Saturday, May 10, 2014

Story #52


Dear Readers,

I'm happy to report that my very short story "But the Coffee Is Excellent" has been published at Columbia Journal.

The following one-page story is the fifty-second and last in the weekly series I’ve been posting to this site for a year. I’m intending to collect all of the stories I’ve posted here—and a bunch more that I haven’t—into a book. Some of the stories for the intended book remain to be written. When there is news to report about the book, I’ll report it here. I may even post a new story from time to time, though the weekly series is at its end.

I’ve very much enjoyed this experiment in online self-publishing, and I’m grateful to those of you who’ve expressed your enthusiasm to me and those who’ve read in silence. If you’ve liked one or more of the stories and you have the funds available and you feel so inclined, please click the “donate” button that appears below this week’s story. (As always, friends and relatives are discouraged from contributing money.)

Thank you very much for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #52

I don’t know where I am. I’m walking somewhere, the ground is covered with snow, snow is falling heavily, I don’t have a coat on, I can’t tell if I’m on a road or in a field. Luckily I’m wearing warm shoes. My wife got me these last year for my birthday. And she got me this phone that I carry around in my pocket. “Hello, honey?” “Yes, Bill?” “Where am I?” “You’re out in the back yard, I can see you from the kitchen window.” “Quite a blizzard we’re having. What did I come out here for?” “To collect logs for the fire.” “I can’t find them.” “Keep going straight, you’ve almost reached them.” “I don’t think I’ll be able to find my way back.” “I’ll come out and meet you.” My wife’s face is next to mine now. Snow is gathering in her white hair. Her name is Gloria. “Come on back inside, darling, thanks for getting the wood.” “Why did my brother send me ashes in the mail?” “That wasn’t your brother, that was our son, Randy, he’s in Chicago, he sent you a letter and you held it near the toaster while you were making toast yesterday and it got burnt.” We’re at a doorway now. A strange old woman with white hair is pushing me through it. “Don’t push me, leave me alone!” “It’s okay, Bill darling, come inside and warm up. Thank you for bringing the logs.” “Hold on, I need to call my wife.” The old woman says, “Sit right here in this chair and call her.” “Hello, honey?” “Yes, Bill?” “I don’t know where I am.” “Don’t worry, darling, I’m coming to get you.”

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Story #51


Dear Readers,

Here is the second-to-last very short story in a weekly series of fifty-two. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #51

Les looked up at the mark on the wall, then back down at the floor. He was sitting in a comfortable chair. Les is more, he was told several times a month, usually as a kind of song whose melody rose and fell. He looked up again. The room was dim and the mark resembled his brother’s face. Milt had been killed in the war, not by a bullet or a bomb. His armored vehicle had tipped over the side of a low bridge and Milt got pinned down, his head submerged in the mud of the riverbed. The initial description of Milt’s death given to Les by the uniformed captain who came to his house six months ago to tell him the news did not include the detail of Milt’s head in the mud, but Les had insisted on knowing exactly how his brother had died, and the captain had told him, and now he knew and could not stop knowing. He drank, not every day but three or four or five days a week, enough so that each time, the knowledge of the manner of his brother’s death was submerged in the whiskey. Les had indeed been more, when his brother was alive. His brother’s body and thoughts and deeds had amplified Les’s own. This had often been a source of pain for Les. Milt was taller, stronger, smarter, braver. Les was older and lazy and tired and scared. His daughter came into the room. She was twelve. Her name was Dorla. “Thinking about Uncle Milt?” “Yeah.” “I miss him so much, Daddy.” “See that mark on the wall?” “I think so, it’s kinda dark in here.” “Doesn’t it look like him? Come here, doesn’t it?” “I don’t know, I’m not really seeing it. Want to play basketball?” “Sweetie, I’m drunk.” “I know.” “I can’t.” “Come on. Seriously. Get up. Please.” Les stood with effort. Dorla was beside him. He smelled coffee and saw now that she was holding a cup in her hand. “Put your right hand on my shoulder and take this cup in your left hand and drink it.” He did. “Okay now we’ll just go shoot some baskets.” He eased down the hall and out the door onto his driveway where the hoop was set up. The sun was going down. Dorla stood at the foul line Les had drawn several years ago and she threw the ball up into the basket. She took three more shots, made two and missed one. She passed the ball to Les and he nearly fell over catching it. He stood halfway between the foul line and the basket, aimed, shot, and missed everything except the side of the house. “You shoot and I’ll just watch, darling,” Les said. “No, Dad, shoot it again, come on, you can do it.” “Dorla, I can’t.” “Dad, look, the energy in the house has gotten pretty bad. Make some shots and then we’ll go in for dinner, where you should try to not be quite so drunk.” “Okay, okay, pass the ball.” She threw it, he caught it and wobbled again. He tried to bring himself more fully into the world through the feeling of the textured rubber against his fingertips. He would try to sink a basket, because for reasons beyond him to understand, this seemed to matter to Dorla, and to Kathy, his wife, who now stood at the kitchen window, her face obscured by the dusk she was looking out into.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Story #50


Dear Readers,

Today’s offering is the antepenultimate one-page story in a weekly series of fifty-two stories. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #50

Tim was trying to take a nap and his housemate’s dog, Frank, was howling by the front door. Tim’s bedroom was just to the right of the front door. He was tired and the dog’s howling was preventing him from getting his rest before his eight-hour afternoon shift at the convenience store. Frank had only three legs because he’d run out into the middle of the road as a car was approaching and had been hit by it. Typical Frank move. Frank was stupid, and now that he had three legs, he was also pathetic. And Frank’s bladder, which was the cause of his current howling, was the responsibility of his owner, Tim’s housemate Annie. Tim had his own problems and some gimpy idiot dog’s bladder shouldn’t have been one of them. Frank emitted cries of a higher and higher pitch, mournful and infantile. Frank must have had some trauma as a puppy and was emotionally stuck at the puppy stage and went around continually acting like a puppy in his adult dog body. Tim got out of bed and threw open his door. There was Frank looking up at him with sad and urgent eyes. Tim would open the front door for Frank but not before he gave him a piece of his mind. “Bad dog!” were the words that occurred to him to say. “Bad, bad, bad, bad dog!” Each time he said “bad,” Tim slapped the front door above where Frank was standing. Frank emptied his bladder onto the floor and ran away to hide from Tim. Tim cleaned up the dog’s urine with a mop and took the hour-long bus trip to his job. He would have to talk to Annie about taking care of her own dog but she was nine years younger than he was and self-assured and a lesbian and he wouldn’t be able to say what he wanted, which was not to be burdened with her dog and its needs. Tim arrived at the convenience store. His first task was to load fresh hot dogs into the steamer. The steamer sat next to the cash register and was also a glass display case that allowed the customers to see the moist, tired hot dogs rotating and revolving like oblong meat planets in a solar system with no star. Customers came in throughout the afternoon and bought cigarettes, coffee, milk, ice cream, potato chips, gum. Tim sold maybe one hot dog a month. He was 32 and hated his job. The store emptied out and he was alone. He stared at the hot dogs spinning, spinning. He saw the pig they had come from, miserable and living in a crush of other pigs, being slaughtered, hung up to bleed out, ground up, shoved in casings made of his brothers and sisters. He took the bus home, watching the stars and planets in the black sky out the window. In the communal kitchen, Annie and Tim’s other housemates were having a drink before bed, talking and laughing. They all were one another’s friends and none of them was his friend. “Annie?” he said. She looked up at him indifferently. “May I take Frank for his late night walk?” he asked. She stared at him, then shrugged. “Where is he?” Annie indicated her bedroom with a slight gesture of her head. Tim opened the door to Annie’s bedroom. It was dark in there and he could see nothing except, faintly, Frank’s two frightened eyes staring at him from the corner. “Frank?” Tim said. “I’m here to take you for a walk.” The dog whimpered quietly. “I’m sorry I yelled at you today.” Stillness and silence. “I promise I’ll never say an unkind word to you again.” Frank wouldn’t budge. Tim got down on his hands and knees and waited by the door.

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Story #49


Dear Readers,

This is the forty-ninth weekly very short story in a series of fifty-two. Thank you very much for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #49

Todd’s mother’s diabetes caused her placenta to deteriorate prematurely so Todd was born retarded, but he outgrew it. By age four he was singing. By six he was an international opera star. He didn’t speak till age eight, when he said, “I don’t want to sing opera in public anymore, it’s humiliating.” He was a very fast runner. One fine day two years after his last singing engagement, his mother, Sandy, drove him down to the track at the high school and timed him in the mile—the tenth fastest time in the world for a boy in his age group. But she knew better than to enter him in a worldwide track and field meet, having learned her lesson when she’d cancelled his last singing tour and was slaughtered on the internet, which triggered a year-long drinking binge that led to the loss of her left leg below the knee, what with the diabetes. Plus the stress of having a peculiar child. He continued to speak almost not at all except to himself, in his bedroom, at night, saying things like, “Don’t worry, I am watching over you, and before long I will come to rescue you from this unsatisfactory life.” She puzzled over who in that speech was imaginary, the speaker, the listener, both, or neither, and concluded that it didn’t matter, the meaning was clear. She told him she’d heard him talking in his room and asked what it was all about. He looked at her in silence, a form of contact despite his thoughts and feelings being unknown to her. And not the only form. He smiled at her when she placed before him each meal that she had prepared, and every third night or so until age twelve, he climbed into her bed and clung to her as the survivor of a wrecked cruise ship clings to a passing chunk of wood. Sandy stopped drinking and was fitted for a prosthetic leg that allowed her to go jogging with Todd—she was quite fast too, and still young, and through controlled diet and exercise had eliminated her illness. On the morning of his fourteenth birthday they were out running in a field when there appeared a dark, medium-sized dog. The dog greeted Todd warmly and vice versa. “Hi poochie, hi poochie, hi poochie,” six more words than he’d spoken to her all week. Watching this communion, she failed to notice the arrival of the dark girl who owned the dog. Todd straightened up from petting him and looked at the girl. She looked back. Sandy saw that they had never met before, but, as if along wires between their two pairs of eyes, they agreed that they would know each other. “Let’s go for a run with him,” the girl said, and Sandy’s immobilized feet said that the invitation did not include her. Todd picked up a stick, and with the strength and agility that still surprised her, he threw it far down the field. The dog took off after it at top speed. Todd and the girl went after the dog. The girl and the dog, neither of whose names she knew, were also very fast. The three of them stopped long enough for Todd to wrestle the stick from the dog’s mouth and throw it again. They sling-shotted out after it, and so on. Alone in the field, the mother watched her son and his new companions become smaller and smaller until she could not see them.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Story #48


Dear Readers,

In this, the forty-eighth weekly very short story on this blog, we accentuate the very. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #48

Ronald hated scented soap. He went outside and screamed. He sat down by a brook and rested his chin on his hands. His housemates used so many scented household products. It wasn’t entirely their fault, there were far more scented than unscented household products on the market now. Why stop with soap or candles or furniture polish? Why not scented windows, scented electricity? So Ronald had argued. They’d ignored him. That was because he didn’t pay rent, or know them. They had begun by asking him to leave, then they’d called the cops, back when he began living with them, five days ago. Ronald was younger than they were. He was twelve. The scents of manufactured goods in this house, in his parents’ house, in any interior or exterior space had become a cacophony to him, a thousand tubas an inch away from his head. The brook was quiet, scentless, though not without a smell. The smell of moss, which he had not noticed until last year, was now central to his life. He lay down in the moss by the brook. It enveloped him. To die in moss. School was starting in a week and then the fun would be over.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Story #47


Dear Readers,

This is weekly one-page story number forty-seven, in an ongoing series of fifty-two. The previous forty-six stories are available over on the right-hand side of this page. Thanks for reading.

Matthew Sharpe


Story #47

I was visiting my father in the psychiatric hospital when I saw my childhood enemy walking toward me down the hallway. He was wearing a thin robe, his head was shaved, and he had a thick scar that started at the top of one ear and arced over his head to the top of the other like a rainbow. I hadn’t seen him in forty years but I’d have known him anywhere. “Chris Markham!” I called out, and pointed a finger at him. He didn’t even look at me. He just kept moving slowly forward, mouth open, bloodshot eyes to the front, a slight jolt with each footfall as if he were walking on stilts. He’d hardly changed at all, still underhanded and duplicitous. My visit was ruined and I didn’t know how I’d ever come back to this place. My father was doing sad, almost immobile jumping jacks when I entered his room. His eyes and face looked less blurry today than usual but he was an old man who’d had a hard life. “Buddy, hi. Your friend Chris is here. Great kid.” He sat down on his narrow twin bed and pointed to the one of hard-backed chairs for me. He said, “Nice to have some company in here. He’s good at conversation, ping pong, and backgammon.” For two years Chris had beaten me whenever he caught me alone, and he always emphasized this—“It’s just you and me now, Buddy”—which made the beatings more frightening, no one to intervene, nothing to stop him from hurting me but his own maimed morals. I never could think of what to say to my father on these visits so we just sat there in silence, me wanting to throw my chair through the window and watch it break apart on the dirty concrete floor of the alley below. Chris shambled in and my father pointed to the hard-backed chair next to mine. Chris sat. My father leaned forward and slapped him on the knee. Chris’s eyes were still vacant, his mouth open, the red scar moist and new, but I saw what was going on. “Chris, this is my son I was telling you about, you remember him?” Chris, who hadn’t looked at me the whole time, said, “He fell down a lot.” Well that was too much. I stood and punched him in the jaw as hard as I could, or would have, if he hadn’t caught my fist in his open hand. “Buddy,” he said, “let’s not do this, I’ve had a hard year.” My father said, “If you can’t forgive, the past is going to eat you up. Anyway, I’m just glad to be here, like old times, with my two boys.”

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Story #46


Dear Readers,

This is the forty-sixth in a series of fifty-two weekly very short stories I’m posting. Today’s story honors March Madness. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #46

Mick found a well-played game of basketball to be about the most profound and beautiful thing he knew in this life, but because he was nearsighted, slow, clumsy, easily winded, and five feet four inches tall, the only way for him to participate in the game in its fully realized and sublime form was to bet on the performance of professional teams. Only then did the degree of Mick’s personal investment in each moment of the game and in its outcome approach that of an actual player. This same degree of investment caused him to bet on the teams with which he felt a bond of similarity, and so he bet repeatedly on a certain Eastern Conference team that played with the most heart. Mick’s current indebtedness to his bookie was upward of two hundred times the amount of money he possessed or was likely to soon possess. One of the reasons he had moved—temporarily, he hoped—from his two-bedroom ranch home into the inexpensive motel room on the warped mattress of whose double bed he now lay staring at the ceiling, was not to hear his home phone ring when his bookie called, since Mick lived more vividly through his senses than through concepts. On this winter afternoon, the frigid air blew into Mick’s motel room under its unevenly hung door. As he wrapped the polyester blanket around his shoulders, his alarm clock rang, signaling the start of a game between his favorite team and their most formidable adversary. He turned on the TV to watch it and heard a sharp knock at the door. He sat on the foot of the bed for the tip-off, and just as the opposing team scored its first basket he heard a second, sharper knock. Mick went to the door, looked through the peephole. Standing outside in the cold was Yuri, an oversized employee of Mick’s bookie. Mick opened the door and invited him in. “The game just started.” Yuri glanced at the TV and frowned. “You shouldn’t be watching that.” “I’m not betting on it.” “I know you’re not. Do you have anything for me today?” “Seventy dollars.” “Seventy dollars is less than one percent of your debt. He needs at least ten percent.” “I don’t have it, Yuri.” Yuri frowned and looked again at the TV, where the game that had brought him together with Mick was being played with fury and grace. Mick said, “Sit and watch it with me for a bit.” Yuri shrugged, walked slowly to the only chair in the room, and lowered his significant bulk into it. Mick sat back down on the bed, and they watched the game they both loved. Mick said, “Have you ever played?” “Tried, but I’ve broken so many of my fingers that my ball handling is crude. I’m going to have to hurt you today.” A guard for Mick’s team threw a bounce pass to the other guard. A quick and long-armed forward for the other team intercepted it, dribbled the ball down to his team’s end of the court, and scored an easy layup. It had been a beautiful pass, if not in the execution then in the intention.
  

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Story #45


Dear Readers,

Warm equinoctial greetings to you. This is the forty-fifth in a series of fifty-two weekly stories I’m publishing on this site. Thanks for reading.

Matthew Sharpe


Story #45

Mayo, mustard, cheese, lettuce, turkey, bacon, rye bread, whole wheat, pumpernickel, kaiser roll, rye, there was no way Connie was going to make it to the kitchen with all this information organized sandwich by sandwich in her head. Not allowing waitresses to write down the customers’ orders while standing at the table was on a par with waterboarding enemy combatants to extract actionable information from them. She reached the window between the kitchen and the restaurant proper. The cook stared at her through it from the kitchen side. She stared back at him defiantly. The noise of the fourteen conversations behind her gathered in her ears. The cook rolled his eyes and turned back to his stove. Connie looked down at her shiny purple uniform to stabilize herself but instead the color and texture of it nauseated her. “All right,” she said, out on the street on a blustery late autumn day after having quit, “so restaurant work is not for me. What does that leave?” “You could go back in. I’m going to, as soon as I have my surgery,” said a young woman in a dark blue uniform who wrote on a bright orange piece of paper and slid it under the windshield wiper of a parked car. Connie said, “Go back into the restaurant?” “No, stupid, go back into the military.” “How do you know I was in the military?” “Let’s see, you’re about 28 years old, you just quit a low-wage job probably not for the first time, you’re standing on the street without a proper coat, you’re talking to yourself, and you have that look like bombs went off near your head.” “What’s your surgery?” “Hip. Humvee crash.” “You look to me like you’re walking okay.” “That’s because I’m a Marine.” “Army,” Connie said, “but if you’re going back in you should join the Air Force. Better accommodations.” The meter maid who was also a Marine sneered. “Anyway,” Connie said, “what, you’d get a desk job?” “Sure.” “And be ordered around by people who haven’t even been over there but think they know more than you because of the patch on their uniform?” “Better than being ordered around by a traffic cop. At least if I go back in I’d be serving my country.” “You’re serving your country now.” “Punishing some sucker who forgot to move his car? Where’s the honor?” Connie said, “Where’s the honor in punishing 100,000 suckers who didn’t even turn out to have WMDs?” Connie could tell the Marine was deciding whether to punch her in the face. Luckily this woman seemed to value even her no-honor job more than Connie had valued hers. “Have a nice day,” the meter maid said and moved on to the next car. A motorcycle came roaring down the street and Connie dove for the sidewalk. She lay there face-down and pictured the colonel who’d de-briefed her battalion when they returned, warning them this might happen. He’d put his right hand up to the left side of his chest and slapped his ribs a bunch of times fast to mime a racing heart. Marcel fucking Marceau saying “Hey, that just means your body’s working the way it’s supposed to after you’ve been in a combat zone. That just means you’re normal.” She stood up again and looked around for the Marine to see how she’d handled the blast of noise. Didn’t see her. There was a bar a few doors down from the restaurant. No, no bar today. It was two in the afternoon. Her mother was at work till six so Connie would have the house to herself for a while. She’d go lie on her bed and do the breathing exercises the colonel had taught them. Not even her bed was safe, but it was reasonably comfortable.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Story #44


Dear Readers,

This is the forty-fourth story in the weekly series of one-page stories I’ve been publishing here since last May. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #44

Things rarely went well for Ralph and he often got into trouble. He was up in the treehouse sniffing glue one day when his twelve-year-old daughter climbed in with two of her friends. “Dad, are you kidding me?” What were she and her friends doing up there in the middle of winter, anyway? He climbed down and walked out across the frozen river and fell in through a hole in the ice. The current carried him away from the hole. He was under the ice somewhere, freezing and suffocating. He found a little air pocket and breathed. From the left, he heard his mother’s voice. “Fuck off, Ralph,” it said, just as his mother had done when she was alive, having been an alcoholic and in a rage much of the time. He went toward her voice, as he did so often in childhood, like one of those sad baby monkeys in the psychology experiment that clings to a cold metal stick if it’s all the mother that’s available. He saw a hole in the ice and moved toward it. The hole was the wound in his mother’s soul, which she now offered to him as an escape hatch from icy death. He knew that when he climbed through it he would be healing both himself and, posthumously, her, leaving behind the terrible life he’d led thus far. He emerged from the hole freezing, aching, panting, in pain, barely able to move. His wife, Cynthia, stood there, looking at him mournfully. She was not an alcoholic or addict, and was kinder than his mother had been. “I’m divorcing you, Ralph,” she said. “Oh please don’t, Cynthia my love,” he said, “I’ve changed.” “Oh,” she said, and wept. In intense pain, he put his arm around her and walked her back to the house, comforting her and leaning on her for support. He didn’t know what her response meant or whether she still intended to divorce him.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Story #43


Dear Readers,

Thanks for coming here. This is the forty-third in a weekly series of fifty-two stories I am publishing in this space, wherever it may be.

Best wishes,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #43

At the party, a technology reporter for a major newspaper spoke to Gene excitedly about a new app he was using. “Look at this,” he said, and Gene looked down at the bright two-by-four-inch rectangle in the man’s clean, manicured hand. So this is what the hand of a successful person looks like, Gene thought. The reporter, Norwood, was rapidly touching one image after another on the little screen, telling Gene how useful and time saving and well made this app was. Gene used technology too. He input things and word processed things for a law firm. He wondered if anything about his life would improve if in his free time he were to use the app Norwood was showing him, and he could not account for what he did in his free time. He wondered why Norwood had chosen someone of a lower importance level than himself to show his new app to, and with so much enthusiasm. He also wondered why it was not he who was talking without interruption to Norwood and why he did not ever talk without interruption to anyone about anything. Norwood’s wife approached, said, “Norrie, there’s someone at this party you should meet, come on,” and pulled him away without glancing at Gene. She was bigger than Norwood. He understood that Norwood would need that much surface area and volume over which and through which to distribute his energy. She was taking him, Gene saw, to meet an older man whose photograph he’d seen on the internet, a kingmaker in the publishing business. This would be an important introduction for Norwood that his wife was brokering. Gene moved to the window and looked out at the dark shapes of the buildings across the street in this formerly industrial part of the city, and at the dirty pink urban fog, lit from below and superimposed upon the black night sky. People walked slowly past him near the window and he did not try to start a conversation with any of them. A long time went by. Norwood returned, drunk, his face red and sweating. “That went terribly,” he said, “I humiliated myself. It happens about 80 percent of the time my wife introduces me to powerful people, and she gets furious at me. I’ve been hospitalized for depression.” “Let me show you something,” Gene heard himself say to Norwood, and pointed out the window at the barely visible buildings across the street and the muddy pink sky above them. “What are you showing me?” Norwood asked. “I don’t know,” Gene said. “Come on, I’m very vulnerable right now, don’t just show me some garbage that isn’t anything.” “Everything is something and everyone is someone,” Gene said and realized. Norwood looked at him almost in tears. “So you’re saying I should just look at… whatever.” “Sure.” Norwood looked, and after ten seconds he said, “This is some kind of joke and I resent it.” He turned abruptly away from Gene, saw his wife, and moved hastily toward her. She nodded severely at him and held out her large arm. He took it in his smaller one, and they strolled into another room of the party, maybe to meet another powerful person. Gene stood by the window, through which he had lost the heart to look. He didn’t know what to look at now, or what to do.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Story #42


Dear Readers,

This is story number forty-two in a weekly series of fifty-two one-page stories that I have posted and will post to this site. Thanks for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #42

Chet disliked his guru. He’d been visiting the man once a week for six and a half years and paying him a hundred dollars per visit. Another more senior guru had referred Chet to this guru in a phone call that lasted three minutes. Chet had known nothing about the senior guru except that a few friends who were into this sort of thing had said, “Oh, Sheldon’s definitely the one to go to, he’ll set you up with one of his disciples, they’re all amazing.” Chet felt people overused the word amazing. Chet’s guru, Joel, was not amazing. He seemed uptight. His white robes would have looked more natural on a tuna fish. His remarks and pronouncements had a tinny, pre-fabricated sound. “Whenever you’re ready.” “Whenever you feel comfortable.” “Take your time.” “Breathe into that.” “Breathe and just allow that.” “How does that make you feel?” “Where in your body do you feel that?” “Can you see your father as wounded and trying to love, just as you are wounded and trying to love?” Chet began their 293rd session by saying, “Most of what you’ve said to me is a lie. Your whole system is a lie. Your white robes are a lie. The groovy woven cushion you’re sitting on is a lie. Why is it so much nicer than the cushion I’m sitting on? What kind of message does that send? How can you afford this huge loft space anyway? Do you have family money? You don’t seem to have any other disciples than me. Have you ever worked a day in your life? This is my last session. I won’t even stay for the whole hour. I’ll pay you for today even though I don’t want to and can’t afford it. I’ve spent more than twenty-nine thousand dollars on you. Do you want to say anything to me before I go?” Joel looked miserable—Chet could smell the acrid odor of his fear sweat. “It’s very hard to hear all this,” Joel said. “I didn’t really think we were making much progress but I’ve been hopeful that we would. You should come back at least one more time so we can have closure.” “Do you have any disciples other than me?” “I’m going to breathe into my distress. Breathe with me.” “I’m getting out of here.” Chet stood up from his cushion and Joel stood up from his. Joel held out his hand for a shake. Chet reluctantly took it. It was wet. “My parting advice to you is—” “Let go of my hand.” “—is to walk around the city every day and let it affect you. Don’t be so closed off.” “I am not closed off.” “Just so.” “Just so” was Joel’s go-to pronouncement. Chet was stuck with it going down in the elevator, “Just so,” “Just so,” “Just so,” “Just so,” once per floor for eighteen floors. As Chet raced through the lobby the doorman called after him, “Got a plane to catch?” The pleasantries of strangers often contained an implied criticism. He stood on the sidewalk in front of Joel’s building trying to figure out where to go and what to do. A downtown bus was arriving across the street. “I am not walking around the city,” Chet said, and stepped off the curb to cross the street and catch the bus. His foot landed at the edge of a pothole and he twisted his ankle and fell down. He stood up and tried to walk but fell down again, his ankle hurting like hell. He sat down on the curb. “I was worried about you so I followed you out,” Joel said behind him. “Let me help you up.” Chet allowed himself to be helped to his feet by Joel and could smell Joel’s b.o. combined with his lightly perfumed laundry detergent. “Hold onto my shoulder and hop,” Joel said. He helped Chet back into the elevator. In his loft, he eased Chet down onto the second-rate disciple cushion and sat down across from him on the deluxe guru cushion. “I’ll call 911,” he said, removing his phone from a pocket of his robes, “and we’ll have some time to talk about this before the paramedics arrive. I’m glad you’ve come back.” Chet saw the happiness on Joel’s face. He sank into a familiar depression.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Story #41


Dear Readers,

Hello and welcome—or welcome back—to ‘Very short stories r us,’ where I am posting one one-page story a week for a year. Following is story number forty-one. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #41

The cat, Parsley, disappeared in the spring. Polly and her daughter, Rachel, assumed she’d been felled by a raccoon or a car. Then one afternoon in midsummer, thin and matted and glassy-eyed, Parsley walked in through her cat door, lay down in her customary rectangle of sunlight on the kitchen floor, and died. Rachel caught this on her phone. She caught everything on her phone. She showed the video of Parsley dying to her mother while videoing her mother’s reaction, and then asked Polly to share her feelings. Polly wondered why Rachel requested, during the feelings-sharing, that Polly not refer to Parsley by name but call her only “our cat.” Turned out it was because Rachel had changed Parsley’s name in the video to The Rock. Upon seeing the video for the first time, before Rachel uploaded it, Polly did her best to find things to praise, like Rachel’s unsparing vision of life and death, and then said, “But honey, why couldn’t you let her be Parsley?” “Because, Mom, Parsley sounds too much like Polly, and Polly is too much like the way you want things to be all the time, and insist that they are even when they’re not. If I’m ‘unsparing’ it’s because you’re, you know, sparing.” This was more or less the same argument her daughter had made for legally changing her own name from Polly to Rachel a year ago. There was something else about the video that upset Polly even more than Rachel’s changing the name of the cat, but she didn’t have the heart to bring it up. In the first few weeks after Rachel uploaded it, millions of people watched, and then Rachel began getting interview requests from major websites. Polly was uneasy. This was not a heartwarming story about a cat. It was a story about a cat featuring cruelty, betrayal, loss, and death. After the studio audience at Rachel’s first TV interview laughed at a certain part of the video that featured Polly, Polly drove Rachel home gripping the steering wheel tight so her hands wouldn’t shake. Rachel was walking straight back to her bedroom, head down, thumbs pouncing repeatedly on the screen of her phone as she responded to congratulatory texts from friends and family, when Polly shouted, “Stop!” Rachel swung around, unused to being addressed this way by her mother. “They laughed at me!” “So?” “‘So?’? I’m your mother and you humiliated me.” “You humiliated yourself.” The part of the video the audience had laughed at was a seven-second freeze-frame of Polly’s face as she watched her daughter’s footage of their cat’s death for the first time. Polly’s look was not one of sadness, but one of disgust—a scowl, an ugly face that was amusing to an auditorium full of people. “Why did you do it, Rachel?” Polly asked her daughter in the carpeted hallway between the kitchen and their two bedrooms. “Because, Mom, underneath ‘Polly,’ that’s who you really are.” “That is not who I am, that is something you manipulated me into feeling in response to one creepy and disgusting video you made so you could capture me feeling it for another.” “You think my video is disgusting. I think your disgust is hilarious, and this morning 300 people agreed with me.” Polly slapped Rachel in the face hard and for the first time ever. Rachel stared at her in shock and then started moving toward her, face red and contorted. She balled her right hand into a fist and wound up to punch Polly. The little twerp was a terrible fighter—she telegraphed her punch and was neither fast nor strong. Polly grabbed Rachel’s punching hand and then the other one, pinned her arms to her sides, and hugged her tight enough that Rachel couldn’t get in a body jab. Rachel’s struggling and grunting soon turned to sobbing. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I miss her so much, she’s dead-uh-haaaaaah!” Polly checked in with her own chest and throat to see if there was any Pollylike sobbing developing. There was not. She wondered, as she’d been doing since the spring, if Rachel had acted in some way to drive Parsley out of their home, before she came back to die. No matter. When Rachel’s crying subsided, Polly released her. “Honey, may I have your phone?” Rachel handed it to her. Polly walked to the kitchen, threw it down on the linoleum tiles, and stomped on it seven or eight times. She picked up the phone’s remains and threw them in the garbage. “Now come on out back with me, dear, and let’s say hi to Parsley.” They walked out the kitchen door into their back yard, first the mother and then, head hanging down, the daughter. They stood at the fresh grave and paid their respects to the dead.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Story #40


Dear Readers,

Here is weekly very short story number forty in a series of fifty-two. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #40

One day Derek was walking in the Amazon jungle and got lost. He was scared, and something bit him on the thigh, an insect, yellow and red, with wings as wide as Derek’s hand and a mouth big enough that you could see it open and close. He sat down on a log. He and his dad were unusually close for a father and son. They’d taken this South America trip together and his father had had a series of mini-strokes the previous night. He was resting in their cabin and being cared for by a local shaman while Derek made today’s hike alone. The insect’s venom merged with Derek’s blood. Derek saw the inside of the cabin where his father reclined on a straw pallet. He saw his father’s face moving up and down and side to side, and realized that it was not his father’s face moving but Derek himself, or rather, the shaman’s hand, which now held him. And he wasn’t “him,” wasn’t Derek. He was the venom of the insect that had bitten him, mixed with water and several plants, a concoction that his father now drank. Derek was absorbed into his father’s blood stream. On a red log flume ride minus the log, he entered and was expelled from his father’s heart. He was in his father’s mind, thinking about Derek, wishing his son would come back to the cabin, wondering why his damn fool son had to take that hike in the jungle today, sticking to the itinerary even though I had a stroke last night. Oh, son, there you are, I’m so relieved you’re back, please don’t ever leave me again, I’m in my declining years and I need you. Well, Dad, I also need to live my life, you shouldn’t have come on this trip with me, I told you not to. Derek, please don’t be angry with me, I feel so bad, I think I’m going to die. It’s okay, Dad, I’m here, I’m here.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Story #39


Dear Readers,

This is the thirty-ninth in a series of fifty-two very short stories I am publishing on this site, in a year-long experiment in internet self-publishing. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #39

Johann was walking through the forest to his mother’s house. He’d been on the move since dawn, it was now noon, and he was exhausted, sweating in the summer heat. She had no phone, no internet, and no postal worker would traverse the 25 miles of rocky trails to deliver a letter to her. She’d been out here for years. He rounded a bend and there she was, standing on the porch of her cabin, shotgun raised toward him. She looked healthy, lean and strong, her hair graying. “I told you to start calling my name before you get to that last bend, otherwise I’m liable to shoot you.” “Have you ever shot anyone?” She smiled and said, “You’re drenched. Go out back, have a shower, and I’ll fix us some lunch. I love when you visit me.” Twenty minutes later Johann came into the cabin. His mother, Alma, had prepared a venison salad. “How’s Dad?” she asked. “Still drunk, last I checked.” “Oh, honey, you have to take care of him, you know I can’t.” Johann stood up and shouted, “This is why I don’t come here more than once a year!” “You’re right, I’m sorry. I ran off and left you with a lot of burdens.” There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Alma said. A tall bearded man not much older than Johann walked into the cabin. “Oh, sorry, didn’t know you had company,” the man said. “This is Dirk,” Alma said. “Dirk, this is my son, Johann.” Dirk tipped his greasy baseball cap. “Why didn’t you try to shoot him?” Johann asked. “I know his footsteps.” Dirk said, “I’ll come back another time. I left you a deer on the porch.” He tipped his hat once more to Johann and walked out the door. “What’s the story with that character?” Johann asked, sitting down again. “We’re intimate.” “Oh gross, Mom, couldn’t you have just said he’s your boyfriend?” “He protects me from the riff-raff around here, I enjoy his company, and he leaves me deer meat, so I guess he is my boyfriend. But there’s also Lars.” “Lars?” “He helps me with home repairs but he gets drunk like your father. And there are Don and Bo.” “Who are they?” “The riff-raff I mentioned.” “So you moved out to the forest to have one continuous orgy?” “No, honey, I moved here because I couldn’t handle civilization anymore, the social niceties, all that smiling and apologizing. I like my men though. Sorry, I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this to my son. Let’s change the subject. How’s your love life?” “Same as usual, I’ve got three cuties fighting to get into my bed, but I don’t want to settle down with any of them.” “You always were a devil,” she said. They laughed and took another bite of salad.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Story #38


Dear Readers,

Very short stories r us r pleased to present to you number thirty-eight in a weekly series. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #38

Arthur was late to meet his father and his car was stuck in an unmoving line of cars on the thruway extending to the horizon. The woman in the car directly to the right of Arthur’s was smoking a cigarette with full lips and long, languid fingers. She had her windows open despite the frigid March air. Arthur’s windows were closed. Her face was not quite gaunt, but gaunt enough to reveal her as someone who suffered. Her facial skin was stretched taut except for the skin of her lips, which was relaxed. Despite his extreme distaste for smoking, Arthur would tolerate it in this woman in the life with her that he imagined, and by successfully consoling her for her suffering he would himself be consoled. This he imagined despite being 43, but he could not open his passenger side window without it being obvious why he was doing so, and the sheer number of details he had already ascribed to their future life together would prevent him from knowing what to say or how to move his body once the window was down. She turned her head to look at him and blew smoke out her window. She flicked her smoked cigarette toward his car with a quick arch of an eyebrow. The man in the car behind him honked and Arthur turned his head abruptly forward to see that the car ahead of him was twenty yards away, and that the whole line of cars was breaking up and moving on. He put his foot on the accelerator and looked back over at the woman. Her car was accelerating in tandem with his. She glanced at him again and she did not smile but simply made a visual presentation to him of her lips in their natural relaxed state. She lifted her left hand and gave him one of those flirty waves in which each finger moves in succession starting with the pinkie, and then he could not continue to look at her without crashing his car. Besides, he had to call his father to tell him he’d be late. His father grunted in response, not because he was gruff, which he was, but because he’d had a stroke. The home care aide who had the 8 to 4 shift answered the door of Arthur’s father’s large suburban house in her faded polyester smock on which were printed many frolicking cartoon cats, part of a bewildering design trend Arthur had noticed on the female healthcare workers who had been a part of his father’s life since the stroke. “I’m just going to tell you right now that I’m not paid to clean, because when you walk in there I promise you’re going to wonder, and you should convince him to hire someone for that,” she said. She was probably about Arthur’s age but looked older, and, in fairness, he imagined his life with her too. She, too, was a smoker, he knew from the smell of her smock, and with her he would find the habit a source of great frustration, not to mention anxiety—about her health and his own. He would dislike her and she him. They would develop chronic coughs of increasing severity. They would contract emphysema and die slowly together. In the physically painful end of their unhappy years as a couple, a strong camaraderie would develop between them that he would have to recognize as love, dissoluble only by death, first hers and then, three exquisitely sad months later, his. He found his father, Arthur Senior, in his den, a hellhole of food crumbs, cat hair, cat litter stink, and actual cats with month-old clumps in their fur. He sat on a cushioned chair across from the old man, who sat in a luxury wheelchair that cost more than Arthur’s car. No TV was playing, no book or magazine was in his father’s hands, no chessboard lay before him or any condescending geriatric brain teaser to extend what remained of his cognition. Arthur had not seen his dad in six months. The skin hung off his face in folds, the eyes were viscous and red. “So, Dad, I’m sorry I haven’t—” Arthur Senior made a stop sign with his left hand, the one that still functioned. “Anyway, you invited me here, so…?” “Muh,” Senior croaked, his post-stroke version of speaking, and looked down at his lap, on which Arthur now saw a folder thick with papers. “Muh!” he croaked again, meaning, “Take it and look through it.” Arthur came to his father and removed the folder from his lap. The man grabbed Arthur’s wrist with his working hand and whispered, “Muh,” implying this was a solemn ceremonial occasion between father and son. Arthur returned to his chair. A cat leapt onto Senior’s lap in place of the folder and he shoved it violently off. Arthur opened the folder. On top of the stack of papers was a one-page will leaving ninety percent of his wealth to the Animal Welfare Society and ten percent to his son. Arthur tried to let this fact sink in but it wouldn’t, he was numb and wanted to leave. He closed the folder and was standing up when his father said, “Muh,” meaning, “Look at the remaining papers.” Arthur did, over the next ten minutes. The papers detailed Senior’s holdings, amounting to about ninety million dollars, nine million of which would belong to Arthur upon his father’s death, minus taxes. “Dad, I… wow, I’m—” Senior stopped him again with his hand, with which he then pointed to his lap. Arthur put the folder back. Senior held out his left hand for Arthur to shake. Arthur’s heart was overflowing with tenderness and he tried to transmit as much of it as he could to his father in the brief clasping of hands. Senior nodded to acknowledge receipt of it. As Arthur crossed the threshold on his way out of the den, his father said, “Muh, nuh,” meaning “Use it wisely” or “I love you” or maybe “Money.” “I’ll hire a cleaning person,” he said to the home care aide in the kitchen as he took in her tired face, on which a default look of annoyance resided. As he walked across the gravel driveway to his car in the late afternoon, the first snow of spring began to fall. He was sorry not to be one of those men who would have known how to make love to the home care aide on the kitchen table and leave within forty-five minutes to the complete satisfaction of both parties. He was sure such men existed.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Story #37


Dear Readers,

Welcome to the thirty-seventh in a series of fifty-two weekly very short stories I am publishing on this site, and thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #37

“Have you ever met her before?” Eldon said to Margie as they stood in line for the guru. “I guess you could say that,” Margie replied. “What do you mean?” “Well it would be like saying I’d met a cloud, or a star.” “Can you describe the meeting?” Margie paused and felt the cool, dry air of the convention center rushing into her nostrils. She had been dating Eldon for a month. He was a neurosurgeon, a man of science. She liked him a lot and was afraid he would be skeptical about this important part of her life. “It’s hard to describe,” she said. “Maybe after we both meet her today we can discuss our experiences. Do you think you can have an open mind and heart about this?” “I’m here, aren’t I?” Eldon said in annoyance. They had waited for two hours and there were still fifty people ahead of them in line. Eldon’s lower back hurt and he had to pee. “Men’s room,” he said, and wandered off. Margie felt a thick, tight band around her head. Under the bright fluorescent lights, Eldon moved past folding tables on which mountebank remedies were being sold by skinny bearded men in white gauzy shirts and women with bright daubs of yellow paint on their foreheads, an enviable calm in their eyes. In the men’s room he urinated, washed his hands, and leaned heavily on the sink to rest his lower back. There were two small, brown, sandaled feet under the door of one of the toilet stalls. A high, clear feminine voice sang from behind the door: “Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, and be better off than you are, or would you rather be a pig?” Eldon found himself floating in the darkness of space in his khaki pants and white polo shirt. When the paramedics arrived, there was nothing they could do but wait. Margie came into the men’s room and saw him curled in a ball on the floor, grunting in pain. He looked up at her and said, “These back spasms last about an hour, then I have to take it easy for a few days. Do you think you could love a man with back spasms?” Tears were streaming down Margie’s face. “Yes,” she said, “and how did your meeting with the guru go?” “Oh,” he said, “it was kind of like brain surgery.”

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Story #36


Dear Readers,

Here is the thirty-sixth in a series of fifty-two weekly one-page stories I’m publishing on this site. This one is inspired by a slide show created by the artist Ad Reinhardt and shown recently at a gallery in New York, though Mr. Reinhardt should not be held responsible for the story. Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #36

It was quite a slideshow. First there were faces, then just eyes, then feet, then buttocks, followed by triangular things, round things, stripes, archways, turrets, rows of windows, crucifixions, etcetera. “I wish this guy had designed our city, which is so ugly,” a man said to Tim when the lights came up. On the elevator ride to street level from the sub-basement where the slideshow had taken place, the man said, “I’m Benny.” “Tim.” “Wait, are you the Tim who’s friends with Chris?” Tim’s heart beat faster and he said, “Yes.” “Oh, man.” The elevator doors opened. The two men walked down a dark tunnel, through a metal door with a rusted exit sign above it, and out onto the dark street. “Look at this,” Benny said, “it’s hideous, this whole neighborhood, the cheap materials, the uninspired shapes, the hasty construction, a festival of expediency and greed.” “I agree,” Tim said, “and yet people are planting gardens, making murals, having parades and parties in the streets, organizing slideshows. People are resourceful and resilient.” Benny said, “So are cockroaches. These buildings make me crazy. And it’s no better elsewhere, even in the so-called Golden Acres area of town, what an atrocity that is.” “Well,” Tim said, “I don’t know, some real innovations were attempted there.” “Yeah, yeah, it’s all ‘green’ and ‘flowing’ and ‘mixed use,’ with ‘indigenous plants’ and ‘lots of sunlight.’ The architects are a bunch of self-serving show-offs, if you ask me.” “I’m one of the architects,” Tim said. Benny said, “Yes, Tim Tonglen, designer of the Mucker Building. You might as well have designed and built a giant asshole. What kind of a name is Tonglen, anyway?” “It’s the name of a Tibetan meditation practice where you breathe in the suffering of others and breathe out happiness for all sentient beings.” “What about the happiness of our friend Chris?” Benny asked. “Ah, Chris,” Tim said, and felt a familiar leaden weight descend on his heart. Benny said, “What good is ‘Ah, Chris’ going to do him now? You could have awarded his company the contract for the Mucker Building but you didn’t, even though you guys were childhood friends.” “His bid was too high, he employed non-union workers, and his safety record was abysmal, so no, I couldn’t have awarded him that contract.” “But did you have to turn him in to the police?” “After he showed up at my house with a gun and threatened my family, yes, I did.” “Do you visit him in prison?” “No,” Tim said, and had the familiar wish that the earth would open and devour him. Benny said, “Prisons are the worst spaces of all. I don’t have to tell you what’s happening to Chris in there. I’m going to give you a beating now.” Tim looked around the dark street at the terrible buildings that would be the audience for the beating he was moments away from receiving. “These buildings want to watch you beat me,” Tim said as Benny walked toward him, hands balled into fists. “Don’t let them. Don’t let your surroundings make you a monster.” “Tell that to the guys who are raping Chris.” Tim couldn’t hold it any longer. He cried like a baby. Benny screamed. They stood there, one crying, the other screaming. Tim backed away, then turned and ran down the dark street. Benny remained motionless, as if held in place by invisible walls.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Story #35


Dear Readers,

Good day or good evening. Here is the thirty-fifth in a series of fifty-two weekly one-page stories that I am posting on this site, in an ongoing experiment in web publishing. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,
Matthew Sharpe


Story #35


Linda had promised her son Chuck that he could Facetime with the Christmas tree before she put it out on the curb, so on the morning of December 27 she called her ex-husband’s wife Savannah’s phone, since Savannah was more likely to be with Chuck than the ex was. Chuck answered, meaning Savannah had seen that it was Linda calling and passed the phone to him. “Hi Mommy!” “Hey Chuckie, how’re the Bahamas?” “Good.” Chuck, who was six, was sitting on a towel on the sand looking at his mother’s face in his stepmother’s phone. Behind him was the supine, oiled, youthful body of his stepmother, in full view next to Chuck’s face on Linda’s phone. “Honey, would you mind facing the other way?” “What?” “Uh, here, you want to talk to Chrissy before I put her out on the curb?” “Chrissy!” Linda propped the phone against a milk carton on the kitchen-slash-dining-room table next to the tree and cleared away breakfast while her son conversed with the tree. On one of her trips back from the sink she heard him saying “…except this morning when we got to the beach Savannah told me to go all the way back to the hotel room because she forgot her sunscreen and when I got to the room Daddy was wrestling on the bed with Yvonne and they were in their underwear.” Linda froze behind the milk carton. Chrissy, the Christmas tree, asked, “Who the hell is Yvonne?” “My nanny.” “How did you feel seeing them wrestling?” “Okay, not bad and not good.” “Did you tell Savannah about it?” “No, she’s not interested in wrestling.” “Where’s your dad now?” “I don’t know. Chrissy, can you put Mom back on the phone? Bye!” Linda picked up the phone and looked into it at her son’s face. He was lying on his back now on the towel and holding the phone above him so she couldn’t see Savannah anymore. “How was your Christmas, anyway, Mom?” “Pretty good.” “Savannah told me it’s okay to be sad.” “Why, honey, are you sad?” “No, you are. I’m gonna go swimming now with Savannah. Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. Bye!” Linda’s phone went dark. “Chrissy,” Linda said to the tree, “what am I supposed to do about this?” “Hire a better lawyer so Chuck can be with you next Christmas and you won’t have to go alone to the Michaelsons’ party, stand in a corner, come home, drink whiskey, and cry your way through Terms of Endearment again.” “Even if I could do that how am I going to compete with a five-star hotel in the Bahamas?” “Listen,” Chrissy said, “I know your human problems are very pressing but let’s not forget that you drove out to the country, cut me out of the ground, strung me to the roof of your rusted-out station wagon, drove me back to the city, stuck me in a shallow bowl of water that often went dry before you refilled it, and hung things from my branches while I slowly died to complete your annual ritual. So forgive me if I’m not aces at alleviating your winter holiday crisis.” “Wow, when did Christmas trees get so judgmental?” “Ah, lighten up, Linda, I’m just fucking with you. Come on, take these ornaments off me and bring me down to the curb so you can get on with your day.” Linda eased all the ornaments off the tree, put them back in the ornament box, and carried Chrissy down the stairs to the sidewalk. “This holiday is always a bit sad,” Chrissy said, as Linda laid her down on the cold curb, “but I guess that makes sense.” “Why’s that?” “Well, we’re celebrating the life of Christ, right? And so even among the rare families in which there hasn’t been a major rupture and no one acts like a schmuck, you can’t fully celebrate it without touching the suffering.” “Well you’re definitely the most philosophical Christmas tree I’ve ever had.” “I’d say I’m about average, you just happen to be in that moody kind of space where you’re paying more attention this year, so if you look at it that way the holiday’s not a total wash.” The sanitation truck pulled up to the curb. One of the workers leapt off of it, picked up the tree, threw her into the back of the truck, and set in motion the device that came down upon her and crushed her together with her brothers and sisters. “Bye Linda!” Chrissy hollered cheerfully above the noise of her own destruction. “Bye Chrissy, and thank you!”

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Story #34

Dear Readers,

Here is the thirty-fourth in a series of fifty-two one-page stories I am publishing once a week on this site. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Sharpe

P.S.: A few people have told me recently that they’ve tried to leave comments on this page and have been unable to. If you are inclined to leave a comment, and the website prevents you from doing so, would you kindly tell me so via email at poopsie.schmelding [at] gmail.com? Thanks.


Story #34

A woman called Felix on the phone, said, “Hi, this is Sheila from Transcorp with your credit score,” and then told it to him. “Is that high or low?” Felix asked. “Low.” “How important is it?” “Well, Felix, I guess if you’re planning to buy a house or a car or apply for a loan or rent an apartment or an office space or start a business or get a job, it’s important.” “I live with my mother and I’m set at my job so...” “Then why did you want to know your credit score?” “Because I went on a date with a woman the other night and she asked me my credit score and when I told her I didn’t know it, she excused herself and left the restaurant.” “How rude!” “So, Sheila, you don’t think a person’s credit score should be a criterion for falling in love with that person?” “Felix, I was a math major in college, and I find numbers to be beautiful and mysterious, whereas credit scores and all the other ways in which we use numbers as an escape from recognizing how unquantifiable and unknowable our fellow humans are, are a desecration of numbers and therefore abhorrent.” “Sheila, isn’t this phonecall being recorded for quality purposes?” “Probably, but my supervisor gets about four migraines a week and doesn’t have the time or wherewithal to listen to the recordings. Transcorp sucks the life out of its employees.” “Including you?” “Including me.” “Then why do you stay?” “I’m supporting my parents and it’s hard to find a job in this economy.” “Sheila, would you please go to dinner with me?” “Felix, yes, but first I have a request.” “What?” “Come to my house tonight at ten o’clock, let yourself in with the key under the urn, walk through the living room and down the hallway, and when you get to the last door on your right, find the light switch on the wall and push it down to the ‘off’ position. The whole house will then be pitch black. Open the door. I’ll be waiting for you.” “Why don’t you want us to see each other?” “I do, eventually. But not at first, because in this world you can’t look at a face or a body without assigning them credit scores of beauty.” So that night at ten o’clock Felix went to the address Sheila had given him and did as she asked. When he turned off the light and opened the door, he heard her whisper, “Felix, is that you?” “Yes, Sheila. Why are we whispering?” “Because my parents are sleeping down the hall, and they are old and sick. Will you place my hand on your heart?” He felt in front of him for her hand and brought it to his chest. She said, “It’s beating so fast! Here, feel mine.” She guided his hand to her heart, which pushed wildly against his hand through her soft flannel shirt. “Come here,” she said, and guided him across the thick carpet of the room, in which he could see nothing. “Here is a sofa,” she whispered. He felt his way onto the sofa and she sat beside him. They were still. He saw in the air in front of him the face of a clock reading 10:06, the second hand racing down the right side of the clock and up the left, toward the moment of his own death and well beyond. The clock vanished. Felix just sat there and so did Sheila, into the night. “What do you think will happen tomorrow?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said, “but do you want to know what will happen in thirty seconds?” “What?” Felix said, lifting his head off the back of the couch in alarm. “I’ll fall asleep,” she said, and she did.