Friendly Enough

Low-slung motel's silhouetted against a stand of broken cedars, No Pets sign mocked by cats in windows, most stalls filled by cars belonging to last-minute flyers out the local airport. Has some name like Shamrock or Lookout, on some street named Bakerview, perhaps, and the late afternoon egg-yolk sun's dropping fast as autumn mercury while a raucous carful of crackheads from north of the border pulls in, looking for a place for four, maybe five hours so they can get royally fucked up this night, two boys two girls equally. While we all glance, pace sticky carpets, warily share our pets, or at least their shadows, lend our corkscrews and local knowhow, act friendly enough.

Emily

Via Jo-Anne Teal, I happened to catch a short fiction challenge featured on Laura Jamez's blog, Office Mango. I was too late to enter it, but I was inspired to write an unpleasant little flash fiction piece based upon the photo of a thrift store doll, and I offer it here. Definitely going to revisit Laura's blog, though.

Since flash fiction seems to be all I have time to write these days, I figure it had better be good. Or at least have some kind of emotional heft, kick like a short-lived mule on a sunbaked, fly-swarm August afternoon. Oddly enough I kept adding words, thinking I must be below the two hundred minimum. When I finally checked the word count, it was actually dead on the maximum of three hundred! Weird. I usually have nothing but difficulty with word counts, so this made me think it was an omen and I'd gotten something right for once.

Anyway, try not to hate me for the content of this dark little tale. It doesn't come from me; I'm merely the pipeline not the well. Or something.

Emily

If it hapens agen, this is what I will do to my baby brother. Mommy was about to make me my favrite milkshake—banana and strawbry—when the sound of my brother wailing like he'd been locked in a room full of bees came from upstares.

While Mommy left the ice cream and fruit on the kitchen counter and went to check on him, I went to my room, got out my doll, Emily, took all its stupid cloths off and did this to its leg and its arm. I will do it to Carl next time. Break one leg and pop out one sholder. I saw on a hospital show my daddy was watching how babies sholders are easy to… I can't remember the right word. Begins with a "D." But I know it means to pop it out because it hapened at preschool when Maddy yanked Sophie's arm out of its sock-it and that's what I heard a teacher say: "it just popped out." It was a aks-i-dent, they said. 

I love my brother and he's very cute but he doesn't come first; I came first, and he needs to lern that. If he lerns it, we'll be a good brother and sister, very hapy in are famly to-gether. But if he ever stops anything good hapening to me agen, this will be how it starts untill he lerns. Not only that but I'll make shore I do it at the bottom of the stares so it looks like he felled. May be give him a few bruses first. Like a aks-i-dent. 

Looking at my doll with that leg all sticking out and busted makes me wonder if it would make a sound like when Daddy pulls the leg off from the thanksgiven turkey. Gess I'll find out.

Addiction

Soccer fans have a saying: "it only takes a second to score a goal." But that has its flipside. Sometimes the moments that end up changing our lives, utterly refashioning them, and not always for the better, also occur within a heartbeat of time. We might only recognize them in hindsight. I realize I am becoming addicted to flash fiction, which is another level of irony given the latest one I wrote for Dan Mader's Friday flash fiction challenge is titled Addiction. Why? I wonder. I think it's partially the brevity, the minimal time commitment in a crowded, busy world filled with deadlines. Honestly, I don't know if I'll ever get to my abandoned novel, and even traditional short stories are becoming increasingly daunting in terms of time, but flash fiction? Especially timed (although I admit I often play pretty fast and loose with that part, and since Dan is a good guy he doesn't give me too much of a hard time about it). Surprisingly, you can say a hell of a lot when everything's pared down to a moment, whether it be a moment of comedy, a moment of fear, a moment of transcendence, a moment of horror, a moment of pure loss. This short piece is a nod to noir, of course, with its femme fatale and smoky barroom setting, but it's also a moment. A moment in which... Okay, that's enough. I shouldn't need to explain it. Plus, it doesn't even matter what I think. I hope someone gets something out of this. I very much enjoyed writing it, how it emerged like slow ribbons of smoke from a cigarette held between slender fingers.

Addiction

The bar is dark in daylight. What paltry light there is moves sluggish, thwarted by dust motes and smoke.

"I can't help it if I have an addictive personality." Liv leans forward and presses one slender finger into my sternum. "And you don't exactly help, my lover, my partner, my significant other."

"How so?"

"Indulgences. Temptations. Urges."

I have no idea what she's talking about, so I decide to enjoy the view down the front of her shirt. Significant other. Ha. She's being an asshole, albeit a flirtatious one. I don't believe in addictive personalities; I believe only in strength or weakness. I smirk at her. She raises one perfect eyebrow, a brunette Lana Turner. Like she knows what I'm thinking, like she knows this postman will not only ring twice, he'll keep on ringing until somebody damn well answers.

"I can quit them all, you know."

I can feel my smirk stretching my face.

"Fuck you," she says, as if she's telling me about the weather. Her face is placid as Arctic ice.

All of a sudden I'm scared. She's out of her chair and at the door before I can think. Confused, I look down at the table.

"Wait! You forgot your cig—"

For Shame, a Becoming

So there's this thing, I don't want to call it a game, but maybe that's what it is, a drinking game, let's call it, where we shame ourselves by admitting the truly awful things we've done, or the tackiest, or perhaps the meanest, the dumbest, or the most plain humiliating. So, here's mine.

Think I was truly having a breakdown, or a midlife catastrophe, right at the turn of the millennium, that cusp of memory and forgetfulness, a fulcrum upon which, in Kathleen Edwards' words, "you spend half your life trying to turn the other half around." And sure, I've already told the later chapters of this tawdry little tale, in which I embarked on my ten-thousand kilometre transcontinental vision quest, even published a short book about it, but never this. Not until now.

Before that idea even occured, it was a particularly bleak winter. Not gonna get too emo here, but you know, aside from all the overt angst and the hot, roiling subcurrents of shudderingly wrong memories still only suspected at this point, my overriding feeling was fear. Fear of myself, of the future, of others, for others, of GETTING THIS WHOLE THING DESPERATELY, IRREVOCABLY WRONG. Whatever. Just fear. You feel me?

So in January of 2001, I went and spent some time alone in a cabin. In the region of British Columbia laughably (in this context, anyway) called The Sunshine Coast. 'Cause there ain't no sunshine there back then, not for me, not that winter. And I mean that entirely subjectively. Wait, no. Objectively. Whatever, I always get those mixed up. It felt especially cold as I stayed in a cute but paperthin cabin where cedar branches sagged under their frigid burdens beside the icy turbulent waters of Skookumchuck Narrows, where the tide waters are forced through the narrows forming the Sechelt Rapids. It's wild in every sense, but especially in January.

And yeah, I might still have thought I was going back to working with the street kids who had broken my heart (not their fault), and I was playing with writing again, having had an article published on the website of one of my remote, austere heroes, but what was I thinking... and what would I do? The thing is, I know exactly what I was thinking, at least: that not only could I heal some odd, male part of me through the solitary simplicity of living a handful of days in a remote cabin held in winter's grip, but I could begin to live the life, adopt the trappings, wear the elbow-patched jacket of a... Real Writer™.

Yes, I know. But it gets worse.

I'll just blurt it out, pass it off as if I'm gagging: Dostoyevsky. Uh-huh. A copy of Crime and Punishment, an acoustic guitar, a pre-iPod era boombox with a limited selection of CDs, one of which was OK Computer, I kid you not, and a large notepad (with rollerpoint pens) since I didn't even have a laptop back then, for shame. You need to say this next bit in Nigel Tufnel's humble voice: So what will you be paying for, sir? Oh yes, the wannabe writer's budget package. Cold, isolated cabin? Check. Raging waters nearby? Check. Heavy Russian reading material? Check. Dystopian UK music about alienation? Check. Acoustic guitar? Check. Forty-pounder of rum? Check. Hiking boots? Check. Hatchet? Check.

You get the picture. Some Kerouac bullshit, right?

But here's the funny part, the unexpected twist. It kind of worked. I wrote. I wrote scads. It's still there, in that notebook. Mostly crap, of course, many spidery lines of abandoned poetry and philosophical musings that would embarrass a fourteen-year-old. But still, however much I cringe at the posturing of it all, I found I'd grown into a slightly different skin after all was said and done.

There was a moment. A song played, but low volume, an insectile murmur. I was whittling cedar with gloved hands into kindling for a tiny wood stove that burned up quality birch and alder stovelengths way too fast. I had a beer beside me, and more than one inside. The air was clean, like the cool hush of an ancient Triassic rainforest, so clean it made me want to cry for all the worlds we won't ever get back or even see. And maybe I did cry for a moment. Yet wrapped up inside of all that was thankfulness. That I was alive. That although my fingers ached with the cold and I couldn't even play my damn guitar, I had all the things that make us happy, and that the final pieces in the jigsaw are the friends and family we choose, and that I'd see them soon, however content I felt in that moment, in that splendid isolation.

Yeah. Maybe that's all that needs to be said here, and I'll surely get gone now.

The Last Debrief

Again, Dan Mader's weekly flash fiction exercises provided a kickstart for another short piece last week. I had his permission to upload this clearly-longer-than-two-minutes excerpt. And I mean excerpt, as it feels like it could be a part of some vast space opera... not that I'll ever probably write it. It's like a brief farewell transmission, a threat whispered along the interstellar dust highways, something ominous lurking far beyond any conceivable future. Yet it's there.

Seriously. Go read Unemployed Imagination; follow the link above. Every Friday there are some excellent pieces of writing on there. Anyway, here's mine:

The Last Debrief

Perhaps it's because you have two of everything. Two lower appendages, two upper. Two mammaries. Gonads. Binocular vision. You are obsessed, bound and determined, to choose this over that, the far over the near, the left and the right, the up and the down, the purest dark and the damnedest light. 

And because we're many-limbed and multivisioned, a field of possibility so much more complex than your stark binaries, we don't need to make your kinds of choice, between faith and nihilism, release and execution. We can live beneath the layered greys, comforted by those rings of lambent light against charcoal backgrounds our generations have always dreamed under, a space less void than some firefly twilight.

Your rage is inevitable given you can only dwell in either the birth agony of sunfire or the raw, biting negation of interstellar cold.

In the banal, prosaic spirit of all your kind's doomed couplings, especially when one party finally grasps the pure harm they've so recently undergone, at the tail-end of a tarnished tryst, we would like to say this: we wish we'd never met you. We wish that fervently and, in terms you yourselves will understand more than most, eternally, with profound revulsion.

As we recoil from you, we realise how ironic it is the extent to which our chance encounter has unsettled and perhaps damaged our own historic, even genetic, equilibrium.

We hope and expect to recover from this after the passing of millennia. We're a long-lived people. If after eons of reflection and purification it so happens that we can't shake your taint, can't scrub away the stink of you, we will return to your skies and, from a sense of both mercy and vengeance, we will obliterate your kind from this universe, for good and for all, and most likely for the good of all.

The final appalling irony being that, in the act itself, we will ostensibly have become you.