Jeff Friedman: THREE MICROS • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Jeff Friedman
THREE MICROS

Our Daughter’s Glow

Our daughter Willow glows in the dark, not a pale glow either—enough to read a book by. Her light is gold, soothing. When she goes to the bathroom at night, she doesn’t need to turn the light on to see herself clearly in the mirror. “We need to do something about this,” my wife, Callista, says repeatedly, but what? I wonder. “She’s a great kid,” I answer, “and she’s not hurting anyone.” Callista counters, “She might be hurting herself, putting too much stress on her small body to generate light.” But Willow is a blur of motion during the day. “Mom,” she says, almost purring, “I’m all warm inside.” At night, my wife covers her with blankets to dim her bedroom. I kiss her forehead.

When we take her to the pediatrician, he says she drank too much milk in her early years. A stethoscope around his neck, he prescribes a dark soda for her to drink two times a day. She burps a lot, but her glow remains. A therapist gives her hypnotherapy and directs her to concentrate on her shadow. “Let your glow sink into darkness,” he says firmly. Her shadow disappears, but not the glow. Our local healer thinks Willow may have swallowed a swarm of fireflies in a dream. “Nothing to be done,” she says, “but wait for her to forget the dream.” “I don’t remember swallowing any fireflies in a dream,” our daughter answers, “or even dreaming about fireflies.” “She’ll grow out of it,” I tell my wife. “What if she doesn’t?” she asks. “Who will want to date a girl who glows in the dark?” But everyone in her class loves our daughter and at slumber parties, the other girls cuddle up to her body, basking in her glow.

Living with My Monster

My monster comes home each night with blood on her lips and teeth. My monster has violent dark eyes and long silky hair, a body with killer curves. She has a face that turns men into blubbering boys or makes them languish, pining for her. The others she simply kills and devours the flesh. My monster is all mine. She looks into my eyes and finds pools in which flowers wilt and die. She looks into my eyes and sees the mirror of herself and turns to stone. She turns to stone over and over again but I loosen her to flesh and blood. I make her a lover. We make love like spiders, ready to bite each other’s head off. It’s a strange dance over the sticky lines, coming too close, pulling apart. My monster flashes her teeth at me and rises up, slashing the air with her talons. She loves me more than she loves herself, but still she wants to kill me.

Curse

The alligator lay across my path in the woods. I couldn’t tell if it was actually sleeping or pretending to sleep so it might tempt me to come close enough to attack. Once they get moving, I had heard, they’re fast as hell. And I wouldn’t be able to outrun it. I edged forward; its thorny tail twitched as though it had a life of its own. Its eyes opened, aiming their gaze at me. “Don’t be afraid,” the alligator said. “I’m a man who has been cursed, and now I live inside an alligator.” I kept my distance, looking around for a branch or stick that I could use to fend him off, should he charge. He squared up to face me on the path. “I’m not a man,” I said. “I’m an alligator who has been cursed. I live inside the body of a man.” He opened his pointed snout as if ready to attack. And I opened mine—deep inside me.

Jeff Friedman’s eleventh book, Broken Signals was published by Bamboo Dart Press in August 2024. Friedman’s poems and mini stories have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, New England Review, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, Fiction International, Smokelong Quarterly, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, five times in Best Microfiction (2021-2025), and in The New Republic and The New Republic. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, and numerous other awards.