"Conspiracy Theories"
My Favorite Flash Fiction from my New Book of Hybrid Essays
It’s always interesting to reread one of your books after it’s published, trying to figure out why you especially like certain pieces, while friends fancy others. What follows is my favorite flash fiction from my new book of seriocomic, hybrid essays, titled, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet ($6.99 on Kindle; free if you have Kindle Unlimited; and $22 in paperback) I'm Old, Not Dead Although short essays make up most of the book, each of the first five “Parts” ends with a flash fiction.
I haven’t monetized this site for three years, so please support the troops. Believe it or not, we writers work hard at trying to make a living—or at least most of us do.
Whatever, I am very fond of the main character in this story, and truly hope he is doing well now, because, of course, all the characters we writers create do not die after a story is finished. In fact, I can hear one now in the table next to me, third-degreeing his girlfriend about the first time she had sex. He was an asshole when I first wrote the story ten years ago, and obviously has not evolved. Perhaps a sequel is necessary . . .
Judgment Day
Footprints in snow the size of a Hummer. God prowling the premises again, unable to let the virus work its slow magic and shepherd me to a pillowed place less humiliating than this one. Or maybe Mister Nosy is peeking into my upstairs window, hoping to catch me crying again. They say He’s all-knowing, but even He can ’t imagine the nutty images occupying my mind: refrigerated trucks filled with corpses; friends hooked up to ventilators, zombiefied by a particularly suspect virus. And then there’s the unmasked oaf at Home Depot who threw an old guy onto the floor before scurrying away on his Harley. He wanted two of everything, he said, convinced the next Biblical flood was on its way, that the vaccine would make his penis fall off. As for me, I’m not that easily translatable. Just ask the American Spirit doll bellowing in the spare room—a favorite of the daughter I never had. Instead, two sons still carrying the Cross of Confusion their great-grandfather brought all the way from Ireland.
Conspiracy Theories
Owen had been up most of the night distracting himself with any crazy thing he could find on TV. The crazier the better because he desperately needed to be distracted. His daughter Maura had begged him to stay with her, but he couldn’t stomach her husband, whose name was Quentin. He was a buffoon with a headful of conspiracy theories he couldn’t keep to himself, constantly amazed at the diabolical possibilities of an unsteady universe. Killer hornets genetically engineered by East Coast intellectuals. Bullets made in Tijuana by Muslims that exploded in your face. Alien mind control labs hidden in caves behind George Washington’s eyes at Mt. Rushmore. Add to this an upper body scarred with tattoos with no recognizable theme or pattern. It was the tattoos’ lack of design and imagination that disturbed Owen more than the tattoos themselves. Skulls, crossbones, dragons, a rose with barbed wire circling it, the names of three washed-up acid rock groups. The “same old, same old,” Owen thought, when he first had spied them—an expression that no doubt would end up on Quentin’s flat granite tombstone after he perished in some ignominious manner.
“We cultivated a rose,” Owen said to his wife when their daughter had moved in with Quentin. “We planted it, gave it room to bask in the sun and flourish as nature saw fit, only to have it severed in the middle of the night by a moronic, ink-stained burglar.” “Don’t worry,” his wife had said, “he’ll eventually disappear like a particularly bad cold. Maura’s too smart to stay with him.” Then she laughed, and kissed him on the forehead, adding, “But you really outdid yourself with the rose metaphor. Some real poetry there.”
She could be like that, playful yet sensible at the same time. He loved her for those traits, and for her stylishness, and for how, unlike his first wife, she was incapable of infidelity. Maybe she was upstairs right now, pulling down the shades, waiting for him with a glass of red wine on the bed stand, halfway through Wuthering Heights. That’s how she’d been spending her first few months of retirement—rereading nineteenth century novels.
Was it he who had brought the virus into the house? Their daughter? The refrigerator repair guy? Or had it clung, sinisterly, to a bottle of honey or a pickle jar brought in from the grocery store. Someone or something needed to be blamed.
Around three a.m. a program on snake charmers came on. It was, preposterously, a twelve-part series, as if snake charmers were as common as cab drivers or cops. This segment was about an Appalachian evangelist named Father Timothy, who died after being repeatedly bitten by three different snakes. Owen was being invited to watch the attack. He realized of course the stupidity of lying on the couch at 3 a.m., watching a man of God being pierced multiple times by snakes, but there was something intriguing about it that kept his attention. Was it the crazed people around the evangelist, gyrating and howling to banjo music as two unruly-haired obese women in what looked like nightgowns called upon the Lord Jesus Christ to raise up the chosen and to smite all sinners who had forsaken their divine birthrights? Or was it because Father Timothy looked somewhat like Quentin—heavily tattooed, with a fat sweaty face and a head shaved to the bone.
Father Timothy was chanting. He was leaping about like a leprechaun, sometimes breaking from his unholy hymns to talk in tongues, his way of priming his followers for a climax where he snatched three snakes from a cardboard box and began to whirl around the room. Sometimes he would pause, appearing to kiss their triangular heads. Or maybe he was taunting them.
Were the snakes messengers from God or the Devil? Owen didn’t know. He’d never been religious, but his common sense suggested these snakes were not inspired by Father Timothy’s shenanigans.
Owen focused more intently on the scene. It was as if he, too, were now in this log cabin waiting expectantly for some kind of celestial sign, which, like everyone else, he received when the snakes began to strike, their fangs drawing blood from Father Timothy’s cheeks. Owen had to give Father Timothy credit. The pastor never stopped chanting until he collapsed onto the floor, his eyes bulging with ecstasy and surprise. The camera shifted to the obese women, who were shrieking, until a worried, deep masculine voice—not the Lord God’s but instead a voice-over—explained that, after the attack, Father Timothy had been rushed to the hospital where he died a few hours later.
“Big surprise,” Owen said, which, for some reason, made him laugh. It wasn’t that he didn’t sympathize with Father Timothy. He was just angry at all the fools and conmen, the politicians and fake men of God, who were going to wake up tomorrow and go stupidly about their business, responsible for spreading lies and disease like big fat rats.
Why couldn’t one of them have died instead of her, he thought, because, in fact, his wife wasn’t waiting upstairs for him, ready to greet him with her mischievous, throaty laugh Tonight, all he had was her favorite red sweater, which he had draped over his knees. If there was an afterlife, what would she say to a fool like Father Timothy if she ran into him at a celestial cookout? “Got any snake oil?”
For the last two nights, Owen had been having bizarre thoughts like that. He shook his head, thinking he might wipe it clean of nonsense, but the crazy thoughts and imagery kept coming: one of Quentin wearing a miner’s cap while exploring alien caves tucked behind George Washington’s eyes; another of him opening a cigar box of Muslim bullets from Tijuana, which would then explode in his face.
He grasped his wife’s sweater to his chest. He had to go to bed eventually. He knew that. But, first, he wanted to finish his program. The next episode was about a defrocked priest who was going to charm an enormous rattle snake, which he swore was sexual predator from a previous life. The camera eye opened to a simple white church in Maine, then panned over a surprisingly large crowd just aching to go inside.
Owen hesitated, then took his place in line.
He was ready for almost anything.
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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of nonfiction is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Humanist I’m Old, Not Dead
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss