Tag Archives: very short stories series

#2 – What If the Sky Were Red?

What If?

“What if the sky was red?” Molly asks.

“Like blood?”

She twists her face as though she’s just tasted a lemon. Or a dill pickle. “I was thinking more like a flower.”

“Ah,” I say, squinting my eyes against the gooey warm light of the honeyed summer sun. It’s only 9am and it’s gotta be close to 85 degrees already. “Like a rose then?” 

She nods vigorously, wiping away a few strands of hair that hang limp on her brown freckled face.

“Maybe it is,” I say. 

“It’s not,” she responds with that brand of certainty possessed only by people under the age of six. And sociopaths. “Look at it. It’s BLUE.”

“Is it though?” I say, leaning back against the tree under which we decided to have our picnic breakfast. (Her idea.)

She stares at me, then rolls her eyes. “You’re just being silly. It’s blue.”

“But what if what I see as red is what you see as blue?”

This gives her pause. She picks a blade of grass and studies it intently. She gazes back up at me. “No.”

I’m surprised at this response. She usually entertains whimsy. Welcomes it into her arms like a gaggle of puppies.

“No?”

She shakes her head with the same vigor with which she nodded it previously. Several strands stick again to her sweaty cheeks. She wipes them away as a cicada begins its song in a neighboring tree. It’s a brand of music that always leaves me a little on edge. 

“Just like that, huh? Just plain no?” 

“Yep,” she sighs. “Because it doesn’t make sense.”

“That I might see blue where you see red?”

“Not unless your eyes are broken.”

“Or yours are,” I counter.

She laughs. “My eyes can’t be broken because my eyes are new,” she crosses them and points to them, “and yours are ooooooooold.”

I cock a brow and give her half a smile. Then I pick a blade of grass and study it as she did. “What do you see when you look at a blade of grass?”

“Huh?” she looks at me with an expression I don’t recognize.

“You were looking at a blade of grass before,” I say. “What did you see?”

“Why? Do you think it’s purple or something?”

I shake my head. “I think it’s green.”

“Good.”

“At least my version of green,” I add. She lets out an exasperated sigh. “But just stick with me a second. What did you see?”

“I saw a piece of grass.”

“Okay. Now, what if you were a ladybug on the blade of grass. What would you see?”

She shrugs. “How am I supposed to know? I’m not a ladybug, am I?”

“You are not,” I confirm. “But do you think a ladybug sees the same thing that you do?”

“No,” she says definitively, picking at her favorite muffin we grabbed at the café on the way here. A crumb falls to the earth. An ant scurries by my left foot and I suspect that he or she is heading to its brethren to report the presence of baked goods so they can organize.  

“So what do you think then?”

“I think this is stupid,” she says and tosses a piece of the muffin off to her right. An aggressive blue jay (a redundancy, I know) swoops down from the deep green canopy of a catalpa tree and snatches it with a victorious war cry; as if to mock everyone else who missed the opportunity.

“I think,” I offer, not that she asked, “that the ladybug sees a long smooth runway that it can take flight from. Like an airplane.”

“Okay,” Molly looks up at the sky. “And is it green?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know how a ladybug sees.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s what I said.”

It’s not what she said though. Not exactly.

“I’m bored and I’m hot,” Molly says through a yawn, which I try not to find annoying – given that it was her idea to come to the park on this sticky morning.

“Okay. So what do you want to do then?” I ask. She’s obviously not into our ‘what if’ game today. I smile thinking about some of the scenarios that have spilled so effortlessly from her imagination over the past two years during our times here. And I try to tell myself that it’s just the heat getting to her today because I don’t want to admit that we’re heading down a certain path. One that I recognize as I’ve traveled it twice before.

“I want to go home. There’s nothing to do,” she whines. Molly tosses the rest of her uneaten muffin into the baseball field and watches it get devoured by a mass of squawking seagulls who are easily twenty miles from the closest body of water. I catch a fleeting little girl delight in her smile and her eyes. It quickly fades.

“You don’t want to go over to the pond and see if the tadpoles have grown? Turned into big old gnarly bullfrogs?” I laugh.

She smiles and ponders this for a moment, but then responds with a rather uncommitted, “Not really,” as though she’s trying it on for size. 

I nod. “Okay. We can go home,” I say with some resignation. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“I do,” she says, standing up.

I don’t know if she picks up on my disappointment. It was not my intention, but she’s always been more empathic than her brothers. She comes over and nudges me gently on the arm. “So…” she begins.

I look at her quizzically. “So…?” I respond.

“So, what if the sky was red?” she repeats, pointing to the sky, trailing a half circle with her finger. “All the way acrost?” My heart stirs at the mispronunciation of the word – which I don’t dare correct. Life and the inevitable shedding of childhood will see to that. 

#52 – Shifting Gears

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged,

They say that every story must have a villain. 

It could be anyone. A selfish robber baron billionaire seeking world domination, a scorned mistress bent on revenge, a demon-possessed child in need of an exorcism. These same three figures could just as easily be the hero in another story though; proving that villainy is fluid. 

As further proof of its fluidity, the villain could be a thing. A rabid dog terrorizing a neighborhood, a too-narrow road that spits cars and trucks from its unguarded peripheries, a quick-moving flood/fire/storm that destroys a village. Then again, the vast majority of villainous ‘things’ are nothing more than the result of human behavior. The dog lacking the care it requires, the road a needless and gross oversight, the flood/fire/storm an unheeded call/cry/warning from the earth.  

The villain certainly makes the story more interesting though. It gives the reader or viewer someone against whom to root. Perhaps even hate. If the reader is a psycho/sociopath, however, it gives him or her someone for whom to cheer. Perhaps even love. And couldn’t this world use a little more love?  

So then what is a villain? 

It’s obviously not that black and white. (Ironic use of metaphor, given that black is usually the villain or dark force, and white represents the hero and the light. I’m certain the slaves in Africa, the Indians being colonized, and the indigenous/First Nations people of North and South America would have begged to differ.) Because NOTHING is ever that black and white. Or more appropriately, that white and black. 

It’s safe to say that, whether your actions were intentional or mindless, you’ve been the villain. At one time or another. Maybe even right now. Because even the most self-aware among us slip up sometimes. Not to mention the staggering number of those of us with no self-awareness. And yes, it’s all too easy to see the sheer number of folks claiming to be victims in the stories where they’re actually the villains. Many of them are victimizing themselves. 

Life is nutty. And I don’t have the answers. Not a single one. 

But here at week #52, the official one-year point of my Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention-Span Challenged, I am shifting gears. Starting next week, the theme will be ‘What If.’ I’m not sure yet what that means. I’m hoping to spin some once again short tales that are a little more imaginative, thought-provoking, and that force me to change the lens of how I (and maybe you?) look at the world. We’ll see what happens. And I welcome you to offer me your own ‘what if’ questions – no matter how weird or unimaginable. I could use the fodder. 

As for the 52 creatures that were born from me this year, I hope to further nurture, teach, and raise some of them into something more substantial. So if you’re among the (precious few) readers who stuck with me this past year, thank you so very much. And stay tuned. 

I hope you’ll stay on board for the next installment.  

#51 – Reframing

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged,

“Come and sit with me,” he beckons from across the room.

She rolls her eyes. “I think you want me to sit on you.”

“There’s no need to be lewd.”

“I wasn’t,” she says. “I was being literal.”

He giggles and laughs like a child.

She plugs her ears to silence him, but can still hear his muffled calls. Plus, she’s looking right at him. His allure is undeniable. 

“I’ll hold you all afternoon,” he says.

“No. Stop.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I need to do my writing,” she says, attempting to plumb the depths of her creativity. But the pool is dangerously shallow today so that any attempt to dive in would render her irreversibly paralyzed. Still, she can’t fathom being any more paralyzed than she already is.

“I hope your creative juices start flowing,” her friend had said to her the hour before as they finished a long walk. The stroll was a procrastination tactic on her part – though she had hoped it would inspire her. The only thing it has inspired is her desire to eat half a box of honey nut oat cereal, scooping out handfuls of Os and pushing them into her pie hole.

“Come on,” he says again. “You know you want to. You can eat those over here and we can watch your favorite show.”

She grits her teeth and sneers at him. Her resolve, however, is coming apart at the seams. She has a weakness for him that borders on pathological. She squeezes her eyes shut again and shakes her head in an attempt to dismiss any thoughts of him.

Then she considers the term ‘creative juices’ that her friend had used. She tries to envision what constitutes creative juice. What is its origin? Is it squeezed from the fruit of a creative tree? And what does that look like? She envisions some Seussian-type tree like a baobab. But in all different colors that shimmer and sparkle in the sun. The vision brings a smile to her face. Until she envisions her creative tree which she can only presume is small and meek and prickly; stretching sadly toward the sun from the darkness of the forest floor destined to never reach the light. 

“Jesus,” she says to herself, shaking her head. “Maybe I need to up my antidepressants.”

“Nah,” he says. “You just need to spend some time with me.”

She sighs heavily. “But what about my writing?”

“What about it?”

“It’s what I do on Wednesday afternoons.”

“And what happens if you don’t?”

“Then I fail.”

“So then you fail today.”

She sighs again.

“You know what they say about failure?”

“It’s the best way to learn?” she responds. 

“Something like that.”

Hobbled by intellectual paralysis and certain there will be no juice from the shriveled fruit in her possession, she decides to give failure a try. Why the hell not? Surely there’s something to learn from this.

Shoving the last regrettable handful of cereal into her mouth, she shuts her laptop, rises from her chair, and goes to him. As always, he receives her willingly. So she lays her weary head on his arm and begins to doze. As soon as she does, she hears the familiar voices of condemnation in her head. They’re always there. But this afternoon, they are a little more subdued. 

And this is undeniably a win.