Nicole Rivas
Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: As a genre, micro fiction attempts to do the impossible: establish a protagonist with a clear conflict, all within a tiny, less than 500-word frame. The author must find a way to show the reader what is physically or emotionally at stake. What is the protagonist’s central struggle? How is the character’s conflict embodied by the described events? This double feature by Nicole Rivas goes above and beyond that requirement. In “Demolished” and “Crumbs,” both narrators grapple not only with death but the reality that morality and responsibility are often not clear-cut. A community chooses to remember a predator fondly, blaming his teenage victim for his tragic demise. A lover questions whether their partner’s suicide could have been prevented.
To hear Nicole read “Demolished” click below:
Demolished
A gray-haired man once lived in the house across the street, the burnt one now being torn down. He lived there with his elderly parents. I never saw much of the parents, but I often saw the man. I saw his shirtless body reclined on a pool chair in his otherwise empty garage. His stomach always seemed to be damp and sprawling past the outskirts of his form, and from my vantage point in the street it looked like he was lying on a gurney. Only his occasional bodily shifts suggested he wasn’t actually dead.
In the beginning, I Rollerbladed past the open garage and wondered why he didn’t just go to the nearby pool. He was belly-up on the pool chair, sweating. Over dinner, my parents gossiped, unaware that I was also interested in the neighbor’s story. According to them, the man worked at a fast-food place during the evenings. He had been married once, no kids. He had even owned a restaurant. Then a divorce, and now, at age forty-eight, back at home. “How sad,” my parents agreed.
Eventually, a teenager claimed that the man had beckoned her into his garage and tried to lick her neck. What an odd thing to attempt. The adults didn’t know what to believe; the girl smoked pot and was known to vandalize street signs. And the gray-haired man with his bare chest, just what was he trying to communicate? Finally, my parents spoke to me directly about the neighbor. It seemed they thought they were bringing him to my attention. “Don’t Rollerblade that way anymore,” they said. “And if anything weird happens, tell us.”
Soon the man stopped sitting with the garage door open. It was as if he had shouted, “I don’t want to see anyone’s neck, let alone lick it.”
The day the house caught fire, I was at school learning about the Donner Party. About the poor decisions, the cannibalism. There didn’t seem to be a moral to the story, only the observation that humans make terrible mistakes and that no one ever forgets them. After school, I Rollerbladed past an empty garage that looked like a giant burnt oven. The man had placed a towel on the hot stove, lain on the pool chair, and fallen asleep. The elderly parents were fine, but the gray-haired man was not.
Now everyone blames the teenager for the man’s death. They no longer believe her and her neck-licking story. They think she is the kind of girl who would want her neck licked. They think many things they didn’t before. They think the man was a great help to his parents, if not a little shy or depressed, but maybe also a saint, his head crowned in golden ash, the kind that’s hard to see in passing.
To hear Nicole read “Crumbs,” click below:
Crumbs
A week before Anna planned to die, we stood in my kitchen making eggplant parmigiana. She’d already divulged her morbid desire to me days prior, certain I would keep her secret. For some reason, I did; we were two eggs whisked. I thought our dinner date would change her mind—the smell of eggplant crisping in olive oil, Pavarotti exploding on the record player, limoncello in old jam jars. What about this life wasn’t to love? I laid a red-and-white-checkered cloth on the table. Anna smirked as I complained about the lumps of egg and breadcrumb between my fingers. I watched her pale hands as she patted excess grease off the gold medallions of eggplant, Anna herself a treasure. I pulled one of her greasy hands to my face and kissed it on the knuckles. Those knuckles were cold. Anna made the joke about the warm heart and smiled, pulled her hand away.
At Anna’s funeral, everyone brought food. Nieces with bruschetta, aunts with penne arrabbiata, an estranged uncle with frutti di mare. The clams stank in the hot sun. Anna’s family mourned at her casket and ate after the burial, right there in the grass next to the six-foot-deep hole and the two-foot-tall photo of Anna when she was still a child, when she was still a Catholic. Grandmas sat next to the hole on lawn chairs, crying with spaghetti sauce on their chins. Young cousins fought over pizza, too confused about death to really think about it. Parents toothed the edges of their blue Solo cups. Even the priest had a plate. Though not family, not even Italian or Italian American, I ate right along with all of Anna’s relatives. No one asked who I was, and I was too upset to speak, certain we were all here because of what I had done, which was nothing.
Roma tomatoes, fresh linguine, garlic marinara, spicy meatballs. The smell of freshly turned earth was a seasoning no one wanted, but it had infiltrated everything, even the cheesy armor of the ziti. And once it was in, it was in.
Nicole Rivas teaches in Savannah, Georgia. Her chapbook of flash fiction, A Bright and Pleading Dagger, was the winner of the Rose Metal Press 12th Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. Other stories have appeared in Newfound, The Journal, and elsewhere. Follow her @nicolemrivas.
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