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.

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.

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.

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.”