Two Flashes: A Bad Ass Nigger & Albino

by: Frederick Foote ((Header art by the incredibly talented Sean Phillips.))

Two offerings of flash fiction that introduce you to the baddest cat, and the most stunning seductress, around….

A Bad Ass Nigger

He’s a Sony Liston badass-looking nigger, with paws for hands and eyes so old the whites have turned egg yolk yellow with tiny red lines crisscrossing them like the road map to Hell.

His hands are as rough as a gravel road, as heavy as tombstones; hands that will slap a nigger to death as easily as you swat a fly.

He’s got strong, big, gray mule teeth that will bite right through flesh and bone, gristle and rawhide. And a six-inch long straight-razor scar, a ragged Rocky Mountain range of scar tissue that runs along his right cheek. Omar ain’t got shit on him.

He’s a distinguished veteran of Parchman Farm, Angola, Alcatraz and Sing Sing.

His language has been reduced to a few singular grunts, groans, glances, glares and finger pointing. He’s not big on conversation. I’ve never seen him smile.

On a good day…on a good day he acts like his hemorrhoids are killing him, or the IRS is auditing him or his dealer is out of stock. That’s what he’s like on a good day.

Only a few have survived a bad day around him, and those survivors ain’t saying shit. They ignore the questions about bad days and move the fuck away from him right quick.

He hangs around The Club a lot. You know, the Dew Drop Inn or The Players’ Club or the Mo Mo Club or the Kit Kat Club. He can be found in every one of those buckets of blood.

He drains all the testosterone from those Friday night razor fight arenas. Hardened gangsters sound like school girls and notorious hit men slink away like shy shadows.

I have never seen him pay for nothing in The Club; never. He doesn’t pay for food, drink or whores not at all. Never even once.

If you deal with him you feel like you got paid big time just by walking away from him intact. No missing parts, just nightmares about what he might have done if you pissed him off just a little bit. Just plain relief and prayers of thankfulness to whatever god you worship.

He was born with a straight-razor in his hand. A “Watch out Motherfucker” in his mouth, and a seventeen inch blue-black dick as hard as rebar.

He cut the doctor’s throat for slapping his behind and cut his own umbilical cord on the day he was born and marched down the street to The Club for a beer, a bourbon and a whore.

He may not be the baddest cat in town, but he will do until the baddest cat gets here.

Albino

I favor the alleys. I stroll the alleys home from my nights out at the club or at her place. Alleys fit me. I find things in the alleys. Sometimes things find me in the alleys as well. Things like “The Voice.”

The Voice is raspy, harsh, angry, evil, lusty, sexy, odd and uneven. It stops me in my tracks, tilts my head towards it to hear better, sobers me up to appreciate it better. That voice makes me sweat, my fingers tingle, and my dick throb.

I follow The Voice to an illegal club in the alley. I give the doorman some bills, and step from the dank, dark alley into the dismal, dark club.

All eyes are on “Her.” Her is clad in a silver tight, sparkly gown painted on a thin frame with a sweet apple of an ass. Her is a black woman with full lips, a well-rounded nose and crinkly blonde hair.

Her is paler than her dress. Her is white. Her is an albino wearing dark glasses and singing to me, staring at me.

Down in the valley
Deep in the cut
Backs bow
Bodies bend
Stuff flows
Skin glows
Yours and mine
Down in the valley
Deep in the cut

She glues me to the floor, Her. Leaves me wanting more of her music and all of Her. She whispers in that voice just to me.

I’ll shuck you like corn
Shell you like peas
Peel you to the core
Skin you alive
Stuff you with
Garlic and cloves
Bury you deep
Wear your skin home
Go home in your skin
In your skin
In your skin

And then she’s gone, left everybody in a trance. The applause is hesitant and a little nervous, leaving folks blinking and looking around to make sure they are where they are supposed to be.

I start to the back, in the direction she disappeared and someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn and there she is with a little black leather jacket over her gown.

I reach out and touch her face.

“You are the alabaster Shakespeare wrote of and the always new snow and the color of eternity.”

She touches my face and in that voice that is soft now and, somehow, edgier, she leans in and whispers in my ear. “I’m the color of death and old bleached bones and eternal loss, but that just makes you need me more and more and more.” The tip of her tongue touches my ear as she speaks, sparks my need into a nova.

I kiss her, tongue her, grind her. Handle her ass with rough affection and trade her a whisper. “Your voice had me before I ever saw you. Your looks are just the cream in my coffee.”

She laughs and laughs and leads me out the door.

“You would fuck my voice, fondle my vowels, consume my consonants, and admire my adjectives?”

Down the alley, we go.

“I would do that to every aspect of your body and soul.”

We cut across Main Street into another alley.

“Will you take me home to meet your mother after we fuck?”

“I think you have fucking on your mind.”

So we do it in the alley up against the wall.

She smiles and laughs. “You’re very much in lust with a voice and a color and a body. I think.”

We are in the lobby of an old shabby apartment building.

I send a text as she unlocks her door. I hand her my phone as I unzip her gown.

She reads the message out loud. “Moms, I have found her. I will bring her over for Sunday dinner.”

She laughs me into her bed, body and soul.

I awake to the smell of perking coffee, frying eggs and ham. She appears in the doorway in a short thin red robe that accents her familiar looking deep brown skin with red undertones, so much like mine, not like the porcelain hand that I’m pointing at her.

I speak in a raspy, harsh, angry, evil, lusty, sexy, odd and uneven voice. “Fuck you! Dinner is off! My mother would not recognize me, her own son. For God’s sake what did you do?”

She gives me a lazy smile

“Son? Are you sure?”

I will not look under the sheet. Nothing can make me look under the fucking sheet. Nothing! As she turns to leave there is the flash of a penis in his open gown.

Frederick K. Foote Jr. was born in Sacramento, California and educated in Vienna, Virginia and northern California. You can find his work online at Specter Magazine, Akashic Books, Piker Press, Every Day Fiction, Short Fiction Break, Cooper Street Journal, The Fable Online, So Glad Is My Heart, Tangental Bird Piles, Sirenzine, The Blue Falcon Review Vol.2, CMC Review, and in the print copies of the 2014 and 2015 Sacramento City College Susurrus Literary Magazine and in Puff Puff Prose, Poetry And A Play Vol. III.