The O:JA&L Masters Series
Flash Fiction: A Writer’s Portfolio
Featured Writer: Pedro Ponce
ORPHEUS
To explore or download selected offerings from Pedro Ponce,
click on the title A Map of the Underground
to access the latest chapbook in the O:JA&L Masters Series.
They say the radioactive fallout will get us way before all the plastic.
I read things. All kinds of things.
Fallout is no joke. There’s the stuff we’ve come to expect—lesions, mutations. But that’s just in the third dimension. No one ever talks about the fourth.
It’s easy to blame the experts. What did they know? They thought they could survive in their basements, barricaded on one side by the bones of Cotton Mather and on the other by the Great American Songbook. They made love by the light of burning isotopes.
How were they to know what the wind carried with it from all those test sites? I’m sure you’ve seen the footage—men in uniform and dark glasses smiling proudly in front of a mushroom cloud named after its corporate sponsor: Cathexis, Aqualux, International Cheesecloth.
Of course, that’s the footage you’re supposed to see. I’ve seen the footage you’re not supposed to see. Do you know what a single flake of oxidized uranium does to a mouse in a maze? They call it alignment paralysis. They want you to call it something else.
The mouse is only trying to remember. With space and time blasted open, you could be anywhere. You could live a lifetime as someone else and never know it. Under the spores of the cloud, you’re not speaking gibberish. You’re surrounded by people who nod and wait to hear more. When you look at them a second or two longer than usual, they look back because they know and are trying to remember too.
You can’t blame someone for that. At least, I like to think so.
About the writer:
PEDRO PONCE is the author of The Devil and The Dairy Princess (Indiana University Press, 2021) winner of the Don Belton Fiction Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Ponce is also the author of Stories After Goya, Alien Autopsy, and Superstitions of Apartment Life. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Witness, and other journals. His work has been recognized with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with residencies at Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He teaches writing and literary studies at St. Lawrence University, where he was recently appointed to The William L. Fox Professorship in Public Health.
Image: Grey Tube Shelter 1940 by Henry Moore OM, CH (1898-1986). Watercolor, gouache, ink and chalk on paper. 279 x 381 mm. 1940. Public domain.
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