Todd Cantrell lives in Lithia Springs, GA outside Atlanta. His short fiction has appeared in Pif Magazine and The Collagist, where he won the 2009 Flash Fiction contest. His work is forthcoming in Twelve Stories.

Smoke Rise (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)

I came out to the pond in the middle of the night to catch a fish. My eyes were tired and made everything seem like the dreams that would not let me sleep. The house was dark and quiet. Tree limbs reached for each other over the water. I pulled out a catfish and it dangled on my line like a hanged man. It was missing a pectoral fin and its head was deformed on one side. It came from some place deeper than the mud bottom, through a hole that went deep to where the reject creatures lived, the failed experiments. I slid my hand up the fish’s slick body and it writhed, trying to stab me with its spiked fins. It ate everything and shit out what it didn’t need.

Southwestern Bell . The fire got too big for us but we kept feeding it. We threw in anything that burned and some things that didn’t, just to see what would happen. Tree limbs, scrap wood, leaves, corrugated metal, a stack of old National Geographics. I hacked apart an old side table that my dad had made a long time ago and no one wanted anymore. I threw that in. Later, when I went into the world alone,I wished for an artifact, a solid object that could tie me back to the blood of my name. I had nothing to hold onto, nothing to get my bearings by, just faint memories of names and hard faces from a loose pile of colorless photographs.

That night I stripped naked and walked into the pond. My feet sank ankle-deep into the soft muck. Then I sank deeper, up to my shins. I stretched my neck to keep my head above the water. I kept my legs still, but treaded with my arms to keep from going under, down into that hole. Over the tree tops, smoke rose up and touched the three-quarter moon. I could smell the still-smoldering ash and embers. I cried out for help but my voice skipped across the water and sank like a flat stone. I cried out for my mother and the man who lived with her but they could not hear me. They were locked in a room inside a house that no one could even see from the road.