Mixed Menagerie
The Beast on the Bridge
Two blond girls are kidnapped and sold to a beast – a good-hearted half-animal, not unduly erudite and not a Disney victim of enchantment. Shunned by others, he lives in a forgotten world across a bridge arching over a melting glacier. He leads the girls along by mutely pointing, stopping to show them a quarry where casts of dinosaur footprints were found. A little further on lies the undiscovered fossil itself, still with hardened felt tongue.
Concrete Nature
I go down to check out an artificial pond newly built near my old college. When I get there, a sad sight: fish are beaching themselves along the concrete border and slowly suffocating. One flies out of the shallow water like a spawning salmon, and I chest-butt it back in. I then begin to toss back the other fish before they die. Some students gather to watch but don’t get involved, as though unused to actual vs. virtual reality.
Crab Dig
In Rome, I am sent on a honeymoon mission to bring back dinner. I buy some small items and place them into a pail. Then I stop my bicycle in front of an Algerian restaurant to check out the menu: too expensive. So I pedal down to the beach where others are digging for crabs. Good idea, I think – to top off my bucket. I poke around with a stick, amateurishly. I eventually spot a couple of crabs, vibrant red, and try to pry them from the sand. Immediately, the ground caves in. I find myself in an underground vault loaded with classical statues and artifacts.
Creature in the Woods/Headless Man
My daughter called, excited to tell me about a news report concerning the sighting of a strange creature near our small town. At the time, we had been having unusually cold winter weather. I tried to speculate: maybe an elk or lone moose a thousand miles from the herd, or a coyote or wolf migrating east?
I hung up and turned on the local TV news. A man was holding up what looked like a Bigfoot costume, but it was only the snowsuit he had been wearing to stay warm.
Then the newscaster introduced a teaser for the next story about a headless man. After the commercial break, an interview was played of a rural man whose wife left him. He claimed to have become so upset that he lost his head.
I tried to tape both stories for my daughter.
Dogsitter
At my sister’s wedding, a caravan of SUVs circled the outdoor venue while many guests watched from their cars. I parked my vehicle and took my place in the front row. Later, at the hotel, I was assigned to watch a dog that had been neglected during the ceremony. I spotted a convenience store on a nearby street and thought of walking to it for some pet food, but leaving the dog behind was impossible. I had to hold its mouth shut so it wouldn’t bite the guests.
Four Dream Creatures
A brilliant blue snake with coils covering a whole lawn. An animal: part fox, part slug. A strange moray eel-like creature found in a swimming pool, elephant grey, with one arm-like projection. A giant demon playing ball on Summit Avenue: horned, all black.
Lioness
What made early Christians cooperate with their jailors while being escorted out to the lions in the arena? The faint possibility of escape? Or that blasé attitude of, Well, after all, if this is the proper procedure…
I asked these questions of myself as I was led into the arena by two guards. Along the way, I bent to pick up raw meat of some kind off the floor. I thought I would place it onto the bars of the cage in hopes of appeasing the lion. The cage itself stretched on for several yards, really looking more like a jungle gym than a prison. The crowd was expectant.
I didn’t have long to wait. A beautiful blond woman crawled across the top of the cage toward me, growling. I held up the meat. She shook her head and her eyes gleamed wickedly, as if to say, Only fresh.
The Ocelot
I was back in college, but still myself, an older returning student. I had to find a class about Great Thinkers in Building A. En route, crouched against a flagpole, I saw an ocelot. It was small and did little more than stare at me, but didn’t go away, either, not even when I tried to brush at it with my leg. Eventually I ran across the quad and found Building A. Inside, I was told that the class already met but was about to reconvene for an evening discussion.
The class was just myself and a large Germanic woman. The British professor was an aging smoker who offered to bring us some tea and a snack. The woman described an elaborate appetizer featuring roasted vegetables, bread, and cheese – not at all bashful of her appetite. I stared at her after the prof left, no longer sure if she was female. She said she was there to play football but had some troubles with rugby and being teased. She pulled out a Maori mask and said she played games with it on. The mask had a setting sun pattern but was not as warlike as I expected.
I was shown the syllabus handed out earlier that day. Oddly, though this was a class in Great Thinkers, I didn’t recognize any of the names on the list. That is fine, I thought, there will be no redundancy. The prof returned, dropped two metal bowls on a chair, and then stood by helplessly. I asked him if I could assist. He immediately answered. Yes, I could help him look for more food. Then I told him about the ocelot. He didn’t seem too surprised, just observing that no one kept one on campus, and a zoo escape was unlikely. But he offered to try to find an answer for me. Faced with dwindling philosophy enrollments, he was not in a position to deny requests. Thus we scrounged about the room as the minutes ticked away.
Water Polo
I was on a college team playing water polo against the Florida Gators. The venue was outside, at a swampy lake, and I worried that there might be actual gators.
The Wild West
I was an iron miner, formerly a serf, coming from Europe to work the fields. In the New World, iron was plentiful and could be dug up in shards from the ground in a form you could eat. This was the 1880s.
Mark Twain held a $2000 bill on the deck of the transport ship, lecturing us on the miseries money could cause before throwing it overboard. Then he thought better of it and dove into the water along with a couple of listeners. No luck. I tried a late dive myself and came up with the bill right away. I kept it hidden from the others. Afterwards, I pretended to have changed my mind about tilling the soil.
Still with bill in hand, I found myself in a Western town with a large round lake in the middle. The edge of the bill was sticking out of my shirt pocket. A foreign-looking man spotted it and began pursuing me. I made it into a general store where word of an alien invasion had spread.
There were large iron-bristle tumbleweeds at the back of the store, and we were all warned not to touch them because they might animate and turn hostile. In my hurry to escape out the back, I did not heed this warning or display concern for anyone else, pushing the tumbleweeds from the exit. They swayed and slowly began to inflate.
– M.V. Montgomery is an Atlanta writer and the author of two books of poetry. His flash fiction has recently appeared in Cafe Irreal, NANO Fiction, St. Somewhere, Two-Bit Magazine, and Weirdyear. He is currently working on a chapbook compilation titled Dream Koans.
