“The Bus” by Callin Naddy is a horror story, a love story, a ghost story. What the second-person narrator “can’t remember” will haunt the reader as well. Note the crafted use of poetic devices: the rhythm of repetition, the bold and impulsive imagery, the blend of interiority and exteriority. This flash fiction provokes a physical journey into the psychological unknown. —Court Harler
The coins jangle into the farebox, and you wipe a sweating palm down your pantleg. Your hands draw back into the cavern of your pockets, gaze dropped low, fidgeting the plastic cap of a bottle, as you slink to the next closest seat.
It takes two stops for the cap to loosen, for your fingers to stutter inside the red-stained plastic casing, for your weeping skin to exhale against the pills.
The bus windows dye the city the same red as your palms. Or the pills. One by one, they slip onto your tongue, and the hair of your spine erupts. They taste of his pebbled flesh, and that’s fine. He’s still yours, isn’t he?
Only, you can’t remember. You know he told you he couldn’t do it anymore, over the sweat of your stained bedsheet, and you said he’d threatened that before. He said, “This time, I mean it,” and watched you paint three more pills across your tongue.
You blink, and the memory bifurcates. He peers like Jesus from the bus’s crimson-stained glass, a concerned tilt to his mouth as he gazes down on you, then the bottle. It is not mercy; this is the gaunt skeleton of his need to help, full-bodied and breathing, his fingers kneading the soft skin of your collarbone then digging deeper until—
You swallow the pills before his memory taints them. They scavenge your throat, your esophagus, the turmoil of your stomach until you can’t remember what you, communal, did. You can’t remember what you, singular, did. You conjured the severed vein of his carotid across your eyelids each time he vanished the pills, like you might not notice their gaping wound, and now your gaze ekes past the other version of him in the window, neck seeping as he stares past you, laid bare and quivering beneath your body.
The bus screeches to a halt, and you slam against the seatback. The knife struggles through his neck.
Another commuter offers their hand. You do not immediately recognize the danger, but then the knife yanks again—into you—and the dual image in the window splatters. His cruor glistens between you both.
You freeze, wait for them to notice: Jesus gazes down at you, only he is not Jesus any longer. You always knew he was not, and now his crucified blood lies hot on your palms. His empty promise breaks from your lips.
Another pill slips through the cracks. The bottle is almost empty again, and finally, the blood slivers away—
you feel it still.
You cannot remember which is true.
CALLIN NADDY writes fantasy novels and short stories. Her short stories have been published in Belladonna’s Garden and pinky. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, EDDA, and Co.Milesplit. Find her online @callinnaddy.
Featured image by Aleksandr Popov, courtesy of Unsplash.
Flash the Court 