Gretal - #fridayflash

Photo: studiohousepro.co.uk

Gretal Hoffenmeir can't hear a train coming at 20 paces but she can hear thunder 200 miles away.

"Storm coming," she worries, slack skin waggling and wobbling as she shakes her head. 

She clucks her tongue, nervous, like a banty hen staring down a fresh cock-a-doodle-doo wearing a twinkle in his evil, reptile eye.

"Don't ring," she says, staring down the cordless phone lying on her doily-decked coffee table.

"I can't answer you if you ring."

The phone lies there, quiet, like the hunk of plastic and metal electronics crap that it is.

She stands in front of the avocado green chesterfield, bright eyes noodling at the phone, skinny yellow-stained fingers clenched at the edges of her dusty rose chenille housecoat, trying to keep it wrapped around her wistful bones. A bobby pin escapes from one of the many pink foam curlers in her champagne-dyed hair; it lands with a skittled clack on the linoleum floor. 

Her head cocks and cracks, following the pin. She squints, sees it, then turns abruptly back to the phone.

Thunder rumbles in the distance.

Gretal eyeballs the phone.

Once upon a time, when Gretal was young and Studebakers roamed the earth, her granny Aubrey picked up a telephone during a thunderstorm and was turned stone deaf, deaf as a popsicle on a post, with one fiery blast of electrified electricity. Ever since then, all of Aubrey's kin, every sadsack one of them, had exactly the same thing happen.

You'd think somebody would have learned something over the years. But nope. Only Gretal has never been zapped deaf by telephone lightning.

She's losing her hearing, alright, but only because she's older than Uncle Pyron's wooden leg and it's expected when you're 87 and headed downhill faster than an Acapulco truck driver.

She's wary of the telephone, though.

She thinks of it as a fat rat might look at a rattlesnake.

Thunder rolls.

The television is nattering. Gretal worries about lightning blowing up her satellite dish. She flicks it off just before she sees a deranged clown running away from a pound of tofu.

"I hate tofu," Gretal says. "And I hate clowns. Frickin' fan-haired fruitcakes."

She wonders why in hell a clown would be afraid of tofu.

The phone rings.

Gretal startles, jumps, hisses, backs away. She plunks her bony butt down on the chesterfield and shakes while the phone rings itself out. 

Thunder roars closer.

The answering machine picks up.

"Mom? Are you there? It's me, Karen. Look, pick up the phone, will you? It's OK. It's cordless. Lightning cannot travel up a cordless phone. Why, Mom? Because it's CORDLESS."

Gretal's banty eyes blink but she doesn't move.

"Mom, we rehearsed this, remember? I call you in a thunderstorm, you pick up, we talk, you hang up, nobody goes deaf, understand? Now pick up!"

Gretal wavers slightly.

"Mom, the machine is gonna switch off in a second, so pick up … c'mon, Mom, you can do it."

Gretal thinks "tofu" and picks up the phone.

A thunderous crash hits the house, lightning snakes through the wires, through the air, straight into Gretal's wax-lubed ear. She screams. Karen screams.

Somewhere in Ohio a deranged clown laughs and laughs and laughs.


While you're touring through #fridayflash land this week, drop by Conversations at Land's Edge to see the winners of Alan W. Davidson's summer flash fiction contest, all with a holiday theme. Some of flash's best writers are featured there including Mike Robertson, David Barber, K.M. McElhinny, me (!), Pablo Gully, Anthony Venutolo, John Wiswell, Anton Gully and that wonderful Nothead, Michael Solender. Thanks again to Alan, Laurita and Ellen for putting on such a fine fete.