Story #33

Dear Readers,

This is the thirty-third in a series of fifty-two weekly one-page stories, if the word ‘page’ has any meaning in this format. I thank you for your patronage and wish you good health and peace and imaginal adventure in the coming year.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #33

It’s that old familiar feeling. Ed is on a yacht that is leaving the harbor, heading out to the open sea for a three-week cruise, and he realizes he doesn’t like anyone on board and no one on board likes him. As he stands at the aft railing and watches the sea swallow the land, his brother Sal slings an arm over Ed’s shoulders and says, “I feel like I should just get this off my chest at the outset. I still blame you for my divorce.” “This again?” Sal says, “You’re the one who encouraged Ginny to take that cabinetry class. It was fine that she made more money than me as long as I did the woodworking in the family.” Sal had had sex with Ed’s wife long before the cabinetry class, but Ed doesn’t remind him of it because Sal already knows that he did it and would probably give the same explanation about why it wasn’t a betrayal that he has given the other hundred times they’ve discussed it. Ed is about to give his explanation to Sal, for the hundredth time, about how Ginny came to him and asked him about cabinetry classes, and that all Ed did was make a recommendation, but the sight of the mother dolphin frolicking with her baby just beneath the surface of the turquoise water alongside their boat causes him to say instead, “I’m really sorry, bro, I should have realized how much that would upset the equilibrium of your marriage.” “Look,” Sal says, and points to the deck above them, where their two young girlfriends are running around playing tag in tiny bikinis while the bearded captain and crew watch them with undisguised interest. The women shriek and laugh. They are sisters, Alma and Ina. Ed and Sal picked them up in a bar a month ago. They are aggressive, impatient, petty, grasping, duplicitous, and fantastic in bed—a mystery almost as old as the universe itself. There is a limit to how long Ed likes to have Sal’s arm slung over his shoulder, and Sal often exceeds it, which sets off a battle inside Ed about why he can’t just accept love from his brother, even if the love isn’t love of the actual Ed, but a crude yearning aimed at a blurry semi-Ed-shaped target that is the stand-in for Ed in Sal’s mind. Oh, Alma is incredible. If only Ed didn’t have to talk to her or see her at all except from a distance, or while they were having sex, and maybe also for ten seconds after, before his disillusion came back. Ed wonders what Alma feels like to herself when she is lying to him, or helping herself to two hundred dollars from his wallet, or sulking for half the day after Ed, who is paying for her whole ocean voyage, has failed to pull out her chair for her at breakfast. He wants her, now. He wants to have unprotected sex with her. He wants to conceive with her a baby dolphin, who will be free of all human encumbrance, and will swim fast through the clear water, its worst fate merely to be devoured by a great white shark.

Story #32

Dear Readers,

Here is weekly story number thirty-two. Thank you for reading and a Merry Christmas from all of us at Very short stories r us.

Yours,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #32

Kirk and his girlfriend, Claudette, were going on a ski weekend with another couple, and had agreed to meet them in a clothing store. But it didn’t really seem like a clothing store. Oh, it had clothes all right, and they were nice clothes—soft to the touch, pretty patterns, gentle colors—but there weren’t that many of them, considering Christmas was almost here. Their friends had not arrived and he didn’t know where Claudette was. A salesman wandered by and Kirk just had to ask the guy, “Is this a clothing store?” “Sure!” the man said. “I mean but is it only a clothing store or is there something else going on here?” “What else do you think is going on?” The guy was smiling now, as if Kirk had told him he’d just won ten million dollars in the lottery. It was all too much. Where was Claudette? He went in search of her and found a soft chair near the dressing rooms. He sat in it but things didn’t go well from there. He moved from the chair to the floor. He lay on his side and saw several women’s stockinged calves and feet in the eight-inch gap between the floor and the dressing room doors. “I could’ve ended up with any one of these women instead of Claudette and I would never have known the difference.” He rolled onto his back and stared up at the shirts and pants and beyond them, the brilliant track lighting. He was taken by the hand and pulled to his feet by the salesman. “You all right?” “No, I’m not all right. Stop smiling at me.” “I’m not smiling, my face is just frozen like this from years in sales. You’re not the only one with troubles.” “Sorry, man, I just don’t know what the hell’s going on. This has never happened to me before. I can’t find my girlfriend, Claudette. I can’t even really see anything anymore.” Claudette tapped him on the shoulder. “I’m right here, baby.” This woman might not even have been Claudette. Their friends Jack and Sondra arrived. “Ready to go, Kirk?” they said. They had their ski hats on with the goggles perched on their foreheads, like a ski advertisement. Kirk just stood there looking at them. Claudette said, “Baby, I see what’s happening. It’s okay, just come skiing with us.” They left the store. Night had fallen and the air was icy. Snow was coming down fast and hard. Kirk just had a thin pair of sneakers and a light raincoat. They arrived at the top of the mountain and the other three disappeared down the slope. Kirk didn’t have skis, but off he went.

Story #31

Dear Readers,

Snow is general all over New York City. Here is very short story number thirty-one in a weekly series of fifty-two. Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #31

Olivia had just gotten a coffee and was trudging to work. She hated her job and dreaded going to it each morning. She looked up and saw an old bent-over woman with white hair walking toward her. The old woman was staring at Olivia and looked deranged. Olivia looked away and tried to hurry past but the woman said, “Where are you going?” “Excuse me?” “Where are you going?” “To my job.” “Where do you work?” “Fit Woman! magazine.” “Oh, I love that magazine!” said the bent and limping crone who looked as if five minutes of the kind of exercise prescribed in Fit Woman! would kill her. “It’s awful,” Olivia said. “Why?” the woman asked. “Well, aside from the murderous office politics, there’re the cover models, mostly anorexic women whose faces have been digitally altered to look as if they’ve received skin grafts from the asses of newborn babies held under tanning lamps for twelve hours each. And what the manically perky ‘Ladies, you can do it!’ copy in the magazine is really telling you is that unless you exercise for two hours a day and eat only kale and have two percent body fat and a five-minute orgasm every night produced by your boyfriend or husband’s dexterous fingers and larger-than-average cock, you’re not really living. All in all it makes me wish I was a man.” The old woman looked at her gravely. “My dear, you must come with me.” Her bony hand clamped down so hard on Olivia’s fingers that she thought they were sprained. She led Olivia down the stairs of the nearest subway station, walked her to the end of the platform, helped her down a ladder onto the track, and guided her for some time through the foul-smelling darkness of the subway tunnel. The old woman opened a door in the wall of the tunnel that led to several flights of metal stairs, at the bottom of which there was another door. She pushed it open onto an enormous, high-ceilinged, softly lit room that smelled of lavender. There were hundreds of women in the room of varying ages, body types, and ethnicities. They were exercising, cooking, baking, knitting, sewing, building furniture, giving and receiving medical exams, reading and writing. Positioned throughout the room were numerous rotating magazine display racks filled top to bottom with issues of Fit Woman! spanning its entire history. “What is going on here?” Olivia asked. “Some years ago,” the old woman said, “I and a group of my friends discovered to our surprise that each of us loved to read Fit Woman!, and that we had all been doing so secretly and with embarrassment. We decided to be embarrassed no longer, and to join together to follow the exercise regimens and execute the recipes and take the medical and sexual advice and create the crafts written about in this excellent magazine, and to do so collectively rather than singly, because in collectivity there is power. Thus was born The Fit Woman! Underground!” “And what in God’s name is the point?” “The point is to follow the precepts put down in each issue of the magazine for a richer, happier, more meaningful life.” “But what about the impossibly skinny, toned, beautiful, wrinkle-free models in wildly expensive workout clothes who populate the magazine’s pages?” Olivia asked the woman, in whose face time had made one deep crease for every year she’d been alive. “They are our gods.” “What?!” “Do Christians feel oppressed by the goodness of Jesus? Do Buddhists or Muslims feel hopelessly inadequate in comparison to the Buddha and Muhammad? No, they understand them to be aspirational figures.” “But I’m telling you, these models have eating disorders and smoke cigarettes and their so-called physical flaws are digitally eliminated before the magazine goes to press.” “Just so. If you read all the accounts of Jesus that were edited out of the finalized version of the New Testament, you find a complicated, contradictory, and sometimes quite mean-spirited man. But that is not the one believers choose to worship.” “So this is a religion?” “No, I speak of Jesus and the others only by way of analogy.” “Why did you bring me here?” “We’ve been following your work since you arrived at the magazine a year and a half ago. We think it’s been superb. The articles you commission, your re-writes of them, the captions you produce for the photos, your sidebars and headlines, all have been very important to a great many women. You work so hard, the pay is low, your family doesn’t respect what you do, your love life has atrophied, and your doubt about the value of your work causes you real suffering, so we thought it was time to intervene, to give you the love and support you fully deserve, to make your life better.” “You’ve made it worse!” Olivia said. “I feel like tearing my hair out!” “But you won’t, since you yourself assigned and edited the article on the perils of hair tearing,” the old woman said, and winked at Olivia. “Go,” she added. “Go to your office. I’ve already made you late and you mustn’t lose your job. Come back on the weekend, we’re always here. You’ll be treated like a queen, and after a day with us you’ll feel great.” “After thirty minutes with you I feel frightened and sick to my stomach. I’m never coming back here.” “As you wish,” said the old woman, and smiled warmly at her. Olivia turned and pushed open the door she’d entered by. When it closed behind her she was surrounded by darkness. She felt her way to the stairs and began to climb them, clenching the muscles of her buttocks with each upward step, just as a fitness instructor in an article for the magazine had exhorted all women to do.

Story #30

Dear Readers,

This is the 30th in a series of 52 weekly very short stories I am posting to this site. Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

P.S. Akashic Press has published a new very short story of mine here. 

Story #30

This was Sheldon’s first time bringing his clothes to a laundromat. He had never before lived in an apartment that had no washer and dryer. He had never before lived in an apartment. He’d gone straight from the suburban home of his childhood to college—he must have washed and dried his clothes in college but had no recollection of it—to the suburban home of his marriage to Julia. Now that marriage was over and some other man and woman were living in that house, and Sheldon was on the threshold of a below-street-level laundromat holding a black plastic garbage bag containing a month’s worth of dirty shirts, pants, underwear, and socks, many of them worn several times. He stood there for a while looking around at the white rectangular machines, each one gyrating internally and emitting a gurgle or a whine. A man approached Sheldon. “You look confused, buddy. You need some help?” Sheldon nodded. “I’m Edmund.” “Sheldon.” Edmund showed him how to separate his white and colored items, what temperature of water to use for each, and so on. “Did you bring detergent?” “No.” “Here, use mine. Don’t ever buy those little detergent packets they sell here—they’re a rip-off.” Sheldon’s clothes all locked away and embarked on their circular journey to cleanliness, Edmund said, “We’ve got some time, let’s take a stroll.” They walked into a nearby park. Edmund removed a joint from his pocket, lit it, took a few puffs, and passed it to Sheldon. “I don’t smoke pot. I’m an accountant.” “Come on, it’s Saturday morning, and you just got divorced.” “How did you know?” “Please.” Sheldon smoked and coughed. “Thatta boy.” Edmund took some more, passed it back to Sheldon, and back and forth till they finished the joint. Sheldon laughed uncontrollably and had to sit down and felt sick. “You ever ride a motorcycle?” Edmund asked. “No.” “Let’s go ride mine.” “I don’t think I can stand up.” Edmund helped Sheldon off the bench, they walked out of the park, and a few blocks past the laundromat they arrived at Edmund’s big red motorcycle. “Sheldon, there are certain machines you’re going to have to learn how to operate as a single man.” Edmund gave Sheldon a tutorial on the bike and then demonstrated up and down the block a few times with Sheldon riding behind him and awkwardly holding Edmund’s muscular shoulders. “Now you try,” Edmund said when they came to a stop. “I’m really feeling dizzy and disoriented.” “You’ll be fine.” Sheldon rode half a block and tipped over onto the street. The bike landed hard on his leg. Sheldon stood up and found long, bloody scrapes on his forearm and knee. His pants and shirt had been torn. Edmund approached him and said, “Jesus Christ!” He picked up his motorcycle and helped Sheldon to the curb. “You all right?” “A little banged up.” Edmund punched Sheldon in the nose and Sheldon fell back against a parked car. “What’d you do that for?” “You crashed my bike!” “I told you I couldn’t ride.” “Tough shit.” Sheldon’s nose was bleeding and his whole face hurt like hell. He hit Edmund hard with an uppercut to the tip of his chin, something he’d learned in high school boxing class. Edmund crumpled to the sidewalk, unconscious. Sheldon squatted over him. When Edmund eventually opened his eyes he looked up at Sheldon, laughed, and said, “This is fun, right?” “I guess it’s not bad. I’m in a lot of pain, and also hungry.” “Let’s go get lunch, you’re the accountant, you’re buying, and I may need to borrow some money from you later.” “What do you do?” Sheldon asked. “Kindergarten teacher.” A bicycle was coming toward them on the sidewalk and Sheldon shoved Edmund into its path. Edmund regained his balance and leapt out of the way at the last second. The cyclist cursed them. Edmund said, “Nice one!”