Story #11

Dear Readers,

Welcome to week eleven and story eleven of Very short stories r us. Thanks for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #11

Evelyn had never done this before and she knew it was stupid. She was on her way to her boring, underpaying, shitty job when someone in a nice suit said he wanted to take pictures of her and of course she kept walking. Then he said some interesting things to her about the type of photo shoot it was and the money involved. Life had been pretty grim for her lately, meaning a few years. The guy was wearing a very expensive suit, that helped persuade her. And then he put cash in her hand, enough for several vacations in Mexico without using coupons or frequent flyer miles. So Evelyn got into a limo with the man and rode to the location, a large warehouse. In it, people were dying—of all kinds of things: diseases, old age, bleeding wounds. All she had to do was have her picture taken next to them, one at a time, for eight hours, to be used in a national ad campaign for mid-to-high-priced clothes. The first one was named Nicholas. He had a fractured skull. “Are you going to die?” she asked him, making small talk while the photographer and the lighting people set up the shot and the makeup people worked on them. “Yes.” “How soon?” He shrugged. She said, “Are you married?” She had no idea what she was saying anymore. He shook his head, which caused him to fall off his chair. Evelyn and the two makeup artists rushed to pick him up and put him back in it. “What are you doing after the shoot?” Nicholas asked Evelyn. When the shoot was over, at six o’clock, Evelyn and Nicholas strolled down by the river. That is, she pushed him down to the river in his wheelchair. “Push me over the embankment into the water,” he said. “Absolutely not!” “Relax,” he said, “I was just kidding.” “No you weren’t.” “Well then can I come over?” “And then what?” “Lie in your bed naked with you.” “And have sex?” “Probably not.” “What for then?” “The usual reason.” “Which is?” “I’m dying, you’re dying...” “I’m not dying, I’m the one in the photo shoot who’s not dying.” “Okay, whatever,” Nicholas said. So now Evelyn is carrying on her back up the three flights of stairs to her apartment this guy who weighs around 170 pounds as compared to her 120 and who will die in her bed. Her knees are buckling. He’s cracking jokes and she’s laughing so hard she can’t breathe.

Story #10

Dear Readers,

Good day or good evening. Here is the tenth weekly very short story.

Best wishes,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #10

Eleven billion miles from Earth, the unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft is approaching the edge of the solar system. It has been travelling for 35 years, and scientists estimate that by the end of the year it will pass the heliocliff and enter interstellar space. On board the ship is a gold-plated copper disc, called the Golden Record, on which are encoded images and sounds from Earth. Inscribed on the Golden Record is a picture of the Taj Mahal, a 560-foot-high white marble tomb an Indian emperor built 400 years ago for his wife who had died. There is a picture of a baby being born and one of a woman licking an ice cream cone. There is the sound of a whale and the sound of a kiss. There is a Chinese woman saying “Have you eaten yet?,” a Georgian song about a peasant rebellion, and the brain waves of an American woman who has just accepted the marriage proposal of a man she loves. Voyager 1 is being subjected to the vastly intensified magnetic field of the heliosheath, while Melissa has not left home in three months, and does not go near her windows. Shortly before she locked herself in, she was laid off from her job as a field operative in her state’s Department of Environmental Protection. She is not an egocentric person but she fears for a planet whose governments cast out the protectors of its life forms. She lives near a several-acre step-down transformer plant for her local power company, and wants to move to a house in the country where there is no electricity or pollution. Ahmet, a librarian, has proposed marriage to Melissa, she has accepted, and will not let anyone, including him, into her apartment. “The playful slap in the face I gave you during that drinking game two years ago,” Ahmet says to Melissa from outside her door, where he is sitting on the floor eating dinner for the 84th consecutive night. Melissa, pressing the palm of her hand against the door from the inside, says, “Yes?” “I wanted so badly to kiss you that night. Every opportunity I missed for contact with you I now regret.” “In forty thousand years,” Melissa says, “Voyager 1 will reach the solar system closest to ours, and our message will be heard by its sentient beings, if they exist. Maybe they are already somehow hearing our message. Maybe they are looking in on us right now, me on my side of the door and you on yours, and they understand us.” “What, what do they understand that I don’t understand? I feel so foolish and ashamed, and I love you so.”

Story #9

Dear Readers,

It is a hazy and humid morning here in Brooklyn. A squirrel just tiptoed down the fire escape, the same squirrel that last summer chewed a hole in the screen, entered our kitchen, uncorked a bottle of Beaujolais, drank half, and passed out under the sink. Following is story number nine. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #9

The well was dry. Betsy stared down into it. Blackness, and a vague stink. Her sister, Theresa, had been lying to her. Their parents had not enlisted in the army to fight in Afghanistan. The email Theresa had left open on her phone on the kitchen table was written by a psychiatrist at the hospital where Theresa, it turned out, had committed their mother. “We are still sedating Donna every day lest she once again attempt…” was as far as Betsy had decided to read in that email. She was good at abruptly willing herself to not do things. Like a few years ago when she had been playing Bengal Tiger with her dad, trying to bite and scratch his throat, and each time she did he lifted her up to the ceiling and threw her on the bed. After the third time she didn’t want to play anymore, but he seemed to want to, so instead of saying she wanted to stop—which she wasn’t always good at—she leapt at him a fourth time, and when he threw her, she willed herself to land on the floor and broke her arm, “a hairline fracture of the ulna, and children’s bones heal quickly.” She also was good at retaining in her memory things doctors said about her or her parents or sister, and could call them to mind at will. “Somatic disorder!” she yelled down into the well, and pictured her mom lying in bed holding her stomach. “Impulse control behavioral problem!” she yelled, and thought of the red heart Theresa had etched in her own right thigh with a utility razor. “Cirrhosis of the liver!” “Who’s up there?” the voice at the bottom of the well said. Betsy did not reply. “Can you throw me down the rope?” She didn’t know of any rope, having discovered the well only two days ago in the middle of the thick gray-brown brambles in the empty lot beyond their back yard. Betsy heard footsteps coming through the tangle of barbed plants behind her. She turned around and saw Theresa. “Don’t let him up, he’s fine down there. Come on inside and have dinner.” Theresa walked back toward the house and Betsy followed. Her sister was supposed to be away at college this year but had stayed home, gotten a job at the mini-mart, and was taking care of Betsy. Theresa was wearing shorts. Betsy watched her strong legs with their thick, pale scars in the shape of hearts, peace signs, and letters of the alphabet that didn’t spell anything. Betsy looked down at her own skinny legs on which she saw a sparse network of shallow scratches from the brambles. If their parents were soldiers, then so were she and Theresa. “Theresa?” “Yes, darling?” “I’m nine years old. You don’t have to lie to me anymore.”

Story #8

Dear Readers,

Here is the eighth in a series of twelve weekly stories I am posting on this site. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #8

Two years ago, when Wendy was a cook for the United States Army in Fallujah, her vehicle rolled over an improvised explosive device, which destroyed her legs and burned five percent of her remaining skin. She counted herself lucky to have married a man—Guy was his name—who was still in love with her. Sure, Guy had had sex with other women while Wendy was in Iraq, and Wendy had had sex with other men over there, but for Guy it was women, plural, and for Wendy men, plural, so that the sex would remain more of a bodily comfort activity and not lead to love. After the pain from the burns and the stumps had mostly subsided, which took about a year—and it was an excruciating year, and the pain never fully subsided—Guy put Marvin Gaye’s song “Sexual Healing” on the new stereo he’d bought with the money the U.S. Department of Defense had given Wendy in compensation for the wounds she’d incurred while serving her country as a fucking cook, and he asked Wendy to “do a little striptease for me.” She didn’t pause for a second, or feel embarrassed, she just went for it. It was Wendy’s attitude, and the strange beauty of her new body—which Guy had bandaged and bathed and covered in ointment and lotion and lifted and dressed and undressed many, many times in the last year—that made Guy want her so very much right now. They’d barely even touched when they both came. They had a lot of sex in the weeks and months after that, though they learned to slow it down. Over in Iraq, all the men Wendy had had sex with were American except for one, who was Iraqi. She had come to believe that he was the guy who eventually made the bomb that blew her legs off and burned her. He had been an especially skillful lover and sometimes when she and Guy were going at it she inadvertently thought of the bomb maker and that intensified her pleasure. She knew better than to share that information with her husband, but she didn’t feel bad about it either. After all, besides that and the flashes of happiness with Guy, she felt bad on a daily, almost hourly basis about pretty much everything else.