Throwback Thursday: ‘Girls Who Dance in the Flames’ by Cheryl Wollner

Winner of the 2018 Raven Short Story Contest, ‘Girls Who Dance in the Flames’ by Cheryl Wollner pulls the reader in immediately with its powerful language and vivid imagery.

Contest judge CC Humphreys had this to say: I liked many things about ‘Girls’. The language was completely believable, with dynamic metaphors drawn from the narrator’s crazed imagination and steeped in the Southern Gothic world from which she comes. … Yet the elegance of the writing never detracted from the flow of the story that just swept me into another, so different world. The construction was good too, a steady development to the fiery climax. The narrator’s voice was strong, clear, twisted, disturbing. … A lot to cram into a five-page story. Yet it held me throughout, had a clear arc, and left a disturbing aftertaste.

Enjoy this excerpt from Pulp Literature Issue 22 and discover a friendship that is impervious to fire.

Girls Who Dance in the Flames

by Cheryl Wollner

Constance lets Doc Jasper probe about her mouth with his tobacco-stained fingers. He prods her gums to bleeding, fingers the sores on her lips, the blisters bursting on her tongue. She lets him pinch the vein in her elbow, stick a needle in her arm. He say, She need rest. He say, She not in her right mind. He say, real quiet when he thinks I’m not at the window peeking in, Shameless girl like you won’t mind — and runs his hand along the inside of her thighs.

She spits at his back but won’t say nothing to his face. Maybe that’s a good choice on account of how city she sounds since the Navy. Before, she talked all sand:  good and grainy running through the holes in your fingers, like cornmeal, like eating the burnt edges of pan biscuits. Now, even around her bruised lips, she talks like polished glass. 

She lopes wild to that cypress tree, chin high, cheeks blazing, and I race after her. We’re like marbles about to collide, back when we shot marbles and scooted muddy elbows and knees across her ma’s sawdust floor. 

But I done check already, and Constance ain’t under that cypress tree trying to mourn over the watery grave. I ain’t a mourner. I’m running to the ricketiest edge of Oak Bridge to jump off the pier. Don’t care I’m in my school skirt, white socks like leg irons. Soon enough, I’m gonna quit school for real. Just gotta make it to sixteen. Constance used to say, It gets better. But she don’t say that no more. She don’t say much of anything anymore. She just sits in her skin where her baby once was and she don’t look right.

I leap off the bridge and slam into the water. The river kisses my face, smells salted as clams. I want a clam. Don’t wanna wait for Jon and his fishing boat to cruise in. Don’t got no money to buy a clam off his cart. I breathe big then plunge down through the floating moss, swatting at water bugs and algae, stroke like a frog to the soiled sludge bottom. My hands become shovels, my eyes blinded by the fistfuls of grit I overturn. I just want one clam, raw and slimy as I feel.

I can swallow objects, hold them in my throat then spit them back into my mouth. That’s how I’ll eat my clam. But I don’t find any clams. Find a rock instead. Night black, flat as a palm, and just as scarred and readable. I’m teaching myself to tell fortunes. Had to do something when Constance left, back when she was dreamy eyed with plans to be the first female officer, an ambassador, a diplomat, words she read about in the weekly paper. Instead, she was some man’s secretary. Another man’s whore. Came back home stained with his child. 

I surface for air, then down down again because I see a shadow of a boat inching close, lazy, crooning and smoothed with hazy heat. I’ll tip that boat right over. 

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Issue 22, Spring 2019 here! And watch Cheryl’s powerful reading of this story on our YouTube channel.

Cheryl Wollner

Cheryl Wollner’s fiction and nonfiction appear in the anthologies Today, Tomorrow, Always; Hashtag Queer, Volume 3; and The Best of Loose Change Anthology; as well as in additional print and online venues. Their short story ‘Girls Who Dance in the Flames’ won Pulp Literature‘s 2018 Raven Short Story contest and appeared in Issue 22. They are pursuing their MFA in fiction at Florida Atlantic University where they are the managing editor of Swamp Ape Review. Currently, they are writing an alternate history novel about Bess and Harry Houdini.