Something wriggles in his mouth. The music at the party is bombastic. Tchaikovsky. The old world. He might hurl. A woman with silky plaited hair speaks to him about retirement incomes and portfolios. Her red lips are perfect purse knobs snapping together in a strange rhythm. Now she mentions a seaside resort she went to last summer. Her cigarette grows longer. Her teeth shine like a shark’s. A black feather flies out of his ear. His eyes casually follow its path up the winding staircase. It flits off to a darkened room upstairs. He wants to pretend this isn’t happening, like the woman is, but he knows it will; he leans against the doorframe and tries to keep his mouth shut. Maybe it was the goat cheese? He thinks about his little twin bed at home and his flannel comforter and his dog Kira, who is likely at that moment curled up on his pillow, poking her head up every once in a while to look out the window to see if his car is pulling in to the apartment parking lot.
“I said, do you ski?” the woman says. His cheeks bulge and it’s getting harder to keep his mouth shut. “Like I said, I prefer the Alps this time of year. It’s actually less expensive, you know.” Her eyes are a brilliant purple. “The kids love it, and Jake and I can just sneak on off to the lodge for brandy. Do your kids go to school around here? It’s so cold out tonight. I can’t stand this weather! I just had my kitchen redone. All granite, from New Hampshire. The land of no income tax, no sales tax. Heaven.”
Tchaikovsky’s eleven cannons go off and just after the last one, a wet, sticky oval body emerges from the man’s lips like a fully formed egg pasted with feathers, and his mouth widens as a purple-black baby ostrich flies out and opens its wings. The man feels a tremendous relief. The only sound is his footsteps clicking on the marble floor, while the crowd stands frozen in silence. The woman is gone. He walks to the coatrack and retrieves his hat and jacket. The baby ostrich swooshes out the door into the star-filled night. He follows.
__________
Cheryl Pappas is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press (2021). Her work has appeared in Swamp Pink, Wigleaf, HAD, Fractured Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow and is currently at work on a novel in flash.