“Landscape Grown Cold” by Carolynn Mireault

Image is a color photograph of a pile of mail; title card for the new flash story, "Landscape Grown Cold," by Carolyn Mireault.

In the flash fiction “Landscape Grown Cold,” Carolynn Mireault’s writing is hard and cool, like a slammed door in a silent room. As in: It startles. Her writing understands how violent it can feel to be stuck in time, to be paralyzed by your own hope. Susan Dunn, the protagonist, is waiting. Mireault explains, “Dunn’s walking between rooms, her drinking and smoking, demonstrate that time is passing, but there is no movement.” The pacing of the story is a slow pour, chronicling each turn the protagonist takes. She is a voyeur watching squirrels screw. She is a woman who remembers suffering. And as much as Mireault’s language shocks the reader, it does even more to balance the weight of suffering. We feel discomfort in the face of such violence. We shift in our seats. We read each line a second time. Susan Dunn knows how to contain things, how to hold things still, and in turn, the reader learns to do the same. We wait together. We watch together. —CRAFT

On the settee, and smoking, Susan Dunn watches out the glass door to the yard, where one squirrel rapes another. She feels no need to stop it, hasn’t creased a brow or pursed a lip, and goes on smoking as normal. If it isn’t rape and is something else entirely—a penetrative game of tag—as she certainly hopes it is, there’s no point in guilt or wonder. Nature being nature. But she knows it isn’t tag. The sow screams just how Brenda Martin (her classmate from Webster) had, when she went out with a serial killer who lacerated her breasts and sodomized her with a live armadillo before she clawed out through the corrosion of the bulkhead. It wasn’t tag then and it can’t be now.

It is cold today, and she has on two robes, plus Robert’s sheepskins, which have gone thin at the toes. Behind her, the wood panels span to the cavern of the fireplace, where ashes of a pink kite smudge the uniform of a melted Batman. Last night, she is sure, he spent with Anne in the mountains. She takes one slipper off to smother her cigarette through the sole. The squirrels stop fucking. She rises and goes to the bar cart. Last night, she knows, Robert finished inside Anne, then tucked her head into his armpit and slept that way, while John was at a friend’s house and Bobby was up with the nightmares.

She pours. Wine now and gin later. It is inherited crystal from a dead aunt on his side, and after she drinks, she adds it to the fireplace. She is hungry but won’t eat. Last night, it’s certain, he had a little thing of hope, and smiled. This morning, Susan knows, he’s hyper with adrenaline, hard with remembered images, and carrying Anne’s scent around like a clinging pet.

It could be worse. It could be how it was for Melanie Buford (her across-the-street neighbor from growing up), whose boyfriend beat her to stars with a microwave oven. Nobody goes to see Melanie now, she knows, at the group home where she’s kept, doing menial crafts and trying to find the words. Every so often, when she drinks, Susan thinks it could be she who shows up, talks to Melanie in her chair, and she who could be the hero, or forge a real friendship, then thinks of how soon this kindness would turn to obligation and commitment, how it would no longer be splendid that she showed up that day, but how disappointing it is when she never comes back.

Susan picks up the log grabber to shove the crystal deeper into the ashes, stoking an invisible flame. It clanks into the Batman that failed to protect her and the kite she couldn’t get to fly. Any little sound she thinks is him, getting home.

She knows about Anne from being friendly with Listie Cooper (the wife of Robert’s colleague), who told Susan to “look out,” “be on guard” if Robert came around saying he wanted to redo any rooms, because a woman named Anne, an interior decorator from Carthage, was going around screwing husbands—and had indeed screwed Mr. Cooper—but not without first screwing their living rooms.

“Bright green couch,” Listie had told her. “He gets a hot affair and I get a bright green couch.”

It could be worse.

She crosses into the kitchen and touches the mail pile as if to go through it, but there’s an exhaustion Susan’s never had that now she’s grown accustomed to, looking at the brass tray covered in letters (seven or eight of them), which are each invitations to weddings and second weddings across Missouri. Hers had been there in Sedalia before she cut her hair above the ear, before they bought the half-pink ranch-style above market value, then had babies filling it up and growing into boys and young men. It could be worse. It’s not how it was for Sharon Farnham (her sister’s friend from nursing school), who carried her daughter to full term, then whose bus crashed en route to Chicago, during which the baby suffered an irrecoverable blow, and in a harrowing labor later that day, was born with nothing to her.

Susan lights another and takes it to the settee, where she looks at the yard and sees a squirrel at the base of the elm. Whether it’s the rapist, the raped, or a new friend, she can’t know. Her face doesn’t move. All the urgency’s in her lungs, which have burned the cigarette down to half in fifty seconds flat.

Before, she and Robert took a weekend in Nashville with the Hugheses, who ate beef off each other’s forks, looked in each other’s eyes as if, somewhere in the iris, sat a little angel on a dick, moaning and riding, and they said “I love you” even in front of Susan and Robert, which rubbed him the wrong way, and Susan thought it was a bad sign that it rubbed him the wrong way, since every time they said “I love you,” she wished it were Robert saying it to her, and feeding her his tenderloin, or looking into her sockets as though they, too, had angels, moaning and riding. They went to see a show, and while there, the Hugheses fought and broke up. Robert told Susan, “See? I told you. Their love was minim. Ours is the opry.”

She watches now as the squirrel eats something it’s found in the grass. Its hands are tiny and precise, gripping whatever it is, and it knows nothing of politics, or cinema, but survives an existence of joy and pain truer than any woman, man, or child. The squirrel knows: it could be worse. It could be minim, or rape. But instead, there’s a nut, filling its mouth and cheeks.

CAROLYNN MIREAULT is a recipient of the 2022 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature and the 2022 Florence Engel Randall Fiction Award. She holds an MFA from Boston University, where she served as a Leslie Epstein Fellow and the Senior Teaching Fellow. Her work has appeared in Cutleaf, Orca, Pithead Chapel, and Glassworks, among other venues. Find her on Instagram @carolynnmireault.