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Flash Fictions
Having Vacuum Cleaners
There’s a bridge between our small island and the continental land mass to the west. The bridge spans nine-thousand six-hundred and fifty-eight feet, and is attached to bed rock with twenty steel girders on either side. And because you are trying to help my lines to be more logical and generally clear, you ask, in that worldly workshoppy way, who is the we in this short-short story? I explain defensively that the we is intended to be poignant and universal, symbolizing all of us. And because you are so concerned for my reader’s enjoyment, you ask, in a helpfully condescending voice, why are the physical dimensions of the bridge so important to your collection of sentences? I explain, in rapid incoherent syntax, you just don’t understand. The bridge is just setting. And in this story, it’s not having vacuum cleaners that makes the we so powerful.
Wood-Grained Metal
She has a small garden. And she is really very old. Her children are dead. Her grandchildren are dead. And all but one of her neighbors deal crack cocaine. Thirty years ago, two weeks before her hundredth birthday and near death in the hospital, a salesman with white shoes and no socks offered her a fair price on siding for her house. The decorative aluminum has held up well, and her home still looks new and protected from the elements. Behind her house is a small garden. Occasionally a reporter will drop by and find her there, digging holes or spreading fertilizer. They’ll ask for some quirky folksy sound-bite explaining her freakish longevity. Leaning on a shovel, she’ll point to the ground, and explain how all things are scoopable. Dirt, cat litter, marriages, all objects and experiences, she’ll say, can be scooped up and moved around. It’s not important where things or emotions begin, or even whether they end up in trash cans or orgasmic fits. It’s the transferring, the scooping and moving of critters and emotions and gold-plated silverware from one location to any other that keeps us young. Taking pictures of her garden, the reporter will respectfully thank her, try to imagine her naked, and then begin mentally planning a story about the benefits of organically grown food. And when the young reporter walks to his car, and drives off in his suped-up Z28, the old woman will look over at the wood grained metal surrounding her house, and know that this siding with its lifetime warranty is the best investment she’s ever made.
Raising rabbits is not easy. No, no it's really not. If you get scared, e-mail me and I'll calm you down. Things being what things being.
