2022 Flash Fiction Award Winner: Eliezra Schaffzin

Triptych: Little Deities 

1. EL-BO 

The morning after she said no to the woman she might have loved, she was accosted by  her left elbow. 

EL-BO, it rumbled, a sustained funnybone feeling, her entire body an eardrum. Lips-teeth-tongue, her mouth replied, feeling cheeky. 

EL-BO, the elbow persisted. 

Alright, she said. 

She adjusted the blankets, ready to sleep in. The elbow popped nitrogen bubbles,  protesting. 

Alright, she said, getting up. At the bathroom mirror, toothpaste foaming, she realized the  thing’s significance. She was, after all, a leading authority in Northwest Semitic languages. She  knew the words: EL-BO. “God in it.” Why not? That’s where a god should be, in the interstice. EL-BO, the god said, declaring itself. I will speak. 

Okay, she said. Listening. 

In the shower, over breakfast, on her commute, the elbow declaimed. It spoke of lint  filters, wind shear, lust, existential risk. It answered questions she’d never asked aloud, fleeting  ones, fired neurons. 

In answer to your question, the elbow said, “chelidon.” 

In answer to your question, there will be a hell when there are no humans left to imagine  it, but not the hell humans imagine. 

In answer to your question, metaphor is a falsehood worth perpetrating. 

When she’d said no to the woman she might have loved, the woman said, “You literally  have nothing to lose.” She’d replied, “If I literally have nothing to lose, I have nothing.”  “Apparently,” the woman said. 

In answer to your question, said the elbow, the woman you might have loved would have  accompanied you to the end of the world. 

She was pressed into the metro, heading home. She asked: The literal end or the  figurative end? 

In answer to your question, the elbow said, the end is the end. 

I literally have nothing to lose, she said. 

EL-BO, rumbled the elbow. I have spoken. 

2. Gingers 

They’d done everything you’re supposed to do to make and raise an infant; the to-do list  was long, but it was done in love. They named the baby Ginger, after the healing root. She was  not the least bit ginge: her hair grew in gleaming black waves, her eyes intent on matching her  hair. When she was four, they got the rescue pup, a white, fluffy male with an underbite, and they  gave the girl naming privileges. She called it Ginger. Their neighbors said, That’s what you get  

when you give a kid a dog’s name. They had to admit to the narcissism in her selection. They let  it slide. It would be an object lesson in the reactions of playmates, veterinarians, strangers on the  street. When, at seven, she requested a skink, they found the thing off-putting, but they were  pleased to see her diversify. She pasted a “Hello My Name Is” sticker to its tank, carefully  shaping the large and small G’s: another Ginger. They arranged a “playtime” visit from a child  psychologist who asked to be introduced to the dolls lined up in her room. The child followed the  lady’s pointing finger to the face of the first and answered, Ginger. And next to her? More  Gingers. The expert said, neuroplasticity unstructured play authentic self. They declined to  purchase the eight-week Healthy Development package. They read up on raw diets, fluoride,  booster shots. They tried craniosacral therapy and family yoga. The child was particularly good  at meditation. She placed the two of them back-to-back on pillows in the the TV room, seating  her dolls around them, dragging Ginger the Dog’s bed from the kitchen. Ginger the Skink arrived  in its carrier. Then she joined the circle, positioning herself cross-legged beside Ginger, closing  her eyes, and coasting into stillness. They sat, four eyes wandering, four arms fidgeting, a double  divinity encircled by its avatars, the incarnation they created once in their image and permitted to  multiply, expanding themselves outward on the face of the earth.  

3. Deus Ex Machina 

It was a deus ex machina moment: the writer was distracted by the vexing details of his  story, the sun sat on the low shelf of winter afternoons, and the cyclist had swerved to avoid what  appeared to be a small, furry animal cowering against the asphalt, but was in fact a single, soggy  

sock the current of melting snow had brought to an arbitrary stopping spot. The writer felt the  blow to his hood like a revelation. He braked, put the car in park, and thrust open the door, his  shoes skidding on the gritty pavement. He squatted beside the cyclist, who, lifting his  unhelmeted head, said “You could’ve killed me,” then promptly died. The writer named the  cyclist “Budgemackey.” Piling indignity upon insult upon injury, the writer mispronounced  Budgemackey’s name, crying “Booge-Magee! Booge-Magee! It was only a sock.” 

He dropped to the sidewalk, resting his face in his hands. He gave Budgemackey a  childhood, and an aging mother, and a slumbering kitten that, curled up on Budgemackey’s lap,  looked like the lump of wool on the road by the writer’s shoe. He peeked between his fingers at  the drenched, lifeless thing in the gutter, no longer a soft housing for a foot but a pile of pulpy,  frozen fuzz, a loop of yarn sticking out at one end. If the writer were to pinch it just so, the entire  thing would come undone: sock, cyclist, story. He thought to reach out, worry the loop, but he  slid his fingers shut across his vision. No matter which route he took, it always ended here, in  pathos intermingled with roadside grit. He might edit out the car, the road, the sinking sun, but  then where would he sit, where would he go, what would he see of the way ahead? “Booge Magee,” he cried, “It was you or me.” Beside him, the sock rose, shook itself, and trotted away,  leaving him to reconcile sorrow with survival. It was a difficulty wrought by his own grimy  hand, but worthy of a god’s unraveling. 

Eliezra Schaffzin’s winning flash, “Triptych, Little Deities,” is included in her tiny collection of tiny stories, Tiny Creatures, which was selected as a 2022 finalist in the New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest and the Masters Review Chapbook Open. Schaffzin is a recipient of the Calvino Prize, awarded for a work of fabulist fiction. Her writing has also been recognized by the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, and the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and has appeared in Conjunctions, PANK, the Harper Perennial Anthology Forty Stories, and other publications. She occasionally writes words for opera and choral music, just finished compiling a short story collection, and is currently at work on a novel about two high school girls in love against a backdrop of college applications, Beethoven’s “Mass in C Major,” religious apocalypticism, and experimental aerial drones.

3 February 2023