Temperature and Distance

July 2020 | fiction

He doesn’t want to go to the dinner party. She tells him he promised but he tries to get out of it anyway. He had his mind set on laying around the house and doing nothing in particular. On the drive over he thinks about the planet Mercury. He’s reading a book about space.

Despite being closest to the Sun, Mercury is not the hottest planet. Venus is the hottest planet. This is because Mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere. Ice has been discovered buried in the bottoms of craters located at its poles. Mercury orbits the Sun every eighty-eight days. A year on Mercury is three months on Earth.

They arrive at the party. They say hello to the people they know and meet the people they don’t. He knows everyone can tell they have just been fighting. Sipping drinks in the living room, he ends up on the couch with Greg and Allison who predictably shift the conversation to improbable, unprovable conspiracy theories. She talks with a couple over by the record player. He met them ten minutes ago but has already forgotten their names.

Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system. It is larger than Mercury. Ganymede orbits Jupiter every seven days and Jupiter orbits the Sun every twelve years. A year on Jupiter is twelve years on Earth. Ganymede has a deep saltwater ocean fixed between layers of ice buried below its surface.

Dinner is risotto with sauteed morel mushrooms, homemade bread, and a fresh picked green salad. He is impressed and compliments the chef multiple times. He volunteers to do the dishes with no intention of actually doing the dishes.  Later, everyone plays a board game in the living room while he drinks whiskey and smokes cigarettes on the back porch.

Neptune is the coldest and most distant planet in the solar system. Pluto is not a planet anymore. A year on Neptune is one hundred and sixty five years on Earth. Neptune has winds that blow close to supersonic speed and rain made up of compressed carbon. It rains diamonds on Neptune.

On the drive home she gets serious. She tells him he is absent. She feels he is no longer trying in their relationship and doesn’t know how long she can keep doing this. Also, he drinks too much.

Triton is the largest moon of Neptune. Triton was once an independent planetary body, drifting in space, that got captured by Neptune’s gravity. Triton’s orbit is in decay and it will eventually be torn apart by tidal forces and the pieces of its shattered carcass will spread out to form rings around Neptune.

Back at the house he apologizes. She is right. He has been absent. He tells her he will try harder and he loves her and wouldn’t know what to do without her. They talk for a while and end up making wild, frenzied love on the floor.

Triton will be destroyed in three and a half billion years.

Barry Biechner

Barry Biechner writes poetry and short fiction. His work has appeared in CIRQUE and Apeiron Review.

The Hidden Room

July 2020 | fiction

The woman had no set schedule. She came and went of her own accord and when we saw her it was like a glimpse of some elusive animal. She had soft flips of hair and wore furs and costume jewelry, dark sunglasses, always wheeling a carry-on. Sometimes we didn’t see her for weeks and then there she was, strolling past the ostentatious clock stuck at a quarter to three, the old men in faux leather chairs reading The Wall Street Journal, the fake ivy planted in plastic urns.

The manager wanted us to clean the room the woman had occupied secretly since who knows when. It was a hidden room behind a wall, and to get to it, you had to remove a patch of carpeting big enough only for a cat. When we peeled back the carpeting, we saw a small square entrance. We chiseled away at the entrance and saw the lair for what it was, a room the size of a large closet with clothes, boxes piled to the ceiling, a cot with a simple pillow.

The manager in her Talbots suit and Tiffany bracelet was anything but sympathetic as she rummaged through the belongings with an attitude of disgust. She uncovered old blankets, sheets, a stewardess’s uniform with a pair of gold wings attached to the lapel. In another box, there were extension cords and blow dryers and large hot rollers with protrusions like sea creatures.

We did not realize there could still be secrets behind the walls. We thought that these had all been eradicated with the razing of the asylum, back when they used to bring in the crazies confined to chicken crates. But we cannot deny—some of us found things: a small trunk under the pigeon-infested rafters filled with photographs and pressed flowers. A collection of glass bottles with poems curled like messages. The remnants of a leather strap. These were different from the hair ties, half-filled plastic water bottles, and gum wrappers we found in the common areas when shampooing the rugs or mopping the floors.

We hauled away some of the boxes. Some were full of Christmas presents, neatly wrapped and with bows. Others had dolls pressed up against cellophane windows; dolls in velvet dresses with names embroidered on the lapels—old vintage dolls with glass eyes peering out at us apprehensively, as if we were doing something wrong and they were concerned.

Later, in the parking lot, we divided up the gifts and unwrapped each one: miniature china tea sets and tiny spoons, glass figurines, the makings of a toddler’s chair. We thought, perhaps, she was dead. Or was she a ditz, forgetting to give presents and have children? We laughed uneasily, thinking of our own children, and remembering the rows of granite markers with chiseled numbers back by the recycling center where the land slopes gingerly toward the cornfields.

Laurette Folk

Laurette Folk ‘s fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Waxwing, Gravel, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Mom Egg, pacificREVIEW, Boston Globe Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy won the Independent Press Award for New Adult Fiction. Her second novel, The End of Aphrodite, is published by Bordighera Press. Laurette is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program. Her website is www.laurettefolk.com