It’s not often that it happens, Slushies, but it’s always a treat when it does. We’re switching to fiction for the day with “Colfax,” a flash story from Patricia Q. Bidar, author of the short fiction collection Pardon Me for Moonwalking. Spoiler alert: read the story first in the show notes or listen to the story in full at 41:50 before our discussion ruins it for you. Something about the story’s theme and concision reminds Sam of Louise Glück’s prose poems in her late collection, A Faithful and Virtuous Night. Sam also appreciates how the story allows a female character the same kind of recklessness found in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Jason shares his surprising childhood connection to Vacaville, CA, one of the story’s locales. And in his role as bad cop, Jason raises a question about uncanny children. Tune in to find out what he means by that. While we’re all bracing for winter storms, we’re happy to dwell, for a moment, in California Central Valley’s humid and fertile atmosphere. As always, thanks for listening!

At the table: Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

Bio:        Patricia Q. Bidar is a western writer and Port of Los Angeles native. Her novelette, Wild Plums (ELJ Editions), was published in 2024 and collection of flash fiction, Pardon Me for Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press), in 2025. Patricia’s work has appeared in Waxwing, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, and Another Chicago Magazine; in the Wigleaf Top 50, and in many anthologies including Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Visit patriciaqbidar.com

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Colfax

Cristina swallows the last of the loose pills from Julian’s glove box. Within a few minutes, fresh energy blooms and fizzes within her; the sensation is of tumbling backward into space. 

Julian: a drug dealer so giant and peevish the floor mats on the driver’s side are bunched and ruined. Underneath his criminal veneer, Julian is just a mundane mammal who’s driven Cristina, an animal woman, to flight. 

Half an hour later, she’s reached Colfax. In this heat, this fecund place. The car has mashed against the gas station’s cashier hut. Years ago, when Cristina was growing up here, this was a drive-in theatre, with a massive image of a vaquero on a rearing steed. Sweltering nights, Cristina would watch movies with her lonely mother, car windows open wide, clasped in the smell of tomatoes, melons, and insecticide. 

Rain begins to pepper the hood. Cristina rises into vegetal air. She doesn’t recall opening the door. 

The window to the hut is dirty and rain spattered. She peers between cupped hands at the empty stool inside, the bank of cigarette packs. Lightning cracks; after a few seconds, thunder rumbles. Cristina presses her hand over her heart. Is she alarmed? Are the pills goosing her pulse? But she feels calm. The sky is a tight lid. It was a mistake, stealing Julian’s car. Julian, who took her in. Identified and claimed her after Cristina finished her time and was so adrift and alone. 

Cristina was working as a server in a West Sacramento brewery. Her last customer on a slow Tuesday night was a black-haired guy in a cowboy hat. Stiff-looking jeans and a pearl-buttoned shirt. A face that seemed not to match the hair. “Lady,” he said so low she had to incline her head. “You think no one sees you. I do. I do.” She joined Julian that very night on one of his quests. He was what her mother would have called a peeping tom. He wanted her to wear nylon hose, like he did. Why not? No one was getting hurt. It was simply watching. Watching women. Women when they were themselves and unaware they were being observed. In a word: seen. Julian was no Rawhead, no Slenderman. Not one of those serial killers roving California freeways in the nineteen-seventies, the ones Cristina’s mother had been obsessed with.

Now she imagines someone peering in through the car door and seeing her, Cristina, slumped behind the wheel. People idealize farmland, farm girls as wholesome. Green, yellow, and blue. 

The sky is cobalt now. Fifty feet away is a bus shelter, sagging and white. A small form is hunched inside. Lightning again, and then, immediately following, that bass sky-rumble. Cristina runs.

Inside, a child of about nine swings its legs. Windbreaker, hood up. 

"Hello there?" Cristina ventures.

"I'm studying these ants," the kid returns. A girl. "Would you like a churro?" Cristina cannot see the girl’s face but is struck by the way she sits. A bell buried deep inside of her tolls.

"Is this the bus stop for town?" Cristina asks.

The churros smell nice; hot grease and cinnamon. Cristina used to make them for her little sisters. She thought she might become a baker one day. At least, when anyone asked, this was what she had answered. She should be hungry.

"That's my car, in case you were wondering,” Cristina says. Nothing. She crouches down beside the girl. “Dead at the service station. Lucky, I guess.”

The child considers this. "Well, not really." She speaks patiently, the way Cristina used to speak to adults at her age. As if they were her younger sisters or the kids in the slow class at school, or the witless ladies in the school office.

“On second thought, I’ll take one of those churros." Cristina says. But the girl has returned to her task: surveilling a line of ants. Cristina’s mind unspools the types. Velvet ants. Pharaoh ants. Argentine ants. Thief ants. The odorous house ants, and then — wasn’t there a sugar ant? 

The smell of water-heavy crops and soil and chemical fertilizer thickens the air. All of the choices Cristina has made in life have led her to this place. "There’s nothing left," she says aloud.

"It depends on how you see it," the girl returns, pushing her eyeglasses up into place with a forefinger. Cristina squints at the obscured face. Then the girl daintily lifts and lowers her hood. And bares the side of her left pinky finger. The small oval scar is exactly like Cristina’s. 

“Did your mother tell you that people with six fingers and toes are giants sired by angels and human women? Something apart from God,” Cristina said. Those surgeries when she was four. 

“She says I’m a monkey.” Cristina remembers a long-ago birthday party, her ninth, attended by zero children. 

She feels the sky drawing her up, then. At the same time, the inverted bowl of sky pushes down. It is like that optical illusion where you can’t tell if the black horse is headed toward you or walking away. Hail pounds the roof of the shelter. The discs of ice flash under the bright lights of the gas pump island. The girl returns to dropping pinches of dough onto the ants. Obeying their internal imperative: a perpetuation of their kind. 

Cristina sees Julian preparing for bed. Applying his eye cream. Clapping twice to extinguish the bedside light. He refers to himself as cerebral. But what is so deep about dealing painkillers during the afternoon shift at the One Stop Spy Shop in Vacaville? Life with Julian had amounted to a slow and downhill slide, and that was for sure.

“We live our lives with our ancestors as witness,” the girl says at last. Her words hang in the air like wet almond blossoms. 

Cristina has to ask. “Am I that? Am I alive?”

And a roar consumes the sky. A silver bus is careening toward them from behind blue oaks.

And a metal monster slips from the asphalt. Rolls end over end. Sky-blotting. Deafening. Images rise and blend and collapse. The blanched face of the driver. The silhouettes of passengers. One of whom is standing. Julian? Something blooms and expands in Cristina’s head.

But there is no bus. No careening crash. Only a fecund silence.

And the girl tears a piece of the churro, nudging Cristina’s lips with the sugar and cinnamon confection. It is absolutely delectable and somehow still warm. Like the corner of a golden kitchen in bygone evenings. A humming mother, changing her dressings. An iron stove and a gray kitten, satisfied and warm. 

Cristina really, finally, is free. She has made it back to the beginning. 

Apart from time, the girl and Cristina stand in the little windbreak like gingerbread children or figures in a Frida Kahlo painting. The girl takes her hand. And then it is she and Cristina and the animal female chain, extending into and past the vanishing point: Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl.