One Flash Fiction Piece by Andrena Zawinski

 

Gun                                                                                                    

 

          “Gun, gun!” Ashley shouted in an early Sunday morning phone call. “He has a gun!”

            Rubbing her eyes, still groggy from sleep and late night they had at their writing retreat’s after party, Wanda asked, “Who? What gun?”

            The party had been packed that balmy evening, everyone dressed in their casual best except Ashley who showed up in a little black dress, strapless with bodice bejeweled in rhinestones. They had too much to drink, Wanda knocking back glass after glass of rosé and Ashley throwing shots of whiskey down an open throat the way her steelworker father taught her.

            Ashley phoned her on-again off-again husband Rod to pick them up in his cab. Gunning the motor and peeling out, he mumbled about losing a solid fare, to which she mockingly returned in a throaty deadpan: “I’m not paying for this.”

            She was beside herself about finding the gun sandwiched between the mattress and boxspring on his side of the bed while changing sheets, a Beretta with gold plated floral grip engraved R.I.P. 

            “He claimed it was for me, asking why else would it have a flowery handle,” she explained, “but then he changed his tune that it was a gift from his ex-girlfriend who worried about him driving late nights in dicey neighbourhoods.” And, exasperated, shouted, “As if the gun itself were not enough.”

            Their relationship was one for the books, a new take on the old “Frankie and Johnny” story. After finding the gun, Ashley drank more and more, her late night calls often ending with slurred speech as they did that evening before Memorial Day.

            Wanda didn’t hear from her for a few days, nothing unusual about that when she was in some tiff with Rod. When a call came in from Ashley’s phone, Wanda blurted out, “What’s the latest on the gun?”

            It wasn’t Ashley but Molly, her police officer friend who had recently become a homicide detective. She broke the news that she was on Ashley’s phone at the morgue, Ashley on the slab, toe-tagged wearing a glamor wig and in full makeup, as a possible suicide. Before her “Gotta go,” Molly clued her in on the q.t.: “You should know that Rod is a person of interest.”

            The death and wild speculations rocked their literary and educational communities. Gossip flew that Ashley had taken the administrative job at the Board of Education because she was about to be fired once a male colleague leaked in the teacher’s lounge that Rod had her pole dancing in a strip club Friday nights, a club where he had actually seen her. Further, she was about to lose that new job because, as one supervisor lamented, “We knew she was in the building once the smell of perfume and alcohol wafted through the halls.”

            Wanda did not attend the memorial service, having moved out across the country for a job; but she could not get her longtime writing companion and dear teacher friend out of her head or heart, couldn’t imagine her with a gun sloppy in her mouth and pulling the trigger, especially from the right side since she was a southpaw.

            On the 4th of July, Molly sent Wanda a text message, “Rod’s dead. Same gun.”

            Wanda fired back an animated GIF—the Scales of Justice exploding into fireworks.

 

Andrena Zawinski’s flash fiction has appeared in Flashes of Brilliance, Unlikely Stories, Summer Shorts Anthology, Digital Paper, Panoplyzine, Beneath the Rainbow, Short Stories & Poems Weekly, Ginosko, Pretty Owl, Oye Drum, Windward Review. Her collection, Plumes, is forthcoming from Writing Knights Press in 2021. She is an established poet with three books and six smaller collections in print. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.