two flash pieces by hayli may cox
Anthropomorphic
She won’t eat because she can hear her cereal screaming, sees the cheerios avoid her spoon when she swipes through her milk. She watches pillows of shredded wheat discorporate again and again until she feels herself starting to come apart. Her eyelashes drop into milk-sugar soup. Starlings braid her fallen hair into nests and as her scalp becomes visible between bare follicles. She chews her nails for sustenance and sucks at the edges for blood.
Her mother gets her help, pays for it with a title loan. A man with stubble across his lip and thick black hair asks her how she feels about her body. Fine, she guesses. Does she wish she was smaller? She’s already smaller than everyone in her grade. What does she think about the girls she sees on TV? She loses count of the questions, focuses instead on a fly’s corpse on the windowsill, the angles of legs. Has anyone ever touched you in a way that made you uncomfortable? She grimaces and shakes her head. The man tells her she will be hospitalized if she keeps this up. Asks, do you want to have an IV? She cannot make the man understand. They take away her mirror, her dolls, her Disney picture books. They leave her dinosaurs, her National Geographic magazines, and her tiny grocery cart filled with plastic grapes and lettuce, toy forks with fused tines and knives too dull to cut.
She sits in her mother’s garden, stomach rumbling, and thinks she can see the pea vines lengthen, the watermelons push and grow. She doesn’t know how long she took to get there, stepping slowly and waiting for worms to burrow or ants to scatter, calculating how long they’d need to move. She doesn’t understand microorganisms, not yet. In the small orchard, she watches wasps swarm around the corpses of fallen apples. She watches mushrooms rise up from the compost, is sure there’s a murmuring within the heap of rot. She rolls small stones in her mouth, shovels a mouthful of dirt. Throws up—hot translucent yellow. A stomach full of molten gold.
Luminance
They should make people anxiety jackets, she says, covering her ears. You laugh, remembering your parents’ latest dog in the tight number, fur billowing out from under his arms, his neck roll obscuring his collar. It’s not funny, she says, and her lip quivers. You scoot closer to her on the couch and pause the movie. I know, I’m sorry. You loop your finger around a coil of her hair that has been trapped between her fingers and her cheek and pull it loose, brushing it behind her hands and taking them away from her head. She smells like pepper and lilacs as she burrows her head into your chest. I’m your jacket thing, you say, wrapping her up.
This is your first July together; you met last August and moved in just last month. Your brother says lesbians move fast but you’ve seen faster, slower too. Besides, he knows you’re pan, and she already felt like home to you. You know everything about her—the name of her first hamster, her once-dream to be a heart surgeon until her grandmother pointed out that she can’t even stand the sight of blood. How that same grandmother had raised her until the day she died, which is when your girlfriend moved back to Iowa. How she’d been at the farmer’s market where you met every Saturday, though you’d only been the once. What you didn’t know until now is just how much some things upset her. She feels so much more deeply than anyone you’ve ever known. As if she’s read your mind, she speaks a muffled whisper into your breasts. It’s not just the sound—it’s the history. Her voice catches. The environmental impact and the bats, and it’s only July 1st .
Another pop and boom resonates, a crackle in your bones, though you can see nothing out the window this early in the evening. You imagine it is one of those golden ones that fall and look like fairy willows weeping against the smoke and black, little lights falling and lingering even as the next rocket screams into the sky. Your girlfriend shakes and squeezes you. Across the living room on a thrifted armchair, your cat swings its tail and rolls over in sleep.
So it goes for the next few days, and knowing this town it will keep happening for months to come. Her petition to replace fireworks with drone shows had gotten exactly sixteen signatures, only one of them from someone neither of you know. On the fourth she puts in the foam neon earplugs from your old factory job (which you find a little gross, even though you’ve swapped plenty of other fluids), then the big blue ear muffs your dad used to use when he mowed the lawn.
In bed, you pretend not to look out the window while she tries to read, the crossword on your phone nothing but blank squares floating in dark mode. You understand her objections, but you’ve also always loved the way your body hums along to a fireworks display. You remember going with your family, your brother in a stroller back then, awe sparking behind his eyes. You think you should ask your mom if she remembers your first time. First time, you think, smiling at the implication. Then she shoves an elbow into your hip. You can go, you know. You don’t have to miss out because of me. She tries to look nonplussed, but misses. You haven’t hidden it well either. I feel like I’m keeping you away from—her voice breaks.
You pull her into you, reassuring, and her book falls closed between you. The grain of resentment you held melts to glass as her arms bend between you. The frizz of her hair tickles your nose. Want to do something else? Want to go for a drive?
She plays that indie music you hate to say you’re growing fond of until you’re out past the corn and fallow fields and into the wetland restoration areas. You pull over into the small parking lot of a wildlife preserve, the posted signs glowing neon in your headlights. You’re not going to murder me, are you? She’s joking, you think. You laugh and grab her hand before turning down the volume, listening a moment. When you’re sure you can hear nothing, you turn off the lights. And she gasps as she threads her fingers through yours.
What were tall grasses, purple thistles, and buttery wildflowers are now a swaying mass, darker against dark. And then the real light show, accompanied by a cricket chorus. Fireflies flick and dart in the hundreds. Thousands? You think you see a bat swoop overhead. The moon is their stage light. There is no boom or crackle, but there is a hum, a dancing in your bones. In her eyes, wonder. You don’t even look up at the rear-view window to check for the colorful blooms you left behind.
Hayli May Cox holds a PhD in Creative Writing with a graduate minor in Women's and Gender Studies from The University of Missouri. She currently serves as Nonfiction Editor at Doubleback Review and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Waldorf University in Iowa. A Michigander by birth, in her free time Hayli paints, builds with Lego, critter watches, and hikes around with a backpack full of field guides.