Łukasz Drobnik’s blog

Three stories from RIVERINE, my flash fiction collection published by VA PRESS

Content warning: substance abuse, violence, suicidal ideation

Meandering I

The river takes you with her, she doesn’t ask questions, her waters aren’t bothered if you’re not up for a ride, her waters don’t care if you’re still bruised after that friendship, a friendship where a person who’s supposed to be your friend is the first to notice you’re falling for a boy, a friendship where she chooses to seduce that boy, where she fucks him in the next room, moans so you can hear it, a friendship that makes you think of razorblades and bridges and prescription vials and nooses and greedy seas, her waters, her waters lead you wherever they want, to this particular street at this particular time, though they could’ve easily led you elsewhere and elsewhen, her waters, like vines, trap you in this moment with sunlight and street dust and a bunch of people you look up to, her waters pour words into their mouths, they invite you to a pub, her waters swirl and eddy when you sit next to X, they make it clear X is your saviour in a stained tracksuit, a drunken saviour who’s surprised you’ve never heard his name, who’s a decade older than you and has a boyfriend, but the love between them has wilted, he says, her waters stir when X notices you’re a tad unhappy, when he praises your Achilles tendons, makes compliments rain, her waters lead you out of the pub with his phone number, they know you’ll be the first one to text, they’re perfectly aware you feel more thrilled than guilty when X lies to his boyfriend to meet you at a pub and he drinks beer after beer and you get sloshed trying to keep up and when you puke outside, X is here with you and lays his hand on your shoulder with tenderness you’ve never known.

Landmines

It’s a separate organism trapped in the innards of its parent. There’s a whole lot of meiosis going on. As you point to the faded illustration with your bitten nail, I can’t help but stare at your hairy wrist.

The pollen lands on the pistil. Just imagine, millions of beings encapsulated in these tiny specks, carried by the wind and insects and hoping they won’t end up in puddles or chimneys or gutters. I move my head closer to the page to breathe in the sweat-infused air. Later that day, I play Minesweeper and feel the vaguest, most indefinable yearning.

We are drunk at high noon in the full sun. We can’t wrap our heads around the beauty of the vegetation. I try not to think that you took me on this trip only to make me forget you are leaving. Two weeks of doing manly things like pissing in the woods and lighting fires and talking about all the girls you’ve slept with. Manly things like watching you undress. You show me the jar filled with swift water fleas, gelatinous hydras, deadly two-eyed flatworms. I wish I could also enclose this moment in a piece of glass.

We talk over the phone now and then as I drink my way through the angst of my twenties, the aimlessness of my thirties, the low-flame depression of my forties. Our phones become watches become chips become implants. Our hair becomes grey then thin then nonexistent. Fat creeps over our organs and under our skin. The pollen tube drills deeper into the cellulose flesh.

The road is wet and black, the stars are plenty. After hours of driving, I’m in your spacious living room on your expensive sofa, holding your trembling bald head against my chest. I wonder if the salt from your tears will leave flowery patterns on my shirt. When the worst crying is over, I talk nonsense to distract you. Just imagine, the pollen tube finally reaches the entrapped creature, one of the sperms fuses with the egg, and a whole new life begins.

Orignally published in Foglifter

Riverweed

There’s a story in this series of vomit stains on the pavement. The first attack must have been strong and short, leaving long radial streaks on the flagstones. The second splash is smaller. Whoever left it must have thought the worst was behind them. The last one is an unrestrained cacophony of colours and textures, as if an artist held on to the corner while a jet of paint erupted from their body, hit the pavement, and cascaded over the curb onto the asphalt.

You picture a river similar to the one you used to go to with E before she moved to another city, before you moved to another city, but wilder, louder, and more beckoning. Its banks are flanked by weeping willows and bristling with reeds, its heart the blackest maelstrom. The swoosh reminds you of the patter of his urine against the floorboards in the middle of the living room, in the middle of the night. The air smells of river sludge and frail waterweeds and empty snail shells. You wonder if a person retains their sense of smell underwater.

The bruises on the thirty-year-old man’s skin tell a story of their own. The oldest have wilted into soft yellows, the newer ones bloom with purples and blues. Some are mere seeds awaiting their time to blossom: the faint knuckle-shaped stains under the collarbone, the ghostly powder pink mark around the forearm. Loud snoring and the stench of vodka come from the adjacent room. A burly fortyish man lies half-buried under a duvet, his underwear damp with urine, bits of vomit glistening in his beard.

The rippling surface hypnotises you. You don’t even notice the fluffy Pomeranian-shaped clouds above your head or feel the vibrations of ringworms and insects under your bare feet. If E were here, she would drag you to safety as she has tried to do with Silesian stubbornness in her many annoying phone calls. Once you dip your toe in the cold bottle green, you remember the psychobabble she spewed at you, her hair full of swirls and eddies, in that blue café overlooking the river. The machine-gun series of ‘co-dependencies’ and ‘over‑responsibilities’ bounced off your skin as you calmly watched the waters roll.

All the fingerprints on the mirror won’t shut up either. The medicine cabinet filled with prescription vials (take the pills, take the pills) reflects the empty white bathroom, superimposed with greasy impressions of papillary lines. Each print reminds one of a small lake, brought to life by the hesitant touch of a finger (take the pills, take the pills), the oily isobaths stepping down to the bottom.

Waist-deep in the water, you imagine you’ll feel like a blood cell pushed by the turbulent plasma, a joyride up the aorta, if blood cells feel anything at all. Part of you, larger with each second, longs for this not-feeling, not having to lie in bed pretending you’re asleep and wait until the click of the lock betrays the level of his drunkenness. Another part recalls that June night when together you sneaked onto the roof of your tower block and kissed for all of the galaxy to witness.

Words turned into electricity and back into words again don’t leave much room for interpretation. The bruised man sits in seaweed-patterned briefs on a kitchen chair and whispers into a phone. When he listens, words seem to fall out of the speaker and stick to the stuffy air, forming a constellation: ‘you’ is just lightyears away from ‘have to’, but ‘escape’ lies at the edge of his universe.

Your head and the rest of your body now belong to two different worlds, cut at the neck by the aqueous boundary. Paralysed, you wait for the viscous current to help you off the slippery stones.

The exuberant kelp of a vomit stain is now sliced through by two wobbly lines like the tracks of small wheels. Could it have been the bruised thirty-year-old’s suitcase? The tracks vanish in the middle of the street. It cannot be ruled out that the battered man, if indeed it was him, became a Slavic god by the name of Diazepamir (his many arms forever toasting shots of rye vodka, lungs choked with catkins), then soared to the night sky (countless hands plucking tenements, tearing off asphalt) and disappeared in a flash (take the streets, take the streets) where there is no fear and there is no death and everything is light.

Orignally published in BULL