The Power of Story
Writer
Short Stories By Gina M. Fields
Gina Fields is excited to be shopping around her 100,000 word adult contemporary BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ fiction manuscript, “Black & Blueness.” She received a Best Flash Fiction award from the Ginosko Literary Journal for her short story, “Dimly Lit by Day.” Gina relishes attending writers’ conference and networking with writers and agents. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley, and continues to take Creative Writing classes at UCLA extension.
Below are a sample of short stories by author Gina Fields of SisterFields Inc.
Dimly Lit
by Day
By Gina M. Fields
[Winner of the Gingsko Literary Flash Fiction Prize]
He lays the gun down gently on the end table, like a baby he’s afraid to wake. I don’t know him. I don’t know his name. And I don’t know why I’m here. I’m smarter than this, or so I’ve been told. He’s a grisly man, probably younger than his hardened looks reveal, wearing an unbuttoned blue plaid lumberjack shirt over a fresh to death white tank top with blue khaki pants – the unofficial Crips uniform.
Staring at me from his worn-down, green, easy chair on the other side of the living room, he says, “You’re the smart one.”
I don’t respond, not because I’m not, but because, I don’t want to seem arrogant or hurt the feelings of my three girlfriends who are stuffed onto this overstuffed, broken down, beige couch with me. We’re sitting in a barely sunlit, sparsely furnished apartment in The Jungle – a low-income neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, where I live with my overprotective mother and my older brother and sister.
“We should go,” I say.
“No,” he says, picking up the gun and placing it in his lap. His eyes won’t leave mine. He adds, “Pretty too.”
Earlier this afternoon, we met three boys, a little older than us, maybe 16, 17, outside the Rave movie theater a few blocks from here, and they asked if we wanted to come over to their friend’s place and hang out.
I said no, but Francine giggled, “Yes,” and Michelle, said, “It’ll be fun.”
Stephanie, who’s way more practical than any of us, whispered in my ear, “We can’t let them go alone, they’ll get killed or raped or something stupid like that.”
Now, I’m sitting in a weed stench-ed, dimly lit apartment, with a single bead of sweat dripping down my spine, staring at a gun, trying to keep us all safe. The three boys who we met, who brought us here, who probably sell weed for the guy with the gun, linger in the hallway door, having been dismissed from the room by our captor.
“I’m not that smart,” I say.
“You’re not?” he asks.
“No, if I was I wouldn’t be here.”
He laughs and says, “Funny too. How old are you?”
“Ummm, 16,” I lie.
I’m 15. Why do I lie? Does that one year make me a more formidable opponent for a half stoned, 185 pound, 28 year old, gang member with a gun?
He squints his eyes like he doesn’t believe me.
I left this behind. I got a scholarship to the private prep, Westlake School for Girls, and left behind Audubon, my neighborhood middle school, my friends, and my mother’s fears for me, to ride a Metro bus an hour and a half away to Bel Air. Driving pass the recovery centers and wigs shops and 99 Cent Stores of my neighborhood to sprawling lawns and 15 foot hedges and palm trees, like you see in the movies.
Then, came summer.
“Why are you here?” the drug dealer asks.
“She thinks he’s cute,” I say, first nodding my head toward Francine, sitting next to me, and then towards the light skinned, skinny boy, nervously snickering in the hall with his homies.
Francine shoves into me, angrily denying, “I do not. Why’d you go and say that?”
I want to tell her, because staring at a gun promotes honesty, and I barely got away with lying once, so I’m not anxious to try again, but I’m concentrating on not breaking our captor’s gaze. He will not respect that sign of weakness.
The late afternoon sun struggles in through closed blinds, saturating the room with heat.
Michelle’s nerves have gotten to her and she can’t stop giggling. Stephanie is sniffling, trying to hold back tears. And Francine, blinded by her crush, is making flirty eyes towards the hallway.
He picks up the gun and points it at me, asking, “So, are you afraid, Beauty?”
Every breath in the room stops.
Heart pounding, mind racing, hands sweating, what’s the right answer, what’s the perfect quote? With a mind full of knowledge, surely Ellison, Emerson, someone, something I’ve learned will make me bulletproof. Words, thoughts, quotes jumble and stumble around in my head.
“Nothing to say?” he prompts.
“Words can’t stop bullets,” I mutter.
He laughs loudly, and says, “Naw, they can’t.” Laying the gun back down on the table, he adds, “Remember this, today, this dumbass hood-rat sitting here, gave you a gift, gave you life. Don’t ever forget. And I don’t care what your stupid-ass friends say or do, don’t ever walk into nobody’s place if you don’t know what’s up. The next motherfucker may not be in a giving mood. Get out of here and go save the world or do whatever shit it is you need to do.”
Roam
By Gina M. Fields
On a train in the south of France, from Nice to Monaco, ultimately ending in Granada Spain, I met them, him. To understand, you must understand my state of mind, like them, like him, I am a traveler too – backpacking after college with little money, no plan and no goal, except adventure.
I’m staying, ‘closeted,’ at my high school friend’s house on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Closeted, because she’s a bit of a homophobe. I say ‘a bit,’ because, she wouldn’t call anyone a dyke, but she stopped speaking to her cousin when her cousin came out. When I asked, why, she said, ‘We don’t have anything in common anymore.’ When I asked, what if I were gay, she said, ‘I’d blame her,’ pointing to my girlfriend, ‘and I’d never talk to you again.’ So, I shut my mouth and enjoyed the free place to stay.
We, my best friend from high school, and my closeted girlfriend, we’re on a day trip to the Monaco Aquarium, when I meet him, them, a band of gypsies, him, the king of the gypsies, but aren’t they all kings.
He’s red as the setting sun falling into the horizon at day’s end. Eight or nine men and women, rag tag, sunburnt, trail after him, the tail to his comet skimming across the edge of the atmosphere. Singing, Bomboleo, they come onto the train at the first stop outside of Nice, jangling with music, harmonizing their noise with one guitar, a few tambourines, maracas and claves. Their hands are out expecting payment for their song.
His eyes, pale blue, like a cloud brushed sky, meet and lock onto mine. I feel naked; he sees my need for something more.
Years later, over time, his clothes will change with my broken memory, with my fantasy; sometimes he dressed like Jesus, other times a Spanish cowboy, (although it was probably bit of both, a beige, knee-length tunic, faded jeans and sandals), but those eyes, those haunting eyes, will stay the same, and will always stay with mine. And his manner, his eloquence, his strong, but slightly effeminate gestures sweeping through the air as he talks remain, attracting me, luring me, a starved fish to bait.
I am a lesbian, but with him I imagine rough sex on a full moon night in front of a raging fire in the forest surrounded by a caravan of trailers and naked madness.
He sits across from me, ignoring my best friend and my closeted girlfriend. Blazing in the sky, blue eyes steel his gaze upon mine, “We’re connected,” he says, “I see you.”
“You don’t know me,” I say, “and I don’t know you.”
“I see your heart,” he enchants. “If you asked I’d give you anything – take all of me.”
Jumping off the cliff into the pale blue insistence of him, my heart opens. I take him in willingly.
He says, “You try to hide, but I see you.”
He takes the guitar from one of his merry men and beguiles me with each strum on its strings.
We will the world to cease to exist outside our locked gaze, but outside the train’s window the big, wide sky and Cote-d’Azure waters, the green rows of crops and golden rows of grain, the reality of us, here, serendipitously together, yet worlds apart, invades our romance.
His gypsy wife, his number one, his bottom bitch, dark as night without a moon, slides in next to him on the seat; she a thin, hungry beauty who’d as soon slit my throat as blink.
“Come with me,” he says again. “I’ll take all of you, leave nothing.”
I gush wet.
I want him; he’s a desert rat, muscled Lawrence of Arabia, ‘coming to me on a fine Arab charger, coming to my emotional rescue,’ saving me from my doubts, my fears, my uncertain future. I could give all that away and just be, just run away with this gypsy.
With long hands and lithe fingers, he strokes out a tune so beautiful, this perfect day acquiesces and starts to beg for night.
Bamboleo, te quiero, he serenades me. Animated now, enrapturing everyone on train, he pours his heart into his gypsy yelps and claps and throbbing melodies, freeing his emotions bravely for me; I can only dream of being that free. And I want to be that open; I want to believe we live in a world that’s safe enough for that. I want to be his truth in that story.
He says, “If you come with me, I’ll make you a queen.”
Did he promise the African woman next to him the same?
He holds my hand, ignoring her and tells me, he loves me.
“Come with me,” he says.
My eyes flit back to the woman, by his side, while he, impassioned, pleads for me.
“Don’t look at her, look at me,” he says. “Come with me.”
“Today, I’m here with you wanting me, but tomorrow I’m there,” I say, nodding my head towards her, “with you blind to my need.”
A smile sneaks across his face. The kindness fades revealing the con. It’s all been a game, a lie.
He sneers, “You have a poet’s heart; you’ll never fall for me. I could have loved you beauty, but I release you back to the day.”
He picks out a dangerously, gorgeous rift on his guitar, slaps out some percussion against the body and the strings before returning to his strumming, standing and leading his band of gypsies off the train.