Berkeley
A Flash Fiction by Guihan Larsen
A week gone since Ma split and Patty’s abduction happened. Remnants were still around. Ma’s lipstick-stained can of Tab, an avenue called Hearst. We lived on the same street as Patty, the difference being she was in the Eucalyptus hills, and we were in the chain-link flats.
Maybe her captors had left a note. When the sky turned velvet dark, Phoebe and I walked past the gabled two-story next to Patty’s. Someone had taped a layer of cardboard across a section of broken stained glass. A bullet hole burnt through the frame. I swore the air smelled more like gunpowder than incense. Another bullet warped the passenger door of a VW bug parked in front.
“Do you think that mustache boyfriend of hers is still in the apartment?” I said.
“Hiding at her parent’s place, where he’ll be safe.”
“The news said Patty wore a robe and slippers when they took her. Do you think that’s true? I would hate being kidnapped in a robe.”
“Trying to make her normal.”
“Poofy pink slippers.”
I wasn’t sure if I had heard, read, or conjured this up. Anything was better than thinking how we were going to eat now Ma’d left us.
We moved closer toward Patty’s townhouse and looked around the street for anything out of place. I searched the slope for pink flyaways.
“I want to see the door they smashed,” Phoebe said.
We crept up the steps on the side of the townhouse. Orange tinge from streetlamps slashed the laurels, and periodic car beams outlined Phoebe’s curtained hair. A garbage can on its side tick-tocked in front of Patty’s frosted glass door. I imagined her in her robe and slippers cradling a bowl of popcorn and moving toward the couch, when, out of her peripheral vision, she spotted ghostly figures dodging back and forth against the murky glass.
“Bang! Shot through the door right here.”
“Stop being so loud!”
Phoebe grabbed my ear lobe and brought me down to squat. She lifted a piece of shattered glass off the ground. Cutting a faint mark along the crescent of her palm, “This, is the lifeline.”
Like the dark space of my imaginings surrounding our fate, this knowing was a part of Phoebe, too. A deep chasm I couldn’t look away from.
“You,” Phoebe handed me the shard.
I was about to cut when a man with a walkie-talkie came round the corner.
“Hey!” His eyes jumped over as we broke away in a run toward campus.
Sure we had lost him, our heartbeats slowed. We sauntered to the bulletin boards to search for jobs. Flyers littered every free space. The campus boards had every request and need on earth pinned to them: information on meetings to stop rent-rip-offs, women’s meetings, rape counseling, self-defense lessons. As we shuffled through sheaths of paper, a Patty Hearst Missing notice was thumb-tacked to the cork.
I borrowed Phoebe’s marker and drew a word bubble. HELP, in tar black, screeched from Patty’s mouth.
Author: Guihan Larsen is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction and flash fiction stories have appeared in, among others, EcoTheo Review, New Rivers Press, and Catapult Magazine. Her work has been supported by The Elizabeth George Foundation and the Ucross Foundation. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.