Such a Sensitive Boy...flash fiction for a cold November day

SUCH A SENSITIVE BOY by Katherine Tomlinson

I wish Devin wasn’t such a sensitive boy, Marla thought as she watched her son happily chow down on a plate of store-bought chocolate chip cookies and a glass of skim milk. The cookies were a rare indulgence, a reward for the good grades he’d brought home on his report card. Marla didn’t want Devin to end up squishy fat like some character on a redneck reality show. (Like his daddy)

They didn’t have the money to eat organic, but she kept junk food out of the house as much as she could, trying to steer the boy away from the greasy fried pork rinds his father favored and toward apple chips and veggies with humus. Not that she called it “humus” around Lee, lest it set off a rant about “Ay-rab food.”

Her mother-in-law thought she was being mean denying Devin sweets, so whenever the boy went over to his nana’s, Marla felt like she had to search his backpack for contraband when he came home.

It annoyed her that Barbara wouldn’t respect her wishes. “It’s my job to spoil my grandbaby,” her mother-in-law always said. “A little love never hurt anyone.” Then she’d give Marla a significant look. “It’s no wonder he such a sensitive boy.”

Marla’s husband wasn’t much help. Lee still ate breakfast at his momma’s nearly every morning because she’d make him sausage gravy and biscuits like he liked while Marla and Devin ate yogurt and fruit.

Lee had voted for the president who’d won and ever since election night, he’d doubled down on being an asshole, like he was sure any minute a Mexican Muslim was going to show up in Huntsville and take his job as produce manager at the Winn-Dixie.

Not that it was much of a job any more. The store had cut his hours last spring and he still wasn’t bringing in a full paycheck.

Marla had been an inventory clerk at Redstone Arsenal before she got married, but Lee didn’t want her working “outside the home,” even though they could have used the extra income now that Devin was in middle school and didn’t need so much supervision.

“No wife of mine is going to work,” Lee had declared even as he sold off their washer and dryer to cover the rent one especially lean month.

Weekend Flash Fiction

                                DARKLING      

                       by Katherine Tomlinson                                 

The sun didn’t rise on Thursday.  The blogosphere, which never sleeps, outpaced the news channels in reporting the situation, but CNN had posted a graphic (Black Thursday!) by 11 a.m.  The parade of pundits began that afternoon, with self-styled experts throwing out phrases like “Little Ice Age” and “global hydrological cycle.”

Dr. Nicholas Solarz, whose theories on nuclear winter had been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, seemed to be everywhere at once, basking in his moment of geek glory. He talked a lot about the surface temperature of the earth being 300 Kelvin and predicted that without sunlight, the temperature would drop by a factor of two in weeks.

When these statements were met by puzzled looks from anchor-people who couldn’t do long division without a calculator, he explained that 275 Kelvin is the freezing temperature of water and that in a month; the planet’s surface temperature would be down to 150 Kelvin.  Then he had added, somewhat unhelpfully, “You do the math.”

But to do the math, people needed to know the difference between the Kelvin and the Celsius temperature scales and have a passing grasp of the concept of “absolute zero” and most everyone had enough problems just converting Celsius to Fahrenheit.  Also, a fair number of viewers thought Dr. Solarz was saying “Kevin” and wondered who he was and what he had to do with anything.

Clean Living--Flash Fiction for Halloween

Rena Jacobs had been offered the job via email, which wasn’t unusual.

People were often embarrassed to be associated with a hoarder house, even if they weren’t the hoarder responsible, and they liked to put as much distance between them and the house in question as possible.

Rena understood the impulse. Cleaning other people’s houses wasn’t exactly the career she’d envisioned for herself. But an art history degree doesn’t go very far in a small town, and when the owner of the gallery where she worked had died, she’d found herself with few prospects. After maxing out her credit cards, and discovering that any job she was qualified for was already being done by unpaid interns from the local university, she’d narrowed her options to medical transcription or becoming a career barrista.

And then one day as she was channel surfing, she came upon a reality show about hoarders. It was perversely fascinating and Rena found herself sucked in. At the end of the episode, a team of specialty cleaners had been brought in to bring order out of chaos. There’d been a phone number to call for people who needed “help with a “situation,” and when Rena had called, she’d found herself on the phone with John T. Macallan, who was more than happy to talk to her about franchise opportunities with KLEEN LIVING.

A touch of flash--Fiction for Thursday--Dead Man's Son

Dead Man’s Son

By

Katherine Tomlinson

Peter hadn't much minded growing up without a father. His mother and grandmother doted on him and his mother's brother, Uncle Henry, was a huge presence in his life, teaching him how to pee standing up, and throw a curve ball and drive a stick shift car, which was way cooler than just being able to drive. Uncle Henry loved him, Peter knew, but sometimes he said things to him that Peter wished he hadn't, like when he told Peter his father was a piece of shit who would have ended up in prison if he hadn't been killed when he was.

"I'm sorry to say that Pete," Uncle Henry had said, "because you're a really good kid. But you've got bad genes."

Peter had thought his uncle was talking about blue jeans and that hadn't made any sense to him at all.

It had been Uncle Henry who'd told Peter how the doctor had extracted sperm from his dead dad and saved it for his mother and how three months after his father was cremated, she'd been injected with the sperm and he'd been conceived. Peter could have lived the rest of his life without knowing that.

But the information did explain a couple of things.

Like how it was that Peter could hear dead people talking whenever he wanted to. And sometimes, even when he didn't.