HONORABLE MENTION, SUMMER 2022
THE SCREW TURN FLASH FICTION COMPETITION
BY TIMOTHY BOUDREAU
“These plums look like the dusty balls of a dead dude,” Eucalyptus said. She bit one, licked at a bead of clear juice in the corner of her mouth, tossed the plum across the yard. Charley watched it roll into a pile of wet leaves.
Charley remembers the blue veins on the inside of her chubby wrists, delicate ankle bones, smoky taste of her teeth, what she said about his aunt’s plums. When he’s with her it’s eternal autumn, the last time they were together. Sparse leaves, chilling rain. He doesn’t know about her winters, her summers, if she still wears her grandmother’s wool scarf when the real cold comes, or swims drunk in a t-shirt in the river.
Back in the day they sailed on a single Oxy all afternoon. Two dropouts, girl in a baseball cap with an oval pink face, boy in a hoody with a double chin. “Ha fuck, look at this, hey shit it’s a Frisbee.” Eucalyptus flipped a round piece of wood at a blue jay. Charley followed close, along the river path, past pale ghostly leaves on fragile rippling trees.
What it feels like to be dead: chills, fog, ache of sleep deprivation. Charley lingers in the sun streaming through her grandmother’s window—but it’s not warm at all.
“They’re from my aunt’s tree,” he told her. “She thought you and your gram might like them.”
Behind her grandmother’s trailer, yellow oak leaves holding the sunset’s pink glow. “Quit fucking stealing my cigs, Jesus H Christ,” her grandmother screamed at her out the window, as Eucalyptus tossed a handful of dead moths into the firepit.
On the trailer patio Eucalyptus looks at the knife scars on her hands, jagged lines, pale crescents. Charley emerges under the clothesline, a patch of soft static in the bedsheets. Euc looks at the wind blowing through the sheets, doesn’t see.
Eucalyptus made fun when Charley studied an orb spider wrapping a fly. In her bedroom she tied him to a chair, cut open his underwear, played with his dick, made him beg for an orgasm. Denied him, vibed herself to climax while he watched, writhing.
A ghost is a late-night radio signal lost, found, lost again; distant music, an unfamiliar language. While Euc fucks some other guy, Charley waits, a pool of cold air in a corner of her bedroom; wants her to know he’s remained faithful, has never strayed.
“There’s nothing special about the Final Girl,” Eucalyptus said. They were watching slasher movies on a stolen tablet. “She just somehow lucks into being the last one standing. Freezing in some skimpy outfit. Same old shit. She’s still gonna be traumatized for life.”
Charley laughed. “I could be the Final Boy.”
“There’s no such thing as a Final Boy. If anything you’d be the First Boy.”
River path, autumn rain, Euc is high, singing to herself. The one place Charley can’t follow her is wherever his body is. Like a magnet polarized the wrong way, he can’t get close. Maybe he doesn’t want to remember. Behind the old house, into the woods.
“Okay you have sixty seconds to play with my tits,” she told him. He caressed them, gently kissed her nipples. When the timer went off, he wouldn’t stop, so she shoved him onto the floor. He bit his lip, tasted the blood.
On the patio Euc swipes her phone, calls another Boy. Charley listens, linty aphids in a bare bush’s brittle bones. “Maybe tonight I can suck you off,” Euc says, shifting the phone. “I have more pills. But it’ll cost you. You ever heard of tributes?” She lifts her boot, stomps an orb spider flat.
“The first tribute is fifty dollars,” Eucalyptus told Charley. “The tribute is proof that I’m your one and only.” She wasn’t shy to say it: “That I’m your Mistress.”
Anyway he knew about tributes, it was on the porn sites, “Any fans who truly worship me will tribute me a hundred dollars.” The online hot girls made the boys at home enter their credit card numbers, bled out their money until there was none left to give.
He’s most with her at twilight, before dawn, when she’s alone, in gray autumn rains, walking the river path. “Don’t talk to those guys anymore,” he wants to tell her. “Stop taking so many pills. Maybe you could go back to school.” Advice she would never listen to: her heavy heavenly body, short legs striding, hair tucked under her ballcap, dark eyes cast down, drops on her long lashes in the rain.
They watched enough horror so they knew: the heart is a veiny muscled organ, full of gristle, sometimes still beating when you cut it open.
He doesn’t wonder what guys helped Eucalyptus dispose of his body, soak it with gasoline before lighting it or drag it to whichever pond or swamp they sunk him into. Officially maybe he’s presumed missing, a runaway. His aunt heartbroken, listening for stray sounds at night, a tree limb brushing the window.
At the end of the river path the abandoned house with shattered windows. Eucalyptus pushed the door open, led Charley through the dimness inside.
A ghost is a veil of dust, a handful of crippled moths. A forsaken, exhausted lover without a heart. Charley wishes he could leave her something, a photo of his ugly former body she could slip into a locket, carry in a compartment in the heel of her boot.
She gave him a bottle of whiskey, opened her fist to reveal a handful of pills. “Take these,” she told him, her eyes lit up, “they’ll make us fly.” He washed them down with the whiskey, felt himself fading into a rapid gathering sleep, but darker; dimly recognized that she’d pulled out a knife, was watching him die with it in her hand, her eyes wide.
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Timothy Boudreau lives and works in northern New Hampshire. His recent work appears in Trampset, Reflex Press, and MonkeyBicycle, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction and a Pushcart Prize. His collection Saturday Night and other Short Stories is available through Hobblebush Books. Find him on Twitter at @tcboudreau or at timothyboudreau.com.
