I write a lot of flash fiction. Because it’s fun. You’ll find one of my flash pieces here. It changes from time to time.

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the restaurant at the end of the world.

It’s the end of the world and my mom’s bartering for lamb vindaloo. Seriously.

She and the cook are speaking in rapid-fire Hindi. I think he’s trying to get Grandma’s gold necklace and her emerald earrings, but I’m not sure. My Hindi’s terrible. He might be saying something about garam masala being impossible to find these days.

This is where we are: a broken Indian restaurant two miles from Santa Monica Pier, which isn’t a pier anymore so much as a waterlogged wreck sixty feet deep. At low tide, you can still make out the top cars of the Ferris wheel, rusted over and covered in barnacles. Sometimes a stuffed animal washes up on the shore. Kids poke at it with sticks, trying to figure out if it’s a living thing or just cloth.

I push myself from the counter and go outside to get away from the increasingly loud chatter. People like the cook who continue to prey on those seeking a little bit of normalcy… I hate them. But not as much as I hate my mother’s incredible talent for turning a blind eye to the fact that take-out food died two years ago. It died the same day the freeways flooded and people started getting sick.

The street is wet. Everything’s always wet. Tides come in, stain the concrete green and red, then recede. But they always come back. I walk along the sidewalk, smelling the salt and sulfur of a world slowly choking on its own filth.

Street vendors and Tenters call out to me. They offer trinkets made of shells and debris, sexual favors, stolen things. Some of them skip the pretense and beg for trade goods, or food, or compassion. I ignore them.

I pass an alley and find myself face-to-face with a Blood Ring. Acid immediately swirls in my gut from stress and pity and disgust. The girls look at me from the posts they’re chained to outside the pitiful tents. There’s no hope in their faces. They don’t expect me to save them. No one ever does. Many of them are already sick, their lesions open and weeping. It’s too late for them, anyway.

A man ten yards from me is bleeding one of the girls. He draws his knife across her arm and her blood flows thick and dark into the bowl he holds to catch it. Her eyes are staring somewhere far away. When he’s done, he takes it to his shrine of metal and plastic and pours it into the soggy ground, muttering a prayer to some made-up god. He asks for the water to go away. For things to return to the way they were, before. Like we can just go back to business meetings and shopping sprees after all of this.

I can’t stand it.

The man sizes me up when I approach him. He’s trying to decide if I’m worth selling, I can tell. I’m young and visibly disease-free, so I’d probably make him a good trade. But I’d also be missed, and he knows that, too. Not worth the risk.

I jerk my head at the girl. “How much?”

Her distant eyes detach from whatever they were watching and shift a little. She watches me through a murky haze.

The owner squints at me. He has no attachment to her. She’s a bloodbag to him, nothing more. “What do you have to trade?”

I open my sack and pull out a dead chicken. Feathers still on. Blood still in. He’d get a prayer and several meals out of it.

Mom will kill me for giving up our main course. I don’t care. She got her vindaloo. She’ll be fine.

He rubs his beard, mulling the trade over in his head. At last, he nods. I hand over the chicken. He unties the girl and shoves her at me. I take her by the wrist, gently. Her eyes meet mine. They’re so dull. She can’t even cry.

She’s maybe fourteen years old. Same age my little sister would have been.

“Maya.”

Mom’s voice is sharp. It slices through the air of the alleyway. The Bleeders cringe away from it.

I go to her, leading the girl behind me. Mom’s face tightens; the lines around her mouth intensify. I notice one of her earrings is gone. She and the cook must’ve come to an agreement after all.

“Why?” she asks. She doesn’t need to say more. I know what she’s asking. Why did I give up our food. Why did I bother. Why did I find us one more mouth to feed.

I glance back at the girl. She still watches me with that same distant, soft look.

“She reminded me of Noni,” I say.

Mom’s expression immediately melts into a puddle at her feet. As much as she tries to deny how much things have changed, she can never deny losing Noni.

Her head drops and she holds out her hand. I take it. We walk, the three of us, hand in hand in hand, down the soaking street.

The sun, swollen and red, dips into the water.