Mayor Hidey Seek

Mayor Hidey Seek

by

Mitchell Grabois

Her mama named her Ivana because the name would make her rich. There was nothing else around to pull that trick. Ivana went to the Gracie Mansion looking for Donald Trump, but her teacher told her: This ain’t where he lives.

My dentist kicked me out, not out of her office, but out of the  luxury condo we shared. From up high we could see cars drive through like baby teeth fleeing childhood. We drank martini’s and watched. I could go back to her office if I want to open my mouth to unendurable pain, but I don’t think I can do that. I suffer from Fear Itself.

This is where the mayor lives. The mayor, yeah, thought Ivana, the man that owns where she lives, all the buildings crawling with people like ants, where she sleeps in one room with her seven brothers and sisters and her mama and her boyfriend on torn mattresses.

You’re a baby, a wimp, a coward, my girlfriend, my dentist accuses. That’s all true, I say. What’s your point?
Gracie Mansion. She’s gonna tell the mayor to do something about the rats. She hates rats. Mist’ Mayor, give em a place of their own. A rat mansion.

There are heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan, she continues, and continues and continues, and every day the shrapnel pierces them, roadside bombs blow off limbs and give them closed head injuries, and you--you won’t have a silly root canal.

She’s lookin’ for the Mayor, lookin' for signs, lookin' for the Criminal Minds guys that guard him, keep him safe, keep him away from the serial killers and the perverts who lurk everywhere, who rape you or send you into free fall some other way.

I have no defense. I have to admit she’s right. All I have to fear is fear itself, but that fear towers above me like a monolith about to fall and crush me.

But Ivana doesn’t see them. The Mayor’s nowhere in sight. All her teacher shows them is stuff she calls “elegant.” Ivana’s mind tries to computes pawn value, but the numbers in her head don’t go that high.

Even if I had an attorney, I’d have no defense. I only hope she relents, blunts her own judgments, finds some mercy for this poor dental sinner.

Back home, Ivana sees two men in her building knife fighting. She sees a crack pipe on the bathroom floor. Ivana feels it: she is becoming the place. The Mayor is hiding. That’s his name, another girl on the tour says. Mayor Hidey Seek.

Bio

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over twelve-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes.  His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.

Chemicals

This is the third of three flash fiction pieces by Mitchell Grabois.

Chemicals

I have a fifty-pound bag of Arsenic and DDT, and a round metal canister filled with mercury infused grain, and 55-gallon drums full of mystery liquids left by my grandpa. I am as intimate with chemicals as I am with my wife, and don’t understand either. The mysteries of sex, of emotion, the mysteries of molecules combining: I’m clueless.

The chemicals are mute, secretive. Once released, they do what they must without my permission. If they want to go against my wishes, they do. My wife’s the same way. They can both be caustic. I’ve taken chemicals into the very marrow of my bones, yet despite all my experience, and that of the generations before me, I really know nothing of their nature.

At work, I find Dexter Troutman playing air guitar in the middle of the Day Room. He asks: Remember when we had groupies? Remember when thousands screamed to see us, to touch us? He strums a ripe chord, throws back his head, and sings: See me, feel me, touch me, heal me!

Remember the hotel suites, thousands of square feet of penthouse, each of us floating through our own psychedelic space, the sitarist sitting on the floor in his hairy chest and BVD’s, playing ragas that lasted for days?

I remember, Dexter, I sigh.

Dexter launches into a wild air solo, windmills his strum arm as if he’s morphed from the fab four to the guitar-bashing Who, but he slips on a gob of phlegm Walter Mac Henry has left. (Walter Mac Henry, shirt over his head like an Arab headdress, always hacking and spitting when he’s not pissing into the Day Room heater)

Dexter Troutman slips and goes down, hits his head on the linoleum-covered cement. Out cold. I gently take his guitar from where it lays across his body and play a few bars of Let It Be before I rush to the Chart Room for help.

Bio

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over twelve-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes.  His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.

Ansel

This is the second of three short flash fiction pieces by Mitchell Grabois.

Ansel

by

Mitchell Grabois

Ansel Adams awoke in a black and white room. He’d bled the world of color as effectively as a 1947 Zenith console TV. He’d fallen asleep on the couch, and when he opened his eyes, the screen was static, pulsating flecks of Yosemite.

Noise was white.

His wife had fallen asleep on the other side of the couch wearing a white apron tied tightly around her Midwestern middle. His black and white cat rubbed against his legs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence, he said to the cat.  

Outside, a city bus rumbles by, accelerating loudly to make the hill. Jesus the Messiah is on the corner, shining shoes, a modern version of washing feet. He has to get some cash to make His nut, paying taxes to corrupt conquerors. His brother is a bourbon salesman, Hecho en Mexico, rotgut, not the good stuff from Kentucky, but he keeps Jesus well supplied. He’s always been amazed that he’s the brother of the Son of God, and wants to do what he can to make Jesus’s life better, until Jesus has to run through the Stations of the Cross, and then it’s all over.

Then it’s no more brother. He’ll have to drink all the samples himself and sit in the corner of the Mercado, depressed and alone, and worry about his mother, now entirely his obligation. Mary is a sword swallower on the street. Her partner is a flamenco guitarist. When Mary gets excited by dramatic strums, her feet start to jitterbug and she cuts her esophagus and spits red blood, which disgusts and excites the members of the audience, who know she always puts on a good show.

Jesus and His brother say: Mom, you’ve got to stop this. We will support you. But She’s independent and never listens. It is as if they are speaking another language, like English. She asks the mirror every day: Why is my life so complex? Why did I have to suffer from mental illness? Not everyone suffers like this.

Bio

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over twelve-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes.  His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.