Posts Tagged ‘ microfiction ’

To Annabelle

Screen Shot 2014-07-15 at 9.32.24 AM

The thing I don’t think you realize is that I’m only your father when you’re around.

It was that way with your mother, too. I was her husband. Felt like her husband, believed in the fact of my husbandhood–but only when we were together.

When she’d bundle you up in those thick, puffy jackets and wrap your little face in scarves so she could drive you to her mother’s house for the day, and I was left alone in the house, left walking up and down the creaking stairs, left sitting on the sofa by myself, I’d sometimes look up at that photo from JC Penney of the three of us and kind of marvel at it, be stunned that, yes, that was me in a picture with a woman and her daughter.

It would take me a minute to remember.

You’ll understand someday. Someday when you’re all grown up and you have a marriage and a family and a life that technically you chose through the inertia of little things you did, but which, in a larger sense, you never really chose in that way that people hold other people responsible for their “choices,” you’ll sit down somewhere and just be shocked that the world thinks you’re who you are.

Because inside, you’re not that person. Or you are, but you’re other people, too. You’re all your younger selves, too, I guess. And those kids living inside you, they can’t freakin’ believe in this other you.

That’s how it is when you’re gone, when I’m alone in the house. I can’t believe you exist. Can’t believe in this father-person that you believe in.

You’ll see, you’ll understand. It’ll all make sense to you–eventually.

2014
07/15
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flash fiction
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Estrangement

When he entered, crossing from the doorway toward the empty seat at the table just outside the open entryway to the kitchen, she could not be sure he was real.

She was confused for a moment by his clothing, which–besides looking nothing like what he had been wearing when he had disappeared three years earlier–seemed to be hewn entirely from rough, burlap-like cloth.

“Where have you been?” she asked in a gasp.

When he sat–like some creature from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story–he sloughed off a drizzle of vermin to twitch and struggle in the fibers of the carpet.

His voice, when it emerged, was dry and course. “It’s a fair question.”

She stepped toward him, still holding the soapy skillet that she had been washing when he had come in.

“What should I call it?” he asked, not looking at her but at the diffuse glow of the remaining daylight behind the crinkled venetian blinds. “A quest?” He shook his head. “I was tested, though. Given an opportunity,” he said with a nod.

Shaking her own head, she came closer to him, mouth agape.

“I was put in one of those situations when I had the chance to prove myself. A moment when all my beliefs and principles were tested, when I could demonstrate I was able to put others before myself, to rise above selfish, petty desires and serve the greater good. A moment,” he repeated. “To be more, to be better. A chance to do the right thing.”

“But,” she stammered. “It’s been so long…what…what happened?”

He ran his hand through his matted, gunky hair.

“I failed,” he said.

 

2014
05/14
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flash fiction
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Myopia

As he passed the tall windows that constituted the long wall spanning both the living room, the dining room and the kitchen of the apartment that clung to the outer edge of its building, he thought suddenly that it felt like weeks since she had gone out, leaving only a short note on one of the self-adhesive sheets they kept near the phone on the marble counter. The phone that they hardly used and which never, ever rang save for occasional telemarketers plumbing out-of-date registries bought on the cheap.

It had actually only been a few hours, he was sure, but it felt as though whole days had been passed in solitude there in the empty apartment, still and alien without the movement of her feet across the dark, dark wood of the floor or the bellowing of television voices or clattering of keys as she fiddled about on the Internet.

Then, pausing in the white glow of the diffuse afternoon light from without, he wondered if this might not be his best self. The him that existed when she was gone, but when he was still alive and in love with the idea of her, just as at that moment–with only the solid white wall of nothing visible from the windows and no sounds of the bustling streets below able to rise up like heat cushions to his ears–there was only an idea of the city outside.

Any other state would require him to engage his too-too sensitive gaze or attention on the reality of one or the other, such as the red blotches at the back of her heels where her overly tight shoes rubbed raw the underpink of her naked feet or the vague rotten meat flavor of the air on a summer day when the city’s thermostat had been rifled up too high. And then, in confronting those bits of reality, his temper might grow short, or he might make some offending remark that would reveal to her and to the city that he was just a cad at heart, that all sorts of pettiness stirred inside him, making him unworthy of either.

And there would be quarrels and bickering, and sheepish grins to try to ingratiate himself again.

But not now. With both remote and only remembered, he regarded them in perfect majesty, in the beauty of absence.

2014
03/09
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flash fiction
prose poem
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Murakami III

The new car has keyless entry.

The dealer gave us a doohickey (I know that the technical name is a “fob” for this small, semi-ovular, semi-rectangular device that uses microwaves or some other kind of science that pretty much is voodoo as far as I’m concerned to communicate with my car, a thing I still tend to feel, if not “think,” one should not communicate with in any sophisticated manner; meaning that one should only communicate with automobiles through gearshifts and steering wheels and pedals and receive communication in return with nothing but guttural engine noises) that allows us to simply walk up to the car, pull the handle and then climb inside.

But I am afraid of this thing, this fob-derived power to instantly open the doors.

Somehow the car knows that this fob (where did they come up with this word, “fob?” It sounds like it should be an acronym, but what for? “freely open…” What? It confounds me. Seriously, I often find myself lying awake, with the spectral shapes of all the acronyms in my life circling above me like spirits of the dead, and then there, among them, is “fob,” wickedly indeterminate in its origin and meaning.) is in my pocket. But how much can this car know about the whereabouts of this fob?

What if I should find myself in one of those situations–like always happens in the movies–in which there is a psychopath chasing after me and I need to lock myself into the car in order to protect myself and all my bodily organs from harm? Will the car know that I am inside and that it should no longer open just because the dookickey–er, fob–is proximal? Will it know when I am in desperate need of doors that simply lock?

And what if, on some occasion, I wanted to be locked out of my car, as sometimes people wish to be. After all, things cannot always go our way. Hardships are inevitable and it is far preferable to face the inconvenience of being locked out of a car than, say, come down with tuberculosis or be chased by a psychopath.

I really wonder if the engineers at Toyota have thoroughly considered all of these things.

2014
02/18
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flash fiction
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Depression

Franklin set the onion ring down and looked out at the gray mist behind the buildings in the distance.

“Mark,” he said to his friend sitting across from him. “Do you ever feel like you might be done?” His friend chomped a bite of his half-pound burger with slow, grinding motions and looked at him, eyes set narrowly in an inquisitive gesture. “You know, like ever take a look at your life and say to yourself, ‘You know what, I’ve peaked. I’m never going to do anything better than what I’ve already done. My life is pretty much as complete as it’s ever going to be.’ And maybe, maybe when you answer that, you realize that you could’ve answered that way a long time ago. Maybe really, your whole contribution, whatever you’re going to add to the world was pretty much as good as it was ever going to get like, maybe five or six years ago. Like at work–all your best ideas were when you were young, climbing up. Now, you’re pretty much just a manager, sorting out other people’s ideas. So, really, anybody could do that. Had kids, and in the early years, maybe you didn’t inspire them to be Beethovens or whatever, but you kept them from turning into serial killers or anything like that. So now, if you were gone, then they might be sad for awhile, but things would pretty much turn out the same for them as if you were there. So, you know, that’s about it. You’ve done what it was for you to do. And really, you could drop dead or just sit on the couch munching every kind of Pringles you can get your hands on, and the march of time and the universe and all that would go on pretty much unchanged. Do you know what I mean? Feeling just kind of done? Over?” Franklin picked up the onion ring again. “Do you ever feel that way?”

Mark, still holding the burger, leaned to his left enough to reach the straw of his soda with his mouth and took a sip. With the chunk of meat, bun, lettuce, mushroom, bacon and everything else washed down, he opened his mouth again and said, “No.”

2013
12/10
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flash fiction
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Due Deference

As the meaty, stubby fingers gripped the back of his skull and forced his head under the water and he gulped the stale-tasting chlorine-laced water, with that desperate realization that there was no oxygen left in his lungs and soon would come unconsciousness and death, he flashed back to a moment a few weeks before.

Someone had waded over to the edge of his lane at the pool, just as he was about to start his 100 meters.

“So,” the pudgy man, wearing as much thick black body hair as swimsuit, said. “You’ve been coming here quite a bit lately.”

“Huh?” he’d answered. “Oh yeah, just moved in down the street. No pool at the apartment, though.”

“I see, I see,” the man said, rubbing his tongue over his teeth. “Listen, we’ve got to talk.”

“Excuse me?”

“You see, I’m the king of this pool.”

“King?”

“So, what I need to know is–are you with me or against me?”

“Wait, king of the pool?”

“That’s right.”

“Listen, I just came to do my laps. I don’t want to get involved in…whatever you’ve got going on here.”

“Oh, yeah,” the man said with a chuckle. “Wouldn’t that be nice? If everybody could just do what they wanted? If there were no rules? Yeah, dream on, man. But that ain’t the world we live in. So in this world, you gotta pay attention to the rules and that means respecting those that make the rules,” he faced him seriously. “So are you with me or against me?”

“I’m just going to do my set now,” he said, shaking his head and plunging forward into the lane, swimming away from and also toward the other man.

2013
10/04
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flash fiction
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No-brainer

He clicked the blinker to the right, swinging the car under the In-N-Out Burger sign.

Pavlovian drool puddled underneath his tongue as he took his place at the back of the drive thru line.

And he imagined for a moment, a tall, red-lined cup fizzing with Mr. Pibb.

But then her voice intruded on his daydream.

“No,” he said aloud to the empty car cabin. “You don’t need a soda. It’s better for the environment, better for your pocketbook, and better for your body.”

His mind respooled her words, “It’s a no-brainer.”

As he advanced, one car length closer to the squawking box asking for people’s orders, he repeated the words: “It’s a no-brainer… It’s a no-brainer… It’s a no-brainer.”

As he said it, he felt the warm calm satisfaction of compliance wash over him.

2013
07/29
CATEGORY
flash fiction
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