Cheap Cleanse
Cheap Cleanse is the winner of Paperbark’s Spring 2022 Flash Fiction Contest
by frankie bb
When you left you texted, “keep the cuts,” like I wanted them. The cuts were slippery little strips of not-so-sweet-nothings. A bedside smattering of fad diets and anti-inflammation propaganda, inducted from grocery store glossies. It was all trash. I wanted to throw them into the waste basket, but its wicker dimensions were yours to take and you did. I wanted to text you back, but I couldn’t really do that either.
I’ve started feeding the local crows. At first it was fistfuls of sunflower seeds, but they only seemed mildly interested. Since then I’ve graduated to sashimi because you took our friends too. I ask them the questions like, "can I clean the inside of an eyelid?" and "do lips come from above or below?" and some third question I haven't found yet. Their black eyes never answer but at least they remember my face.
Three more abandoned curls clung to the face of our fridge: a lecture on paleo “intentions,” an informative add for apple-cider vinegar, and a broadside on the symbiotic magic of the gut-biome; each slab printed with the severely dehydrate Inkjet we kept hidden in the closet. Behind me on the balcony, a crow pecks at a puddle.
Out of some misplaced spite, I drank a whole tub of apple cider vinegar. All I got was uglier and ulcerated. Now, not even my foods will stay down. I scroll through your various social media accounts with my hair tilted toward the toilet. There is a masochism to this movement, I know.
On the back of a crumple about cruciferous lifestyles is a sliced-up note on love birds and their homesteading materials, old magazines were mentioned. I went out to buy some human-shears and a pair of safety scissors. Then I turned my lochs and the cuts into a lackluster nest, twining the tidbits like DNA double helix, and leaving them on the balcony in the barren dirt of a flower box. It worked, in terms of entertainment—you had taken the tv—but the birds never blew in.
Last night's dinner was a fortune cookie that was too specific. It told me to look up more and ditch the Android. I felt targeted, but still I smashed the screen to bits and hoped to see a million faces reflected in it. It didn't work; it was like the mirror emptied out of the glass and all I was left with was a dangerous glitter. Every night, I walk down the road to restock on Tums. Tonight, I need more than a solution to burning, I need gauze, a metallic trash can, and some salmon. I look up and notice the crows are filling up the telephone wires, watching me move. They bend beaks to me and my freshly shaved skull; they shuffle sideways and give each other enough space. My stride doesn’t break but I keep on staring, coming up with the question "why can't I recognize you?"
frankie bb is a map of eyes that have yet to assemble into a crowd, a jaw bone that dislikes being called "mandible" and prefers "crescent catcher." A guilty harvester who believes milk is best served wild. Words in and forthcoming: No Contact Mag, The Lickety-Split, Club Plum Literary Journal, Maudlin House, The Landfill, X-R-A-Y Lit, bedfellows magazine, B l u s h Lit, and Witch Craft Magazine.