Unemployment Benefits by Alan Michael Parker

Winner of the second Lunate 500 competition

‘This flash stood out from the start. A skilled response to the theme, I was delighted by the wrong turns Alan Michael took me on: all the bad ideas and inadvisable journeys of a life misspent. This is extremely skilful world-building. The prose sings. The use of present continuous contributes to the sense of movement, mirroring the narrator’s search for something they never find. Alan Michael chooses language with care, with attention to telling detail, eg “Bohack’s Supermarket” rather than simply “supermarket”.

One of David Gaffney’s Rules for How to Write Flash Fiction is ‘Sweat the title’. Of all the submissions, the title Unemployment Benefits did the most heavy lifting. When every word counts, a wise writer makes full use of the no-word-limit title. And the piece closes with meteors. Yes, I have a passion for astronomy, so that final detail was always going to catch my eye!’

(Rosie Garland, judge)

***

I was fired from my job as a soda jerk for wandering away from the milkshake machine, the milkshake machine making a grinding roar that matched a sound in me I hadn’t known, and so I had to walk away. I was fired by a bookie for revealing my real name to a bettor. I was fired by the Italian restaurant in Windsor, Ontario because I was not Canadian and illegally using my lover’s social insurance number, and I guess that no one wanted my retirement contributions to be hers in sixty years. This was before the Ninth Wave of Regret.

Just after the Thirteenth Wave of Regret, I was fired for drifting off too often into a fugue state, a low-oxygen spiritual environment where a version of me always seems to be hammering a piece of iron and trying to catch the sparks in his hand while singing. I would go there unaccountably: I would be swimming, and I would not be swimming. I would be lifeguarding, and no one would be safe. I would go there when I was supposed to be doing a job. So I kept getting fired.

Nineteen Waves of Regret later, I was still trying to catch the sparks. I would try to describe them to my lover: they are fireflies, but no; they are like the bits of jalapeño in the cornbread, no; they are the sudden untranslated Japanese word in a sentence, no. It is true, however, that the sparks can be felt with the tongue. And sometimes in my lover’s mouth.

I was fired for reading in the bookstore when I should have been dusting spines. I was fired for Benito doing coke but everyone was fired. That was at another ice cream place, where we the busboys spent our shifts ambushing one another: fudge on the handle of the pressure washer, dish soap on the floor, maraschino cherries squashed inside a shirt, quarters glued to tabletops.

I was fired by the assistant manager at Bohack’s supermarket, a guy who died of an aneurism a year later, at twenty-five. He already had an eye that rolled off and to the left, toward his ear, especially when he was yelling at me for jamming the cardboard baler. I was sorry, but I wasn’t really there: the hammering and the sparks, in me, were there.

Is my being me an excuse? My lover says yes. Forty-three Waves of Regret. Fifty-seven Waves of Regret.

What happens if the world that feeds me isn’t the world I need? That’s another problem with being me.

I was fired by Julio, one of three Julios who worked at the country club. My job: towel distribution, soap refilling, empty glass pick-up, stacking collapsible chairs into a wooden bin, patrolling the driving range for empties. My real job: Sixty-three Waves of Regret, and standing in place in a moving world, the sparks in me like meteors going the wrong way.