Flash Fiction Contest
Honorable Mention
Romany
Lyn Halper

It isn’t something he usually does, this married man, stopping for a drink on the way home. But he sees her through the window of the Nuevo Cubano Bar and is drawn to her. They talk, laugh, and a couple of scotches later he is at her place in the darker part of town. The poorness of her room surprises him with its metal bed, lop-sided dresser, suitcases stacked in the corner. Nothing to show the place is hers except for a snarl of cosmetics on a corner table. She makes them black coffee and they drink it silently. Then they are tangled in the bed sheets; her face caught in a sliver of moonlight. Cubano? he asks. No, Romany. Gypsy girl. The idea strikes him as quaint, romantic, as coming from a fever of impulses beyond identity or reason. He sighs and buries his face in her neck, burrows deeper as though to lose himself in the blackness of her hair. When he leaves nothing is said; she gazes at him through heavy-lidded eyes.

One night she tells him they are going out and takes him to her people. It is some kind of festivity: a mash of men and women piling into an apartment on the sixth floor and spewing out again. Talking. Laughter. The odor of sweat, alcohol, cigars, and in his imagination, caravans, campfire smoke, sun and blood. The place is a maze of small rooms like an intricately carved box. He thinks the doorways should have beads clicking and clacking; a kitten trembles in the corner. The men glance at him, they snicker, he hears the word, gadje, outsider. The one called Basio, with thick black mustache, grips his shoulder and shoves a mug in his hand; he swallows and it is a rough kind of beer. You are what?…a banker? That is good! We can use a banker! Yes, for loans, and…well…who knows. No one whispers, and yet everything about the way they talk, and stand, and bend toward each other, suggests secrets and wild schemes.

They play cards. He loses. They are cheating, even as they tell him he must go with them to the back mountain region. Yes, they have a cabin there, and blankets, and the fireplace is good for roasting meat, and the guitars twang and sing all night, and in the morning there is wild boar to hunt. “You will come with us and I will call you ‘brother.’” Basio laughs and he laughs with him. The women have banded together in the kitchen and their voices crescendo and ebb, and erupt, now and again, into high-pitched cackling. He thinks they are gossiping about the sexual prowess, or lack of it, in their men. His eyes search the room for Gisella. He remembers his wife and wishes to summon guilt, but finds he cannot. Gisella is walking toward him. Her eyes are searing his flesh.

It is six months later. Gisella is gone. There are memories of pushing open the door of her apartment to see nothing but the husk of a room, the farrago of bottles on the table top is gone. He corners the landlady, “Oh, that one – took up with an old lover – killed her in a drunken rage” He feels faint. He shivers. When the numbness wears off and his senses return, he is, oh so well aware, that her death is his salvation. She is gone to her maker – vanished like a fugitive into the mist, and he is lifted from her spell. His life is returned to him. His life is, once again, his own. He seizes that life: works hard at the office, tends his garden on weekends, clings to his wife, promises they will have the baby she has been wanting. He imagines himself holding the child, kissing its soft forehead, stroking its hair. It is old enough to walk and he grasps the small hand in his own. He gives the child a bath, tucks him into bed…and well, all right…just one more story before the light is out. This is the vision floating in his mind’s eye as he enters the elevator, pushes the button, and takes the long slow ride to Basio’s.

 

Author’s Note

Lyn Halper’s fiction and creative non-fiction have been published in commercial magazines and such literary magazines as Bellevue Literary Review, Karamu, Fiction International, Snake Nation Press Journal, The Rambler, and others. Her plays and poetry have won national competitions and in 2004 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Fiction International. She is formerly professor of Religious Studies for Rockland Community College of SUNY, and has taught creative writing at The Writing Mews in NY.