and the alarming erosion of skills in student writing The death spread too to the Department of Biological Science, to the cats and frogs dissected in the labs, and to the c hemistry of what was already a corpse of life, and on into the Nursing Department where the mock cadavers got overwhelmingly 17 attentive care that seemed as meaningless as the case s of pneumoconiosis from the local coal company when miners c ame out of t he hollers to be treated. Finally, D eath stalked in the M ath Depart ment and in the head y achieve ments of Physics. They too applaud the imaginary numbers, direct hits on the television , the exact trajectory through doors on the top of building s It is here where the D eath started at the local Community College along with the School Administration that feared the student body. Even though o ver seventy - five percent had relatives or frie nds serving in the Middle East , and so on the Administration office doors were placed yellow ribbons in support of the troops. They couldn’t have done otherwise when D eath got underway , in full swing, scythe in hand, and circulated through student body ; th e institution of higher learning became an almos t communicable disease that few believe d they were the carriers of, or had originated, and finally it wandered the air passageways and rested inside the epiglottis and down the tracheal vents and caused a bla ck lung nobody could quite diagnose outside that found on the local miners . For everyone went on with their careers. By March 3 when asked at a briefing how many Iraqis were killed on the road to Basra, General Richard Neal said, “There is nothing to be gained by ta lking about wartime causalities.” The small C ommunity C ollege went on with its life. No blood dripped out from under their doors connecting each Department . There were no footprints left from having stepped in it, for the hot sands had already soaked it up, blew it d r ied across the desert granule by granule. Their hands too were clean attending to their labs, balancing chemical 18 equations, marking errors in sentences, reading even about th e horrors confined to World L iterature and History courses. At best the red Kentucky dirt told of another story of Educators who se blood flowed not red, nor moist, nor drained in desiccated bodies, but was alive in the minds of all who picture d American life in their warm houses, in the food they prepared on holidays , in the electricity and running water that Baghdad was deprived of ; a ll these things were evident along with the smiles on everyone’s faces and their sense of humor as they embrace d their children, fathers, mothers, unlike the Iraqis who we claimed “ don’t value life like we do .” 19 Carousel The children grew heavier the more I watched them. Their little thighs puffed up, their backsides ba llooning, their disproportionate heads leaden as their fingers chubby and exploring reached for the ponies’ ears, and kicked their sides as if they were really guiding them. They pulled at the mane of hair that hung down over the eyes and buried their nos es into it, or cocked their heads lovingly embracing the animal’s neck to give their parents a big smile. And the axle went around creaking and groaning, screeching through the hoots of the children and the rusty spokes of the wheel hitched up to the car that seated six. And the carousel music tried to drown the children’s hoots, the imagined neighs, the whinnying, tried to drown the communicative pawing with dazzling curvets. The children saw the horse’s teeth bared permanently, felt the froth fling ing from the mouth, imagined long lines of saliva extended by the swift movements of the head, imagined plaster necks of chestnut and dapple gray, rosy muzzles, the shiniest whi t e underbellies, the silver manes flowing in the ocean breeze; the ponies thems elves freely galloping on the beach with the scud of the waves at their backs. And the children’s thoughts return ed to the days of solitary knight s - errant perched high on their mounts fighting off Saracens. The horses caparisoned in gold and silver with tiny mirrors, and their own metal armor gently jingling up and down, lightening the children despite their weight and oversized bodies with the stuff of dreams. Did the parents too imagine plaster reinforced with steel, and colors richly 20 glazed, and did t hey hear the bells that shook with the reins? And were they themselves not perched for a moment atop the horses in place of their children going up and down as the carousel turned and pumped as they caught glances of themselves in mirrors past, or tearing off to some urgency that their children now silent on the pony only betrayed the secret nature of? Could that have been what raced through their own minds as they forked over the few hundred pesetas for the ride? And the children cried “giddyap, giddyap, ” and pulled the bridles and kicked the little bellies. And of course the animals couldn’t move any faster but proceeded at the same slow mechanical pace bound to the rhythm of the music as they pulled the little ones around and around as the spokes of th e wheel and the shafts of wood permitted. Two ponies in tandem, three alone, and a bigger one for the cart; the gilded chariot for the little Romans. Gladiators on their way to fight the lions the tawny sands on a hot afternoon suggested. Did everyone gi ve up such thoughts when the whole thing stopped? When the one refractory pony who periodically made everything come to a halt pawed some communication to the operator who only whacked him on the hindquarters. Did the parents see plaster fall off and sto mped into dust? Or imagine some rust in the steel showing? A stirrup loose? Again and again the one refractory pony had to be wheedled, coaxed, pulled by the bridle. Did the parents see instead an oil can in the operator’s hand for the little pony’s jo ints to get him moving? Or were they already mumbling under their breath that the carousel was too old, out of date? Did they think even the froth from his little mouth was for realism’s sake? Jets