Very Short stories

The crooked paintings

 There's mystery about those around me. They perform poorly, but only by my recognition. It has created in me a sort of superstitious belief in nothing at all. Here is a story inspired by the ones I love. 

On my last visit, I noticed again the paintings. They hung askew as always. And in the kitchen, the cabinet doors all left open again. 

I do not know which is more tormenting, that these things have always been, or that they are my complaint each visit? So I walk in, and I pretend not to notice, as always, and we gather, as always, to speak in the den by the kitchen bar. Then we go to dinner in the dining room, and somehow it always happens. Before I go, I slip from room to room and let all the corners down, I slither by the cabinets to close them. 

On any major night, my aunt wears a fantastic smile. My cousin, her daughter, is sulking. She has great hair. She has perfect makeup. I feel embarrassed. I haven't tried. I am worst at small talk. I have a dangerous approach, I try to make up for everything by being clever. Everyone is put off by this. This is when I end up straightening things out. The casual atmosphere is undone. And it's my fault, maybe.

The theme is always the same. Holidays and a mixed bag of relatives. Somebody's birthday, graduation. I've found we always stay late. These things happen over the course of a week or more sometimes. At Christmas there are dinners. The straightening is constant. I leave the house walking backwards. Cheek kisses, surveying the damage.

One year I become self-consciously aware of myself, my habit, and the strange crooked pictures. I notice that I'm the only one who seems to notice, and yet, can someone be playing tricks on me? I also notice my grandfather is thinner, paler, and wan. H fails to give me his typical squeeze, that kiss on the cheek? He stays in his seat. The paintings are especially crooked. There are things "gone missing" Grandma says. She isn't her cheery self. She serves boxed cookies from the supermarket, and takeout on New Years. 

A few months pass. I hear leukemia. These events pass by like an extension of the holidays. We meet and we eat. We share more tears this time. Hold each other close instead of sweet brushes off with polite kisses.

I go by my Grandmother's house. Everything is straight. The table is always set. The doors in the kitchen are always closed. I check them, regularly. I feel as though I was from a haunted past. I sit quietly at dinner, I have not felt misplaced in a while.

My cousin is getting married to a smart girl. At a barbecue, I put my foot in my mouth. I'm briefly embarrassed, but then, I feel like I have a family bonding experience there. How do you like that?

She cooks, she buys nice wine. Grandma sits at the head of the table now. The take-out has gotten better. I am starting to have "great hair". Now a days, we notice each other more. People are getting older. Another cousin is having a baby. The first in years.

Things are still straight. This haunts me. It haunts me the way a crooked painting should.

Our Ring

"Is it romantic to believe people have happy lives? Well maybe it is" looking kind of beaten, raising the brows and trying to avoid an emotional interchange between the two sitting there. They both seemed to have that accusing look, and too much. 

"It has nothing to do with a happy life. I don't like it." she tells him. She looks at her hand and wonders why this symbol they knew about before happily ever after was a sure thing has to do with happily ever after? It is so ugly and plain. It has chips and grooves that are supposed to mean taste but mean the exact opposite, or else bad taste. It barely shines. She showed him which ring she wanted. She showed him five times, no ten times! He never said anything to make her believe he didn't understand.

He called from the kitchen, "Men wear plain bands." 

He is comfortable in her mothers house. He says what he feels.

"Are you jealous of my ring?" 

The eyes roll. She stares down in amazement. He saunters in affectedly. He knows he did wrong but doesn't care. He is right anyway, even if he is wrong.

"Why would you do that?" He builds a defense. "The big rings are ugly to me." He explains. "They remind me of different women.  Not you. You think I don't know you but I do. I don't want you to look like one of those women with big jewelry, big hair, and big attitudes."

"Do I have a big attitude now?" she asks, getting upset.

"Like one of those women at the pool in the summer with skin like beef jerky, all brown and wrinkly, with bright lipstick and big diamonds." She shakes her head in disgust. "Or one of those women in the supermarket who thinks she is better than other women." 

"How do you know which women think they are better than other women?"

"They have attitude" he laughs incredulously. "I know you, you like to match, I want you to match with me." 

"You're marrying me, wait, we don't match? I have been wanting a pretty ring, damn it, like every other girl who was ever married. How is this about you?"

"You mean that ring isn't supposed to be about me?" He asks, He is joking, but he is adamant.

"I am confused. How do you do that? How did you make my pretty engagement ring about you?"

Her mother breaks in at this. She knows only words, and not romance. Their words are like a war, but their love is true. She shush's, shakes her head, breathes heavy sighs, explains that you must be cautious with delicate matters, and warns never to say what we don't mean. Her daughter locks eyes with her future husband. She stares at her hand in disbelief. 

"But why would you do that?" softly now, shaking her head.

"We're moving in circles" he draws a little loop in the air.

"Are you being punny?" she makes a sarcastic face.

"What?" he asks absently. They both look at the ring as he stands over her shoulder, his head turned to the side, a strong feeling of pride rises in him. He knows she will wear this ring. He knows that she will. He knows that she will never wear anything that doesn't match it. He knows she will accept it. That she will wear it until she dies. He knows that it will be worn begrudgingly. He knows it will make her think. He knows she will.

Years later ...

"And do you know I never did stop hating this ring?" She said, now very old, a beautiful smile peeling over her face, eyes smitten with tears. 

"I thought of it often. I thought of it when I would dress up and I felt very conscious of his preferring me to "fit with him". I thought of myself, I thought of pretty things I wouldn't wear, and I was like a secret princess, and my beau was my rescuer. He loved me too much to be my on own. Right down to this fine detail."

She looked at her hand, with thin soft skin and noticeable veins and spots. She looked at her ring, with years of wear, and reached her hand to her ear to feel, in thought but without words, her small studs in her ears, barely noticeable in her cream white earlobes. 

The man has been dead for ten years now. They have children and grandchildren. Everyone misses him terribly. Everyone loves their story. A man who loved his wife is always beloved by his family.   

Imaginary Snowflakes

My mother wrote a lot when I was young. She taught me about what it was that she did, told me secrets about it. Short sentences. Straight to the point. She wrote a screenplay while I was a teenager, while I was becoming a woman. It was her very first and she took a long time writing it; perfecting small technical details, stripping excess content, re-imagining her dream. This dream became my dream. An illusion I kept close. A fairy tale ending to a simple life story. 

It happened to be so close to my own life, this semi autobiographical movie-to-be. It didn't deviate from her specific rules for desirable content. Write what everyone can relate to. Write what people want to relate to. She was a damn psychic hotline recorded, I could go back to remember what she said. How it rang true, and how the very obvious failures at adulthood which bring all of us to the brink on our darkest nights, were smartly and sequentially mounting, in conflict and resolution, until they seemed to be the arrows thrown by gods at the hero as they become triumphant over all, to realize that responsibility comes in time. And then you have perfect love and lots of money.

Like her, I was a young mom, single and struggling. The fact that life is filled with misfortunes can be tolerated, even conquered, by positive expectations. Dickens did well to make an exposition of the error we make in believing in happy endings. But you see, even happy endings do not make heart aches disappear. And the story usually lies before the happily ever after.

In her story she returns to a small town where she lived before her life took off. A rags to riches story, if not a coming of age story. There is love, there is loss. Most of the things she suffered I suffered. Peculiar parallels. I moved. I lost. I was alone. I worked hard and I was under appreciated. Blah, blah, but those are the things that if we all knew were coming, ... how much do we need to know there still lies out there a happy ever after?

How much does it help to think of life when it is hard as having been written, and how much do we need to keep moving forward, full of possibility?

To look back we see stories, and though many things we look at, which should be to our sentimental hearts those monuments; births, break ups, or when we won the game, and though these things are meaningful to us, they do not always hold the place closest to our hearts. It is that time we took that moment in, that moment ... that is art. 

One year, when my husband came home with me, before he left, before he passed away, when it was Christmas, when it was very cold outside, late, late at night, when everyone else was home in bed, and we were all sneaking around in the public sphere, when the hours had rendered us criminals, and we shivered in delight, when we were all out on the long lost strip, and the town has since been stripped itself, it has been torn down and put up new and beautiful, (There's that happy ending), there was dirt then. A dirty smut store, a strip club. There was a pizza place that hadn't been changed in years, carpet over linoleum or linoleum over carpet, who could tell? Worn and black with tar. Plywood booths and fast and heavy swinging bathroom doors, precariously locking. That was my favorite place. A fantastic Hollywood burger joint, a tattoo parlor. The familiar oriental rug store, and a very affluent antique store with a then new building across the street. A bright spot. We sat on their new property in someone's future gazebo.

Late at night, the sky black. Except if there were stars, maybe they were all being swallowed by that darkness. The street was all still, an occasional intruder made our hearts beat fast. We had been out, four or five of us, maybe drinking, now smoking in a Christmas light lit, white gazebo, rod iron twisting and turning around us.  The smoke and the steam from our breath making magic puffs in the chilled air, like whispering clouds. We said little between the silence, or else we joked and laughed in fullness of spirit. And we were glad to sit and not be made to go. We were all still so young. I remember it like a vision, inside a globe, with snowflakes most likely not there, invisible to the eye but not to the mind. The magic of winter is that it sparkles with dazzling memories.

That quiet night is kind of a metaphor for things as they are now. Those wondrous flakes, that are invisible but always possible, haunting in the magic of beautiful moments, like those who were there but are now gone. Between the stillness and the quiet, when we still look for these moments, those who have left us can be seen, and we stay a little longer, a little quieter, to feel their presence there, always invisible, but always possible, perhaps floating by like imaginary snowflakes.

One Night Stand- tragic flaw love story

Singularity story, Karmageddon. 

Short story bout the making of Laura, the blockbuster film 

Something else

What is a tragic love story? Is it one where one finds loneliness when they have been able to achieve their dreams? Is it to never have loved at all? To be loved but not know, like some sad missed connections on Craigslist? 

My life would never be the same again, it would never be the life I'd dreamed. And then it was failure upon failure. And then regret. Remorse. 

Triumphant,  mostly by accident. You see, I have had what everyone wants. Maybe nobody knows what they want. That isn't the problem, though. The problem is not suffering enough. I think. I think if people knew how to suffer they would be triumphant over their miseries. Not everybody. Some people aren't disasters. But us disasters, we triumph by disaster.

Let me tell you what I mean. My husband, he is dead. He has been dead ten years this year. True story. At one time, having him in my life again was my greatest mistake. But you never know what life is gonna hand you. I wasn't grading on the curve. I wanted my life to be normal. I didn't get a normal life. And because of that, I started having dreams. Not night dreams. I mean, I started trying things. Creating, self improvement. Yoga. I was even gonna take ballet.

Still true. My brother came to stay once, he was a dreamer, too. Only with bigger dreams, and better plans. His life didn't pan out either. And when he came to stay once, we could have been good for each other, a shoulder to cry on. A place to hang his hat. Like my husband, but he wasn't there, and he wasn't my husband. But I was pregnant. 

I was pregnant, and my hormones were terrible. Oh God, my hormones are always terrible. I my man back, but he wasn't any good. He was always drinking. And he might have been over me throwing him out,  that trick was up. Maybe other women didn't care as much. I made him come home, and my brother left. 

After our baby came, she was perfect by the way, he was Mr. Mom. He wanted to stop drinking. He married me, I'm old fashioned. I'm sure other women didn't care as much. But something changed in him, and in me. And we had a couple of years of domesticated, I don't want to say bliss. How about domestication. We were domesticated. Like saved animals.