Jeff Friedman: FOUR MICROFICTIONS • Cleaver Magazine

Jeff Friedman
FOUR MICROFICTIONS

Card Trick

Even though it was warm in the house, Callie covered herself to the neck with the afghan and lay down on the couch. Her red and green wool socks pushed out into the open. “Can I bring you something?” I asked. She shook her head. “How about a glass of wine? Maybe that will make you feel better.” She didn’t say, “No,” so I poured a glass of merlot and placed it on the coffee table. Then I got my deck of cards. “Pick a card,” I said, holding the deck near her hands. She picked her card and held it up to her face, and then when I opened the deck, she slipped it in. “Are you ready?” I asked. She looked tired and weak. “Va voo, va voo,” I said and fanned the deck again as I opened my hands. The deck floated above us, all fifty-two cards spread out but still touching each other. I plucked the card from the deck as it floated. “Queen of Diamonds,” I said. A hint of a smile on her lips. “It’s not my card,” she said and closed her eyes.

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Broken Promise

Mabel promised to bring Thelma, her daughter, a necklace made of moonstones. Thelma didn’t know what moonstones were, but she imagined they would give her a special power, and she really wanted a necklace. Mabel said that moonstones were chunks of moon that had broken off and fallen to earth. When you hold them up to the light, she said, you can see the pale waves of the sea. Then Mabel left and didn’t return for a month. In her absence, Thelma went out every day searching for moonstones. She picked up hundreds of rocks and stones and held them up to the light, but none of them looked like the moon or held the pale waves of the sea. When Mabel finally came home, she had forgotten to buy a necklace made of moonstones. Thelma began to cry. Tears oozed from her eyes and hardened on her cheeks, sliding off them until dozens rolled over the wood floor. Mabel begged her to stop crying. She gathered the hard round tears into a bowl and handed it to Thelma. She picked out a tear and could see the blue waves glistening in it. She picked up another, and a pink sea washed through it. She picked up another, and a ghostly light flickered under its surface.

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Like Buzzards

They were screeching like buzzards. Each day, they would lean forward with their angry beaks, aiming their eyes at me as if they saw a corpse. I wondered where they went when they suddenly disappeared. Did they find a carcass to devour? Were they soaring through the clouds waiting to plunge down on a dying hedgehog? Each day, they would return to the same path at the same time, walking back and forth without variation. Each day, they would raise their talons and slash the air. And there were always the bones of dead animals and birds strewn on the gravel. No one cried for help or whispered a prayer. Not even the crows said a word.

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Dragons

There were no limits to their carnage. They could see the disintegration in geraniums, petals blown away. They could read a blackout in the tides. They plundered fortresses, gathered their gold to hide it in caves. They blew up buildings with their bad breath. They killed the moon with their venomous spit. Fires flew out of them like belches. They burned hope to ashes, but the ashes kept rising. They slayed the dragons only to find out they were the dragons.

Jeff Friedman’s tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press. Friedman’s poems, mini tales, and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Plume, 100-Word Story, Cleaver, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, and 2023. Jeff Friedman has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. Find more at his website.