Story #20

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the twentieth week of this blog. Following is the twentieth very short story I am posting here. I’ll be doing this for one year, or so I intend. Thanks for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

P.S.: M.J. Fievre has interviewed me about this project here.

Story #20

Katie’s father drove her to her cross country meet on Saturday morning. He was in a bad mood. He took pills, she didn’t know how many or for what. He hid them from her and she never saw him take them. Sometimes they improved his mood, sometimes they worsened it, sometimes neither, but she could sense the pill presence in him, and in his periods of abstention, the pill absence. They arrived at her meet, three high school teams running five kilometers on Katie’s home course. She hugged a few of her teammates and said hi to the rest. They admired her because she was fast, and she liked them fine, but she did not want to get drunk with them on the weekends or, as often happened, sit along a wall and watch the boys get drunk. She befriended the foreign exchange students from places like Germany, Norway, Finland, and South Africa, who introduced her to music, books, words, and ways of thinking that were new and exciting to her. Then they went back to where they came from. She lined up with the girls from all three teams, and a coach from one of the other teams fired the starter’s pistol. For the first 400 meters they would run across a field, take a long looping trail through the forest for the majority of the race, and finish back across the field.  By the time they got to the woods, the girls who’d sprinted out front had faded to the middle of the pack, and the three runners battling it out for second place were ten yards behind Katie. She sped up, faster than she would usually run at this point in the race. She checked in with her breathing, her posture, her stride, her arm swing. She relaxed her shoulders. She had many opportunities for solitude. The solitude of the race was one kind of solitude and the solitude of her room was another and the solitude of cooking dinner while her father was late at work or asleep in his room or mysteriously away was yet another. She ran past the semi-blur of green trees, 35 yards between her and the pack, 36, 38, 41. She rounded a bend and no one behind her could see her. There was a fork in the trail. To the right was the final thousand meters of the race. To the left was the railroad track. She took the left and soon was running alongside the commuter train to the city, which was slowing down for its stop at the mini-station between towns. Katie leapt up onto the platform. When the train stopped and opened its doors she boarded the rearmost door of the rearmost car. Her friend Jürgen was waiting for her just inside the door with a small overnight bag containing a few changes of clothes, some toiletries, and her wallet. Her wallet contained $500 in cash she had earned from babysitting as well as the credit card with the $10,000 spending limit her father had gotten her under the influence of his troubled conscience. Jürgen hugged her, handed her her bag, and stepped off the train. He could not accompany her or his host family, the Lieboviches, would be worried. Katie sat down in an empty seat of the mostly empty car as the train pulled away from the little station. She wanted to try out city life for a week or so and then return home, for now. Her father, Mel, watched as the first few runners emerged from the woods and came into focus, racing furiously toward him across the field. There was a close battle among two of Katie’s perplexed teammates and a girl from another school. Mel was dejected that his daughter would not be coming in first.

Story #19

Dear Readers,

“The only other sound’s the sweep / of easy wind and downy flake,” wrote Robert Frost. Here: the fridge, the pigeons, the garbage trucks, a barking dog, my downstairs neighbors’ new Casio electric piano, and my tinnitus. “Tinnitus miracle,” the internet told me just now when I asked it how to spell “tinnitus.” Anyway here’s the nineteenth of fifty-two weekly very short stories I am publishing here on this site.

Also I am happy to report that Leonardo Moro is publishing one of these stories a week on the excellent Italian literary blog Brown Bunny.

Yours in gratitude,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #19

Lonnie saw her in the morning when he walked out of his apartment building and hated the way she was holding her phone as she got into the cab. She didn’t even hail the cab, she just opened its door and stepped into it after it had stopped at the light, as if her thinking about needing a cab caused it to appear, and the phone in the hand because she was probably willing a wealthy friend or relative to call her on it, once she was inside the cab being whisked to her cucumber facial spa treatment and could answer without straining. She was wearing a white form-fitting dress of course. Next time Lonnie saw her was a month later in the business district where he worked, several miles from his home. This time he just had to say something. He moved in front of her on the sidewalk—not too close, he didn’t want to be menacing, he just wanted to mess up her day a little bit, thereby correcting an imbalance in the universe. “Why do you even wear those?” he said, pointing to the black lace half-gloves or whatever they were that didn’t cover her fingers and went halfway up her forearms. “And don’t tell me for warmth, it’s not even cold out. They’re ridiculous and pretentious. What are they supposed to be, a fashion statement?” He hadn’t meant to say that much but all the while she was standing there looking at him mildly and he felt he needed to keep talking until he got what he wanted. “Apparently,” she said, “they are a fashion provocation, provoking your fashion question. I bought them yesterday. I know it’s too warm to wear them but I really needed a little bit of fun.” Lonnie could still win this. “And why do you just walk around with that phone like some fungus growing out of your palm?” “Oh, well, my mother’s dying and I asked the hospice people to call me when it looks like the end is coming so I can get there in time to see her off and let her know as she leaves this world that she is loved.” “Is she rich?” Lonnie couldn’t believe he had just said that, he’d gone too far. “I wish she were, for her sake and mine,” the woman said, still regarding him in a friendly way, “because then she wouldn’t have had such a hard life and I’d be able to stop taking the verbal abuse that comes with my alimony payments. Of course what I really need to do is become financially self-sufficient. I keep getting involved with these older rich men who turn out not to be so nice. I’m working on this.” “My God,” Lonnie said, sick to his stomach, “I’m like your ex-husband only not even remotely rich.” “You’re nothing like him. Much younger. And so lonely.” “Why are you being nice to me?” “I don’t know, it’s a thing I do, it gets me into some interesting situations, maybe I ought to work on that as well.”  “No,” Lonnie said, “it’s so refreshing!” Tears came to his eyes. She said, “You know, I’ve seen you around the neighborhood, and not only are you wearing a dreadful outfit now, but you have one on every time. Could I please take you clothes shopping right now?” “I’ve only got an hour for lunch.” “Can you call in and make it an hour and a half?” “Okay.” She enfolded her arm around his and he hated her again for a second—just taking his arm as if she knew he wanted her to, which he did. He was now the one with the messed up day, because as they strolled arm in arm toward some clothing store that would no doubt be incomprehensible to him, he wanted her to love him as he was dying, and even as he was alive.

Story #18

Dear Readers,

Autumnal greetings from the editorial staff at ‘Very short stories r us.’ This week we bring you the eighteenth in a series of stories we are posting once a week. Thanks for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #18

Against his oncologist’s advice, Randall started walking one day and kept on going. He slept at night, exhausted, under thick hedges or in sheds. Once a day he went into a fast food joint and choked down a burger and fries, though he had little appetite. He had a credit card and a YMCA membership so every few days he bought a new set of clothes, showered, put them on, and threw away the old ones. Time went by but he had succeeded in losing track of it. At some point he arrived on the moon—rocky hills and craters, no trees or grass, the feeling of walking and floating through corn syrup. Hedges, sheds, fast food joints, and YMCAs did not exist here and credit was worthless. “Looking for work?” A man was standing by a large pickup truck that several other men had already climbed into the back of. Randall climbed in too, though he had to be helped up by one of the other men. They drove for a while and stopped near an enormous pipe whose length stretched to the horizon. The other men jumped out of the truck and joined still other men who were lifting segments of pipe out of a cargo container, carrying them to the end of the enormous pipe, and fitting them onto it. The segments were so heavy and big around that four men had to carry each one. Randall tried to help three other men lift a segment but he couldn’t hold his part and the thing almost crushed them. The man who had spoken to him earlier came over and said, “You’re no good for this work. Sit over on that rock and tonight we’ll take you back to where we found you. You bring lunch?” “No.” “Water?” “No.” “Well it’s going to be a long day for you out here.” Labor was not much different on the moon than on the earth. Randall first sat and then lay on the rock. He was parched, hungry, and in pain. His wife, Sybil, walked up, holding their six-month-old daughter, Clara, and handed him a bottle of water, which he drank. “How did you find me here?” “You weren’t moving very fast.” “I’m so sorry I left you.” “I guess you did what you had to do. Please stay with us from now on. We need you.” Clara started to cry. “How do we get back home from the moon?” Randall asked. “My love,” she said, “I don’t think we do.”

Story #17

Dear Readers,

Thank you for visiting ‘Very short stories r us,’ where I’ve been posting one story a week since May of this year. I woke up unusually early this morning just before, it seemed, a crucial turning point in a troubling dream, and while the coffee was brewing I scraped and washed a baking pan we had used last night for vegetarian sausages, a reassuringly mundane task. It is still quiet in the house.

Yours feelingly,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #17

Jim was fishing with his ten-year-old son, Hal. They did other things together too but those either left little space for conversation (tennis, skiing, videogames) or generated their own (chess, math homework). With fishing, once you baited your hook and dropped your line, then you were just sitting out there in the rented speedboat under the hot sun, waiting. Jim was a pretty good conversationalist if the other guy kept his half going, but Hal talked hardly at all, barely looked at Jim, and when he did he seemed to be either imploring him to talk or telling him it was hopeless to try, which Jim knew meant the same thing. He stared down at the little form of his son’s body, the thin strong arms holding the pole, the freckled face that was the seal on a thousand mysteries. “Did you have a nice week at your mom’s?” A little shrug. Bad opening line. Dumb. “Have you ever been fishing before?” Slight head shake. Classic out-of-touch dad question. God of the sea, help him. “I wish,” Jim said, “one of us would catch a talking fish.” Hal looked over at him warily and said, “What would it say?” “It would say, ‘Hey fellas, it’s a beautiful day, why so sullen?’” “No, no, Dad, it would be a shark, and it would say, ‘Hey fellas, it’s a beautiful day, really happy to be in this boat with you,’ but it would be lying to make us let down our guard, and then you’d just be sitting there going, ‘I caught a shark, I’m so happy, duh,’ and that’s when it would bite you really hard on the calf, right down to the bone, and I’d take off my t-shirt and tie it around the gash in your leg and you would say in this kind of weak shark bite voice, ‘Son, do you know how to operate this boat?’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, Dad, I do,’ and I’d steer us back to shore and in the mean time I’d radio to the paramedics to tell them to meet us at the dock. But when we’re about halfway there you go, ‘Son, I don’t think I’m gonna make it,’ and sure enough I look down and see blood all over the floor of the boat and that’s when I use fishing line to stitch up your cut while steering the boat with my other hand and we get to shore and the paramedics say, ‘You’ve done well, son, he’ll live, we’ll take him from here.’” Jim waited to see if his son would say anything else, but Hal was waiting for Jim to say something. “What happened to the shark?” Jim asked. Hal said, “Oh, it was still alive. Animal control wanted to kill it but Jim begged them not to. When Jim got out of the hospital he built a giant shark tank with his son Hal and put it in his living room, and when they were putting the shark in the tank the shark said, ‘Oh, no, fellas, don’t put me in here, I need to go back in the ocean where I can get caught again and bite other dads. Besides, I can only talk when I’m out of the water. Once I’m back in I can’t—Oh no! Glug, glug,’ and then they put the lid on the tank, and then whenever they played chess in the living room they looked over at the angry shark to remind them of the hard times they went through together.” That’s when Jim felt a tug on his line.