Me and Barnaby, Alone by Travis Flatt

Dear Abigail,

Be happy you taught your lion to swim.

I’m not.

Me and Barnaby on the island, alone.

He must be hungry.

I am.

For the week after the shipwreck, the Strongman and I lived off bananas, but he got sick off some tropical bug from bad stream water he guzzled uncooked.

I woke to find him curled across a log by the campfire ashes, limbs upward and crooked like a bug husk.

Dead, he couldn’t complain when I stole his dirty magazine, whose page I’ve torn for this note (hence the lascivious backside) or the whiskey bottle I intend for its vessel.

I hope it finds you grieving me desperately, despondent, a shut-in. The thought of you alone keeps me going. You moving on makes me want to walk into that jungle, into Barnaby’s maw.

But, I must hope, like Odysseus.

Our parting in Miami was bitter and the Ringmaster firing you ridiculous. If it helps, he admitted this somewhere around Cuba. When confronted, he withdrew his claim you’d “fucked the whole circus.” A sad jealous man.

A sad, drowned, jealous man.

Abby, I can’t forget the elephants.

Unlike your lion, they sunk like boulders, meteors, hellishly trumpeting in the flaming night.

The juggling pins you bought me in Seattle were lost in the scramble to abandon ship. My make-up kit survived to shore—that’s it. The Strongman grew furious over how I’d thought of the kit instead of a first aid kit.

Or rations.

The Geek, your cousin, made it halfway to shore, riding on the Strongman’s broad back like a raft, but he bucked him off for speed. He denied this; we didn’t speak for days, and I regretted mentioning it.

I would bury the Strongman, but the beach sand is shallow.

The jungle mud is deep and soft, but I feel Barnaby out there watching, waiting. At the circus, I always sensed his gaze. I told you he didn’t like me. I never told you how he slashed my arm when I fed him a pastrami sandwich.

What I’d do for a pastrami sandwich now. From Katz’s in Manhattan. 4th Street in Philly.

I should have married you. I planned to do it in Paris, under the Eiffel Tower. I’d quit the circus and spend my savings, fly us to France, and get down on one knee. They say French people are rude to tourists. You shouldn’t die never seeing the Louvre. Or Rome. Or the Great Wall of China.

Let this bottle be a wedding ring. Slip your finger into the neck.

Soon, I’ll throw this into the ocean and wade through the steaming, stinking underbrush, letting the green swallow me one final time.

I should have written you more letters when we were

It’s been days. I couldn’t choose a word between “together” or “alive.” I’ve settled on alive.

I should have written you more letters when we were alive.

I allow you to move on.

Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured Lit, Gone Lawn, HAD, Bull, Tiny Molecules, New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Frog, The Disappointed Housewife, and other places. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee and was long listed for the Wigleaf Top 50. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs.