Category Archives: quickfiction

Quickfiction: Ghostly Playmates

Date
Posted by
Comments0

I was working on a few new Quickfiction pieces this week. Here is one, inspired by a post over PostSecrets blog where a woman said that when she hears her children playing with imaginary friends, she thinks it is the fetus she aborted long ago.

Playmates
Listen to the story
This cigarette tastes ugly. I draw another breath and struggle against the tide of air again. In the distance, I can hear him, playing. His five year old head is off in his imagination. This house looks strange, as if someone else is living here other than me, and him, and all of those ghosts from his imagination. I am sure they are here to haunt me, not him, but got caught up in the excitement as kids do. Even ghost children can’t resist the possibility of play. Another drag. Another shot of ugly. Is this how I punish myself these days? It used to be cutting. Then drinking. Tattoos up and down my arms. Now tar in my lungs. There they go again — playing pirates now, avenging stolen treasures. I can only hear my son’ voice and then empty silence where their voices lay scattered to the wind. Boys? Girls? One of each? How could I not even know what they were before they were gone? And why are they haunting me, us, now that we found some semblance of happiness? He’ll never know the truth about these imaginary playmates. But I know. I know. I draw another breath and choke on the sadness of siblings who only linger in the air. I crush the end on the ground beneath my shoe and begin to forget all over again.

Peace (in the story),

Kevin

Rubberbands: A quickfiction piece

Date
Posted by
Comments4

It’s been some time since I have written any of my quickfiction, but I was inspired for this short piece by a magazine article I was reading about a child prodigy violinist who used to sit in his room, with rubber bands, making his clothes dresser into a musical instrument.

If you are interested is more of my quickfiction, you can see my site over at Hypertextopia. The collection of stories there is called Inside Kaleidoscope Dreams.


Rubberbands
(listen to the podcast)

You scan the floor for rubber bands. Underneath the rug. Inside the kitchen drawer. Behind the cushions of the couch. Anywhere you think they might be, you look. Of course, you have learned to be careful. Your mom will take them away, again, and shout at you, again. “Rubber bands? Rubber bands?” Her voice will echo through your head for the rest of the day, crowding out the melody. Someday, when you are older, you will have your own place and your own guitar and you won’t need rubber bands. You will sink into that freedom and know it to be paradise. For now, it is all about the rubber bands. You count them in your hand — onetwothreefourfive. Not quite enough, but enough for now. You close the door to your bedroom and push the chair against the door. The drawer of your clothes chest open reluctantly, as if it needing some oil, and one by one, you extend the rubber bands across the surface of the open spaces, fixing it so that you can adjust the length of the rubber bands as you need by moving the drawer in and out, out and in. One band becomes smaller, lower pitched, while another become longer, higher. It is a full eight minutes of adjustments, getting it all just right in your head until you can close your eyes and begin to play. The melody dances, first through your fingers, then along the vibrating hum of the rubber bands, and finally filling the room with light only you can see. You know it won’t last and it doesn’t. Either your mother will pound on the door, or your brother will shout some obscenity at you from the hallway or the dog will start barking at someone in the street and all will be broken. Today, you are shattered by a string, the snap of the rubber like a shot in the night, startling you with a surprising ferocity. The silence at first is odd and then, almost comforting, until you hear your mother yell: “All right, who took the damn rubber band from this deck of cards?”

Peace (in fictionalized worlds),
Kevin

Inside Kaleidoscope Dreams: A hypertextual collection

Date
Posted by
Comments0

Since November, I have been working on Quickfiction stories and sharing them out here at the blog. It has been a really enjoyable writing experience for me and interesting experience, too. But I have been struck about what to do with the stories after they have been posted on the blog. I considered self-publishing via LULU, and then thought about creating a website.

Recently, though, I have been fooling around with Hypertextopia and it occurred to me that the platform might make sense for gathering all of the short fiction stories together under one roof, so to speak.

The result is something I am calling Inside Kaleidoscope Dreams — which is a collection of the stories gathered together under themes and also by narrative device. I have included audio readings of the stories, plus some photographs for illustrations. And I also wrote up a short author reflection about the project.

Head to Inside Kaleidoscope Dreams

(Note: The illustration above shows the concept map that I created, with links to various stories. It shows the connections of stories in a visual way. The readable version, however, is brought together in a more cohesive structure.)

I am interested to get feedback from people about the use of this hypertextual platform. Does it make the reading of the stories more interesting? Or just confusing? Do you have any suggestions for improving the design of the book?

Later, I will share out some of the nifty things that you can do with your writing in Hypertextopia, including re-arranging words, ideas and stories.

Peace (in linklinklinklinked text),
Kevin

Quickfiction: chapter 5

Date
Posted by
Comments5

This is a continuation of my forays into Quickfiction writing. I am also completing an entire collection of my quick stories over at Hypertextopia and I hope to share that project and reflection out tomorrow. It has been another interesting adventure, to be sure.

Here are the latest stories (click on the little arrow to hear the podcast of the stories):

Ghost

It was on his walk to work one morning that Jack noticed the white ghost bike propped up against the tree. A long thin chain held it against the aging Elm that looked bent from the weight of its mission. As if it might just topple right over. A rusty padlock dangled from one kink in the chain. Jack was sure the bike had not been there the previous morning. Sometime in the night, someone had placed the bike here. It spooked the hell out of Jack, this ghost bike. It was Tiff all over again. A little placard was attached to the handlebars. This was not just a bike, he realized. This was a memorial. He didn’t dare get any closer. Fear kept him back, although he was aching to know what the little sign said. Would it be a memory of some stranger he did not know, nor ever would. A tribute, perhaps? Or would it be another reminder of the past life he had tried so desperately to leave behind so many years ago. Tiff, and her bike, and how he had followed her everywhere, falling in love so many times over as he watched her legs in motion. Everything back then seemed to be in motion. He could still see Tiff, in the white athletic suit that she always wore on outings, as if riding a cloud in the midst of civilization.She was pristine perfection. Back then, he would follow her anywhere. Even to the end of the world. Or so he thought, but when the time came to stand at the brink, he had hesitated, and she had disappeared from sight. Tiff had never glanced back, never even acknowledged that he had stopped. She just kept right on pedaling. Then, she was gone. To think of this now brought on the pain all over again. Jack shuffled past the white ghost of his past and, again, he tried to not to remember.

Smog

It’s true. I went to Big Sur for answers. I had gone to Lowell, too, and felt lost among the brick facades of the old mills that had become nothing more than monuments to the past. Everything seemed abandoned and set to rust. I even sat on the edge of the river that snaked through the worn-out downtown, listening for the prose that had long since been extinguished by time. I wanted to hear echoes. All I heard was silence. So it was on to Big Sur. My car complained the entire time, the muffler spoiling any sense of silence and contemplation I might have otherwise had or wanted. There was no Dean to keep me company. No bottles of booze littered on the seats. No scroll of endless white paper on which to scribble my dreams. My America was not Their America. My America was shopping malls, neon lights, and long stretches of conformity. Route 66 had become just a long stretch of traffic lights. You could not gain momentum or traction anymore. Still, Big Sur beckoned and I answered. It became yet another false promise, however, and in the forests and isolation of the California coast, I found little of anything of value. Nothing other than my own preconceptions of him in this place, writing with abandon. I, on the other hand, am always too careful. Too precise. Instead of gaining illumination, I left Big Sur with a deep-seated impression that my own writing days were over. So it felt strangely comfortable to finally leave Jack behind and descend into the smog of Los Angeles and begin my life anew.

ER

The wait is endless. Yet you can’t help but notice that the stream of people continues unabated, hour upon hour upon hour. Is there this much suffering, you wonder? You shift in your seat. The movement does little to ease either your pain or your boredom. Your head still hurts. Next to you, the man in the brown jacket nurses a finger, wrapping and unwrapping a bloody bandage. From time to time, he, too, shifts and bumps into you. This makes you uncomfortable — like the crowded feeling of the middle seat on an airplane — yet there are no other seats to move to. If you get up, you know you will lose the seat. All eyes covet the row of chairs. People are sitting on floors, leaning against walls, pacing the floor. The nurse just stares straight ahead. She seems to have perfected the art of never focusing on anyone. Her glassy, sleepy eyes just move forward in time. You feel another jolt to your temples. The force of it almost knocks you out of your seat. Your fingers clench the armrests to hold on. They all thought it was nothing. They all laughed. You can tell. You remember the accusatory looks they gave you, questioning your intentions. If only that were the case. You know the truth: your brain is in a state of severe disfunction. The little girl, in her mother’s lap, moans again. You watch the mother pull the girl’s head closer to her chest and she whispers some soothing words into the little girl’s ear. You wish that were you, that the words were for you. You wish someone would hold you and absorb the pain. All eyes look up as a doctor enters through the double doors. He beckons for the little girl and her mother. Brown jacket man swears under his breath and re-adjusts the bandage again. Another jolt hits your head. Stronger this time. The world that was once nothing but light is now darkening, and still you wait.

Elevator

He knew the time would come when he would die in an elevator. How many closes calls had there been? Too many to count. The most dramatic had been the time when he and his sister had gotten stuck in-between floors in their aunt’s low-rise. He had not meant to leave his toy truck in the gap. And he had been horrified to watch how the fireman, after dragging both of them up through the emergency exit in the ceiling, had presented their father with the mangled red fire truck and suggested that elevators did not make good play zones for children. There was the false alarm, too, in the office building and the scrambled rush to cram into the elevator to get to safety. He knew that had been dumb — no one rides an elevator in a fire — and it was that very stupidity that scared him. He did not trust himself to make the right decision in these situations and it was only a matter of time that the end would come in a vertical death machine. His sister had feared escalators. But at least on a moving stair, you can jump. You can’t jump to freedom from an elevator. He read books that reassured him that elevators were safer than cars. That engineers designed them to use counterweights. That it was rare than anyone might die in an elevator, as long as they stayed calm and were smart about it. That, of course, was what worried him. Panic made him stupid. And so, when the job he had dreamed about for years finally came his way, he was disappointed to learn that he would have to travel 45 floors up and down every day, in a so-called “smart elevator,” and after a nail-biting trip up to the interview and a harrowing trip back down, he decided he could not handle this. This tension was too much. The time might come when an elevator ended his life, but he would be damned if he would be a willing accomplice to the crime. His world was flat and level and he intended it to stay that way.

Peace (in stories),
Kevin

Slice of Life, Chapter 30

Date
Posted by
Comments6

(This is part of the Slice of Life Project)

Today, my slice focuses in on my writing.

Since November, when I was inspired while traveling home on a train from the annual meeting of the National Writing Project with a laptop open on my lap, I have been periodically writing some quickfiction stories (also known as flashfiction in some circles). I love the genre because it all about what you don’t write and what you don’t tell, and there is the challenge of developing a character in as little of time and space as can possibly be. I’m sure there are rules to the genre that I am dutifully and openly ignoring.

Some stories in my series have been stronger than others, and I mostly write them during freewriting moments in my classroom. An idea sparks the writing, and as my students write, so do I. I have not shared these with my students, however. Someday, I intend to go back and do some editing and revision and then see what remains. For the most part, these are rough quickfiction stories. But I like them a lot. (You can view the rest of the quickfiction here) I also realized that quickfiction lends itself to podcasting and so I have included the reading of my stories, too.

Here, then, are the four latest stories:

Winner
It seemed an odd place to leave an egg. Out here, in the middle of nowhere. How many people had come this way, I could not tell. There was not path, not even the wayward trails left behind by animals. The river was far enough away that it would attract more people than this little alcove of pine trees. The sunlight was filtered out almost completely. I had expected nothing but solitude and yet, there, hidden among the stones at the base of the largest pine tree, was a colored plastic egg. Purple with pink stripes. The discovery had stopped me dead in my tracks. Now, I inched forward, my eyes scanning the world for some signs of something. A voyeur with a video camera. perhaps? A child at play? Nope. Nothing. I kicked at the plastic item gingerly with my boot, as if expecting the egg to explode. It moved, shifted and then did a wiggling roll off the rocks and stopped near my foot. I reached down and picked it up. The egg was not empty. I shook it. Something was inside. Again, I looked around to see if I were being played for the fool. No. I was alone. The egg twisted slowly in my hands, and the halves released their grip. Inside was a plastic baggie. My first thought was that I had uncovered a drug run of some sort. A cache of cocaine or pot. Walking away would be the wisest thing to do. Yet, I had come this far and could not resist my curiosity. The bag opened up and a note dropped to the ground. I bent down and saw the thin outline of faded handwriting. I unfolded the paper and read: “Congratulations! You are a winner!” and that was it. Nothing about what I won or why I was winning or what to do to claim my prize. I carefully put the paper into the bag, and then the bag into the egg, and then twisted the egg closed. Holding the object in my fist, I scrambled east for about a quarter of a mile, deeper in the woods than ever before, and there, I found a hollow tree. I left the egg there and made my way home, a winner.

Headless
The head came off as soon as the body slammed down the bottom of the stairs. The head rolled against the wall, careened across the floor and settled into the dust beneath the couch. Sam came barreling down the stairs, unaware that the head was gone. He picked up the GI Joe that was sprawled in an unhuman-like position near the last step — one leg this way and the other leg, that way, and the arms behind the back — and he ran his fingers along the neck. No head. Sam glanced around, making sure his grandmother was nowhere near. GI Joe had been a gift, just 15 minutes ago, and now, the head was gone. He didn’t want to deal with her anger. Again, he rolled his fingers over the nub where the head had been. Then Sam got down on his hands and knees to look for the missing appendage. He found other lost treasures — a moldy jelly bean, a paper clip, an old credit card. But no head. He could feel tears starting to well up inside him, and it made him embarrassed that he would be so sad over a doll. He heard a sound. Sam looked around. The sound seemed to be coming from underneath the couch. It sounded like a head, rolling. Sam got a bit scared. Ghosts and spirits scared him. He knew they were real. Maybe the ghost of GI Joe was mad at him. Maybe the head was coming back to life. He heard his grandmother in the kitchen. He had to move fast. Sam slowly approached the couch. The sound got louder. He got more frightened. Footsteps. His grandmother. Sam lifted up the fabric covering of the couch and the head of GI Joe came rolling out at him. He jumped back. His grandmother called his name, spurring him to reach out and take the head in his hands. In an instant, he had popped the head of GI Joe back onto the nub of the neck. His grandmother came into the room but ignored Sam completely. Instead, she was scolding her cat, Scout, who had emerged from the other end of the couch in a catnip-inspired panic and was tearing his claws into the side of the cushion. Sam looked at GI Joe right in the eye and smiled.

Blood
Blood on your hands is an odd sensation. The color strikes you first — the coating of red drippings. Your first instinct is to avoid the splatter but it is unavoidable. Ask any police detective with a DNA kit. Blood goes where blood wants to go. Kimball stared at his hands with these thoughts in his head, frozen by the sight. It occurred to him that this had happened before, in some freeze-frame memory from the past — his brother, perhaps, and the hunting knife accident. The bone coming up through the finger. Then, as now, things unfolded quick even as time slowed to a crawl. The blood kept dripping. Now, too, he could smell it. Iron or some metals. Something in the blood that seemed not quite right. Kimball felt the blade drop to the ground. His mind was turning black but he heard her voice cutting through the fog. “My god, Kimball, what ….” before everything faded to dark.

Performance
If they had asked her, she would have declined. She would not have willingly accepted this mantle nor this well-lit space on the stage — doused in floodlights and a thousand eyes on her every move — if she had had a choice. She opened her mouth to speak. Nothing emerged but her silence, and this silence glued her to her spot. The conductor raised his arms, baton dancing in his fingers. All around her, instruments moved, shifted, ready for the moment of life. She, however, remained still. If they had asked her, she would not be here. She could see the outline of her father and aunt, seated a few rows back. She felt caught in a net. The conductor moved and a musical explosion erupted around her. She noticed the violin now on her shoulder. The bow was balanced perfectly in her fingers. The conductor’s eyes now shifted to her. If they had asked her, she would not be at this place at this time. He nodded. So she played, imagining all of her notes like broken bones scattered on the stage. The violence of her sound was the only sweet revenge she could think of. For, of course, they had not ever asked her, nor would they ever.

Peace (in shorter stories),
Kevin

Quickfiction: chapter 4

Date
Posted by
Comments0

I was able to write and podcast two more pieces for my ongoing Quickfiction Project during a Pink Eye Sick Day on Tuesday. One story is inspired by a student from years past and the other, by my own experience as a teenager.

Bridge
Listen to story
You wish you had been honest. Instead, there they wait. On the other side of the river, urging you on. Between you and them is this log, a slippery bridge over a raging gorge that barrels down from the mountains to the town below. If you had been honest, and owned up to your fears of heights and crossing these logs, you would not have all five of them staring at you, cursing at you to get moving before the sun goes down. If you had been honest, you would not be frozen here. Immobile. Honesty was never your strong suit, anyway. You think of this as you inch your left foot forward. There is green moss on this tree and the bark is crumbling. This tree has been here for a long time. It has witnessed much in this world and it cares not one whit about your fear. It is only there. Last night’s rains make the bridge even more treacherous. The path seems slick. They’re talking to themselves. One shakes a head and begins moving on. The others look back at you, wave their hands and then, in disgust, follow the path into the darkening woods. You remain, now alone, on the other side of the gap, wondering how this will end. Will you retreat? Or move forward? Your right foot crosses your left. You are leaving the solid world behind but the fear races through you. You can’t do this. You can do this. Voices compete in your head in a battle against the sound of the rushing water. Don’t look down. Whatever you do, don’t look down. They are now long gone. The woods are silent. It’s your decision — move on or go back. Forward or retreat. At long last, your inability to be true to yourself is at hand and you realize that you are not ready. No one ever is.

Test
Listen to story

She had no doubt that she knew the answer to every single question on the sheet in front of her. It had always been this way. The trick had been how to hide it so that others would not know. She glanced down, her eyes following the questions and the answers dancing in front of her mind. 24. A equals 56. Square root. Isosceles Triangle. It would be so simple just to fill in the ovals with the answers and just be done with this nonsense. Yet, she didn’t. She couldn’t. She remembered third grade, when she never even opened the test and instead, she had illustrated a picture of her kitten by using the bubbles as dots that could be connected. It was a very beautiful rendition of Scuttle but the results landed her in the Resource Room for the entire fourth grade. She learned to tune them out. Her teachers. The other students. Her parents. Why? they would ask.Why are you here? they would wonder. Tuning them out made everything so much easier. She was feeling worn out by the game, though, and the question of why had begun to creep into her dreams at night. Why, indeed. And why not? The answer sheet crinkled in her hands. The pencil felt cold. Her mind raced on, finding solutions as if it were not part of her entity at all. As if she were separate from her mind. One-million-twenty-five. Radius of a circle. Flip the diagram and slide it right. Parallel lines. She laughed at the thought of what they would all think if she did this test the way they wanted. If she followed the rules. They would be stunned. No doubt, they would imagine that it was somehow a mistake. Some error of the computer system. They would not suspect a thing. She thought of her cat, all curled up at home in the warmth of her bed, and she started to write.

Peace (in stories),
Kevin

PS — I just posted a piece on data collection over at Ben’s blog collective (he is still looking for writers — how about you?) called Teacheng.Us.

Quickfiction: chapter 3

Date
Posted by
Comments2

I am continuing to explore the world of Quickfiction, reducing down a narrative to its essentials and creating characters and motivations as concise as possible. It’s quite a challenge.

But here are my latest stories:

Disconnect
The week there was no email, Chantel almost killed herself. Later, she would joke about it and laugh about it with her colleagues. Susan, who worked in the cubicle next to her, was astounded. “Come on, Chantel, you wouldn’t really kill yourself just because no one emailed you for a week, would you? That’s just ridiculous.” Karen cultivated the social gossip at the water cooler every day and she offered, “I wish I could go a week without email. I hate weeding through that junk.” Another one, Sam, who fixes the copier when it breaks down, added, “What did you do before email?” There was no life before email. Although Chantel played along with them, and even made detrimental remarks on her own sanity in order to feed the laughter, inside her head, she was, indeed, quite serious. Her lifeline had somehow come to rely on short missives on her computer from family and acquaintances. Friends might be too strong a word. She didn’t really have friends, just acquaintances. An empty inbox was some sort of coded message: she wasn’t important. She wasn’t needed. It had come to the point where she was now finding herself reading Spam, just to convince herself that someone out there was trying to communicate with her, even if the garbled words did come from some computer farm somewhere in the world. And so the week with no email was traumatic and it was only later that Chantel even thought to look behind her computer. That was when she realized that an Ethernet wire had come undone — it just dangled there like a noose — and she had been physically disconnected from the world the whole time. She breathed a sigh of relief as a flood of messages entered into her inbox, giving her a sense of relief not felt in many days.

Cat
He watches me from just outside the window, nose pressed against glass. I stare back. He opens his mouth to make a sound and yet, I hear nothing. It’s not cold outside today, not if you are wrapped up in a fur coat as he is, and I know he is in no danger of freezing. I find myself entranced by this creature that depends so much upon me for survival that I wonder, if the tables were reversed, would he keep me on the outside looking in? I smile at imagined acts of feline revenge against me. The cold nights. An unreliable source of food. Long hours of disappearance. No respect for gifts on the doorstep. None of this is likely, though. If I were the pet, and sometimes I think this may be true anyway, he would no doubt rush to the door, let me in and curl up on my lap just to keep me warm. He would understand that I just don’t have the stomach or fortitude for the world of rodents and Mother Nature. He has a different kind of spirit than I do. Me? I just stare back through the glass and write a story about him looking in at me and do nothing more. I have a story to write. He’ll just have to wait.

Tears
No one noticed me. They never do. I was dressed impeccably in my best suit, hands in my lap, a mournful gaze on my face. I was respectful and in a funeral, no one questions those who are properly contained in the skin of emotional reserve. The body looked handsome, given the circumstances. How it is that they can prepare such things is beyond me. Perhaps we would be better off if this weren’t the case, if we had to look at the dead as they are and not as we imagine they should be. The mother was weeping in the corner, being held together by what looked like one of her other children. The father was in the back of the room, drinking coffee with other men. All of them removed from action. I nodded silently to a few other people in the seats near me. We were in this together, our collective nods seemed to say, acknowledging the loss. The service was short and to the point. Life lived. Too short. Grief. I waited for the tears and again, they didn’t come. They never come. Two years gone and still, I could not shed a tear for her. What was wrong with me? I made a slow route around the room, drawing in as much of their sadness as I could and silently offering to be the one to hold it all in for them, to feel the weight of loss for them, to give them a moment’s reprieve. Such sadness and yet, for me, nothing. I left as I had come, with stealth and beyond the field of vision of anyone in the room. The obit crunched as I fingered it in my pocket. There was another up the street. A woman, age 52, cancer. I was already dressed and ready and hopeful, truly hopeful, that I would find some tears where tears had not naturally come for me two years ago this very week.

Godzilla
A life in miniature. That was the answer Stephen would give when asked why he spent so much time with his trains. It’s true that by the age of 32, he should have outgrown them, placed them in a box for storage in the attic and be happy with the memories. Still, here he was, crouched down low with a piece of broken track in one hand and a blue engine in the other. Curtis looked on, almost antsy with anticipation but respecting his uncle’s request for both silence and stillness. Not easy for a seven year old. Spread out before them in the basement studio was the largest railroad track that Curtis had ever seen. It seemed to go on for miles and miles, twisting through tunnels and moving over mountains and careening around buildings, slicing off at various junctures to create two trails out of one and then one out of two. Stephen ignored the boy. He was angry at Karen for allowing his nephew to come down here. The boy had no business here. So Stephen kept at his task of restoring order through repair. A life in miniature and also, a world completely under his control. Curtis, though, could feel something rising inside of him. He kept it contained, whatever it was, and continued to eye the tracks. Everything seemed so perfect. Everything in its place. Curtis’ world was never this neat and ordered and despite his love for his uncle, the only thing Curtis could think about was ripping up this entire world and feeling the power of destruction. It would be like King Kong! Or Godzilla! Stephen remained patient with the track. A small screw was coming loose. “I need to get a screwdriver, Curtis. Upstairs. Don’t touch a thing.” Curtis nodded and watched his uncle go up the stairs. It was the moment. The moment when Godzilla came alive and wreaked vengeance on an unsuspecting world.

Peace (in stories),
Kevin

Quickfiction: chapter 2

Date
Posted by
Comments1

I continue to explore this work of quick/flashfiction. It’s interesting because I am trying to use the concept of podcasting and voice to help me edit the writing, speaking as I write and editing as I speak. The difficulty with this form is providing enough of a story, without giving the story away. It’s all about the gaps in the narrative and how the reader/listener might fill them in.

Here are my latest:

Black Friday

How do you explain this? You can’t. It’s 2 a.m. You should be home right now, sound asleep with the cat purring near your head and the desire, if not the reality, of a warm body sleeping beside you. You need comfort, not bone-chilling cold. You should not be here, at this hour, in this place, waiting in this line. But here you are. You hold the ticket up in the moonlight, and you see the number 27. You can hear the mini-vans and the cars and the trucks running in the parking lot and you imagine the heat. You can’t risk it so you bundle up as tight as you can possibly be. You draw yourself up inside of yourself, like so many other recent nights and descend into the darkness. Part of what brings you here is the understanding that he is there at home, with his youthful dreams of something that must better than what it is, and the other part of it is the knowledge that so much of your life together has been wrangled so completely out of your control. The divorce. The violence. The terrible abruptness of departure that has settled upon the two of you so heavily that it makes you choke sometimes. You can feel his inherent trust in you withering in this dark winter. Words are beyond you now. Words have no currency anymore. It kills you that your only way back into his heart may be through the object that sits on the shelves in there, beyond those big glass windows and bright neon signs. It’s 2 a.m and you feel as if you have sold your soul to something wicked. You finger the credit card and hope to God that there is enough of a ceiling left to allow you to bring it home, wrap it up and be his hero again, if only for that one morning in December.

Threads

The instant the doors closed, he knew he was on the wrong train. He could barely catch his breath from the mad dash down the tunnel and his overnight bag and computer felt like bricks in his hand. It had been all he could do to find a seat in the crowded car. He watched the doors slide shut and he knew, in that instant, that this train was not his train. He wanted to curse out loud but that was something he never did. His mother had taught him better so he held it inside and felt the blackness seep into his head. He tugged out his ticket from his overcoat pocket and looked it over, as if it and not he were the mistake. There were faces of every color all around him. None seemed to invite a question so he wrapped himself up in loneliness and wondered where he was bound. He felt the familiar unloosening of life that comes from making yet another bad decision and imagined one of his grandmother’s beautiful hand-woven afghans being pulled apart thread by thread by thread. That was his life. The ticket-puncher temporarily saved him. She took the ticket from his outstretched hand and shook her head in that sad, pathetic way people often did with him. He could feel another thread being pulled.”You’re on the wrong train,” she told him, in almost a whisper, and he nodded. “This one goes to Philly, not Penn Station.” He lowered his head. Philly. “Nothing to do now but ride into Philly and get on another back to the city,” she offered, handing him back his ticket and moving on. He could hear the rhythm of her clicker as she moved down the aisle. Philly. He’d be late for the meeting. His bags felt even heavier in his lap and he fumbled around, trying to reach his cell phone. He’d have to let them know and ask to reschedule. It occurred to him, however, that in his rush to get the train to New York on time that morning, he had left his phone sitting on the counter, all charged up for the day. Another thread, being pulled, as he watched the landscape roll past him.

Guitar

She cursed when the guitar string broke. She tried to keep going but it was impossible with the wire dangling down the fretboard. It made a loud twanging noise that made her curse even louder than was normally acceptable on this street corner. The little girl was watching her, so she turned away from the sidewalk and faced the wall behind her. “Damn it,” she muttered, and looking back over her shoulder, she saw the little girl still there, watching, waiting. The collection hat sat between them. Just a few coins and a dollar bill or two in the old cowboy headgear her father had given her years ago. Not much, but enough for dinner before she would knock again on the shelter door for the night. Katarina nodded and the girl smiled back, showing gaps where teeth had fallen out. Where was this child’s parent? No one seemed to be tending her. Katarina ignored the girl and dug into her case for another string, slowing unwinding the broken one and rewinding the new one. The guitar made a strange whirling noise as she twirled the peg and tried to get the string in tune. It took longer than usual as the uncooperative string seemed bent on going too sharp or too flat before being herded into the right pitch. Katarina looked up. The girl was gone. Good. Damn it, she muttered. The girl was gone, and so was the hat.

Yawn

If it were at all possible, he remembers his life beginning after the yawn. It was clear as day and it happened in second grade. Tommy and Sandy were nearby, having one of their endless arguments over whose turn it was to use the computer when it was that he realized that he had been yawning for what seemed to be forever and that nothing had existed before the yawn. It was as if everyone was a blank slate. Was that even possible? Years later, that yawn would seem like some Great Awakening in his life. For it was now, with clarity, that he realized a few things. Tommy was nothing but a bully and at recess that day, he pushed his former friend away and made him cry for the first time in his life. That felt good. Sandy was not quite the yuckiest kid on the planet. He thought about this as they walked around at recess together in the snowstorm that stung their eyes. The snowflakes looked wonderful on her outstretched tongue.Words in books suddenly seemed important. He could hear his teacher talking and understood. He was listening for the very first time in his life. Really listening. And then he went home and lost it all in a good night’s sleep.

Peace (in shortprose),
Kevin

A New Writing Adventure

Date
Posted by
Comments1

I am back from New York City (from the National Writing Project Annual Meeting) and I will share more about what I was doing there in NYC, and whom I met, later in the week as I pull together some files and thoughts. (I will definitely share a session I led called Writing in the Digital Age, with all of our resources).

But during my stay, I was engrossed during my few down times with a collection of Quickfiction or Flashfiction put out by McSweeney’s. This is a fiction-writing technique of capturing a story or character in a short amount of words. Now that my Poetry Project is over, I have been mulling over what to do next with my writing and this blog, and I think Quickfiction has taken hold in my brain.

On the train ride home yesterday, I started writing and came up with five Quickfiction stories. And hey, I might as well podcast them, too, right? One thought is to collect the best of a series and combine the words and voice with images for some sort of fictional movie project (I haven’t yet figured it out)

Ants

He didn’t think of himself as a killer, even though he stood there with the implements of death in his hand and hundreds of corpses laying around him in every direction. It was just an adventure but he knew his father would be angry with him. He knew this with certainty. He thought suddenly of Horton the elephant and how Horton kept reminding himself that a person was a person, no matter how small. What would Horton think? They were small, these little bodies that had been moving just minutes before but now seemed like exclamation points on the driveway. The magnifying glass felt heavy in his hand all of sudden. He gingerly used his feet to create a pile of bodies and then went into the garage to get a broom. His father would never know. And neither would Horton.

Remote

I barely conceal the remote and still be able to use it, so moving around the mega-store proves to be rather awkward. I imagine the eyes of all the blue-shirted employees watching me, scanning this hesitant figure marching through their midst. In reality, I’m invisible. Just another wallet wandering through with eyes on overload. The difference is that I have had enough. I use my thumb. Click. Click. Click. I’ve learned to move fast in this environment. I’m a clandestine operator. Click. Click. The noise drops. It’s as if a black hole suddenly opened up, with silence rushing right into the gap. Beautiful silence. I feel the most satisfied I have felt all day, even as I hear voices yelling behind me as I push my way through the revolving door and continue my path down Times Square.

Leaves

Their heads are visible and nothing else. Their bodies are down below and their necks are barely just above the color line of the fading leaves. Their heads are there – just faces sticking up. One disappears. There is laughing and then a playful struggle. The second one disappears. I want to jump in and join them down there, below the leaves in a world of their own making. I resist. This is child’s play and I am only the observer here. They need an audience. I hold the rake tight. There’s another rustle of leaves and then, the heads pop up again. They look at me as if I am a scarecrow, tethered to a post and unable to move. I walk to another spot of the yard and begin the endless work on creating another pile of leaves for them to destroy.

Balloon

The balloon dropped so suddenly, it was as if a fish had taken a bite of bait and dragged it down into the water. Like a bobber. You were just a kid then, remember? And balloons were this amazing mystery you couldn’t quite figure out. How was it that something could be lighter than air? Everywhere you went, you looked out for balloons. This one caught your attention as you sat in the back of your parents’ car that Autumn day. Perhaps you were on your way to the supermarket, or a movie, or maybe your grandparents’ house. It may have been a Sunday, coming out of service with your faith in the unknown still safely tucked inside of your pocket. You had long given up pointing the balloons out to your parents and so this view was all of your own. The balloon dropped and that’s when you noticed the basket under it, now swinging up above the oval – it was like a pendulum, it occurred to you — and then it was gone altogether, dropping below the tree line at an incredible speed. You blinked. You didn’t say a thing to your parents. Not a thing.

Death

She was seven years old when the cat died. Eight, when the dog died. And ten, when grandmother died. She assumed that everything was going to die sooner rather than later and when her mom didn’t come home from that long weekend away when she was sixteen, there was no way for her to mourn the loss since she expected it anyway. The problem was that now she often looked to her father, wondering. When? The only time she tried not to think about it was in the mornings, after a long shower, when she was standing in front of the mirror. She didn’t think about it then but she knew. It was only a matter of time.

Peace (in quicktime),
Kevin