Monthly Archives: December 2016
In her dreams, he was elusive and distant, staring at her with grave eyes. How she longed for his words, his words, once so sweet but now – when he did bother to open his mouth – unruly and hardened. But he said nothing, in her dreams, while she murmured something over and over again, inaudible to them both. Even she didn’t know their contents or intent.
Her dreams were her reality’s inverse. During her waking hours it was she who refused to speak, drifting through the long, masculine corridors of their home like a ghost ship. Her last words to him, spat from the foyer on her way to exercise class: “It is what it is.”
It was one of her favorite sayings. It made him cringe; he considered that turn of phrase a worthless tautology. In the days since she decided to stop speaking (thirteen and counting), he gradually forgot why she said that anyway.
He still tried, mildly and with condescension, to engage her in conversation. But to no real end. He, too, dreamed. He dreamed not of her words, or even his, but rather of an implicitly understood and forever sweet silence that needed no words at all.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, dreams, fiction, love, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, silence, sleep, words | posted in Her, Him, Short Fiction
Still not used to her new glasses, she reached behind the lenses and rubbed an eye. “Why did you make me get these?” she asked. “I can see fine.”
She kept the windows open even in the winter, and a sharp frozen breeze blew in. I retrieved her favorite cashmere throw and draped it over her shoulders. “Thanks,” she said with surprising sweetness. She extended her hand as I walked back to the kitchen, grazing my arm. It was the first time in three weeks she had touched me.
I asked her how many eggs she wanted and she said two.
Her touch, though faint, stayed on my skin. As chilly as it was inside, I felt myself growing warm and the kitchen seemed stuffy. An eerie quiet settled in and I could hear her measured breath.
“Are you okay, K?” she asked from the kitchen table where she was reading a fashion magazine.
Without warning, I toppled to the floor. I heard her scream with an unfamiliar urgency as she rushed to my side. Her hair was messy and the lenses of her new glasses were fogged up. I closed my eyes, stung by the life in her breath.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cold, death, December, eggs, fashion, fiction, flash fiction, glasses, love, magazine, reading, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, winter, women | posted in Me, Uncategorized
The door creaked open. The bald florist on the other side offered K the same expression he offers him every year on the thirtieth of December – looking somewhat like a vet explaining to a crying child the fate of her shar-pei.
“Happy anniversary, K,” said the florist, presenting the same maudlin bouquet of half-dead flowers he presents every thirtieth of December.
“Thanks,” replied K heavily, reaching one arm through the gap in the door. “No card, I suppose?”
The florist shook his head. “I’m afraid not.” He looked at K with no expression: “Why do you keep putting yourself through this?”
K propped the rotting flowers on his hip. “I don’t know. I keep hoping that maybe this year it will be her knocking instead of” – he paused – “well, you. Not that I don’t like you.”
“It won’t, K. It’s been five years. She’s not coming back. At least she remembers your wedding day, I guess.” The florist shrugged and took his leave.
K closed the door and set the dying flowers – her favorites – on the kitchen table.
He then marked in his calendar exactly 51 weeks into the future, when he would place his next order with the bald florist.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bouquet, break up, calendar, flash fiction, florist, flowers, heart break, marriage, relationships, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
Even the cruelest and most random moments of the turbulent past year and a half failed to upset the fragile stability they found that snowy night, exactly 729 days ago, in some shabby Italian restaurant in some equally shabby track mall. She was in rare form, babbling sweetly – in hushed tones; for all its dilapidation, the restaurant was undulating with working-class Christmas Eve romance – into his ear.
She was, he reasoned, still high on the adrenaline that washed over the two of them when his new Lexus spun off the road and into a snowbank – where it was fated to remain until the roads were properly cleared and salted. They wanted to interpret every extraordinary thing as fate drawing them (back) together, as some force telling them that everything would be okay. If only they would only almost die whenever their relationship seemed beyond resuscitation.
She ordered french fries (somewhere near the end of the menu with stuff like friend chicken, just in case) and a glass of red wine. He ordered red wine, too, but spent the next several hours, until the only other patrons were two drunkards attempting courtship, watching her and worrying that the snow would eventually stop.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, flash fiction, french fries, italian, italian food, lexus, red wine, relationships, restaurant, romance, Short Fiction, short story, snow, wine, winter | posted in Him, Short Fiction
The dazzle of the evening – fancy cocktails, lots of cleavage, rolled up sleeves – was eclipsed by the weight of inevitable failure.
She took me to a french restaurant, where we sat rooftop and looked out at the decaying skyline. Ever the portrait of dark sophistication, she sat contemplatively in the embrace of the day’s remaining shadows, her gaze drawn to something beyond my right shoulder.
“There’s a building on fire over there,” she said, removing the olives from her martini. “It’s pretty bad.” When I first met her, she was, to me, impossibly unapproachable. I made up a bullshit story about wanting to adopt her dog.
“Is there a lot of smoke,” I replied, losing myself in her eyes.
“Yeah.” She lifted her martini. “People are jumping.”
“I imagine it’ll spread soon.”
She scrutinized the scene behind me. “Probably. We’re the only ones left up here. At least we won’t have to pay. But my martini is almost gone.”
She was right. I could feel an uncomfortable warmth biting at my neck.
“Do you want some of this?”
“I think mezcal is disgusting.”
“Are we in trouble?”
She nodded silently, took my hand and pressed her lips to my knuckles.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, death, disaster, fire, flash fiction, french, french food, martini, mezcal, relationships, rooftop, Short Fiction, short story, smoke | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
She had been a robust child.
Years later, however, she found herself prone to serious illness and disease. On Christmas several years ago, I nursed her through pneumonia, strep throat, and a host of other dangerous afflictions.
As terrible as it all was, watching her die (It was inevitable. If not this illness, then surely that one, or that one.), we benefitted handsomely on, as we came to call it, PharmDay. We would put on our best farmerwear – a hard thing for a couple of middle-class snobs to accomplish – and head to the pharmacy. The whole thing was terribly fun.
Back at home, we would dump her medicine on the kitchen table and play with it. Small pills became stones from which we erected mighty pyramids; other pills became grenades as we tried to blow each other up. Still others we simply abused with alcohol.
She maintained until the end that she would rather spend her time this way than filling little boxes – one for each day of the week – with medicine.
And so we did. And one day she overdosed on a little green drug.
I tried carrying on the tradition without her. But it just wasn’t as fun.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, disease, drugs, flash fiction, grenade, love, medicine, overdose, pharmacy, pills, pyramid, relationships, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
By degrees, the night swallowed us, leaving her luxury SUV to grope its way to civilization. Her relatives didn’t live far, but in the rural midwest it doesn’t take much to transport you to the edge of the world.
“I need a drink,” I said, taking her hand. “Let’s never do that again. Until next year of course.” I glanced at her profile.
She was crying inaudibly, eyes focused on the crisp white beams of light projecting from the front of her Volvo.
“You need a drink, too,” I said gently.
When the city emerged later, we were dismayed to find nothing but empty streets and solemn lampposts.
Still we drove, desperate for an alcoholic reprieve from our holiday traumas. We settled on a kitschy hotel on the border of the bad part of town. In the bar was a handful of middle-class refugees like us. The bartender, the Death Star tattooed on his forearm, looked inexplicably tragic in his vest and bowtie.
I ordered our drinks and followed her to the end of the bar. Less than ten minutes later I ordered two more drinks. This was a blatant attempt at escape. She put her head on my shoulder.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, bartender, bow tie, Death Star, drink, drinking, family, fiction, flash fiction, holidays, luxury, Moon Rise, relationships, Saint Louis, Short Fiction, short story, Star Wars, SUV, trauma, vest, Volvo | posted in Short Fiction
I made myself a drink with his expensive scotch and lay on his expensive couch. For some reason, I felt uneasy. “K?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “K?” I asked again, deciding that he, under the influence of too much alcohol, passed out somewhere out of view. I turned on the television and watched a show about winter in upstate New York.
I fell asleep.
When I woke up, my coat had been thrown over me. K was banging around in the kitchen.
I sat up. “What time is it?”
“Five,” he called from behind me.
“What are you doing up?”
“Making waffles. Want some?”
“I guess,” I whined.
He dropped a plate of waffles on my lap, returned to the kitchen.
We hadn’t spoken about what had happened several nights prior, and amidst the lunacy of the waffle conversation, I felt the need to speak up.
“K,” I said from his couch. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Huh,” he replied cooly. “I feel the same way.”
I didn’t get the joke he was trying to make. He continued: “How are the waffles?”
“Fine,” I replied, not yet aware of what had just happened.
Then an uncomfortable silence settled in.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, breakfast, couch, death, flash fiction, murder, relationships, Rochester, scotch, Short Fiction, short story, Upstate, Upstate New York, waffles, winter | posted in Short Fiction
And so we went to Thirsty Thursday, as her short-haired friend liked to call it. Thirsty Thursday was the cutesy name for the four of us gathering around her friend’s dining room table making stilted, domestic chit-chat and drinking poorly made gin-and-tonics.
Thirsty Thursday used to just be three, but her friend went and got herself a boyfriend – bald, midwestern, decently friendly. He worked in a train yard, kept a tally of how many vagrants he busted riding the rails.
I drank six poorly made gin-and-tonics, slept until 2 pm. I woke up with a terrible headache and a half-baked plan to take up model railroad.
“Enjoy yourself last night?”
Her voice rattled against the insides of my skull, causing me to wince. “I always do.”
“You wouldn’t shut up about trains and” – a dramatic pause – “their symbolism as great modernity or some shit.”
I dropped my head back on the pillow. “Sounds like something I’d say. Trains are always going forward after all. Progress.”
“Whatever.”
I closed my eyes. “Remember how I used to live next to some tracks?”
“Yeah. I used to fantasize about your death by train.”
She heard me sigh, then added: “Now that would be progress.”
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, death, domesticity, fiction, flash fiction, gin, Gin and tonic, hang over, modernity, murder, progress, railroad, relationships, Short Fiction, Thirsty Thursday, thursday, train, travel | posted in Me
I was walking home that night, paying little attention to my surroundings, when a woman – slight, fashionably dressed, dark eyes – approached me.
“Are you K?”
I said that I was, trying to ignore the incredulity of the moment. It was dark, but I knew her voice.
She looked at me, then punched me in the face, sending me backward. Her punch had knocked her off balance, so the force of the blow was relatively tame. Still, my right eye began to swell.
“Stay the fuck away from me!” she shouted.
Too stunned to reply, I grimaced at her. She took a knife from her back pocket. “And give me your fucking watch.”
I did. Then she flipped me off before tottering off into the shadows.
In a daze, I tripped and had to limp home in the dark.
I woke the next morning on the couch, and you were sitting next to me. “Sorry,” you said with resignation, handing me my watch. “I’ve always kind of liked it, I guess. We met the day you bought it.”
You were leaving for work.
“At least you didn’t try to run me over this time,” I said, watching the front door close.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, assault, couch, fashion, fiction, flash fiction, love, punch, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, time piece, violence, watch | posted in Me, Woman
For a moment neither of us spoke. She had taken up smoking, was practiced in exhaling through her nose. It was cool, I admit. She leaned hard on her elbows, took a moment to glare at me, and jammed her cigarette violently into its ashtray. Music from a neighbor’s stereo was stirring somewhere outside.
“It’s a terrible thing, what happened,” she sighed, lighting another cigarette.
I couldn’t disagree, but I said nothing. She had painted her apartment this odd shade of light blue. Through the haze (she had been smoking all night), the walls took on a dinghy, worn look – like a discarded Tiffany’s bag.
“What did you expect,” she said abruptly, pissed that I wasn’t listening. “You left. I had to stay here. I threw out all your shit and painted over your poems. They were good, really good. But they had to go.”
My eyes burned from the smoke, and from fourteen hours of driving. I swallowed the rest of my martini.
“I write fiction now,” I said in a way that I found impressively detached. Then I walked to her desk and unearthed a Sharpie from under a pile of cords, papers, and letters (unopened) from me.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, art, cigarette, fiction, flash fiction, heart break, life, love, martini, music, poetry, relationships, Sharpie, Short Fiction, short story, smoking, Tiffany & Co. | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I must have fallen asleep, for I don’t know how long – at some point she had lit her favorite candle (shaped like a man’s bashed in skull), so I had probably slept a while. She was as I remembered: arms hugging her legs, book in her hands. The flame of her favorite candle looked like a man trying to shake off his own immolation. He writhed, casting her profile in varying depths of black.
She smiled. “Someone was tired.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I guess.”
The house was shadowy and cool.
“It’s snowing,” she said, eyes returned to her book.
I looked behind me. “Jesus,” I said, transfixed by the vast white on the other side of the window. “How long was I asleep?”
She shrugged. “A few days. It hasn’t been snowing this whole time, though. Just since yesterday.”
Yesterday?
I swung my legs off of the couch and stared at her. She caught my gaze, momentarily, before the shadow cast by her favorite candle swelled again.
“What,” she said from somewhere in the shadow. “I wanted to finish my book. But your friend K came over instead.”
The shadow receded from her face and she was still smiling.
Leave a comment | tags: affair, affect, book, burning, candle, darkness, fiction, fire, flame, flash fiction, house, marriage, reading, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, snow, winter | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
