Tag Archives: very short stories series

#47 – A Moment in the Sun

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged,

As it so happened, Geraldine was not, in fact, dead. Not completely, at least – though her skin did have a certain pallor. But she’d modeled that particular hue directly from the womb; having no ability to swap it out for something more stylish. Yeah, it made her the target of nearly endless derision on the playground. Though in all fairness, the playground was unkind to most children at one point or another. Childhood itself was unkind to most children. 

At one point or another. 

But it had been a long time since Geraldine had been a child. Known now as Geri to her friends and enemies alike, she’d screamed into adulthood like a banshee who’d broken through heavy iron tethers out of sheer force. From that point forward, she was not one to suffer fools and she took no prisoners. 

Even so, with her copper halo of wild hair and sparkling eyes the color of melted ice, she could, on certain occasions, easily pass for a playful sprite. The less observant among her deemed this as hypocritical. But who the hell were they to pass judgment? After all, isn’t everyone a bit of a paradox? Even Tinkerbell was something of a firebrand. 

“Whatcha doin’?” asked Ollie, standing over her and staring at Geri’s sweat-drenched body splayed out on the grass. 

How long have I been in this cursed sun, she wondered, a little bewildered. Her skin – that crepey wafer-thin wrap that still somehow held her body together – was stinging. When she initially positioned herself on the grass earlier, she’d scoped out a shady spot. The sun is the worst kind of invasive species, she thought. 

“Well, isn’t it obvious?” she finally responded to Ollie without changing her position, despite the sun’s searing effect on her skin. 

Ollie shrugged.

“I was talking to a family of spiders, of course.” 

“Ooooooh,” Ollie kneeled next to her. He looked directly into her cold grey eyes with his that were a warmer shade of hazel-green. He cocked a crooked smile. She couldn’t tell if he believed her or was playing along. It didn’t matter either way.

“I brought you a present,” he said, handing her a small parcel wrapped in shiny red paper that he’d pulled from his pants pocket. 

“A present?”

He nodded.

“Well,” she began, pulling herself up to a seat, “it’s not my birthday, you know.”

Ollie nodded again. “Mama says that presents aren’t just for birthdays.”

“Does she?”

“Yep.”

“I see,” Geri smiled and took in a deep breath. “Your mother is very wise,” This was, however, a bold-faced lie. Geri felt that Ollie’s mother was a bimbo. (Did anyone even use that term anymore? Bimbo?) But she also felt no need to burst those shiny iridescent illusion bubbles that fueled his little boy brain. Those bubbles would explode soon enough and she would NOT be held responsible for any part of that travesty. And she most certainly didn’t want to be there to witness it firsthand. The odds of that were slim though; given her growing intimacy with the monitor in her hospital room each time she landed there; spewing out her vitals in a not-so-melodious cascade of beeps. She’d faced the proverbial music more than a few times in the past three months.

“Are you going to open it?” Ollie asked impatiently.   

She was jolted by a fleeting remembrance of how time worked for a five-year-old. The way one minute could stretch out indefinitely, an hour felt like an eternity. What a strange thing is time.

“I am,” she confirmed, gently grazing the dewy softness of his smooth cheeks with the back of her hand. She could almost smell and taste his newness – all cream and caramel with a hint of vanilla.

Geri slowly unwrapped the package. The leisureliness was not an attempt to test Ollie’s patience but rather a necessity because of her arthritic hands. Ollie’s impatience was merely a bonus. As she peeled back the final layer, she found three perfectly stacked animal crackers. 

“Well, well,” she began. “What do we have here?”

“Animal crackers,” Ollie said with proud authority. “A horse, a cat, and then… another one.”

“Another one?”

He nodded sheepishly, looking up at the sky for a moment.

“And what, pray tell, is the other one?” she asked with the most serious tone she could conjure. She held up one single animal cracker with no defined shape. “What kind of animal, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Ollie shrugged, looking past the strange cookie. “I mean, I don’t remember.”

Geri cocked a brow. “You don’t remember?”

“I bit off all the arms and legs and head now I don’t know what it is.” 

She couldn’t help but let out a guffaw. “Let me get this straight! You gave me a half-eaten animal cracker!?”

“I gave you two whole ones,” he quickly reminded her.

“That’s true,” she nodded, impressed with his comeback. “You did. And it’s important to pay attention to the positive,” she said more for her benefit than his. 

“I think it was a spider,” Ollie suddenly said. 

“A spider?”

“The other animal cracker. I think it was a spider before I bit off all its arms and legs and head.”

“Ahhhh,” Geri pondered. “You mean like the spiders I was talking with earlier.”

“Yes. But no. Because I wouldn’t bite off their arms and legs.”

Geri frowned. “That wouldn’t be very nice.”

Ollie shook his head vigorously.

“It makes perfect sense that it could have been a spider,” she said, not pointing out that for the cookie to have been a spider, he’d have had to bite off eight arms and legs and the only animal crackers she’d ever seen had only ever had four. It was this brand of highly sensible nonsense that rented so much space in the adult mind. She was so tired of it.

“Let me see it,” Ollie reached over to grab the amorphous cookie, but Geri pulled it closer to her chest. 

“Mine!” she exclaimed like a belligerent child. 

Ollie broke into laughter, which made her laugh as well. It tickled her how a child could find such delight in adults acting like children. It was as if the adult had unwittingly entered their exclusive club of childhood innocence with a special day pass. And as she listened to Ollie’s continuing laughter, she imagined there wasn’t any price she wouldn’t pay for such a pass. 

#46 – Favorites

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged, ,

Parents always say that they don’t have favorites, but Christina knows this is bullshit. Of Ruth, Moses, and Levi, it was Levi who had stolen her heart from the first time their eyes met. 

Meanwhile, it had been her older brother who was the clear favorite in her family. He was the golden child who could do no wrong and who grew into the golden adult who could do no wrong. Especially in her mother’s eyes. Christina had always taken the silver. Maybe she didn’t get top billing, but it was better than the award given to her youngest brother, Louis. He was never even a contender for the bronze. The quintessential ‘problem child’ since he came home as a squirmy blue bundle from the hospital, he was in military school by the age of 11 when there was nothing more that any of the therapists, doctors, teachers, tutors, specialists, or spiritual gurus (and there were a few) could conjure to save him from himself. 

This was compounded by the fact that her father had no room in his crowded life at that point for additional worry. Having divorced Christina’s mom when Louis was 9 (and Christina was 11), he didn’t waste any time adding two new stepchildren to his menagerie. While they never stole Christina’s silver, they quickly tied for the bronze that was denied Louis. At least, as far as her father was concerned. 

Christina had watched her parents struggle to reconcile their choices when it came to Louis. And then eventually, their marriage. Her mother’s overriding inclination for survival made her a fierce fighter. Meanwhile, her father’s gossamer vision of immortality rendered him an impractical dreamer much of the time. The third child who was supposed to make the family complete instead accentuated these differences and pulled them apart.

“He frightens me,” Christina heard her mother say in a low voice one night behind their bedroom door when Louis was getting ready to enter kindergarten. “He has this… distant look. Like he’s not all there.”

“He’ll grow out of it,” her father had said in way that even Christina knew was dismissive at the time. She’d had the same experience of feeling that disconnect from her younger brother – though she hadn’t been scared of him. Yet.

“I don’t think he will,” she said, desperation in her voice. “It’s like he’s fearless.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” her father laughed. “Would you rather he be a scared little mama’s boy who clings to you all day?”

“Of course not,” her mother sighed. “But you’re not listening to me,” she said, her voice a little louder. “He doesn’t understand consequences.”   

“He’ll grow out of it,” he said again slowly, annunciating each word this time as though her mother didn’t understand. But she did understand.  

So she gave up. Eventually, her father did too. 

And Louis did not grow out of it. It turned out that the fright her mother had felt early on would be tragically justified.

“You ready to go?” Christina hears her husband calling from the other room and she’s relieved to be drawn back into the present moment. She puts the finishing touches on her makeup and walks out to the living room. Her husband is sitting on the couch, Levi next to him.  

“Wow!” he smiles. “You look fantastic.”

She feels herself blush. “Stop,” she says, yet ever grateful that he still regards her as beautiful; even as each of them approaches their 60th year. They’ve been the best of friends for such a long time. As she glances at him and Levi on the couch, her heart feels as though it might break from all the love. She knows it’s cheesy. But she presses her hand over her heart trying to feel for the jagged edge of that broken heart beneath her flesh. 

“Ready?” he asks again.

She nods and takes a deep breath thinking about the night ahead; about the reward she’ll be receiving for the tireless work she’s done in their community; about how wonderful it feels to have the means and the inclination to help so many families become whole again. And to be a part of all of them. She then thinks about her mother and realizes how fortunate she’s been to have the luxury of time and self-study over the years that her mother never did. Of course, it was a conscious choice she made. And it’s a choice she’s never regretted – despite how often she was told the contrary. 

As her husband and Levi rise from the couch, he asks, “Did you feed the skittish Yiddish?” 

She smiles. “Of course I did.” The skittish Yiddish is her husband’s name for Ruth and Moses who stay hidden whenever Christina is not home. Levi, by contrast, must always be the center of attention. In a way, he’s a little like Louis was. But also, not at all. “Need I remind you that I’m one badass childless cat lady?”

Her husband smiles. “Never.”

#45 – Purple Dress Morning

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged, ,

Isabella had a good morning. 

At dawn, the sun poured through her bedroom window, coating the room in honeyed light. She swore she could almost taste its sweetness. 

Rolling over in her bed, she glanced at the clock. It read 7:15 in digital numbers that seemed a brighter hue of red than the day before. Even in the glimmering sunlight. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d awakened to anything but darkness and considered it a victory. She smiled; knowing that her brother Xavier would fail to see a 7:15 wakeup as anything but drudgery. He whose definition of drudgery hailed from a different dictionary than hers. So she decided that the only thing to do was to call him right then. 

“Is everything okay?” he answered quickly in a voice that managed somehow to be both sleepy and alarmed. 

“Let’s get breakfast,” she said. 

There was a long pause and a sigh. “You do realize what time it is.”

“I do,” she said. “And I’m hungry.” 

Another pause. She knew he was tilting his head back and throwing his arm over his face in exasperation. She knew this because she knew him better than anyone in the world. She also knew that he would capitulate because she had barely eaten in a week – despite his repeated efforts to get her to do so. Just three days previous he’d swung by with a bag of Funyons and a cherry Slurpee – two of her childhood favorites – in an ill-fated attempt to lure her out of the darkness. She could not bear to put either to her mouth that day for all of the uncontrollable shaking and shuddering of her body. 

“Fine,” he said. “But you owe me.”

“I will never argue that,” she said. “Ernie’s?”

“Sure,” he said through a yawn.

“Meet at my place in 20 minutes?”

He paused again. “How about a half hour?”

Izzy stood at her window and bit at a loose hangnail on her thumb. She watched her neighbor Corrine tending to her garden. She had a faraway and peaceful smile on her face. “Fine,” she responded absently to Xavier – marveling at how Corrine moved from plant to plant with such effortless grace and focus. It gave her a familiar sinking feeling; something that smacked of failure. 

“See you then,” said Xavier, then hung up. His inability to formally end the conversation with a goodbye had always irked Izzy. More so, in all likelihood, because he was her brother. 

Since she had a little extra time, she decided to shower. Realizing she hadn’t cleaned herself in five days, she knew she must be a bit ripe. At this thought, the words no wonder nobody EVER wants to hang out with you moved across her consciousness as though on a ticker tape. She closed her eyes, shook off the words, and replaced them with an image of her brother smiling at her. 

From the closet, Izzy pulled out her favorite summer dress – the flowy purple one upon which she’d embroidered pale yellow flowers with delicate blue-green leaves. She carried it into the bathroom and placed it gingerly on the back of the toilet. Turning on the cold water in the shower, she quickly stepped into the icy stream. She’d heard that shocking the nervous system in this way was good for the body. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Whatever the case, she felt a long-absent surge of energy edged with a sense of hope. She inhaled the clean scent of the peppermint shower gel, then released a long exhale – envisioning a small cloud of black glitter dissipating then settling to the bottom of the tub where it would circle down the drain and out of her life forever. 

“Adios, ick,” she said to no one. Except, of course, the ick.

She pulled her hair up into a ponytail and looked in the mirror – relieved to be spared of the repulsion she’d felt in previous days. There was a lightness in her step as she walked through her kitchen, swiped her meds off the counter, grabbed an apple and a bottle of water, and went onto the porch to await Xavier. 

Sitting in the warmth of the early morning sun, she reflected on her nearly two decades of practicing yoga and meditation. Then she opened the bottle of water and took her medication. As the cool water flowed down her throat, she was overcome with gratitude for it all. The yoga. The meditation. The pills. And, of course, her brother.

Then she sighed, thinking about all of the unsolicited advice from well-meaning “healers” over the years who thought they had the magic elixir for what ailed her. They promised her she could go off her medication and live a happy life. She was not too proud to admit that, compelled by misguided shame, she bought into these ideas a few times. Not once. Not twice. But three times. Yep. Turns out the whole “fool me twice” trope (or thrice in this case) was easily achieved in moments of painful desperation.

“See, you need to stop referring to them as your meds,” one particularly bleary-eyed New Age creature had recently said to her. “When you take ownership, you become dependent.” And so Izzy had gone off her meds. Three times. And three times, she went back on them when the agonizing emotional pain and physical misery outweighed the shame of needing to take them. This time was the third time. And the last time, she said to herself with resolve.

“I brought you some flowers,” Corrine said, appearing suddenly at the bottom of the stairs and startling Izzy to the point where she jumped. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.” 

“No, that’s okay. You didn’t,” Izzy lied, then added, “I just startle really easily.” 

Corrine came up the stairs and handed Izzy an array of lively zinnias, sunflowers, and snapdragons so brightly colored that they vibrated and hummed. Izzy reached forward to take them and smiled. “Thank you so much, Corrine,” she said, holding them close to her nose. She knew they wouldn’t be sweetly fragrant in the storybook way of flowers, but would instead impart a scent that was organic and earthy. Warm. “This is so kind of you.”

Corrine smiled and shrugged. “We could all use a little more brightness in our lives, yeah?” She nodded in a strangely knowing way to Izzy and smiled as she turned around and began walking back to her house. “Have a good morning,” she called out, leaving Izzy standing on her porch with the flowers and the recognition that, once again, it was a good morning.

“Bella Ding Dong!” she heard Xavier sing as he came up the walk a minute later. 

As a child, Isabella’s name was never shortened to Izzy, but rather to Bella. Shortly after recovering from her first serious episode/setback, she’d adopted Izzy in an unsuccessful attempt to wipe the slate clean and start over. And since she’d retained no childhood friends and her parents had since departed, only Xavier still called her Bella. 

“Nice flowers!” he said with a goofy smile that reminded her of the 3-year-old Xavier.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I think they are.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re up and about,” he said, investigating a ball of wax he’d just mined from his ear. She envied how he seemed to move through life with such ease. He always had. And even if he couldn’t grasp the trappings of her brain, he was always there for her. Always. “Ready to go?”

“I am,” she said, proud that she was unafraid to leave her house. “Just let me go put these in some water,” she said, holding up the bouquet like a trophy. Placing them into a vase of water, she was moved by their beauty.

Yes. Isabella had a good morning yesterday. 

But today, as the same bright sun shines in her window, she begins the day in darkness. The flowers that hummed and vibrated have gone quiet and still while her body shakes and shudders in fear. There will be no leaving her house today, no purple dress, no invigorating shower, no Funyons, no cherry Slurpee. The memory of yesterday reminds her that the meds are finally beginning to work again. Meanwhile, the hopelessness of today tries to convince her that they won’t this time. If she’s to survive, she’ll have to hold on until the next purple-dressed, brightly-flowered, sunshiny morning at Ernie’s with Xavier – whenever that might be.

Because this is the process. 

The cruel, exhausting, goddamned process.