BRIAN LEUNG / 2 FICTIONS
In Case of an Emergency, are You Willing and Able to Perform the Following Functions?
His fingers are itchy. On a flight between Indianapolis and Las Vegas Markus Edell falls in love with a woman in the Safety Information card plucked from the seatback pocket. Markus is seriously considering popping the Emergency Exit in order for the occasion to meet her. The woman is heroic in her staid purple blouse and black skirt, appearing in the card not once, but twice, as she selflessly assists other passengers into a life raft, then, clearly, returns to the aircraft interior, rushing down the aisle to another exit where she assists passengers into the water. All this in sensible flats, sensible flats that match her blouse. That’s okay. Markus doesn’t like complicated women. Two dimensional is perfect. He looks again at the Emergency Exit latch. If he pops it she will come. He knows it. How many times have his friends blamed him for his loneliness, for not putting himself out there or being too rash once he does? The woman in the card with her not-so-tantalizing purple blouse will rescue him. He needs to be rescued. He deserves love. She deserves love. But now, who is this man in panel seven wearing a long sleeve green shirt and Khakis and being all too helpful? Will he come between Markus and the woman? Has he already? There are good reasons not to open the Emergency Exit when there’s no emergency, and yet, that is what Markus is going to do, again.
Check Your Voicemail, Will You?
He built for his daughter a doll house made entirely from cigarette butts. He’d purposely smoked heavily for nearly two years in order to gather his materials. Some days he denied his daughter meals in order to afford her surprise. Together they prayed for protection and prosperity.
The father completed the doll house a week before the alien invasion. His daughter played with the doll house just twice before it was destroyed by a Hydrogen ray. He was devastated. Had the aliens aimed for the doll house or his daughter? He had prayed for help but none came. In any case, his daughter was vaporized. All that wasted effort on the doll house.
She began to haunt her father immediately. As a specter, his daughter took the adult form she was destined to grow into, lithe and irresistible to women and men alike. Men too old for her, women who would have given money for her company. She whispered “Daddy” into her father’s ear using a tone that sounded like she’d had a lot of practice. She wanted to devastate him.
The aliens abandoned Earth abruptly. They left behind only specters who immediately began haunting each other because devastation was the one human quality still thriving. But then, at last, the angels arrived. They taunted and shamed the specters for letting things get out of hand. When they found the spectral father, they chastised him for building the doll house of cigarette butts. They chastised the spectral daughter for embracing wickedness. The father looked the angels directly in their pewter eyes. “But we invited you and invited you since forever,” he said, “and you’ve only come just now?”
Brian Leung is the author of Ivy vs. Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands, Lost Men, and Take Me Home. Among other honors, he is a past recipient of the Lambda Literary Outstanding Mid-Career Prize. Brian’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry appear in numerous magazines and journals. He is a professor of creative writing at Purdue University. His forthcoming novel, What a Mother Won’t Do (C&R Press), will be released in fall 2021.