Tag Archives: very short stories

#34 – Delicious Music

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged,

Arriving home from school, she placed her backpack on the old wooden bench in the kitchen. It creaked and complained. She sighed in return. She set to replaying the day in her mind, as she often did. It must have been something I said, she thought. Though, as usual, she had no clue what it was.

She felt most of the time as though she viewed the world through the gauzy and gossamer walls of a cocoon. And that she was perpetually at that stage between caterpillar and butterfly. Long languid days in the chrysalis when enzymes dissolve the caterpillar into a soup-like substance while its tissues, limbs, organs, and imaginal discs strategize their move to their correct positions. Yes. She was butterfly sauce. 

What was it I said this time? She bit into an apple bursting with a sweetness that washed over her tongue like cerulean blue music. Were she to describe the experience out loud, that’s exactly what she’d say.

At the sound of her sister and brother in the other room playing and laughing, she felt that familiar surge of overwhelm – bitter in her mouth like unsweetened chocolate. So she sought solace in her bedroom closet just as a nautilus retreats to the first chamber of its geometrically perfect shell. It was a place where she was free to ponder, mull, wring her hands, and gaze through the small circular window on the eastern wall. How lovely it would be if the rest of my house were as perfect as the nautilus shell, she thought. 

From the closet and the space inside her head – that cozy attic corner where she truly resided – her words flowed into the air with seamless precision. They were white-hot percussion – clear and concise. But she suspected this is not what other people experienced. Those troublesome creatures who lived outside of her head seemed to witness something more akin to an illegible sign composed of buzzing, flickering, and fading neon letters; their narrow winding tubes filled only halfway with the illuminated gas.

“Screw them,” she said and moved to a deep nook at the back of the closet. There she had carved out a her-sized spot complete with a small lamp, a pad of paper, and a set of colored pencils. She leaned against her favorite polka-dotted dress and put pencil to paper. Her body felt at ease and she moved through the gateway to an alternate world. It was a world where colors had flavors, flowers had song, and she never EVER said anything wrong. 

#33 – An Inexperienced Homebody

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged

It was their ritual. Every time they settled in a new place, Clara, her younger sister, and her parents would take a long walk to ‘get their bearings,’ as her father said. Clara had come to question the point of such an exercise. They more than likely would be here for only a year. If even. That’s the way it always was. In her ten years on the planet, Clara had never witnessed a full cycle of seasons in one place; had had no opportunity to welcome the return of the perennials that had bloomed the summer before in the yard or to watch for the birds that had migrated the previous autumn. Yet, here they were getting their bearings. Again. Even so, Clara loved this part of the move. It was safe to say it was her favorite – though she was normally not wont to choose favorites. Doing so often resulted in heartbreak.

The ritual was familiar. And being in the company of familiarity was a rarity for Clara. It made sense that the word ‘family’ came from ‘familiar’. Or was it the other way around? Whatever the case, in those first hours that they walked each new neighborhood they would fleetingly call home, she’d willfully ignored how some of the plants appeared to be from another planet; how the people spoke in a way that sounded strangely off to her ear; how the other children observed her as though she were some odd specimen to be viewed under glass. Noticing all of that would come later. And with it would come the prickly insecurity that increasingly populated every corner of her life. But when holding her father’s hand and laughing with her mother and sister during the ritual, the rest of the world fell away. 

This time as they wandered the long road leading into town though, something felt different. Clara glanced upon three grackles and a cardinal perched on a fence near a feeder. The sun was bright and it drew out a shocking iridescent blue on the grackles’ otherwise ink-black heads. The cardinal, by contrast, glowed red even in the shade. (Such a show off.) The recognition of the birds surprised her. In fact, it was the first time that none of the flora and fauna seemed alien. This was in startling contrast to when they’d moved to southern Florida when she was six or to Alaska when she was eight. These locales were particularly jarring. While she hoped to never again set foot in ‘God’s waiting room’ (as her father loved to call it), she’d adored Alaska. Particularly the First Nations people she’d come to know and even call friends. She loved the way they were of the land, the way they knew they belonged to something and to one another. Having no steady home and only a very tiny tribe to call her own, she envied them this. Approaching the end of their year there, Clara had begged her father to stay.

“Pleeeeeeease, dad? Can we please stay? I finally have friends and I love it here.”

“Ah, my Clara,” her father had laughed and patted her on the head. “Who’d have guessed I’d have a homebody for a daughter.”

She wasn’t sure what her father had meant by that. What was a homebody? “Well, can I stay at least? And you and mom and Remy can go to Tennessee? Maybe send for me later?”

“You know we can’t do that,” he smiled and leaned down. “Look, I understand it can be hard moving around. But you have to trust me. It will make you a more well-rounded person.” 

But Clara didn’t want to be round. Nor did she wish to relocate to Tennessee. Alas, the choice was not hers. On her last day in Alaska, she cried. Her best friend Tonngaviak (“Tonnie”) and every member of her family gave her a hug. Tonnie told Clara that when she felt alone, all she needed to do was to look up at the sky and she’d always be right there. Given that her name translated to butterfly, Clara at least half-believed her.

Walking through their new neighborhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Alaska now felt so very far away. But she also realized for the first time that they were only a few hours from where they’d lived in Northeastern Ohio just three years before. Ah, she thought. No wonder. This would account for her familiarity with the birds and many of the plants, trees, and flowers. Bucking her usual convention, she decided to also listen to the voices of the native Kalamazooians (or whatever they called themselves) to determine if she could parse out any unusual drawl. There was none. While this should have brought relief, it instead caused Clara to worry that she’d retained a Tennessee drawl from the previous year. That would be more than enough to secure her candidacy for ‘most bullied’ in school – a role she’d inadvertently won a few times and had no intention of revisiting. Thus, reverting to her usual ‘ritual’ behavior, she kept her head down to avoid eye contact with potential kids they may encounter. She resolved right then and there to eliminate any hint of that drawl before she started school the following week. 

Ech. The thought of another new school made her stomach flip. While her perky and ebullient little sister took each move in stride, Clara was starting to understand that her wiring was different. Faulty, most likely. How else to explain it? The rest of her family – her minuscule tribe – danced gracefully while she performed a series of stumbling missteps. In frustration, she let go of her father’s hand and lagged back a few feet. The sun continued to blaze and she stopped to shed her jacket and toss it to the ground. Staring up at the sky, she longed to have Tonnie come up from behind her and give her a hug. But that wasn’t going to happen. And looking up at the sky, she was betrayed. She felt no connection with Tonnie. Instead, she felt sad and alone. She wanted to go home, but didn’t know where that was.

“Come on, Clara,” her mother called to her from ahead in a sweet and reassuring voice.  “We’ve still got a ways to go.”

“Of course we do,” Clara whispered to herself and shook her head, discouraged. “I’m coming,” she responded with a world-weary sigh, scooping up her jacket and moving forward. The noticed the leaves of a giant oak and a smaller red maple flutter as she passed. Behind her she heard the battle cry of a blue jay and the raspy caw of a crow. What she didn’t see flitting along behind her, however, was a majestic Green Marble butterfly – an insect native only to Siberia… and Alaska.  

#19 – Perfectionism Takes the Gold

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged,

Steph sat down to write. Next to her was one of her three cats. It was the one who farted a lot. Even in her precious, furry, deep-breathed sleep, the flatulence persisted. 

The house was cold and the tight and muffled feeling in her ear distracted her. She was trying to understand what it was saying but the sensation mostly made her feel anxious and irritated. She didn’t want to write today. She wanted to lie on the couch, eat Doritos, and snuggle with her flatulent cat. 

“I promised myself I’d write though,” she said to herself. So she sat down and began typing:

Zelda always felt that humans were more red in tooth and claw than any animal she’d ever encountered. It wasn’t that she was raised in the woods or anything like that. In fact, she’d been raised in 1970s Brooklyn – back when it was a very different place than it is now. She lived in a third-floor walk-up with her mother and her Depression-era grandparents. 

What the hell did she know about Brooklyn? She realized she could change it to Chicago, though she didn’t know enough about the Windy City to make it believable. She highlighted the paragraph and deleted it.

“But it doesn’t have to be perfect,” she reminded herself. Again. “Honestly, it doesn’t even have to be believable. You wrote a story about an asshole cat teaching yoga three weeks ago,” she laughed a little.

She no sooner finished her giggle when Perfectionism emerged; that raven-haired beauty full of rage, shame, anger, and fear. “I fail to see what’s so amusing,” she said with that voice that coated Steph’s brain like an oil slick. “As you know, if you’re not writing something of great brilliance, that just proves you suck. Which, by the way, you do.”

She couldn’t entirely disagree, though she felt Perfectionism’s approach was a little harsh. Nevetheless, she returned to the keyboard:

My first memory of Pelko was when I was six. I was at the Canadian-American border with my grandparents who still lived in Canada part-time. Being at the border has no relevance. Being with my grandparents does. Particularly my grandmother. 

She stopped and looked it over. She did have a pivotal moment at the Canadian border with her grandparents when she was six years old. While she was sitting in the backseat of their car and staring down at the sheen on her patent leather Mary Jane shoes, she was violently gripped by the understanding that she was going to one day die. Just like that. She would be no more. Bite the dust. Cease to exist. And it scared the hell out of her. “No need to revisit that one today,” she said, deleting that paragraph as well.

“That’s best,” said Perfectionism. “It’s hardly a legitimate story idea. Who cares about your revelation?” Perfectionism temporarily wrapped her lithe and sinewy black-clad body around Steph’s frontal lobes before sliding down into her gut. “Ya know what?” she asked, not really seeking an answer. “You should just give up. It’s pointless, really. So why bother?”  

Steph tightened her hands into fists. Not as a result of some burgeoning idea to wage war with Perfectionism. (This was a lost cause, she’d already learned.) It was mostly to warm her fingers. Sure, she could turn up the heat in the house. But she knew she didn’t really deserve that sort of comfort. 

“Honestly, I’m not really sure why I bother,” she said. “I mean, I guess at the end of the day, that’s who I’m doing this for…”

“That’s the person for whom I’m doing this,” Perfectionism interrupted, holding up her hand to observe her obsidian black nails and then poking their pointed ends into the soft tissues of Steph’s lungs to make her cough. It was an unpleasant feeling.

What was also unpleasant was the January sun shining behind her heavily curtained windows. She longed to sit in the warmth and life-affirming brightness of its beams. But it was four degrees outside. Fahrenheit. And her 100-year-old windows were drafty and leaked. 

Gathering her resolve, Steph sat down and began typing again. “You can do this,” she said quietly to herself, while Perfectionism, with her dog-like hearing, just laughed at the statement. And so it went. One silly sentence after another came pouring out. She’d type it and then erase it. Type another and erase it. She did this over and over. Then finally, she began to type:

Steph sat down to write. Next to her was one of her three cats. It was the one who farted a lot. Even in her precious, furry, deep-breathed sleep, the flatulence persisted. 

The house was cold and the tight and muffled feeling in her ear distracted her. She was trying to understand what it was saying but the sensation mostly made her feel anxious and irritated. She didn’t want to write today. She wanted to lie on the couch, eat Doritos, and snuggle with her flatulent cat...

She shut her laptop, stretched, and yawned. Grabbing her farty feline and a bag of Doritos from the kitchen, she headed to the couch where she situated herself under a thick blanket, snuggled in with her cat, and began to diligently consume the Doritos. Perfectionism was sitting right there next to her, of course.

She wasn’t going anywhere.