Flash Fiction by Robby Sheils
Noel Hammond looked out his townhouse windows to the fractured sidewalk, its bricks covered in ant hills and tufts of beige grass. All of Brooklyn had been dry for a month, and the seventy-year-old grew to believe the bizarre fantasy that it wouldn’t rain until he pitched a new mystery for adaptation.
Amid the drought, Noel struggled to find his next success. He had made a living from his mystery novels, many of which went on to become bestsellers, though most of his success came from production companies buying him out. He had recently written a novella’s worth of pages on a retreat to his lake house, about a boy who fished dinner for his folks and fell in love with the girl in the cliffside mansion. It marked the fastest story he ever wrote, but it ended without a twist. And a movie without a twist seemed foolish, and so Brooklyn remained dry.
Noel recognized that blaming himself for the dry spell was a silly thought. But it was also a haunting one. He agonized over this supernatural burden until his stomach grumbled, and with great reluctance he stepped outside.
The afternoon sun hung high, and the clouds above him loomed massive and ominous. It was the hottest June in memory; every afternoon the sky threatened to break and every night it balled up and looked ugly and never did. All waiting on Noel.
Lost in a brainstorm, he meandered the quiet, upscale streets of Fort Greene. He daydreamed of Polly. Had it really been five years since she passed? Every step down their block felt undeserving. She was the one who pointed out the flower beds, who took great interest in holiday decorations and raved about the font of street numbers. Never Noel.
In the deli, four Hispanic men sat huddled, joking about something. Or nothing. The cold air from the AC snapped Noel back to Brooklyn, and rainless guilt spread across his arms in goosebumps.
He grabbed a ham sandwich and moved along. Home happened to be past an old Episcopalian church, but the heat made him lightheaded and so he paused to stare at the copper steeple, its years worn into a muted patina.
And right then and there the sky made up its mind and broke wide open. In an instant, rain fell in buckets and the road rumbled like a revving jet engine.
Noel ran as fast as his arthritic knees could take him, beelining for a skinny overhang outside a laundromat. A woman, about Noel’s age, and a boy were also marooned. Out of courtesy, they shuffled as close to the edge as the tiny cover allowed. The woman stood tall and elegant, and the boy had shins that marked a lanky and painful stretch of puberty. He held an orthodox paper-mâché diagram of a volcano, complete with a construction paper forest and a bright blue river of churned up Jell-O.
“Thank God for roofs!” he yelled over the slugs of rain, attempting to dodge awkwardness from their suddenly close quarters.
“Ah!” the woman agreed, along with other words that got swallowed in the storm.
“Pardon?” yelled Noel. The rain beat the roof at an alarming speed.
“My grandson! He wants to become a chemist!”
“Aha!”
The woman edged closer to Noel. He could see that when she smiled, like she was now, two dimples peeked through her wrinkles. “What about you?” she asked. Her voice sounded clear and steady.
“Sorry?”
“What did you want to be? When you grew up?”
She stared at him warmly, like an old friend or lover, and the inside of Noel’s chest fluttered in a way it had not in years. He glanced at his shoes and down the road. “An author.”
“Ah, that’s a good one,” she said, looking towards her grandson. “And what did you become?”
Noel rubbed at his knuckles. “An author.”
She laughed with her whole body, beautiful and earnest, and rounded it off with a clap that rang above the rain.
“Have you written anything good?”
“I think so.”
“Are you writing something now?” she asked, turning back to Noel.
Despite years of answering this very question—his agent’s favorite one—it still caught him off guard. Her tone sounded neither critical nor demanding, but honestly curious. It defied business. “Trying to,” he said.
“How much have you got done?”
“The whole thing.”
There was that laugh again.
“The whole thing?” she asked.
“Yes, but it needs a twist.”
The rain toned down to a pitter. The grandson used his pointer finger to do touch-ups on his Jell-O river.
“That’s silly,” she said, dimples showing again.
“No one would buy it,” he said.
“I would.”
The rain had nearly died, and the wet road began to glint. Noel looked at her, straight in her unblinking hazel eyes, and believed her.
“Would you like to get a coffee sometime?” he asked, the words out of his mouth before he could digest them himself.
“Yes,” she said, “as a friend. Could we be friends?”
Noel surprised himself with a smile. Like a boy crushing on a schoolteacher, he recognized the flutters in his stomach as butterflies of respect, not romance. Having someone to talk to—about whatever, about nothing—he missed dearly.
The two brainstormed a café where they could meet, and then said their goodbyes. Noel crossed the road, smelling the sweet metallic rain, and wondered if others would read his story. It was the fastest one he ever wrote for God’s sake, and it may as well be finished.
Robby Sheils is an emerging writer from Portland, Maine, who primarily writes slice-of-life fiction. He spent two years as an editor for The Telling Room, and in 2022 released a self-published novel, Shelley Avenue. He was most recently published in Rock Salt Journal. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
