Flash Fiction by Arman Kaymakcian
The musty smell of urine crawled inside Roman’s nostrils as he lay half-dead in the vestibule on Summerfield Avenue. The rusty baseboard heater beside his face warmed like a heated morgue. He found himself lost somewhere between crib and coffin in the snowy confines of another relentless New Jersey winter.
Roman removed his coat, exposing the track marks that climbed up his arms like raised roads to childhood abuse better left unsaid. It had been hours since Danny took the money. Now the familiar dope-sick, ritualistic agony twisted him. His eyes clouds without rain, blurring his vision as if looking through stained glass, the vestibule a sanctuary desecrated by syringes—a city where drugs and crime nourished, and stuck to the bones.
He stared at a worn picture of his parents. They gazed back—ghosts caught in between worlds. The world stopped, and Roman grew so still that the dimly lit bulbs above his head droned like a train barreling toward him. He whispered aloud the smudged note on the back — For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Love, Daddy.
The light snapped shut, abandoning him to darkness. He whimpered, brushing the vale of tears from his eyes.
Pulverizing his teeth with clenched fists, he slowly arose, beating his chest like a war drum—defying the pain pulsing through his veins and marrow.
“What about mercy!”
“Huh!? He screamed.
What about grace?
Can you hear me!?”
“God!?”
“Do ya give a shit!?”
I said can you hear me!
He collapsed to his knees sniveling, once again mommy’s lost little boy, face to the matted carpet, snot leaking like a busted pipe. His mind, an untamable storm. Then his mother’s voice drifted in—soft, sweet, like breath.
“Do not let your heart be troubled.”
Roman tried to ignore it, to drown it out, but he couldn’t. She continued,
“I am going to prepare a place for you.”
His heart plunged into the depths of his stomach, an inhuman groan bellowing from a place without form and void. “I’m sorry, he whispered… mommy, daddy, I want to go home.”
He continued, in a whisper, “I want to go home.”
The words barley escaped through his teeth. A moment later he collected himself and stepped back out into the crystalline snow that blanketed Summerfield Avenue.
He heard footsteps.
Before he could turn—a loud crack and a sudden burn to the back of his head.
Roman’s ears rang watching the blood flow from his head in rivers without permission.
The white of the snow gave way to crimson sidewalk as he drifted away from his body and everything, he’d ever known…
The sky swallowing him whole.
Bio: Arman Kaymakcian is an Armenian-American author, poet, and fiction writer from New Jersey. His work explores memory, faith, identity, suffering, and redemption. His poetry has appeared in multiple issues of AGBU Magazine and in Volumes 2 and 3 of the Jewel City Review Anthology. He is the author of He Calls Me Redeemed and He Meets Us in the Dark.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arman_kaymakcian?stkn=MXJpYTVycDVvMWw3Ng%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
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Website/Author Page: http://www.ArmanKaymakcian.com
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