Flash Fiction Friday: What's Cooking?

I didn't care for Chuck's challenge this week, so I decided to pick my own challenge, from the book I reviewed Monday, Spilling Ink.  I took the "dare" on page 103, to turn an ordinary event into something suspenseful.  I chose a kid watching mom cook dinner.  I could have made it suspenseful by having aliens land during the process or something, but that was cheating.  I just made it nerve-wracking to watch Mom cook dinner.  It's short this week, at only 700 words.

What’s for Dinner?

What’s for Dinner?

Mom’s acting weird.  Well, that’s kind of normal, if you follow me, because she’s always weird, but usually she’s weird like wearing strange clothes and working all night on one of those bizarre sculptures she makes.  I won’t ever tell her this, but I don’t like them.  They have too many jagged edges.  They’ll tear holes in you if you get too close.  I sometimes wonder if she’s out to destroy someone, or if she just sees the world that way, all jagged.  Either way: weird.

But what’s really weird is that she’s started cooking.  No more Swanson’s pot pies, and no more trips through the fast food drive-through window.  So now, I have to eat what she calls “real food,” which is sometimes pretty unreal, if you follow me.

The thing is, her idea of real food can get pretty disturbing.  And that’s why I am sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, instead of in my room with my music.  I’m keeping an eye on the cooking, between algebra problems.  I’m watching for that moment that says she’s gone over the edge, so I can try to save the rest of us.

She’s put on a big pot of water to boil.  That seems pretty safe, so I turn back to my math book.  6x + 7y=23.  If y=2, what is x?  Okay, algebra’s weird, too.  What do I care what X equals?  I can see at a glance that it’s not going to be a nice round number.  I don’t like decimals.  They’re messy.  And I need some kind of motivation for X, if I’m going to care why it’s multiplying six.

Pasta.  She’s gotten out the spaghetti, which is good, and matches the pot of water.  But a lot depends on what she wants to put atop it.  My palms start to sweat as she begins pulling things off of shelves and muttering.  She’s got an awful pile of weird stuff: ginger and allspice and beans, and for some reason a bottle of pickled pigs feet.  And is that an incantation she’s muttering?  We have never in our lives eaten pickled pigs feet, and I do not intend to begin now.  I forget all about algebra and concentrate on willing the bottle to disappear.

She puts the first cupboard load back on the shelves, and I heave a sigh of relief when the pigs feet disappear.  Then the search starts all over, and I start to sweat again.  What is that green stuff?  And is it supposed to be green, or is that a very bad sign?

Mom does the search three times, and I can’t tell what she’s selected.  By the third shelf of the third cupboard, I’m a nervous wreck, and algebra is a distant memory.  Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is the night she poisons us all, and I can only wonder if it will be on purpose or just because she let her artist’s imagination get loose.  But if I’m poisoned, I don’t have to turn in my homework, so I won’t hurry.

I start to pray.  I’m not religious, but when we studied world religions last fall, my best friend Griffin and I memorized prayers from every one of them, mostly in languages we don’t understand.  We made up a couple of our own, too, in the elf language J. R. R. Tolkien invented for The Lord of the Rings.  I repeat them all now.  Maybe at least one of the gods will appreciate the attention and save me.  And Dad and my sister, though by this time I’m thinking mostly of myself.

Mom plops the big pasta bowl onto the table, interrupting my prayers and scattering my algebra.

 I stare into the bowl, horrified.  It’s green.  Radioactive waste is green, isn’t it?  Or ectoplasm, or space aliens.  And mold.  Mold is green.

“Eat up,” Mom says.  “Come and get it,” she calls to Dad and Lily.

My hands are shaking.  We who are about to die. .  .

“It’s just pesto, for heaven’s sake Joseph!”

I sag in relief.  Pesto’s bad, but it’s better than interplanetary ecto-slime. 

Rats.  I’ll have to finish my homework after all.

###

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2014

Empty the box and find a meal hidden therein!

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Not sure how well I'll do, with my summer travel plans (real world, not blogosphere, travel), but I've jumped onto the A to Z Roadtrip to help remind me to keep visiting the blogs I didn't get to during the A to Z Challenge.

Flash Fiction Friday: The Quick and the Quicker

It's another Friday and another Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction Challenge. This week he presented a list of (reader-provided--that was last week's challenge) opening lines and asked us to write a 1000-word story starting with that line.  I chose “I never trusted that statue in the garden behind the house.”

The Quick and the Quicker

I never trusted that statue in the garden behind the house.  The place was crawling with statues, but the rest remained well-behaved, doing as they were told and returning to their appointed places when asked.  It creeped me out a little, but Mom and Dad took it all for granted, and said I was much too sensitive.  Mom liked it.  She said it was like living in an art gallery and that helped her create.

Mom’s an artist, and she’s had a lot of trouble working lately.  She says all artists go through dry periods, and she just needs inspiration.  I don’t know what inspiration one gets from statues that won’t stay put, and I’m not sure I want to know.  Mom’s work is a little weird.

There was one statue that did the washing-up for us every evening.  She looked like some kind of queen or something to me, but seemed to like scrubbing pots, so we let her.  It was only later that I thought how weird it was that a bronze statue could plates and teacups.  At the time, it seemed natural enough, and what surprised us was that a queen wanted to wash dishes.

The place was doing strange things to us, and I blame the statue in the garden.  It bugged me because it was the only one that didn’t ever move.  Maybe  that should have been reassuring,  but not in a house where every other statue, sculpture, or bit of three-dimensional art wandered the house at will, trying out new points for displaying themselves.  Not many were as active as the Queen, of course, but even the paperweight on the library desk, an amorphous blob probably made by someone’s 4-year-old, drifted around.  Once I caught it hiding in the drawer.  But though the statue in the garden behind the house never seemed to move, I noticed it didn’t have any weeds or vines or even lichen growing on it.

We’d taken the isolated house for the summer, and at first it was great. Then, at the end of the second week, it rained, and I stayed in.  By now I’d gotten pretty used to the statues, and learned to look where I was going in case one had moved into my path.  Once in a while I chased one off to keep the hall clear enough to get to the bathroom in the night, or asked the man-sized abstract to move so that it wouldn’t block the front door.  They didn’t talk, but moved politely.

But the statue in the back garden.  .  . I sat in the library that rainy morning, looking out and debating if it was worth getting my boots and rain jacket and going to see if the creek was rising, when it caught my eye.  It still hadn’t moved from where it stood—and it’s a sign of how the place was getting to me that I found that creepy—but I could see its head swiveling from side to side, watching the house with blank eyes.

After a few minutes, I began to hear the familiar shuffling of the statues rearranging themselves.  It sounded like they were all gathering in the hall, and suddenly I didn’t like it one bit.  I crept to the library door, and opened it just enough to peek out, down the hall toward the entry.  The big abstract had blocked the door again.  And all the other statues, I’m pretty sure it was every one in the house, stood before it, as though they were receiving commands from a leader.  Aside from the shuffling noises, they were as silent as always.

Suddenly frightened, I ran back to the window.

The statue was gone.  Now I heard a noise in the hall that sounded—but I must have imagined it—like a murmur of angry voices.  Now I was really scared, and I wanted Mom.  But I stopped with my hand on the doorknob.  If I opened that door and went out, I’d be in full view of all the statues, and they were between me and the studio.  Whatever was happening, I didn’t want them to know I was watching.

That left the window, and just before I climbed out, I turned back and picked up the fireplace poker.  It was the only thing at all like a weapon that was definitely not also a work of art.  I’d wondered about it.  In a house where everything was art, this one tool was clearly just that: a tool, bought at the hardware store, straight, dull, and heavy.  That weight felt good in my hand as I crawled out the window into the rain.

Creeping behind the bushes, I make my way toward the front of the house, where I hid behind the largest bush of all.  The statue from the back garden stood on the porch, and the front door was opening, ever so slowly.  The noise from within grew louder.

At that moment I knew that statue must not be allowed to enter the house.  In my most commanding voice I yelled to them all to go back to their places, but the garden statue only turned to fix me with a malignant gaze from it’s blank stone eyes.  If the statues wouldn’t obey me, I knew what I had to do.

Clutching the poker in both hands, raising it over my head, I ran for the porch, and brought the weapon down on the stone head with all my force.  The impact numbed my hands, and bits of stone stung my arms and face.  The statue split in two, and lay still.

The door swung open, and I felt the gaze of all the statues in the hall.  Pretending I wasn’t scared to death, I stood taller, held onto that poker with both my stinging and numb hands, and faced the crowd.

Then I commanded them to return to their places, and they went.