https://www.broadkillreview.com/post/2019/05/28/the-cinderella-of-sunset-park

Published by The Broadkill Review, November 2019. Nominated by The Broadkill Review for a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2020 Best of the Net.

The Cinderella of Sunset Park

Tonight, I have the perfect venue to show off a new drop-dead gorgeous me – my sister-in-law’s brother’s wedding party. The happy couple got married at Brooklyn Borough Hall three months ago before she was showing and the family is throwing a big bash to celebrate everybody doing the right thing. The buzz on the block says Johnny, the bride’s brother, is coming all the way from sunny LA. Hard to believe Francie’s family is paying for such a big gala to show everybody she’s a married lady now.

I have a to-die-for dress I snagged at H&M. It’s short and sassy with a billion silvery sequins. I have fire engine red stilettos and a statement necklace with matching earrings. I’ll tinkle like wind chimes and twinkle like the stars above tonight. No one will notice the bride and her bulging tummy, just yours truly. I’ve been starving myself thin for weeks.

I spotted the perfect place for my ‘do’ when I was on jury duty last month and I went on a walkabout to shake the boring off me. You can tell it’s a classy place and that’s exactly what I need for my big night. If they throw me out because I got no appointment, so what. I’ll just spit on the floor and disappear. But, I’m feeling totally badass, so I take the subway over and jog in about noon.

The owner nods and smiles when I ask him about doing my hair up to match the magazine page I found at the gyno’s office months ago. It’s a retro-forties upswept style, a boogie-woogie bugle boys’ kind of look with swoops and curls all over.

“I am Boris and this is my salon. Your name, miss?”

“Darlene DiAngelo, but everybody calls me Dolly,” I say.

The thing is, you can’t change yourself up on my street without every freaking busybody butting in, making spiteful comments, and giving you the hairy eyeball, but for a big celebration or a wedding, you could get away with it. You, sure as hell, better be back to the same ol’ same ol’ by the next day.

“You have a special affair this evening?”

“Yeah, a blowout at the Grand Prospect Hall.”

“Nice,” he says.

I’ve never been there, as yet, but I know all about it from the TV commercial where the owners, a lumpy old couple with heavy accents, show you the elegant curved staircases and sparkly chandeliers and promise, ‘All your dreams will come true at the Grand Prospect Hall.’

Boris calls over one of those skinny malinks like my Aunt Carla, who’ll look like a raisin in a few years. He introduces Anna who becomes my torturer over the next few hours. My fairy godmother too since she transformed me like magic.

“Anna will wash your hair now. She is very good at following the pictures. Would you like some green tea?”

Anna sure as hell better be good at pictures because she can’t understand much English. Everyone has some kind of heavy accent here at the Elite Salon in Brooklyn Heights. They might be Russians or Israelis. I saw one of those medusa things nailed on the door jamb. But these folks are very nice, real accommodating.

The shop is on a quiet tree-lined street in an upscale section no more than four miles from mine, but it might as well be on a different planet. That’s Brooklyn for you. It’s one borough, but it’s got fifty neighborhoods at fifty price points, rich and poor, every color, tone, and accent you can think of.

There Are No Whys

Published by Flash Fiction Magazine, October 28, 2019.

Click on title to read the story or read the story below..

There Are No Whys

In her neighborhood, beauty was hard to find.

Celeste lived in an ugly part of Brooklyn in the 1980s because rent was cheap for large artist lofts with long leases. At night, it was a deserted no-man’s land. No trees or flowers grew along the grimy streets. 

DUMBO was all industrial then—mills, workshops, and storage facilities with few full-time residents. The buildings formed brick canyons five or six stories tall, towering over the cobblestone roads. File cabinets were manufactured on the bottom floors of her building. Across the way, they printed wallpaper, and there was a custom framer and a doll factory around the corner. 

A.I.R. was hand-painted on doors where a handful of artists lived and worked in lofts on upper floors. Celeste was an artist, too, or trying to be one. They all did something else to make a living because there was no money in art. Everybody knew that. 

The reek of solvents, garbage, and paint permeated the air. Every few minutes, subway trains thundered across the Manhattan Bridge. Celeste compared it to the sound of the ocean surf. Constant noise pounded, clanked, or blared throughout the streets, ricocheting with such intensity it was impossible to locate the source of any particular sound.

Occasionally, Celeste heard a musician playing lovely refrains that sliced through the racket and caressed her ears. The tunes were often sad and echoed in the concrete walls of her loft long after the last note was played. Sometimes, they were light, joyful. Then they faded quickly.

She looked forward to the melodies. On days he didn’t play, she missed him. She was sure it was a man, but she couldn’t say why. There was clarity in the tone and an extension of the notes that sounded male. Celeste realized it was a clarinet. When she walked her dog, she varied the hour to better determine where the musician was playing. She became obsessed with finding him. 

https://streetlightmag.com/2019/06/07/salmonella-summer-by-suzanne-c-martinez

Published in Streetlight Magazine, Issue 29, Spring 2019 and Streetlight Magazine 2019 Anthology (https://www.amazon.com/Streetlight-Magazine-2019-Anthology-Trudy/dp/B08QDNJ2TD)

Click on title to read the story or read the story below..

Salmonella Summer

I spent four days and nights smashed against a bus window in transit to my first husband’s family reunion half nauseous from breathing in the diesel fumes and the aroma of the chemical toilet a few feet behind us. The vinyl seat stuck to the back of my thighs, as he seeped into my half of the bench I was sharing with him.

He was a big guy, Swedish-Norwegian and a lapsed Mormon. Six months earlier he’d announced it was necessary for him to move out so he could enjoy anonymous sex, drugs, drinking and stay up all night if he wanted. Marriage was cramping his style.

In early May, he stopped by to pick up his mail since he hadn’t changed his address after moving in with my best friend’s estranged husband. “My mom’s holding a family get together the third week of June. She wants all of us come.”

“We’ve been separated so long they aren’t my family any more. Why would she want me there anyway?”

We’d slogged cross-country so I could meet his Mormon dad in Southern California and his agnostic mom outside Seattle the summer after our wedding three years before in 1979. It was a ‘twenty states in twenty-one days’ low budget camping trip that included us nearly drowning in our sleeping bags during an Albuquerque flash flood and illicitly pitching our tent at midnight in a Safeway parking lot in San Francisco.

“My mom really likes you, Annie.” I hadn’t spoken to her in over a year.

“You haven’t told her about us, have you?” He shook his head. “You need to tell her. And I’m not spending a dime for a trip all the way out to Seattle.”

“By the way, you’re looking great. Very slim,” he said.

Since the separation, I’d lost the twenty pounds I’d gained during our marriage from birth control pills and eating the elaborate meals I cooked for us every evening. He’d gained sixty, which proves men will compete at anything. And I’d come to enjoy coming home after work again—not finding a half assembled motorcycle in the dining room or a new/used Firebird in the driveway or him sitting in the dark living room paralyzed by the immensity of the universe.

He showed up the following week with two unlimited Greyhound bus tickets good for 30 days and a promise to pay for everything. I folded. Part of me hoped we could work out our problems away from the everyday distractions of jobs, school, friends, decent food and daily showers.

We Are All Strangers

Published by Bull+Cross, Issue 23, February 2019 and reprinted in The Gathering, WWS Anthology, November 2021. (https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Women-Who-Submit-Anthology/dp/173324154X)

We Are All Strangers

I love the first day of class each year. The oil paint and turpentine aromas become concentrated in August, when they close the building for the summer. I inhale its heady perfume as I click-clack across the painted wood floor in my mules, wearing my street clothes. Everything in the drawing studio at the art college is freshly painted white or pale gray for classes resuming in September, except the wooden easels. The morning light streams in the southeast-facing, floor-to-ceiling windows at an angle that diffuses some of the harshness. I’ll observe it travel across the length of the studio and disappear during the four-hour class. Usually, no one takes notice of me until I open the small door leading to my cubical and close it behind me. They’re all scoping each other out like a mob of meerkats on the savanna.

I’ve been modeling for Donahue’s drawing class and painting workshops at the art school on and off for more than twenty-five years, so I’ve worked out a little routine I follow every time. To begin with, I wear very loose clothing especially undergarments to avoid any pressure lines on my legs, back, or ankles. They’re very distracting when someone is drawing the figure. As I’ve aged, I realize this is very important. And I arrive at least fifteen minutes before class to allow myself time to disrobe and read a few pages of my current book before I pose. I need something to think about while I’m up on the stand.

It’s sort of a funny story how I got into modeling back in the seventies. My gorgeous older sister was asked to pose for a sculpture class. The post-war students were complaining about the plaster casts they’d been using to learn to draw the human form for a hundred years. The GI Bill guys wanted real, breathing flesh. They earned it, right? She did it for the cash money it paid and the flexible hours. And because of her husband who’d returned from Viet Nam suffering from stuff he couldn’t control, except her. He monitored her like she was a fugitive in witness protection, refused to let her work or give her any money of her own. They had no kids and she was bored silly hanging around their one-bedroom apartment dusting the same lamp every day. Modeling was quick money and hers alone. Anyway, she fell in love with the instructor, divorced her husband and they moved to Paris. I needed a second job, so I took over for her, but no one’s asked me to go anywhere yet.

https://www.hongkongreview.co/vol-i-no-1

Published in the Inaugural Issue of The Hong Kong Review, Volume I, Issue 1, January 2019 (https://www.hongkongreview.co/vol-i-no-1)

Celeste sat on the concrete stairs of the station. She was a little shaky; she didn’t dare try to stand. A minute ago, she was lying prone, the sharp edges of the steps digging into her head, back, hips and legs. There’d be nasty green and purple bruises tomorrow, she realized, but that was the least of her concerns. 

When she’d entered the subway near her home in Brooklyn just before noon she was excited about getting to MOMA to see the Picasso exhibit before it closed that evening. She’d always admired Picasso for his fractured vision of humanity, especially the seated portraits of his wives and mistresses, many entitled ‘Femme Assise.’ Celeste was drawn to their distinctiveness, all the more tangible with their rearranged features and body parts. The likenesses – one eye placed on a forehead, a nose where the ear should be, lips split but closed – depicted the complex and multi-dimensional women in his life. Each portrait declared his affection or loathing for the sitter at the time of the portrait. Picasso never ceded to abstraction, but held fast to representation, recognizable objects or figures when most Twentieth Century artists had veered away. 

A young man she hadn’t noticed on the street brushed past her on the steps. He abruptly stopped in front of her, knocked her backward onto the stairway and fastened his sizable hand to the bridge of her nose in an instant. It hurt. A lot. Attempting to move her head made it hurt more. 

Her mugger was young, but he’d lost the clean dirt smell of boyhood. Celeste recalled chiding her teenage sons that they must remember to use deodorant. Mother nature’s nasty little trick made teen girls extra sensitive to odors simultaneous with the boys-to-men smelling like wet goats.

“Don’t fucking make a goddam sound. I’ll break your nose.” He sounded ominous and confident in his convictions. “And keep your fucking eyes fucking closed,” he hissed.

He pried her cellphone out of her hand and smashed it against the edge of the stairs.

In her youth, Celeste had been a temporary criminal. Her high school boyfriend and his brothers, experienced shoplifters, had cut their teeth on an extended family of trusting shop owners in their town. Her role was minor, but key. She carried an oversized shoulder bag and an unsullied conscience. They’d enter a shop casually. One of the brothers would troll the interior and sidle up behind her. He’d rest an affectionate arm on her shoulder pointing out an item of interest while dropping his loot into her bag. She only discovered later what she’d stolen. Celeste was lucky. She decided to retire at eighteen with a clean record. Her mugger might not be so fortunate.

Her initial inclination to sneak a peek for future identification purposes was abandoned. The pain between her eyes nearly blinded her anyway. Before she was knocked down, she’d caught a glimpse of a skinny kid in black basketball shorts and a grey tee shirt.

 “Anybody coming?” he stage whispered.

 “Naw. You’re good,” a quiet voice above her replied.

Of course, she should have known there was a lookout. Any savvy mugger would bring along his wingman to waylay his quarry in a stairway hidden from the street. 

But surely, someone would walk by soon, Celeste prayed. This was New York City. There were eight and a half million people living here, close to three million in Brooklyn alone. Where the hell were they? It was a gorgeous day in June, sunny, mid-seventies, a ‘ten best’ day for sure. There was hint of honeysuckle on the breeze as she walked to the station. Celeste willed someone to come right now. Please God, now.

(Click on number 2 to continue reading the story.)