CENSUS
I count the people, the in-hand finger church people, the felt people who live on the felt board, the barber shop barbers and customers, the fake people and the real doll people, the nativity wooden people, the siblings, the Sabines, the Rogers, the Catherines and even the just-born babies that don’t have names yet because their parents can’t agree on one name let alone a first and middle. It’s hard to keep track of them, a nose blurs or eyes blink and I count one Harold twice and one playground child not at all. I beg them all to hold still but they can’t because they are childish adults and wise children who know standing still leaves them open to attack. I know I am probably in danger but I stand still and count birds too, lines of Hitchcockian seagulls and crows and blackbirds and vultures, like I’m Noah but not, because I haven’t been able to find him to count him. And I need to find him, his boat is full of two’s and occasional three’s because babies and baby animals are born on boats, especially wooden cruise ships erected in backyards, not shipyards.
When the count gets past my fingers and toes, I think I’m done but I’m wrong. The voice from the sky, my boss, says keep counting and suddenly drops an abacus on my head like that will help. I reach out for it and it looks like a harp but doesn’t play music, just numbers and square roots and square areas. There are a million beads or maybe only three, I can’t count the beads fast enough to tell because they are alive and squishy under my fingers as I move them up and down, Susan and forth. One. Sixty. Five thousand. I count like a naughty school girl pretending to do pushups but only doing one, five thousand because my stomach hurts and I hate gym and counting and math and the teacher who teaches math. As I count, thunder comes one one two one thousand followed by lightning two thousand which is dangerous too. I feel the lightning move through my head bone connected to my neck bone but I still need the accountant’s green light on a pedestal to see the numbers and the people to count, because it has become dark. We all move inside to get warm and get counted and get forgotten after the counting.
I keep track in my notebook, its flimsy sugar paper pages and a licorice pen that doesn’t write, just leaves bloody tick marks. It is the ninth notebook I’ve bought this week because I love buying notebooks with moleskine covers and gilt edges because they look pretty but only pretty if they are blank. This notebook isn’t blank. It is the counting notebook. The first number I write in it is: nine because it is the ninth notebook, separated from its virgin sisters who have been spared numbers and numbers and more numbers. I can hear the left-behind notebooks crying, now their pages are soggy and wouldn’t hold numbers even if they had been chosen for the task.
I used to go door to door selling the need to be counted like it was an encyclopedia subscription that I would dole out volume by volume or an Avon lady with perfumes and collectible steins in a tote bag. But no one bought it and slammed wood doors and screen doors in my face even when I spritzed them or read aloud from the A-Ab or S which had the naughty sections in it. So, instead I gather them all like cattle in my little white picket fence front yard where it doesn’t seem like they’d all fit but they do, like cord wood or toothpicks or skinny all-you-can-eat breadsticks.
I tell the people to be counted that they must sit criss cross applesauce and then they all start begging for applesauce, in the plastic cups, not the metal ones because those taste like metal. I count the applesauce cups in the cupboard and know there aren’t enough. Someone will have to share, I tell everyone. They aren’t happy with this decision. They aren’t used to sharing applesauce cups or pudding cups or bra cups or any kind of cups really or any kind of sharing.
“That’s not what happened with the loaves and fishes,” they say in unison.
They didn’t like the Wonder Bread and tuna fish I served last time there was a counting that had to be done. I didn’t like it either because it smelled like tuna in my house for days, a lingering fish smell that doesn’t belong in a third floor walkup with thirty-six stairs or a first floor flat, no stairs. But they were hungry and it was snack time and someone’s mom had forgotten to bring the snacks, not gone to the store to get oranges in bags and bags of orange fruit roll-ups that weren’t fruit but turned tongues orange. It was easy to count them all that day with all orange tongues and fingers and faces. But not today. Today is applesauce day. A song breaks out and the designated troublemaker Eve storms the cupboard for applesauce. She’s always the troublemaker, standing behind the apple tree in my front yard and throwing snakes down at the boys as they pass.
“I’ll get the applesauce for everyone,” she announces, her orange tongue stuck out at me defiantly, her orange ribs sticking out through her white school blouse. She tosses applesauce cups out to everyone, to her friends first of course. But there are no spoons and no one can figure out how to open the containers so they all poke sticks in the foil tops until there is goopy applesauce splattered on my abacus.
“Stop,” I tell them.
But they don’t listen. They are licking their fingers and counting each tiny finger, each pudgy finger, each long piano-playing skeletal finger, as they clean them up from the sticky applesauce they are eating with their fingers. I start counting again but the abacus sticks this time, each squishy little primary colored bead dragging up and down on the metal rods. I lick my own fingers and pull open my notebook with sticky applesauce fingers like a stenographer pulling thin pages apart. They are distracted by their finger apple drippy snacks and I quick quick count them all again, even the paired-up animals who march in front of me with no applesauce on their hooves and paws because they don’t like applesauce, only apples. They’ll expect a real apple of course, especially the one horse who can count with his hooves and helps me on occasion.
Once everyone is counted, the numbers don’t match from the notebook to the preliminary count I’ve been given to audit. I realize I haven’t counted myself. And I bear back down to count again but it’s too late, everyone has moved and changed clothes and changed families and homes and names. I turn to the 10-key that sits on my desk but it only has 1-key. I push it over and over again, one time for each person, bird, monkey, counting horse. The sugar paper roll rolls and rolls and sticks and sticks until it is a white fruit roll-up covered in numbers and people and more numbers and my middle school basketball team number. My sky boss calls out a new set of directions.
“Count the sinners and the saints now.” The voice booms.
That’s easy. I wave my hand across the uncounted, teaming, unclothed masses and say, they are all saints and they are all sinners.
I hear a laugh from the sky and rain falls. I count the first raindrop one and then jump to five million. My ninth notebook is now too wet to write counts down in anymore at all. I head to the bookstore to buy another one, a tenth one but they are out of notebooks and sell me two concrete tablets instead. I stop off for more applesauce cups and chisels at the warehouse store where they sell them by the gross.
Amy Barnes has words at a variety of sites including The New Southern Fugitives, FlashBack Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, X-Ray Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Museum of Americana, Penny Fiction, Stymie Lit, No Contact Mag, JMMW, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Lunate Fiction, Rejection Lit, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit, National Flash Flood Day and others. Her work has been long-listed at Reflex Press (3rd place), Bath Flash Fiction, Retreat West and TSS Publishing. She is an Associate Editor at Fractured Lit and reads for CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD, The MacGuffin and Narratively. She is nominated for Best Microfictions and the Pushcart. Her flash collection, “Mother Figures” is forthcoming in May, 2021 by ELJ Editions, Ltd.