Gravitas. Gravity. Gravitas.

I don’t know why Shiranui tolerated the ringmaster pushing him around, making him do all those crazy publicity stunts. Shiranui was huge, even for a sumo wrestler, but maybe he was ashamed of being in the circus — loss of face or whatever — and so he didn’t argue. 

Every time Shiranui got a letter from home, he’d clop around in his wooden sandals, picking up litter on the grounds, which wasn’t even his job. He and I met near the carnie booths one early morning. Shiranui was bent over pulling a weed, an international mail envelope tucked into the fold of his yukata. The empty rides creaked back and forth; you wouldn’t catch me on one of them, knowing how stoned the carnies were all the time. 

I saluted. “Float like a butterfly? Sting like a bee?” 

The weed came up whole in Shiranui’s hand, its undermop dripping dirt. He stared at it, as if he’d expected something besides roots. His topknot had loosened, and was sprouting wiry hairs, like it was trying to pick up radio waves. “How did you know?” He grabbed my shoulder, and the way he looked at me made me sink back on my heels, the toes of my huge clown shoes pointing up. 

“It’s what that boxing guy… shit…Cassius… Ali. Just something to say, man.” 

He let go of me, but his other fist was still balled, choking the weed. 

*** 

I painted Shiranui’s face, making him up like a clown. We were headed into Dallas and the ringmaster wanted him to float in the sky above the opening day parade, tethered to ropes held by us real clowns. “You can do that?” I asked. 

“I’m light on my feet,” he said, “Comes of swallowing too much air. Sometimes I fly.” 

“Cool.” 

He shook his head. “A man who swallows air is easy to push around, and a man who is easy to push around — as they say in sumo — does not a good rikishi make.” 

“You’d make a real downtown clown. Here — hold still.” I drew a teardrop on his cheek. 

He looked at me, his eyes more serious than ever inside the diamond-shaped patterns I’d drawn. “You think?” 

“It’s your gravitas, man. People dig it.” 

*** 

I’m sure that no one in the crowd had ever before seen an ex-sumo wrestler floating in the air and shouting, “Flying is serious clown business.” 

“Where’d he get that damned megaphone?” The ringmaster signaled for him to quiet down, but Shiranui ignored him and repeated, “Very serious business” over and over. 

The crowd laughed. I wrapped the end of the tether rope around my hand. Maybe there was a hint of a smile behind the sad clown makeup, but the sun was in my eyes, and I couldn’t be sure.

 

Nancy Stebbins is a psychiatrist who lives in College Station, Texas. She has an MFA from Pacific University and is working on a novel. She is the current president of Brazos Writers, and a staff editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her short stories and flash have appeared in several online and print journals, and are listed on her fiction page.

PROSETRY July

Original Artwork by LEX

Prompt: Using the above image, write a microfiction (less than 500 words—yes, 501 is more than 500). In your piece, respond to the image in the above photograph. Your piece may take any form you like as long as it includes less than 500 words and relates, in some way, to the image. Have fun with it.

Deadline: July 31st, 2010Midnight

Submit:

MMR Online Submissions

Winner: First place will be published in Moon Milk Review.

Fuchs, Felix, Anuran & Grenville

The offices of Fuchs, Felix, and Anuran are normally damp.  The building’s maintenance crew installed a complex system of de-humidifiers, but they don’t work well in the muggy Virginia heat.  Felix, Fuchs’ corner of the building suffers most; they are on the northeast side and do not benefit from the broad light of the southern sun. 

The secretaries are happy for the cool light and warm moisture, which are perfect for African violets.  But in early summer, the weather encourages a smoky grey mold to grow on some of the case files. 

“Blue mold.  The associates bring the spores in from depositions,” George Anuran says. “Then, the damn stuff holds on tight and grows where it can.” 

“It’s really bad in the janitor’s closet,” says one junior secretary, turning a small violet-pot toward the sun.  “ . . . which is nearly swampy—someone left a wet mop in there last week.  I think something’s growing in dark.  I mean, besides the mold.  And the bugs, which are from worms, I think.”

***
Everyone at FF&A sneezes through the summer.  Tobacco clients stay away and ask the lawyers to visit them on their farms. 

“At least we have fresh air, here, George.  Get out of your fuckin’ office, into your goddamn Jap car and get down here. “

“Those Japs buy cigarettes, Jack.  You want to boost their economy.”

“And bring one of those wormy kids with you.  They need some sunshine. They’re pale as store-bought eggs—you’d think they grew up in a hallway.  Or in that closet where Judy keeps her grandkids’ toy bike.”

This is when new associates appear, ready  and desperate to ease into the sunny, aromatic tobacco growers’ fields—and they grow to love tobacco.

“We grow our own and roll our own,” Fuchs says about his lawyers.  “That way we know what we’re gettin’, and everyone knows what they’re best for.”

***

“Where’s the new associate?” says a junior partner.  

“He’s in the closet, Mr. Sullivan.”

“The closet?”

“The new associate, yes—Grenville.”

“Which closet?  What’s a lawyer doing in a closet? 

“The utilities closet—the one with the cleaning supplies and the circuit breaker—that’s where Mr. Fuchs gets them.  He’s riding Gavin’s truck, right now.”

“Who?  George?  Or some kid in the supply closet?”

“The associate, Mr. Sullivan.  But he doesn’t have his suit or briefcase.  Dolores ordered them, but he’s a ready a little early.”

“What?”

“He’s coming early.  He’s ready early.”

“Oh. What about references?  Where the hell is this . . . lawyer supposed to have come from?”

“Three years of defense work.  Paperwork’s thin, but it’s believable.  He’ll be O.K.  We’ll get him out before he matures too much.”

“All-righty, then. But I need someone today.  I guess George took the other one out to the fields to color-up and meet clients.  In the meanwhile, find a towel or something and let this one out.”

 

Winona Winkler Wendth is a peripatetic New Yorker and freelance writer who lives and teaches writing and literature near Boston. So far, her work has appeared in Spectrum Magazine, Third Coast, Falling-Apart.net, The Bennington Review, and The Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine. She holds an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars, is a film buff, not a bad photographer, and a pretty good cook.  She spent a couple of years working in a law firm that specialized in corporate defense.