Flash Fiction
A BURNING MAN'S BREATH
by
Rusty Barnes
Vinnie loves barbecue ribs. He sits at Redbone's in Davis Square and polishes off a half-rack during lunch, watches another rack drip blood and sauce over an oak fire. It's easy for him since he has no job, since his disability checks get direct-deposited now, since his hair hurts if he goes outside without a hat, a burning in his scalp, a burning in his gut, everything burning. For every bit of meat field-stripped with his loving mouth and tongue, teeth ripping violently the butter-smooth morsels of corn from the cob, there is a story or three in blue-green flame, waiting.
In His Teeth
The taste of raw meat, the gin-breath of a blind and redheaded whore, so strong you could light it, and a marriage, heaved up violently, all of it the end after night after night of his tender preying in the Burren, where any woman looked a prize, that sleek woman with the mouth of Jesus sucking his cock in the party annex, and her tongue of Judas when it came time for him to pay.
In His Fingers
A license he didn't need, keys to a car he wouldn't drive, a feeling that his skin might burst with lesions at any moment, an itch beneath his skin and a feeling of moment and import, that these actions which made up a life were not applicable to him, that his accusing pointing finger would turn a flamethrower through which he could slag his life like a derelict house and poke among the ruins for something to save and build from again.
In His Mind
A nightcap in the Sligo-three words earlier, he might've walked away, but instead found himself in the street with a fat man's fist in his gut and that fat man's fingertip bitten off in his mouth-and then a cool-down in the back of a police car, when Sheila came and stood outside, her fetid breath a warm wind in his face as she bent to speak to him through the window but did not, full of silent recrimination, then her dark-eyed sister, not yet cowed by time, saying Vinnie, you stupid fucking Wop.
In His Eyes
A crusted film of late nights. It reverberates through the sclera, imprints his retina, the film A Tone Poem Named Regret, flickering in the iris, played over again in his mind until the tape runs out and the spindle endlessly turns and chitters.
Vinnie wakes in Redbone's to a smell of charred meat, his breath a kerosene fury, pure like a lightning-fire, born again in flames, always and forever now he will dream of fire, wisps of smoke in either hand, rising with the wind and his soul to meet God.
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Rusty Barnes lives in Boston with his wife, two children, sister-in-law, cat, and 10,000 books.
His work has appeared most recently in the In Posse Review, with stories, poems and essays forthcoming in Buzzwords UK, Columbia: A Journal of the Arts, and Praxis.
You can reach him at rustybarnes23@yahoo.com