Flash fiction by Oliver Reimers

The Inevitable Truth of the California Dream

You’re seven years old at a campsite when you try to pick the golden poppy.

“Don’t do that,” your mother says before your fingers close around the stem. “You can’t do that in California.”

For the past week, all you’ve been able to do is watch a video of a piano teacher play “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” from Piano Adventures 3A. She messes up at the thirty second mark but does not edit it out. She does not do a retake. It is a fifty-three second piece. Her right hand falters after the error. How humiliating to make a mistake on a song from Piano Adventures 3A.

Even though you can’t bring yourself to clip your nails or wash your face, you are in the car with Saraya, hurdling seventy miles per hour up I-80 towards Reno. She is made up pretty with black eyeliner that looks like kohl, and you think you would like to have your brain stirred up and removed through your nose. “There’s a comedian tonight,” Saraya says. “He finally broke out of New York.”

Between California and Reno, there is nothing but hills and the dimmest evergreens you’ve ever seen. A pulped skunk sticks to the side of the road. A woman parks her car to scrape it off.

“I’ve always wanted to be a comedian,” Saraya says, “but I’m not funny.” Even her attempts at self-deprecation are pathetic.

This trip was supposed to cheer you up, but it is taking everything not to throw yourself out of the car and join the skunk.

It would have taken less than a minute to rerecord the video.

The car stutters. A rock skitters behind it onto the empty road. “That wasn’t an animal, was it?” Saraya says. A quarter mile ahead, a lone sign welcomes you to Nevada. The car jumps. There’s a hiss. Saraya jerks the wheel. You hope she will swerve left and leave the two of you steaming in a ditch, but she swerves right, and you skid across the dirt and weeds until the brakes kick in and you bang into the dashboard.

You get out of the car.

Neither of you are hurt. Saraya kneels by the popped tire and prods it for a nail.

Maybe it was the seventh time she’d restarted the video. Maybe it had taken hours. Maybe she’d watched her finger move astray, knowing it was fate, and accepted that no matter what she did, her pinky was always destined to strike that B.

On each side of the border sign, there is a golden poppy. Saraya curses behind you. You walk to the first poppy reach down, then remember. You step past the sign. Welcome to Nevada.

Beneath your fingers, the stem snaps so easily.