Let’s get started. This is Flim-Flam’s first flash fiction piece – by yours truly. A small taste. Be sure to get the details of our Flim-Flam contest and win a chance at publication plus $5.
This will be the last piece you see from me. I want to see what you have to offer, so enter the contest. Submit future flim-flam flash when the contest is over.
Suzie Shrewsbury steps out of her 4X4 jet black Dually in her snazzy rodeo queen cowboy boots. A burly grizzly-faced man walking from the front door of a trailer home grins big so she can see his yellowing teeth. He is carrying an armadillo in his left hand, holding it by its short tail.
“Are you the man selling the frozen armadillo?” She says.
“One and the same,” he yells.
He stretches out his huge right hand. She takes it, shakes.
“Bill Trumble,” he grins.
“Suzie,” she says. Her father’s voice chides her for not being too careful.
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars, whole shebang.”
“I thought it was thirty.”
“Nope. Fifty.”
“You said thirty on the phone.”
“That was my son. He don’t know nothing. My armadillo.”
“So you won’t honor thirty?”
“No ma’am. Got thirty into it. Wouldn’t make me nothing.”
“Very well.” She opens the door of her Dually and starts to step in. Bill snatches her arm with his handshaking hand.
“Wait a sec,” he says. “Maybe we can work something out.”
Suzie stops, closes the Dually door. She waits for Bill to say something. He’s staring at her tits. He escapes from his trance and shouts, “Tell you what,” snapping his fingers and pointing. “I’ll take forty.” He grins ear to ear at his offer too good to refuse.
“Thirty,” she snaps coldly, folding her arms across her chest.
Bill’s smile turns sour. He grows frustrated and chomps, “Toldja. Got thirty in. I can’t just go giving my armadillo away. How about a compromise?”
Suzie opens the truck door again and sets her foot on the running board. She starts to climb in. Bill looks at her ass. Her jeans, a little wide for a girl her size, have a leather pad on the back with “Lee” written across it. A designer belt, bejeweled and sequined, reads, “B I T C H” in bold pink letters. Bill’s eyes travel down her long slender legs to her boots.
“Those armadillo?” He asks, upbeat.
Suzie turns. She sits in the driver’s seat of the Dually, stretches her legs out. “These?” she asks, pointing her toes.
“Yeah. Them armadillos?”
She places one boot on the floorboard of the pickup and crosses the other over her knee, sits with her legs in a figure four. She caresses the boot on her knee. Her long pink fingernails glide across its leather skin and she smiles. It was the first time Bill had seen her teeth, a perfect line of pearly white. The gleam in her eye told him she was flirting, trying to use her feminine wiles to get him to drop his price again.
“Yeah.” Her voice jumps like a high school cheerleader. “I loooo-ooove armadillos. Don’t you, Bill?”
Bill loves armadillos, but he doesn’t like to kill them. Suzie leans forward, sliding her hands over her custom-made boot, kneading her toes like fresh bread dough. Bill gets a glimpse of her breast and a tattoo of an armadillo just above it.
“You fiend!”
Suzie’s eyes widen. She’s startled as she sees Bill lift the armadillo in his hand over his head. She uncrosses her legs and turns toward the steering wheel of the Dually but slips out of the truck instead, onto the ground. The armadillo cracks down on her shoulder and makes a loud pop.
“Armadillo killer!” Bill screams.
Suzie turns toward Bill, hoping to scare him away. The armadillo lands on her nose. It crackles.
“Oh, my God!”
Suzie screams bloody murder. She thinks her nose is broken. She bends forward, grabbing the nose with her hand, checking to see if it’s bleeding. The armadillo hammers down on her back and she can hear Bill screaming, “Bitch! Fucking bitch!”
The nose isn’t bleeding. Suzie rises to her feet with a loud screech and kicks at Bill. He backs away swinging the armadillo. Suzie jumps into her Dually and closes the door leaving Bill in his front yard heaving and holding his frozen armadillo, his grizzly face sprinkled with tears. He scowls as Suzie punches the gas throwing gravel when she guns the Dually out of the drive. Then she burns rubber with her cell phone to her ear as Bill shakes a fist at the sky.
Don’t forget about the contest. Garden gnomes like contests.
Tags: Allen Taylor, contest, flash fiction, flim flam