Gary Fincke

​Immunities
 
The animals have always suggested cures--skin of frog, gut of pig, airway of cow. “There now,” the nurses say, “You’re doing fine,” needle in their hands, bringing sorcery to the blood. Today, the overhead lights shingle this house of water where spiny dogfish sharks slide forward, antibiotics, according to the news, in all of their tissues. Do fish sleep? We think, and press the glass like an infected world. All of the places in ourselves where death begins are humming. The incurables are foraging through the animals. Full vowels swim up our throats, repeating themselves like these sharks that turn left, follow two sides of glass, plunge, face forward, and drive upward again, to our stare.
 
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The Danger of Yawning
 
Surely, long odds for death by yawning, but you should know that over a thousand drivers per year die that way, distracted by the language for the need to sleep.  Yes, like anyone, you might question how such claims are verified, survivors necessarily testifying to cause, though who doesn’t yawn while traveling the freeways that hurry us long distance, the radio tuned to news of a war so lengthy it sounds like songs dripping from the dropped ceilings of dentists? And who am I, this afternoon, marveling at the oddities of death, free to guess how large a yawn might shutter sight because every victim has an unfamiliar name? But imagine, for a moment, how once, in Australia, a dwarf somersaulted from a circus trampoline and plummeted, clown-costumed, into the incredible yawn of a hippopotamus, swallowed whole while the audience applauded, then paused, waiting with disbelief, like the parents of soldiers receiving new, perfectly folded flags, impossibility laid precisely down upon the mothers’ quiet, unfurled hands.
 
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Orbits
 
Since the funeral, snow has fallen thick and packable. Her brother begins to roll balls for a solar system in his yard, shaping the huge mass of Jupiter, the extraordinary sphere of the sun. He works the planets to scale, measures circumference and the distances from ball to ball. When the planets seem unfinished, he gives them moons to scale, snow berries and packed pebbles of ice. At last, he needs the neighbour’s yard for Pluto, clearing a space for that small sphere before he walks down the street to form the nearest star, nowhere far enough to reach her.
 
**
 
Senescence
 
The falling-away, my grandmother called it, claiming it could be cured by rain, as long as the shower is caught in a pan before sunrise. In that water, she said, boil an egg.  Through its shell, bore three holes, then set it upon an anthill and wait for the hunger of ants to end weakness, weight loss, or persistent decline. Like all of the dead, she repeats herself now, sometimes shaking me awake in the dark to say it’s raining, to suggest an egg. Pay attention, she says, there are hundreds of versions of falling-away, the skin and bones, the heart’s flicker, the mute surprise at the cloudless noon of embolism. And lately, there are certainly evenings of weakness, a daily log of general decline. A vague pressure turns to pain and swelling. In the kitchen, the bleak jingle of knives is a barely heard phone. My wife showers for so long I worry that she’s fainted. I scroll through sixteen reels. Yesterday, I met a student who has inhaled two kinds of household products to alter an hour. Outside, the late morning rain compresses the anthill near the crown vetch to the cyst of a child’s castle swirled sodden by tide, bubbles forming in the sand’s needled holes to reveal something alive lies beneath them.
  
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Coveting                                                                                                                   
 
Sometimes, we allow others to name us. Just yesterday, a man I know boasted about how hot his young daughter had become and laughed as if confident I would be eager to see photographs of her, somebody who might confess to coveting with the ancient, carnal words. By not speaking, what I appeared to be was a small, neutral, defenseless country. I remembered and said nothing about how my wife, hours from delivery the morning our daughter was born, answered a call that came so early it sounded like emergency until a man’s voice hoarsely insisted how hard he wanted to penetrate her soft, luscious body. Over forty years now, our small kitchen’s rotary phone an antique, my daughter with three girls of her own, but that morning, between contractions, my wife said, “I think I recognized his voice,” naming a man who worked for her, somebody she had hired, not our neighbour who, even the day before, had watched her cross our just-mown lawn from what I knew was his bedroom window. Or how, for months, I’d noticed that habit of his, so often pleased that he surely coveted his neighbour’s wife that I might as well have been calling her myself to spew that I needed men to desire her.
 
**
 
A History of When
 
When my mother stopped holding her head, she carried canning jars up from the cellar. When she sat at the table, catching her breath, she snapped the ends off green beans, an hour to recover, whether the pills kicked in or not. Because who else would preserve the beans or later, the tomatoes and peaches, arranging the filled, sealed jars for winter? Who else would cook and clean, strip the beds and remake them when her headaches only simmered like soup she reheated, sipping the broth because she could keep that down and work? When she stopped moaning into her pillow. When she came out of her darkened bedroom. When she could do what needed to be done. When she could save things that needed saving until October sighed, ready to close, Castro and Kennedy rerunning on the nostalgia network, romanticized while kidney failure overwhelmed her in the bedroom with no mirrors and one radio, its clock set so far ahead that she, accordingly, outlived herself.
 
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The Abilities of Birds
 
Sometimes, a mother hen’s screeching wakes her chicks unhatched in eggs. Ravens remember past relationships. Crows recognize the voices of birds of other species, and, in Australia, lyrebirds, the males, mimic any sound they hear, from cameras to car alarms, to attract quiet females for mating. Such shrieking as prelude to joy, but here, for the third consecutive year, doves have chosen the central crotch of his weeping cherry, fluttering, more often than hourly, from the lawnmower and slammed car doors in the driveway. Last night, for the third consecutive year, the nest has collapsed during a storm, eggs strewn beneath the hapless veil of drooping branches. So persistent, those doves, remarkable as the couple next door who are paying for pregnancy, the wife acknowledging, yesterday, their third failure, her voice, from where she now stands beside his tree, keening into the knotted wail of unendurable.
 
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The Dim Light
 
What his mother sewed by, the one shaded bulb over her left shoulder, her chair drawn close, teaching sacrifice in the hours between opening the vials labeled four times a day or as needed, and because it is 1961, the radio emits light with its music, the tubes glowing while she sighs so often it sounds like breathing broken only by the brief brilliance of her cry when her body shifted as she put one thing aside and reached for another. This light, a flightless bird, has always lived in a foster home where myths become biographies. In the museum of memory, he inspects webbed footprints sunk so far into the earth he nearly remembers the shape of a bird so large it believed there was nothing it need fear. Like an approaching search party, the world is a face of lights.
 
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Gary Fincke's latest collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.