Worthing Flash

Tonight, I wear my flip flops in our High Sierra camp, which I normally wouldn’t do, but my boots and shoes are wet and hanging up. The fire has died down, and we’re in our camp chairs watching the stars and talking memories when I feel something scurry across my naked feet, something furry, something small. I yell and stand, and then we all laugh. In camp, all summer long, we live with rodents like squirrels, chipmunks, mice, rats, and even a family of marmots that moved in this year, and they’re fine. This is their home after all, and they generally stay out of our tents because we have no food in them. We all wonder out loud how often a critter runs across our toes when we are wearing shoes. There’s something so natural about these little creatures when we live close to the earth like this, something that doesn’t frighten me. Last year, we had rats invade the attic of the house I was renting in the city, and it felt unclean. It felt like a violation even though the rats wer...

  Lamp Post Stopped at the light and from across the street, you know at a glance that the woman leaning against the lamp post on this overcast day leaning toward rain is Debbie, your first wife, whom you haven’t seen in twenty-five years, which means the infant in her arms is who? Probably a grandchild. It’s the way she leans, the way she holds her head. You wouldn’t have been able to identify any of your other wives this quickly, but there has always been something about Debbie that none of your other wives and girlfriends have, and you feel her loss in your chest in a way you didn’t when you were twenty years old. She must feel you staring because she looks up, tilts her head at you and then mouths the question, “Chester?” She was the only one who ever called you that, everyone else calling you Chaz. You smile and raise a hand in a wave, and she holds up the baby so you can see his or her face, and that’s when the light changes, and you exit her life once again. Nin...

Cyndi comes home from camp completely obsessed with rabbits. She saw a little one eaten by a rattlesnake early in the morning when she slipped away at dawn to hike alone through the desert. You ask, "You went off by yourself?" She is a serious eight year old, with the eyes of a forty-three year old woman who has seen war or plague or faminine, something like that. "I just needed to get away," she says. "Those girls can be a lot." You can’t disagree with her there, and since she’s been home, she’s been researching rabbits, reading about them in encyclopedias, begging you to go out to the scrub and help her find them. It’s been three days that she’s been back, and you’ve been hoping that her attention will snap to something else, but it hasn’t yet, and you think it might not for a while. She begs you to get a book about rabbits. So you take her to the bookstore, holding her hand as you walk the aisle. The salesperson takes you to the c...

Catherine sits cross-legged in the backyard under her mother’s loquat tree, eating its fruit and talking to Jack, her big brother’s best friend, who is just going into his sophomore year of high school as she is entering her freshman year. He’s telling her about what teachers to avoid even though she doesn’t get to choose who her teachers will be, so she’s only half-listening to his words, concentrating more on the music of his voice as they wait for her brother to come back outside. She puts a loquat between her lips and presses down on its flesh, the softness and smoothness of the skin and the meat, and she wonders if this is what a kiss feels like. He says, “You know if anything goes wrong, you can always come to me. I’ll help if I can.” He narrows his eyes as if this is a wise thing to say, and she half wants to laugh at him. Instead, she palms the fruit and crawls over to him on her hands and knees. Without planning or thinking about it, she leans forward, arch...

Dancing Alan’s in the room with Degas’s ballerinas when the earthquake hits, not a huge one, just a jolt that makes him stumble into the woman next to him. She’s sporting a side braid and smells a little of some kind of floral perfume. She must be a native Californian too because she laughs and puts her hand on his shoulder to steady him. He imagines saying, “You know when our kids ask us how we met, we’re going to say the earth made us dance with Degas’s ballerinas.” She’ll laugh at the clumsiness of his delivery, and he’ll buy her a coffee in the museum’s restaurant, and they’ll talk about art, all that he knows, which isn’t much, but she’ll pretend to be impressed. She’ll ask him what he does, and he’ll say that he’s in school studying art history, and she’ll tell him she’s an engineering major, and secretly he’ll think that’s kind of dull, but then on their next date she’ll open him up to how beautiful it can be to design a road that people use every day. On their fif...

             It’s been two years since Peter’s son Jacob announced at his college graduation that he was going to move to Chile. “Why?” his mother asked. “There’s a lot more of the world to see.” A month later Peter’s mother moved out of the house telling Peter to expect divorce papers. “Why?” he asked. “There’s a lot more of the world to see.” It’s been a year since Peter saw Jacob’s fifth grade teacher, Ms. Milton (he still thinks of her as Ms. Milton although he calls her Polly to her face) poking squashes in the grocery and asked her if she maybe wanted to have dinner with him. She’s been coming over two or three times a week, and today as Peter lies naked in bed next to her listening to someone in the living room, she rolls over and places a hand on his chest. “What is that?” He’s afraid at first but then says, “It’s Jacob.” No one shuffles their feet just like him. He is handling things in the refrigerator, taking out each one and p...

sunday morning mr pembrooke wakes up in a bed next to a woman for the first time in fifteen years and he goes downstairs and makes breakfast for a woman for the first time in fifteen years and he thinks about the lectures his father used to give him about sex before marriage for the first time in fifteen years and he puts the coffee on the table next to the halved grapefruits and toast dripping with marmalade and soft boiled eggs and four strawberries each for the first time in fifteen years and he opens the newspaper and listens to the sounds of a house that is not empty and it is so different from the sounds of one that is and he decides that this morning he shall do his sunday morning crossword puzzle in pen. John Brantingham is  the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and my work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has eight books of poetry and fiction including The Green of Sunset from Moon Tide Pre...