Short Short Stories

Well, I'm leaning more towards just using my blog as a place to post my writing. I've recently decided to minor in creative writing along with getting my BSE, so my output of pieces is only due to increase. Here are a couple pieces I've written recently. We've been doing a unit on the "short short story". This makes the pieces very concise, yet very difficult to write. The challenge is finding the right details and getting rid of the "fluff." Enjoy!

A Change in Appetite

                I didn’t eat lasagna for ten years. The very site of it used to make my stomach toss. I had just gotten off work and was sitting in the living room enjoying my first Bud of the night. Carly was making dinner. The smell of garlic wafted through the air. I started to doze off through her intermittent chirps of all the things women waste their breath on. I was doing my best to ignore the shortcomings she was pointing out. Then silence.

I jerked awake in my chair with her screeching at me. Something about flowers. Sleep still hazy in my eyes, I couldn’t tune in. Something else about affection, a brief monologue about emotion. I stared, mouth still slicked with drool. Then it hit me, literally, in the eye. The unmistakable fling of a 1 carat princess cut diamond ring collided with my eyeball with incredible accuracy. It was the first time I’d ever seen her actually hit something she was aiming at. But this wasn’t a hit that was supposed to miss. Something else about falling out of love, and a guy named Brogan. Brogan’s a funny name. I still picture some beefy oiled up bouncer with bleached hair. Then a warm gooey mush as she dumped the entire pan of lasagna in my lap. A couple of slammed doors, a fleeting pink duffle bag.

Years later I saw her at the grocery store. Fake tits and three chubby kids with white-blonde hair. I called my wife on the phone and asked if we could have lasagna.

“You hate lasagna.” She replied.

“No, not anymore. I think Lasagna just hates me.”

When the Glitter's Gone

After sundown, the fireflies flicker in the side yard. Brother and I would ride bikes around the block. Calling out to our friends, we were met with the hollers of after dinner excitement. Dodge ball games, capture the flag, sardines; we would hide from the moon. Every game was prematurely ended by the kid that lost, complaining it wasn’t fair, and proclaiming the next game was due to begin. Friday nights no longer mattered, in the summer, every night meant no bedtime, no homework, no cares. Grandma’s house became a place of refuge, the porch a breezy sanctuary from the sweltering midday sun. Happy to be rid of parents during the days, we filled every waking hour with the dreams we had spent the school year conjuring. I became a pirate, a teacher, a postman, a soldier, every bike-ride was life or death, and every playground a treacherous sea. Justice would be carried to every corner of the globe. Kids became warriors, doctors, heroes. Late summer afternoons could turn into the last battle to win World War II.

Mother left us every morning with a warning,” you boys have fun today and don’t you grow up too fast,”  words that meant nothing to us then ring harsh in my ears now, pounding, reminding me that those dusky summers have long since passed, now only filled by piles of paperwork ever glaring, lists of to-dos, ever staring, and the taunt of my own children now yelping in the yard, resounding the same proclamations that I had once uttered with my own brother, trespass and die, and now the ground is lava, and now we both can fly, you just went blind, I win, I’m the hero, this spaceship can takes us anywhere we want to go.

Now I only wish I could say these things, with a sliver of the belief that I had then. Only cynicisms, complaints, curses, now fill my ears and erupt from my mouth. Plowing away at my computer, day in day out, the floor becoming lava sounds nice now. Questions from my kids bring tiny sparks of imagination back to life, but nothing ever sets aflame. “Really Dad, is that really how you can become a Jedi Knight?” Some days I wonder what it would be like to grab my wife and call our friends for a game of capture the flag. They’d probably block our calls after that.

Unfortunately those summer nights don’t have their magic anymore, the glitter of fireflies goes unnoticed as the mosquitoes bite and the sleep tank whines for refilling. Very seldom, I’ll join my boys in their play games, only to find myself annoyed at the impossibility of their imaginative scenarios. “Why won’t you place with us Dad?” “Xenos the warrior God doesn’t really exist boys, and you don’t have a chance of beating him even if he did.” You can’t really say that to a six year old. Zero days this year, not a single one, that mother’s words don’t haunt me.