Monthly Archives: September 2023

#3 – Sharp-Toothed Snails

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged

“Inside everybody’s nose,” Gertie begins, cocks her brow, glances off to the side, then shuts her thin-lipped mouth. She looks at me. 

I wait, lean in toward her a little. I wait some more. She has an odd smell like rancid caramel. And I wonder if the scent means that she’s sick. I suddenly feel like one of those animals that can smell illness in people. She still says nothing.

“Inside everybody’s nose what?” I finally ask her. 

She gives me that world-weary sigh of hers. As though I really am nothing more than a disease-sniffing animal. Lord knows I’ve been called worse. “Inside everybody’s nose, there lives a sharp-toothed snail,” she finally says in a matter-of-fact way.

“Ah,” I nod in agreement. “Yes. I suppose that’s true.” No point in arguing it really. I turn back to my task at hand – which at the moment is washing Gertie’s dishes. She says she hates washing dishes. That it’s below her station. Whatever that means. I suspect she just plain doesn’t like washing dishes.

“Are we going to the store today?” Gertie suddenly yells as though I’m in the other room rather than just six feet from her. “George!?”

I turn to look at her. My hip hurts when I move my chin. It’s peculiar and I wonder what this condition might smell like to an animal. “Yes,” I say calmly. “As soon as I finish cleaning the dishes.” I could have added your dishes, but what’s the point really? I don’t so much mind washing her dishes. It calms me. And Gertie isn’t capable of gratitude anyhow. Not since the accident. (Though if I’m being honest, she wasn’t all that grateful before it.) I gently wipe down each piece of silverware with the drying towel and place them carefully into the drawer. I like the sound they make when they settle into one another. Like far flung friends brought back together.

“You don’t owe her anything,” both Ma and my sister Rose like to remind me. Usually when I’m heading out the door to come here to Gertie’s.

“She is my oldest friend,” I have to remind them; at which point Rose always rolls her eyes and says something like, “Some friend,” or “It’s not your fault, George.”

I know that it is though. My fault. Still, it’s not the only reason I keep coming back here. 

“There was a boy in our town with long hair,” Gertie blurts out as I reach for the casserole dish from last night’s macaroni and cheese. “Did I tell you about him before? He was strange,” she tightens her face as though she’s just sipped vinegar. Then she smiles and stares past me out the window above the sink, her face softening. “Probably a queer,” she whispers the last word.

“I believe you’ve mentioned him before, yes.” I scrape off a particularly aggressive glob of cheese hanging on for dear life to the edge of the casserole dish. I don’t have the wherewithal to tell her once again that that boy was me and that she had once been my sergeant-at-arms. My ally. The keeper of my secret. She wouldn’t believe me anyhow. 

“Done,” I say, shaking off the towel and folding it neatly over the cabinet door. “Are you ready to go to the store?” 

“Well, it’s about time,” Gertie stands up from her seat and holds out her arm to link with mine. “Shall we stroll, darling?” I smile. She used to say that a lot. Back when. She giggles like a young girl and my heart jumps then sinks just a little when I recognize the spark in her eye. I take her arm in mine as we walk slowly toward the screen door. The floor creaks beneath our feet and Gertie suddenly stops short of the door and looks at me. “Are they gone?” 

“Are who gone?”

“The people,” she speaks in a low tone, eyes wide open.

“The people?”

“The people!” she says more emphatically. “You know. The people!” 

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

Again with the sigh. “The other day there on Hanover Street,” she points to the door. “Over by the church. I think that the traffic light simply would not turn green so the people stopped to wait. They must have been there for hours, George! Hours!” 

“Oh, those people,” I nod, though I have no clue what she’s talking about. That doesn’t mean there weren’t people there though. She’s taught me that much. “Yeah. They’re gone. They all went home.”

She calms herself and leans her head against my arm. “Oh good. That’s good,” she sighs, but this time in a peaceful way. “Home is the nicest place, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I say. “It is.” 

Ma always says God knows when to send you exactly what you need. But then she’ll say on the same breath that I should just ditch Gertie and get on with my life. I know one thing for sure. Either Ma’s wrong, or else God is. 

(excerpts from Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein)

#2 – Who Is A. Flora?

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged

Adam sat at the edge of the ocean the day after the storm, holding a notebook wrapped in a floral cloth sheath. The trees near the shore were wind-torn and weary, though restful now. He appreciated their adaptability. Always had. 

He glanced out over the water, momentarily trapped in a stare. “The sea is not boiling hot,” he said aloud to no one but a small skittering crab. “Though one day, about five billion years hence, it will be.” He dug his toes deep into the cool sand and scanned the sky for birds. None were to be found. There was a group of seagulls congregated on the beach. 43 of them, to be exact. But they were quiet. Eerily so. This was most certainly the calm after the storm – the calm that nobody ever talked about. 

“Whew! That was one for the books,” Clem had said early that morning when he came upon Adam on the old town road going into Fernandina. Clem owned and ran the bait and tackle store on the island. Everything about him reminded Adam of leather. His skin, his scent, even his voice somehow. Clem couldn’t have been a better fit for the role of ‘old guy who runs a bait and tackle store’ had central casting sent him. “Don’t reckon we’ve had a storm around these parts like that since ’99.” 

“That’s what I hear,” Adam had responded. A new transplant to Amelia Island, he’d already been privy to plenty of talk about the tropical storm that hit near Tampa back in 1899. “Sank a schooner right off Fernandina Beach,” they’d all say with the same downward tilt of their heads as though it were island-issued. The old-timers at the diner spoke of it often enough that one would think it happened recently rather than 53 years ago. Then again, they did that with a wide array of topics really; perhaps in a vain attempt to resurrect their youth.  

Whatever the case, Amelia Island and its residents suited Adam. So too did its birds. An ornithologist by trade, he had recently fled his place of birth (or breeding grounds, as he called them) for parts unknown. He lacked wanderlust in any true sense of the word though. Thus, he settled a mere two days later on this quirky little island south of his former home in Savannah. It was far enough away that he felt liberated from the disapproving glances of his classmates and colleagues who now deemed him a reprobate. It wasn’t far enough to skirt his father’s admonishments though. He’d hoped by now his father’s disappointment would have met the same fate as the elephant bird; extinction. It had not.

He sighed.  

It wasn’t that Andrew ‘Buzz’ Flora was a bad father. He was certainly a misguided one. No crime there. Like many a father, Buzz had had big plans for his son. It’s just that they didn’t include… well, his son. A respected engineer in Savannah, Buzz assumed that Adam would follow in his rather gargantuan footprints. “That’s just what you do, son.”

Never mind that his mother also had a successful career. And as an obstetrician, no less – a rare breed in 1952. His mother had never pushed him toward medicine though. She understood Adam’s love of science; believed he’d inherited it from her. And she encouraged his bird-watching; sometimes sitting with him in the woods behind their house while he pointed out birds with funny names like Brown Thrashers, Tufted Titmice, and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. 

He recalled one afternoon, swatting at mosquitoes while watching a Turkey Vulture circle gracefully overhead. He thought it magical that such an ugly bird on land could be so beautiful in the sky. “It’s like he defies gravity,” he’d said.

“It is,” she’d responded in a dreamy voice that belied her usually logical demeanor. “You know, I believe that if you work hard enough, opportunities for defying gravity open up everywhere.” He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it felt correct.

As he grew progressively more distant from his father, Adam’s conversations with his mother moored him. With her, he could happily share, with painstaking detail, the lengthy mating dance of the red-capped manakin. And she would explain, with the same startling attention to minutiae, the drawback of the human’s big brain and how it made childbirth exceptionally difficult and painful. In his mother’s orbit, there were no drawing boards, no brainstorming engineers, no wind tunnels testing prototypes or scaled-down models. There was just them. She loved and celebrated his gentle and sensitive nature. 

The very things that made his father squirm. 

Adam finished writing his ornithological observations in his journal, scant as they were for the day. At the bottom of the page, he wrote A. Flora, as he always had – the same name on his father’s business cards. And in that moment, it dawned on him. His father’s disappointment may go extinct, but it would never be gone. Not completely. It was forever embedded in his heart like the remains of the elephant birds. 

So he carefully tucked the book back into its fabric sheath, gathered himself, and headed toward town. That night, after a rather animated conversation with Clem, he would have fried chicken and a milk shake at the diner, banter with the beleaguered waitress whose name was Alice, and devise new ways to rise above. To defy gravity, as it were.  

***(Sentences taken from Flights of Fancy, by Richard Dawkins)***

#1 – Reading Is Good Fun

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged

I had been almost immediately punished for my curiosity. It is far from the first time. And if I were the betting sort (which truthfully, I am not), I would wager that it won’t be the last. Still, this seems an incommensurate punishment for what I deem to be a not-so-radical inquiry. 

“Do you have a tissue I might borrow?” I ask my jailor, then shake my head and smile. “I take that back. What I meant to ask is, do you have a tissue I might have?” I blink at her, sheepishly. “I can’t imagine you’d want it back.”

“It depends on what you’re planning to do with it,” my jailor responds in her usual brand of bone-chilling monotone she’d mastered by the age of sixteen. 

“I thought I might wipe my bum with it,” I say with a sly smile. Making jokes is good fun. 

Anna, which is my jailor’s God-given Christian name, glances over her left shoulder. “Must you always be so prosaic,” she says with a sigh and rolls her eyes with equally impressive skill. “It’s disgusting,” she adds, scrunching her nose on the ‘gust.’

“I’d argue that it’s not disgusting at all,” I say.

Anna looks at me. Or really, it’s more that she looks through me. 

“Poop is very natural. We all do it,” I continue, leaning back into the bean bag as far as the chains will allow. “In fact, African cultures feature the dung beetle in myths of the beginning as the creature able to bring up a piece of primordial earth from the watery abyss,” I say, in an attempt to impress my younger sister with my knowledge. Or, at the very least, my reading comprehension skills. “They carry poop, Anna,” I raise my eyebrows and nod. 

“Yeah, thanks, Dr. Science. And they don’t carry it so much as roll it,” she responds in a way that indicates she is not impressed. “And I told you to be quiet. You’re forever prattling on about something… innocuous.” At last, she hands me a tissue. “Asking stupid questions is what got you in this situation in the first place. And I do NOT want to know what you plan to do with that,” she nods toward the tissue.

“Then I won’t tell you.”

Anna has chained me up before. Many times. When I was younger, it was a sort of game. Now it’s always ‘for my own good,’ I’m told. This is the first time it’s for asking a question, however. In the past, it was always the result of my spying on her. She’d had concerns that I would tell our parents about her transgressions; despite my countless proclamations to the contrary. I think the legitimacy of her concern is reasonable. Still, I truly didn’t care that she stole beer from the pharmacy when she was twelve, or that she was having a tryst with her English teacher when she was fourteen. Yes, I did care a little when she tried to set fire to our cat Boo Boo’s tail that same year. That seemed a bit extreme, not to mention foul-smelling. But still, I said nothing. I believe for her, my spying on her was a case of opportunity making importunity. For me, it was just a cure for boredom. Voyeurism is good fun. And I didn’t have a lot of other options. (One could safely argue that I still don’t.)

Anna paces around the room and keeps glancing out the window. I think she might be waiting for someone. It isn’t my parents; this much I know. They aren’t coming back. Mr. Alex made that clear after the “accident.” But for as skilled as I am at reading the written word, I’ve never excelled at reading people. They might as well be books with the pages out of order and occasionally upside-down. As such, I can’t tell if she’s angry, nervous, or excited. It may be none of these. 

What I do know is that the chains around my wrists are beginning to cause me distress. I also know that the chains never come off until Anna says they do and to request their removal is futile. So I employ a breathwork technique to help ease the pain. I’m forever grateful that I studied the Upanishads at length that summer while waiting for my broken collarbone to heal. From that text, I grasped the sheer power of breath and this knowledge has come in quite handy. Especially over the past several years. It really is remarkable that we can alter the inherent rhythm of breath as it passes in and out of our lungs. I’m quite taken by the whole affair. 

I close my eyes and am just beginning to move rather peacefully in and out with my breath when Anna suddenly nudges me. I open my eyes and she’s standing over me. I’d hoped she was going to unlock the chains, but no such luck. Yellow then red light claws its way along the walls behind her before coming to a halt. 

“Stay here,” she whispers. 

“I don’t really have an option,” I say, holding up my bound wrists. I laugh. Anna does not.

“Don’t be a smart ass.”

I shrug. 

“Listen, I’m gonna go out for a bit,” she says. “I have to go take care of some business.” I want to ask her where she’s going, but my proverbial sixth sense is telling me to keep quiet. (‘Keep your trap shut,’ Uncle Shaun used to say.) She starts to walk away, then stops short of the door and turns to look at me. “Remember that book you read about insects?”

I nod. 

“Then you know that sometimes you have to lure insects to pick up your pollen and persuade them to fly the precious cargo where…,” she pauses. “Well, where it needs to go, I guess.” Anna’s eyes are glimmering and her cheeks are flush. 

“Oh!” I delight in the reference. “How wonderful! Is that a riddle?”

“Yeah,” she smiles. “Yeah, it’s a riddle. See if you can figure it out,” she says as she shuts the door behind her and locks it from the outside. 

How kind of Anna, my jailor, my sister, to leave me with a riddle. Riddles are good fun.