Gary Fincke

The Onset
 
The first moment screams crippled. Hurt ovals its small, cramped mouth. Previous health vanishes, an unleashed dog, the owner with his sack of cheap candy, a silhouette at a Halloween door. Winter’s end is a season of shots. Memory yammers while he shuffles to the elevator that rises to where syringes grow like the green onions his father salted like hard-boiled eggs. March withers until its shadow goes out. Each night the grins of animals enter his room like memorized prayers.  They rhyme their breath with his, reciting. His mother, dead before his age, unclasps her beaded purse as if entering his house requires a ticket.  For twenty-one years, she says, she’s carried the proper ID for pain, waiting to hand it over.  She’s dreamed his body crippled in yesterday’s underwear, his breath caught in phlegm’s thick web. In a doubled brown paper sack, she’s brought twelve pounds of pennies gathered from sidewalks and carpets. She asks him to arrange them in rolls for the teller she knows by name, the woman who lost her husband in Korea.  She shakes his clipped hair and nails from her purse, spelling his name with her finger in the thin dust.  Only after she knows the exact sum of her savings does she allow him to moan his symptoms.  Lie down, she says, so I can love you.  In two places, she ties her green gown behind him. There, she says, now finish undressing. And yes, she examines him, saying, “Relax now, close your eyes. This is where the past ends.”
 
**

Subsidence

It’s not the end of the world, the eclipse shifting foundations, the cinderblock cracked where corners of houses keel over like drunks. It’s not the atomic bomb. It’s not fallout, the despair that covers homeowners in the helpless housing plan built over the long-closed, anthracite mines.  It’s not a firestorm that ruins these roads, not a shock-wave that creates refugees. It’s not my father inside the fire hall huddled with his neighbours.  It’s not his hands that straighten the map where his modest street shows so large he believes it’s a river. It’s not cancer in every family. It’s not decades of dying, nobody returning, not ever, not even to the half-life that they endured, measuring themselves by mortgages that outlive them. It’s not the apocalypse.  It’s not news, watching while my father walks his hallway, measuring slope with his body, leaning.

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This was previously published in a different form at 100 Word Story.

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During the Plague Years

For his appointments, two years and counting, the woman who cut his hair was always masked when she unlocked the door and recorded his temperature like a dedicated nurse. She opened early on Thursdays to accommodate his fear, the salon empty, her partner not due for half an hour, his hair self-washed just minutes before. Her mask was always leopard-spot print, his black, the radio flush with current pop songs. With what he often felt was tenderness, she lifted the loops of his mask from his ears to trim. Years before, like his daughter, she had failed algebra, the two of them miserable, but together in summer school. For six weeks, they had been friends, a coincidence that made conversation easy. “Solve for x,” she said. “Solve for y,” and they laughed about no longer remembering which function came first among addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. In late spring, the third year begun, she said, “It’s been crazy” before murmuring the details of how her former husband had been shot and killed while outdoor-eating chicken wings, the gun home-made by the jealous shooter. He did not interrupt her. Most of all, he did not admit that he had no idea the dead man had been her husband. That he knew her only by her high school name, the one brought home by his daughter more than twenty years before. Before she brushed his loose hair to the floor, she showed him a photograph of her two daughters, their father no longer absent, but gone. This daughter, she says, drives her dead father’s car to work and washes it by hand each week. That daughter wears his shirts to bed. To solve for three unknowns, he thought, use simultaneous equations. Something he kept to himself like a terrible perversion as she allowed him a moment with the hand-held mirror. And though her ex had been with a woman who was also dead, the first to be shot, she confessed she had been sleepless since. That she was thinking she could live without cutting and styling hair. His spoken sympathy, he knew, did not comfort her. He paid, in cash, the tip, as always, pre-calculated to minimize the chance of contact. Already, he was telling himself never to speak of this and yet, weeks before she vanished and his hair was cut by a young, beautiful stranger, he betrayed her.
 
**
 
The Everlasting
 
If he used a rotary phone, a man believes he could dial the long nines to his mother’s voice, breathless from her downstairs hurry and failing heart.  He’s years alone, three weeks sleepless with waiting that whirrs like locusts.  His house has learned a language he cannot translate.  All morning its strange monologue chants the vowels of threat and fear. By noon the rooms darken for rain. The windows seal like lids on lungs.  Light flees to where everlasting breathes promises without people. Already he is months older than the dead he wishes to heal with his hands.  The familiar moans its daylong emergency song. On the kitchen table, papers and books, the small, reusable place setting.  The heart of a king, he’s read, was mummified with mint and myrtle, frankincense, daisy. After centuries, it’s a thing that travels like a campaigner. In each room the unbearable waits like a woman he’s paid for.
 
**
 
The Martyr in our Town
 
The martyr in our town is scouting the public places where we gather in great numbers.  He enters our malls and notes the busiest stores; he scans the food court’s longest lines.  Fridays, he watches football at the high school; Saturdays, a blockbuster film. Sundays, there are churches to attend, sitting with families on wooden pews. He studies prophecies and commandments.  He reads only the holy translations. At last, when winter justifies his knee-length coat, he thickens his waist with dynamite, develops a nails and ball-bearings paunch, and enters our one restaurant where every diner has three forks, two spoons, and wine on ice. He is ticking as he gives his reservation name, deciding that the tables nearby are perfect with capacity use. All this, he prays, will spread and go airborne like a pandemic’s contagion. Before he steps forward, the hostess displays a complimentary hangar for his heavy coat. She begins with the word the word “sir” just as he triggers himself, ascending.
 
**
 
Robbing the Pillars
 
In the Pioneer Tunnel, the tourists learn about robbing the pillars, how those seams of anthracite were blasted and stripped, how pillars of coal, left thick as support, would tempt the owners to send miners back down to shave them. How there, in those caves, men decided to take one more inch, then daring one more, the last thing the guide says before turning out the lights to make them eyeball the dread such darkness conjures. Think what's overhead as unstable, the guide says. Think of thinking that when you're blind. He listens for crying. For whispering between couples. Near the end of the minute, he reminds them where they are and what was done to the pillars among them. Often, he hears a scream. Always, someone applauds when he restores the light, the group more compact, appearing to be thicker than before.
 
**
 
In the Attic                                                                                       
 
My father, the magician, rose, without alarm, at five-fifteen to ready himself for night shift. My mother, his accomplice, materialized from work of her own at six-thirty. And I, seven years-old, mastered the tricks of straight-home, relock, and silent play. Before he descended to the brief privacy of water, my father, overhead, was a marvel who made the ceiling speak with his feet, his stage forbidden as matches, one more commandment I kept until the afternoon when stillness stayed sprawled above me, his performance so late I freed myself from fear’s handcuffs and climbed, sweat soaking my school shirt as dark as each corner of that barren room. I kept myself quiet while my father’s breath stuttered. I coughed and heard something snag in his sleep-drugged throat. My mother floated three miles away. She carried our phone. I might have called out to wake him, but that attic wheezed with prophecy, my father’s slack mouth suggesting death, nothing in that room but his body and the unkempt bed, not a book, not his flour-dusted clothes left downstairs as laundry, my terror a secret shame, its cry stifled by the heavy, mote-filled air.
 
**
 
Bloodletting
 
Missionaries came to my door this morning, speaking through the screen about the end times that are running, one said, on fumes, grinning like the bright dot on my Celica’s fuel gauge when I am fifteen minutes from stalling. Those preachers hoped to stir the fear I’ve stored since a thousand Sunday sermons rooted it so deeply I could imagine a soul. They spoke with the fervor of plague year priests, the certainty of bloodletters draining two pints to cure diseases embedded by a chronic imbalance of humors, the four I studied once, remembering the barber, past seventy, who had cut my schoolboy hair, how thirteen years later, he had stood with me outside his long-closed shop and recited the contours of my head, the way the strands nearest the crown needed special tending, and I, at twenty, confessed how much he’d frightened me with his story about the symbolism of barber poles, how his father and his grandfather had cut the blue veins of customers who believed their sicknesses could be emptied with their blood, that even boys like me had a pint to spare. The street was becoming a plain of absence for an approaching thruway. My hair curled over my collar, something to cut; the veins in my arms seemed swollen the way they felt when I watched those two terrorists enter the house of the woman across the street, admitted by the daughter who cuts herself daily, drawing a blade across her limbs as if she were lancing the boils of fear, squandering herself on anticipation.
 
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​
The Biblical Epic, with Intermission 
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Some Sunday evenings, while he sat between his parents like a prisoner, God was the deep voice that shook trees and billowed the cloaks of bearded men. Jesus was always the back of a head, a spotless hem of robe, or a lifted hand. The Old Testament women were full of lust, the men overcome by violence. The New Testament women were never blonde. But whether Old or New, the stories were so long that his parents watched them, during the waning days of the double feature era, one by one, those films turning epic, an intermission included at a cliffhanger moment. His parents never spoke; they never used the rest rooms. They contemplated. They considered. They turned introspective and thoughtful. At last, the rest of the movie-goers took their seats and shut up for the last halves of the holy films. Suffer the little children, Christ said, but soon he was suffering, too. The boy’s mother passed him a ham sandwich and a cup of milk from her blue thermos. When Jesus turned, his white robe fluttered at his top-of-the-screen cut throat. When he spoke, his back was turned, his face, in those films, never shown, his voice issuing soft sermons toward a void beyond the crowd. Sometimes, when the heathen women leaned forward and their loose clothes opened to a hint of breasts, the boy wished for a glimpse of the face of Christ, a way of knowing whether his eyes shifted down despite the tilt of his holy, upturned head.
 
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Gary Fincke's two latest collections of poetry have just been published: For Now, We Have Been Spared (Slant Books), his fifteenth collection, and The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53). His latest flash fiction collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis, 2024). His full-length story collections have won the Flannery O'Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.